APPRECIATION FOR JOHN CLOUGH
Charles J. Smith
University at Buffalo

My name is Charles Smith; I’m the coordinator of the Music Theory program at the University at Buffalo. I have the sad duty to inform you that one of the most admired and respected figures of this University, Prof. John Clough, died a fortnight ago, after an almost two-year-long struggle with cancer.

John occupied the Slee Professorship at UB for over 20 years—the oldest fully-endowed chair of Music Theory in the country, a position created by those same generous benefactors who gave UB this lovely concert hall and the fine chamber orchestra we will hear this evening. John was truly a senior member of the University, in every sense of that word; many of us here tonight knew him as a colleague, and will miss him more than words can say.

The UB Music Department is offering this evening’s concert as a tribute and a memorial to John Clough. I have been given the impossible task of trying to present in a few words some sense of the stature of a remarkable man.

Professionally…, well, it’s probably not possible to speak too highly of John’s professional contributions. Quite simply put, he transformed the discipline of music theory—essentially and irreversibly. He was one of the first to see how fruitfully mathematics and music theory could interact; John had a gift for seeing how certain important things about music can be said precisely and effectively only with the help of mathematics. In the process he came up with some theoretical structures of great elegance and beauty, and revolutionized the way everyone now thinks of the basic elements of music—and, not incidentally, put Buffalo on the map theoretically, since he almost single-handedly transformed our graduate program in Music Theory into one of the best in the country.

For me, one of the most important things about John as a professional scholar was his persistent refusal to espouse any theoretical orthodoxies. He was always a thorough-going skeptic about clubs of any kind, especially those that exist mainly for the purpose of excluding the uninitiated from their ranks. Whenever I would express dismay at finding myself in some theoretical quandary or other, John’s response would consistently be, “Perhaps you’re asking the wrong question,” or “Perhaps you’re haven’t thought through your assumptions carefully enough?” In other words, don’t do it this way just because everyone else does; think it out for yourself. This was intellectual integrity of the highest order.

In personal terms, that’s the key word about John Clough—integrity. I don’t think I’ve ever known anyone with as fine and deep a natural sense of justice and fair play. If I had to pick a literary character that John reminded me of, it would be Atticus Finch, in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird…and he even looked a little like Gregory Peck. John never played favorites, and never advocated his own interests above those of the department or whatever community he was working within. He was unfailingly generous with his time and his encouragement, but had no tolerance for empty rhetoric of any kind. He never stabbed anyone in the back; if he had something critical or unpleasant to say to you, he simply said it to your face, without rancour. In short, WHO HE WAS IN PUBLIC was exactly the same as WHO HE WAS IN PRIVATE; there was no role-playing, no hypocrisy, no attempt to escape in any way from the standards he had set for himself. John never sought to impress anyone, because I don’t he ever felt the need to do so. He simply was who he was…and that’s a rare quality in today’s world. I don’t know of a single serious scholar in the world of Music Theory who has a bad word to say about him. His UB students knew this better than any of us, and loved him for it; to them he was simply “Papa Clough”.

I knew John as my colleague for 15 years, and as my teacher for many years before that. I’ll never know another like him—father figure, the most civilized of colleagues, dear friend.