For Paul Caputo, 1932-2024

I am very easily influenced, especially in the realm of drums and music.

Teachers, mentors, bandleaders, friends, and colleagues all leave big impressions on me, and I carry those impressions with me forever.

All that really means is that I continue to listen to their music and think about them. That fundamental act of music— listening— remains mysterious. For one thing, anyone listening to music is doing music theory. If you hear a song and think “this sounds happy” or even “I like this song”, you’re in: you’ve begun the practice of music theory, aesthetic philosophy, and probably half a dozen other liberal arts.

Music theory is just the story we tell to explain how melody, rhythm, harmony, and form create music. In a classroom, this can get a bit stuffy, which is sort of inevitable.

But far from the academy, in a private lesson, music theory, harmony, and counterpoint all take on a new hue. Seen in the right light, the old books and endless exercises have, within them, a recipe for joy. The human capacity for learning is bottomless, and a good teacher is an accelerating agent.

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Paul Caputo at his teaching studio, ca. 2018. Photo by Yoon Choi.

Paul Caputo, a beloved teacher who gave private lessons in harmony and counterpoint to scores of musicians in the jazz and classical world for decades, died at his home in East Midwood, Brooklyn, on Saturday, February 10th, 2024. He was 92 years old.

His weekly and bi-weekly students were of a diverse age and background, though a large proportion were jazz musicians, including guitarist Leni Stern, pianist Angelica Sanchez, trumpeter Dave Ballou, pianist Dan Tepfer, violinist Dana Lyn, trombonist Brian Drye (of Hadestown), and many others. Caputo was revered for his easy and down-to-earth approach to the sometimes-foreboding arts of harmony and counterpoint, for his command of the material, and devotion to his students,

Born in 1932, Paul Caputo grew up in Bushwick, the youngest child of a large Italian- American family. Immersed in the songs of movies and radio, Caputo started piano lessons as a child. In 1949 (I think), a high school teacher of Paul’s, knowing that he wanted to continue his music studies, introduced Caputo to a fellow Brooklynite, saxophonist Joe Maneri.

Maneri, only five years older than Paul, was a student of composer, conductor, and pedagogue Josef Schmid, himself a disciple of composer Arnold Schoenberg and a former student of Alban Berg. Maneri passed on his understanding of Schmid’s methods and goals to Paul, who, under Joe’s tutelage, studied both species counterpoint and the entirety of Schoenberg’s Theory of Harmony, the composer’s 1911 treatise.

By the mid Fifties, Paul was married and had a young family to support. Initially, he made his living outside music, spending a few years in advertising and sales— I believe he worked for a Madison Avenue firm. But by the Sixties, he’d returned to music, and devoted himself to teaching.

At first, he gave private piano lessons (I liked hearing his stories about biking to student’s houses), but soon was branching out. Maneri had told Paul that the best way to learn material was by teaching it; in the Sixties, Caputo took on his earliest Theory of Harmony students, and began developing his own method of teaching Schoenberg’s text.

At the same time, Caputo immersed himself in Zoltan Kodaly’s vocal music pedagogy, a natural choice as his beloved wife Judy was a Hungarian survivor of the concentration camps. By 1970, Caputo was a faculty member of Turtle Bay Music School, where he directed a choir, was chairman of the theory department, and offered a very popular musicianship class. Paul’s exercises for ear training and sight singing revolved around a repertoire of Palestrina and Kodaly, and this formed the basis for his first self-published textbook, Music Skills.

Eventually, Paul became, as he often told me “the only faculty member on yearly salary at Turtle Bay”; his night classes in musicianship at Local 802 further spread his reputation. In the Eighties, he left Turtle Bay to take a position at Manhattan School of Music in the theory department, and taught at Kingsborough Community College.

But once his roster of private students was thriving, Paul left academia for good. From the early Nineties on, Caputo was focussed solely on teaching counterpoint and harmony out of his studio in Lower Manhattan, seeing as many as 20 students a week, and he never returned to a formal academic setting.

In 2018, Paul began compiling material for A Workbook In English Based On Arnold Schoenberg’s Theory of Harmony, his exercises and summaries of Schoenberg’s text, the summary of his life’s work. (The title refers to the availability of several German-language guides to Schoenberg’s text.) It was finally completed and printed in 2019, and circulates among his students.

Paul stopped teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic. He closed his studio for good in 2021, but continued to see friends and former students at his home on a very limited basis until 2022.

He is survived by his daughter Susan, a therapist, and his son Michael, a city employee, and the many students whose lives he forever enriched.

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From 2008 until 2014, and then intermittently until 2018, I was lucky to be one of Paul Caputo’s many students. He taught so many of us, of such a wide age range and from many backgrounds, that his studio was its own community, sort of like the folks around Sophia Rossoff or Barry Harris.

Sometimes, people would ask “So, what exactly do you study with Paul?” I’d always sort of fumble about— “Harmony, but from the Schoenberg book, you know, not the traditional harmony.” Or “counterpoint, but he has his own feeling about it”, or other half-answers.

Really, I should have said, “we’re studying magic”. The most fulsome words of incantation on Ted Gioia’s Substack are what every musician knows— this stuff truly is transformative, and Paul Caputo could guide you to the magic, if you did the work.

For the first three years, we worked exclusively out of the Schoenberg book, always singing the examples. The main thing you study in that book is various techniques for artful and logical modulation between key centers, from the closely-related to ever-more-distant; at first from C major to G major or A minor, with much attention paid to modulating from C major to F minor, and eventually, from C major to any key center at all.

Schoenberg’s book has dozens of examples for every technique he describes. Paul had composed his own examples with more detailed instructions, which he’d print and give to you. He’d essentially re-written Schoenberg’s book to make it more clear and easier to teach.

