A stained-glass window in Church of the Holy Apostles by William J. Bolton, the earliest artist in America to create figural windows, assisted by his brother John. The Bible scenes in the Holy Apostles windows may be copies from illustrations in the Bolton family Bible. They also resemble tapestries by Raphael in the Vatican. (Text adapted from "Stained Glass by Bolton" and "The Early Beginnings of Stained Glass in America".)
Click to see the cover Tom Garber created for the score of "Walk Across the Water."
Click here to listen to the refrain of "Walk Across the Water."
Thomas Garber started piano lessons at age six with Toba Kremer at the Irene Kaufman Center in Pittsburgh, PA. Ms. Kremer also taught him theory and harmony. At age eight he wrote his first composition, which he performed that year in a recital. Also at age eight he began studying the cello with Jean Wessner. The majority of the music he heard on records at home was by Mozart, and his early compositions were in a classical style.
As a teen-ager, Garber studied piano with Ilse Karp, whose husband was the director of the Pittsburgh Opera company. He played the cello in various city-wide youth orchestras and summer music camps. He played both piano and cello in student chamber groups at weddings. He sometimes made arrangements of the music to suit the instruments available, or wrote down the music from recordings when no score was available. He also composed a string trio and a baroque prelude for these occasions. His senior year in high school he won a local piano competition, the Volkwein Award, as well as auditions which entitled him to perform as both piano and cello soloist with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra.
Garber's undergraduate musical studies were at Carnegie-Mellon University, where he studied cello with Theo Salzman and piano with Harry Franklin. Garber also studied counterpoint and composition with Roland Leich, who had been a student of Hindemith. His sophomore year, Garber wrote a string quartet in a modern style which won second prize in the National Federation of Music Clubs Competition for Young Composers. That summer, a string quintet made up of medical doctors commissioned him to write a piece for them In his senior recital, he performed the cello part of a trio for flute, cello and piano which he had composed in a style similar to von Weber. In those years, he often accompanied violin and viola students on the piano. For baroque works, he sometimes played realizations of the figured bass which he had written down from recordings.
Garber continued with post-graduate studies at the Institute for Advanced Musical Studies in Montreux, Switzerland. His professors were Dimitry Markevitch for the cello and, for composition, Rainer Boesch, a student of Olivier Messiaen. While at the institute, Garber composed a group of four French songs to poems by Janine Fuchs. The original version was for soprano and piano, but he also arranged the work for chorus and orchestra for the Queen Marie-Jose Competition.
After two years the Institute closed, and Garber got a job as a cellist in the Kurphalz Chamber Orchestra of Mannheim. For one of the orchestra's radio concerts, he reconstructed the middle movement for a Clarinet Concerto by Franz Wilhelm Tausch from a few fragments. The work was accepted for performance and broadcast by the South German Radio in Karlshuhe.
Upon returning to the United States, Garber studied computer programming and became a Programmer Analyst with the Bank of New York, which is his current position. However, he continues to compose and arrange music for various occasions, including, among others, a dance-theater production of Salome, music for two films, and various works for the Holy Apostles Community Chorus, including most recently, the Yizkor for the Ivyer K'Doshim, a setting of the text for the Prayer of Remembrance for Martyrs from the Yom Kippur service.
