The following article by senior writer Steve Barnes was published on the Times Union website on June 12, 2024.
TROY — William Carragan, who died Sunday at Samaritan Hospital at age 86, about a week after a stroke, possessed an abundance of intellectual accomplishments as well as a fondness for singing classical music in chain restaurants.
Following in the footsteps of his mother, a composer who knew luminaries including Sergei Rachmaninoff, he became a musicologist and among the world’s preeminent scholars of the work of composer Anton Bruckner. Carragan was the first person to complete Bruckner’s difficult, and unfinished, Ninth Symphony. The version, which took him four years, has been performed all over the world and recorded multiple times.
Following in the footsteps of his father, he became a physicist and professor, teaching the subject at Hudson Valley Community College for 35 years, writing a four-volume physics textbook and twice being nominated for a SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence.
Following his own inclinations, he was learned about astronomy and geology, translated all 150 Psalms from Greek for use in worship services, was an accomplished harpsichordist and collected model trains.
Despite the driven personality suggested by such achievements, “His nature was gentle. His disposition was toward kindness,” said Louis Lohraseb, a Rotterdam native and successful opera conductor in the U.S. and Europe who counts Carragan as one of the two biggest influences on his music education and career. (The other is local pianist and retired music professor Findlay Cockrell, who for years was a friend and collaborator with Carragan and introduced him to Cockrell’s then-11-year-old student Lohraseb.)
Said Lohraseb, speaking on the phone from San Francisco, where he is rehearsing to conduct a gala concert next month, “There was a fire and passion which burned inside of him, but … he never used his incredible intelligence to discriminate.”
Recalling visits to one of Carragan’s favorite haunts, Man of Kent Tavern in Hoosick Falls, Lohraseb said, “Everyone knew him, but I don’t think any of them gave a hoot about Bruckner. It didn’t matter. They all wanted to talk to him, and he was happy to talk to them.”
As a friend and collaborator, “He was extremely particular,” said Cockrell. When the pair played harpsichord duos that Carragan had arranged, Cockrell said, “Of course, having made the arrangements, he had a lot to say, but I always enjoyed working with him.”
Cockrell created and was conductor and often piano soloist for an ensemble called the Amadeus Chamber Orchestra that performed from the mid-1980s through the early 1990s, returning a decade later for a few years with some different members. Among the works it presented was Carragan’s completion of Franz Schubert’s unfinished Symphony No. 8.
According to Cockrell, “Schubert had to write some incidental music in a hurry, so we think he took some of the music conceived for the symphony and put it into a project that he was actually getting paid for. … (Carragan) got that same music and restored it to the symphony. That’s how he finished the ‘Unfinished Symphony.’”
Carragan was always painstaking and meticulous in his musicology, whether he was working on something as epic as Bruckner’s Ninth or the 15-plus volumes of Byzantine Orthodox music he prepared for liturgical services at the Albany church where his funeral will be held on Saturday, said Christian Ritter, a local music teacher and conductor who collaborated on the project with Carragan.
“Whenever there was any kind of progress — perhaps if I found some music that we’d been hunting a long time for — he was thrilled,” Ritter said. “It didn’t matter how small. That was one of the most endearing things about him.”
Ritter recalled Carragan telling a story about a visit to Japan for a performance of one of his Bruckner editions, during which he had the opportunity to meet the emperor.
“The way he told the story,” Ritter said, “it was so lacking in pretense or lording it over us. It was as if he actually thought that normal people might get to meet the emperor of Japan. … There seemed to be no recognition that he was able to do it because of how particularly gifted he was or how particularly impressive his resumé was.”
Although Carragan had master’s degrees in physics and geophysics from RPI, where his father, George Howard Carragan, was chair of the physics department for many years, the younger Carragan never earned his Ph.D. — a shortfall that likely would preclude him from teaching at the collegiate level today.
And yet, “The third- and fourth-semester courses he taught were so esoteric that those students who graduated and went on to RPI outperformed RPI students. He was teaching things at Hudson Valley that they weren’t even teaching at RPI,” said Jeff Schoonmaker, who was a professor of physics at HVCC for 51 years. He shared an office with Carragan from 1980 until Carragan retired in 2000 to spend time caring for his wife, Julia Weston Faunce Carragan, a professor at HVCC for 34 years and medieval historian who was dying of cancer.
The officemates had a weekly lunch date for the all-you-can-eat buffet at a Pizza Hut near HVCC. When Carragan began dilating about Bruckner, Schoonmaker said, he sometimes became so animated that he would loudly sing a melody or other snippet to illustrate his point. The tendency grew in scope when Carragan, Lohraseb and Cockrell, while dining at a TGI Friday’s, would burst into a vocal version the horn trio from the scherzo of Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony, according to Lohraseb.
Whether Carragan was discussing Bruckner over lunch or geology while out in nature, Schoonmaker said, “His mind was boggling to me. He could look at a rock, tell you what it was, where else it could be found in the world and what would be in the layers above it and below it.”
William D. Carragan was born in July 1937 in Troy, where his parents had settled in 1929 for his father’s teaching career. (He lived for the last decades of his live in the Brunswick home of his childhood.) His mother, Martha Beck Carragan, a composer and pianist who was performing with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra by age 19, taught piano at Emma Willard School in Troy, occasioning young William to be one of the few boys to spend an elementary year at the girls school. George died in 1982. Martha lived to be 97, dying in 1997 with a legacy that included founding Friends of Chamber Music, which recently finished its 75th season of presenting concerts, coordinating Albany Symphony youth concerts and composing more than 100 pieces, including choral, chamber and orchestral works.
“From the moment he was born, he was exposed to both of the fields of his formidable parents,” said Lohraseb, Carragan’s friend and protege.
Lohraseb said he he did not know precisely why Carragan was so drawn to Bruckner’s music. He speculated that the mathematical rigor with which the composer divided his scores into what are called metrical periods, as well as what Lohraseb described as the scores’ “architectural framework,” appealed to Carragan’s analytical mind.
Schoonmaker, who shared a strong Christian faith with Carragan, believes his former colleague identified with Bruckner’s own beliefs as a devout Catholic, and Carragan himself once told Lohraseb that the reason he believed his completed Ninth was better than those done later by others was “because I’m a Christian,” meaning belief in a heavenly afterlife informed both the original composition and its completion.
In Bruckner’s work, end-of-symphony codas function to resolve complex themes that were developed and restated earlier in the piece. Carragan’s completion of the end of the Ninth, assembled from partial-score sketches and other material left behind after the composer’s death in October 1896, is described at length on Carragan’s website. What wasn’t available, however, was any instruction for the all-important coda. Although not all Brucknerians agree, the empathy, intelligence and faithful rigor Carragan brought to his completion, which he continued to work on for decades, produced what is widely considered a masterful achievement.
According to Lohraseb, the musicologist saw not only the forests and the trees of Bruckner’s scores, but looked even down to the pine needles of individual notes. In the scherzo of the Sixth Symphony, the French horn plays a high E-flat, the highest note the composer ever wrote for the horn. When Carragan was assembling the coda of the Ninth, he raised the composer’s horn summit a half-step, giving the instrument a high E-natural.
Carragan told Lohraseb about the change and, referring to the composer, said, “I hope he won’t mind.”
Said Lohraseb, “I’m sure the two are in heaven now discussing it.”
Carragan is survived by two daughters from a long-ago first marriage, but Lohraseb said he did not have their names, and they could not be immediately located in public records. He and Julia did not have children.
The funeral will be held at 9 a.m. Saturday at St. George Antiochian Orthodox Church, 1 St. Georges Place, Albany.