Mike Moss

Last week I received some unexpected and very sad news.  The director of the music program at Drexel, Myron (Mike) Moss, passed away suddenly this past Monday.

I first met Mike in 2009 when he was looking for an adjunct horn teacher to come and teach at Drexel.  The thing that impressed me immediately was his enthusiasm and kindness.  He had such high hopes and endless ideas for building the program at Drexel and he wanted for me to be a part of that.

During my time at Drexel, I knew that I could go to Mike with any concern or problem and he would listen and do everything in his power to help me. I know it was the same for all of my colleagues.

He asked me once to come and listen to the band play and give my feedback to the students.  So I spent a good deal of time just watching him conduct and interact with the students.  His enthusiasm, quirky and funny as it was sometimes, was contagious.

Since I was only at Drexel a few hours a week, and often on Saturday, I didn’t get to know Mike as well as I might have over the past few years, but we corresponded by email about students and ideas for the program as well as some other correspondence about some of my blog posts.  I got to know him as well as I could given the limited interaction.  He was such a thoughtful man.

I’ll let some of his words speak for themselves.  He writes to me in response to a post last summer in which I sign off with an excerpt from Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet.  He writes:

This must be the Summer of Rilke. I was re-reading the Letters to a Young Poet, and one of my facebook friends (wife of a former student) mentioned singing settings of his Book of Hours. I began reading them in early July and am really relishing the insights and moral energy in his writing. These are short poems, mostly addressed to God. Truly amazing. Anyway, your sign-off on travel, with Rilke seemed so timely and appropriate.

He went on to talk about running (something I have done in the past) and mentioned his goal to run a half marathon as a 60th birthday present to himself.  That there was something so celebratory about the act of running.  Not for the goal of the finish line, but as an act unto itself.

There are so many beautiful poems in The Book Of Hours.  I find myself wishing that I could talk with Mike about them now.  Here is one that perhaps he might have us contemplate at this moment:

No, my life is not this precipitous hour

through which you see me passing at a run.
I stand before my background like a tree.
Of all my many mouths I am but one,
and that which soonest chooses to be dumb.

I am the rest between two notes
which, struck together, sound discordantly,
because death’s note would claim a higher key.

But in the dark pause, trembling, the notes meet,
harmonious.

………………… And the song continues sweet.

– Rainer Maria Rilke, Poems from the Book of Hours

Rest in Peace, Mike.  You left us far too soon, and we will miss you.