Pitts informs at symphony concerts

 

BY JOHN ANDOLA

KONK LIFE STAFF WRITER

 

When the South Florida Symphony performs at the Tennessee Williams Theatre on Stock Island, it’s best to arrive a half hour early to hear Edward Pitts conduct a brief instructional interlude on the evening’s musical selections. Speaking informally, Pitts regales the audience in the TWT Cabaret Lobby with his knowledge of the program music, the composers and the times in which they lived.

 

“If you study music,” says Pitts, “you are also studying history. To fully understand Beethoven, you need a course in French history because Beethoven is a direct product of the enlightenment. His 9th symphony is an expression of humanism.” Napoleon and Beethoven were born and died just two years apart. Napoleon died in 1768 and Beethoven died in 1770.

 

Pitts begins to prepare for his talks at the symphony a full year prior to the actual concert. Maestra Sabrina Alfonso provides Pitts with the program selections far in advance and he begins studying by ordering the CDs of the music and books on the composers as well as books on the history of the times during which the composers lived. He is currently reading “Mussorgsky and His Circle” by Steven Walsh (2013) and several books on Russian history. Pitts also owns about $4,000 worth of CD courses from The Learning Company.

 

Pitts created his own program in the Philosophy of History at Williams College, where he graduated in 1956. He studied Hagel who talks about how all history ensues from the dialectic (process), which leads from thesis (a proposition) to antithesis (negation of the thesis) to synthesis (resolution which leads to another thesis).

 

When Pitts left Williams, he joined the Navy and flew spy planes over Russia. It was while in the Navy that Pitts first came into contact with Key West. He remembers being stationed here, getting drunk at Sloppy Joes, and the next day deciding that he needed to return to Key West some day.

 

After leaving the Navy, he got an MBA from Harvard Business School and purchased for $3,900 a defunct furniture company and renamed it David Edward Furniture, in honor of his oldest son. The company now employs over 600 designers, manufacturers and sales people. Pitts retired at 40 (he is now 80) and his three sons now run the company. After retirement, he obtained a degree in psychology from the University of Maryland and Johns Hopkins prior to going on to the Family Therapy Institute for post-doctoral studies. Pitts now donates time to helping troubled teens. He meets with potential dropouts and helps them to develop their potential.

 

Pitts’ wife, Marilyn, is a former interior designer and painter. They live in Key West about eight months each year and split the rest of the year between Delaware and Baltimore at the inner harbor. They have four sons, two daughters and 17 grandchildren.

 

One of next season’s symphony offerings will be Samuel Barber’s Piano Concerto. Barber was very atonal and dissonant as a young composer. “This concerto is a ball buster,” says Pitts. “There is a lot to take in so I will listen to it several times before going to the dress rehearsal to get it fresh in my head.” If the program included a living composer, Pitts contacts that composer personally to discuss the piece, the composer’s motivation and the history surrounding it.

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