Paul Nordoff, A Life’s Work

The Library of Congress acquires the collection of a prominent composer, music therapist, and anthroposophist

by Christi Pierce Nordoff

Did you know that one of the most respected and internationally recognized music therapy trainings in the world was started by an anthroposophist? And did you know that this anthroposophist was an American composer who was hailed as a “boy wonder” pianist at the age of 12, awarded two Guggenheim travel fellowships, a Pulitzer Traveling Scholarship, and the coveted Bearns prize from Columbia University? This multi-faceted artist not only wrote symphonies, operas, music for Broadway plays and ballets for modern dance pioneer Martha Graham, he also composed music for eurythmy, acted in Steiner’s Mystery Dramas, and composed and played for the dedication of the Threefold Auditorium in Spring Valley, NY. Some of the most influential artists of the time (e.e. cummings, Thornton Wilder, Aaron Copland, Benjamin Britten) and European royalty such as the Grand Duke of Hesse and his family, were counted among his friends. 1 This remarkable man was Paul Nordoff.

Left to right: Paul Nordoff, Thornton Wilder, Marion MacDowell, Nikolai Lopatnikoff, and Margaret Widdemer, at the MacDowell Colony

Paul Nordoff began his life in a working-class suburb of Philadelphia. Born to a Vaudeville family in 1909, he became a brilliant pianist and composer, eventually landing a full scholarship to Juilliard. 2 He received high praise from renowned artists who recognized his gifts, including famed cellist Pablo Casals, who listened to him play one of his own compositions, and the poet e.e. cummings, who called Nordoff “the only composer who has set poems of mine to music which I not merely like but love…” 3

Nordoff, who became a member of the Anthroposophical Society at the age of 34, described himself as indebted to and inspired by the work of Rudolf Steiner. Steiner’s influence is clearly expressed in an article Nordoff wrote for the Philadelphia Conservatory yearbook:

The materialistic age in which we live has cast its dark shadow over music, the most spiritual of the arts. A musical career today is seldom a dedication —more often a neurotic exhibitionism depending for its success on personality, pull, and publicity… Let us seek consciously to permeate music with the spirit to save it from becoming a dead and lifeless art. 4

At the age of 49 Nordoff took a semester off from teaching at Bard College, traveling to Europe to audition his opera and secure performances for his various music compositions. While in London he attended a lecture by Karl Koenig, founder of the Camphill Movement of communities for people with special needs, on how music can be used therapeutically. Inspired, he visited the Sunfield Children’s Home for special needs children and was moved by what he witnessed there.5 On another occasion, in Germany, he observed a 12-year-old girl who ordinarily never spoke but who was able to repeat the music therapist’s words if she plucked strings on a small instrument while uttering the syllables. This moment was pivotal for Nordoff, who wrote:

As I watched this, it occurred to me that what he was doing with this child was so much more important than any performance of any work of mine that it made me feel that all I was doing to secure performances was senseless. On my return to America I could think of nothing but the children I had seen and the work that was being done with them…Then I began to read all I could lay my hands on about music therapy and visited several institutions… I resigned my job from Bard College, cut myself off from the past, and started this new career from scratch… I felt that I was doing what I had been born to do…and I dimly perceived that there might be tremendous possibilities not yet explored in the art of music as therapy.6

Nordoff moved to England to work at Sunfield Children’s Home. There he met the teacher Clive Robbins with whom—along with Director of Research Herbert Geuter, M.D.—he made an in-depth study of Steiner’s music and curative education lectures. Colin Andrew Lee in his book, Paul Nordoff: Composer and Music Therapist, called this “the beginning of what was to become the celebrated Nordoff-Robbins approach to music therapy.” 7

Aided by Robbins who knew the children well, Nordoff began to work with the Sunfield students. Encouraged by the immediate results they observed, Nordoff wrote:

I can already see the real possibilities for a therapy that will involve healing. This means a specific therapy, and it involves all the scales, in their spiritual relationships to man in his evolution, as well as intense study of man himself, as a being of soul and spirit. 8

Above and below: Paul Nordoff in music therapy sessions with special needs children

This became Paul Nordoff’s abiding passion: Finding ways to help special needs children through working with music out of an anthroposophical understanding of the human being. Over the next decades, Nordoff and Robbins combined international travel, teaching and demonstrating their techniques, with writing books. 9

The Nordoff-Robbins Music Therapy Centre in London was founded, the Department of Education and Science approved a graduate course, and the BBC made two films featuring their work. The Centre has been generously supported by the music industry and endorsed by the likes of Elton John, Paul McCartney, Robert Plant, Rod Stewart, Sting, and Pharrell Williams among others. Nordoff-Robbins music therapists practice worldwide and have graduated from training programs around the world, including the Nordoff-Robbins Center for Music Therapy at New York University.

Dr. Konrad Schily, neurologist and cofounder of the Witten/Herdecke University in Germany, invited Nordoff to start an anthroposophical music therapy training there. Nordoff did offer some lectures, but was too ill to develop a full training course; diagnosed with prostate cancer, he died at Herdecke Hospital on January 18, 1977. 10

His London Times obituary reads:

Paul Nordoff held a unique position in the world of music therapy for handicapped children. Believing deeply in the inner life of each child and the uniqueness of every individual, however disadvantaged, he concentrated his acute perception and musical creativity to the task of finding a means to motivate these children. 11

In December of 2021 the Library of Congress acquired the musical compositions, journals, papers and correspondence of Paul Nordoff. These rich materials provide new opportunities for further research into the life and work of this Twentieth Century American pioneer of anthroposophically inspired music and its therapeutic possibilities.

Christi Pierce Nordoff lives in Great Barrington, MA, and is a member of the Anthroposophical Society. Paul Nordoff was her father-in-law.

For an article on Paul Nordoff’s settings of e.e. cummings visit www.thefreelibrary.com and search for “a sun among men”.

Endnotes

1 The Grand Duke of Hesse and by Rhine, Ernest Louis, was the grandson of Queen Victoria and the elder brother of Empress Alexandra of Russia. Throughout his life he was a patron of the arts, and he founded the Darmstadt Artist’s Colony.

2 Nordoff lived with his grandfather, Lawrence Huntington, who was called “The Grand Old Trouper” and had a Vaudeville act involving the whole family.

3 Letter of September 18, 1949, from E.E. Cummings to Hildegarde Watson, in Selected Letters of E.E. Cummings (1972) edited by F.W. Dupee and George Stade, published by Andre Deutsch Limited, London.

4 As quoted by Andrea Olmstead in Vincent Persichetti: Grazioso, Grit and Gold , Rowman & Littlefield (2018), Chapter Seven entitled “Paul Nordoff”.

5 Sunfield is a British independent special school, Children’s Home and charity founded in 1930 for children with a variety of social, emotional, physical, and learning difficulties, including autism and visual impairment.

6 Letter to Dr. Henry Katz, personal correspondence in Paul Nordoff Collection at Library of Congress.

7 Colin Andrew Lee, Paul Nordoff: Composer and Music Therapist, Barcelona Publishers (2014), page 217.

8 Letter to composer Romeo Cascarino, personal correspondence in Paul Nordoff Collection at Library of Congress.

9 Books by Nordoff and Robbins include: Therapy in Music for Handicapped Children , Music Therapy in Special Education , and Creative Music Therapy.

10 Audio Recordings of lecture/demonstrations given in German, in Paul Nordoff Collection at Library of Congress.

11 Obituary for Paul Nordoff in the London Times, January 24, 1977.