This was logic, science, rhetoric, and aesthetics. As I played Schoenberg examples, then Paul’s versions, and finally the ones that Paul composed on the spot with you in the lesson, I eventually got it: these were the shortest, most meaningful musical stories I’ve ever heard. This was music. The little progressions told the Story of the Notes.

Eventually, I finished the harmony course, and then Paul pushed me to counterpoint, reading in obscure clefs, studying melodic contour and tension. There was even some piano tutelage, and he wouldn’t let me slide from singing— I remember a two-hour Palestrina session with a changing cast of other students.

It was daunting to measure up to Paul’s standards, which weren’t really his; they were the standards of air molecules, time, and human perception. Honor those standards and do the work, and the notes would have a life of their own.

This was, for all intents and purposes, magic.

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I remember so much from those lessons. Like how Paul would play through your chords on the piano, and he got the most beautiful sound out of that upright, and you’d just be watching him…and if he paused and winced, you knew you were doing this one again.

Watching Paul work— witnessing him compose a progression of 12 or 14 chords, connecting close or distant tonalities; or a two, three or four-voice counterpoint example on one of the cantus firmus— this was humanity at its best.

No one got stuck more than Paul— he’d be writing, saying it looked good, and then find one of those dastardly outlined sevenths in the bass, or parallel fifths or octaves, or just plain bad soprano or bass lines— a series of notes that just told no story, that made meaning vanish— and he’d give that side look, hold his hands out, and say “That stinks!”

Then he’d start erasing, erasing, the eraser bits falling on the piano, the lamp on the music paper showing all the eraser bits, all the eraser bits blending with the wood of the piano….

And then he’d find something, some solution, using every trick in the book— jumping octaves, repeated notes, 6-4 chords, unconventional doubling, everything— but when he played it, there it was: 10 to 15 seconds of rigorously logical and beautiful music.

I was convinced every time. It was truly labor, manual labor what he did. Brickwork.

Then there were the times we sang Palestrina the whole lesson, just he and I. Afterward I would walk to the train hearing that stuff, all those fifths and thirds from the 16th century, and I understood just how spiritual, as opposed to holy or pious, that music really is.

As Paul said, almost to himself, in our first lesson, as he sat away and let me work at an example on my own, “You have to be crazy to study this stuff!”

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Eventually, Paul’s lessons were very simple: this is what you do, this is how you do it. No exceptions are made for those who were ‘good at this’ or for those who ‘find it hard’. This is the work you do, and if you do it, make every mistake, and stay with it? Well, no one can say for sure, but you’ll probably be able to do something you couldn’t do before.

Paul affected my thinking about tradition in music generally. For instance, I realized from Paul that all those fussy counterpoint rules— preparing and resolving, avoiding parallels, good vs. bad doubling, step-wise melodic guidelines, elaborating with upper and lower neighbors— weren’t prescriptive; no one dreamt them up to ‘fix music’. They were not a series of “thou shalt nots”, handed down from on high.

Rather, they were descriptive: artful and persuasive modulations can be achieved by writing music like this; three or four voices can be made transparent and beautiful if you compose this way. Certainly, there was powerful and moving counterpoint long before Fuchs’ book and all the rules were compiled. The music came first, and the rules followed; that’s how Paul thought of it, and that’s how he approached your writing.

Take parallel fifths. They are famously “not allowed” in the tradition Paul taught. But as Paul said, the reason they’re not allowed is that they sound too good! They’re so amazingly powerful and evocative that if they were allowed, what would there be to study? Without the resistance of avoiding them, how would we grow?

Also, there’s no prohibition on composers using them. The rule is “parallel fifths are to be avoided whenever possible in the study of harmony and counterpoint”— that’s it. I often heard Paul loudly proclaim that “Fifths are fine! Puccini used parallel fifths in La Boheme to create a snowy effect”.

And then there was what Paul taught without teaching, what he taught by his very presence— graceful, down to earth, kind, and generous. That’s enough for effective human connection right there. He embodied the tradition of classical music so naturally, so effortlessly.

But, funnily, Paul never called it classical music, and he never talked about favorite composers. If he reflected on what he did, he would mention Joe Maneri or an opera he loved. Mostly, he would talk about his kids and Judy, and then he would play some examples of mine.

To Paul, my musical biography was not germane to the lesson, and the same went for his own. I was his pupil, and he was my teacher; the only thing that mattered to him was my effort and his honesty.

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Obituary for Paul Caputo by his son, Michael Caputo. Published in the Italian Tribune, March 7, 2024

Let’s give it up for the NYC music teachers: for Barry Harris, Sophia Rosoff, and for Paul Caputo. And while we’re at it, let’s hear it for teachers everywhere. It’s among the least respected jobs in the world, but where would we be without them?

To Paul, music wasn’t gigs, concerts, and recordings—  it was sharing what he had with those who came, a life of service and devotion. I don’t think Paul once gave a concert of his own music, nor was he ever hosted or celebrated anywhere. It was perhaps unglamorous, but Paul’s life was filled with meaning, connection, and joy. He lived for his students, for his family, and for music.

Paul’s down-to-earth artistry and absolute conviction, his total belief in the value of his work, has informed, more or less, everything I’ve done. It’s behind this Substack, it’s in my playing, and it’s in the songs I’ve written. I’m no composer, but whatever notes I’ve jotted that have meant anything to anyone were written with his spectral presence next to me, saying “Hey, this is pretty good!”

I’ve tried to capture his essence here, but I’m sure I’ve missed most of it. This much is certain: Paul Caputo is loved, missed, and made a valuable contribution. I’m so lucky, so glad to have known him, and I’m so thankful for him and his work, filled with the capacity to make meaning.