Gabriel in his apartment on Manhattan's
Upper West Side, near where he grew up.

“As soon as I walk into a school, I feel young again,” says Gabriel Kosakoff.

Actually, the 83-year-old Mr. Kosakoff gives an impression of youthful ebullience even when he speaks about walking into schools. As an instrumental music teacher and conductor, and then chairman of the instrumental music department, he walked regularly into the High School of Music and Art, his alma mater (later merged with the High School of Performing arts into LaGuardia High School) for 35 years. He continues active in its alumni society.

And, although retired, he continues intermittently to walk into schools as part of his principal retirement undertaking – helping the Mr. Holland’s Opus Foundation evaluate schools in the competition for new and reconditioned musical instruments, which the Foundation funds and supplies. It has donated over 9,700 instruments since its founding in 1996.

The late film composer Michael Kamen, a 1960 graduate of Music and Art, was inspired by the 1995 film Mr. Holland’s Opus, for which he wrote the score, to set up the Foundation. In the film Richard Dreyfuss plays an impoverished musician and composer who develops into a dedicated music teacher.

Former students say that Gabriel himself played that role to perfection.

“From the moment I walked into his music theory class to now, 50 years later,” said Marcia Drut-Davis, a retired Long Island school teacher, “he has remained a treasured mentor, friend and special person in my heart.”

A former colleague, Justin DiCioccio, now dean of the jazz department of the Manhattan School of Music, summarized Gabriel’s qualities thus: great humor, indefatigable energy, the “organization king,” an innovator, and an administrator who showed trust and confidence in his staff and allowed teachers to create innovative programs at their own pace.

“He was directly responsible for the development of the high school wind ensemble movement in New York State, as well as the first percussion, electronic music, and jazz programs on a high school level in the United States,” Mr. DiCioccio said.

Gabriel with poster designed by Board member
Ron Taft for the Mr. Holland's Opus Foundation.

Gabriel is a tall, lithe, good-humored man who does not disguise the enthusiasm he brings to his activities. Words come easily to him, and his sense of empathy with the young is apparent. “I don’t know why they paid me,” he says of his teaching career, “I had such a good time.”

He was born on Dec. 24, 1926, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, the son of Reuven Kosakoff, a concert pianist and a well-known composer of Jewish liturgical music. After elementary school at P.S. 166 he entered Music and Art in 1940 as a pianist. Among his classmates were Stanley Drucker, later the long-time first clarinetist of the New York Philharmonic; Bernard Garfield, retired bassoonist of the Philadelphia Orchestra, and Richard Horowitz, timpanist of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra.

Gabriel entered as a pianist at the High School
of Music and Art, but he became a trombonist.

Gabriel himself became a trombonist at the school, playing in an orchestra conducted by the legendary Music and Art conductor and teacher Alexander Richter. He returned as an instrumental teacher in 1956 and 13 years later succeeded Richter as conductor of the school’s senior orchestra and as assistant principal of the instrumental music department. Gabriel retired in 1991.

In one sense he never left. He is active on the board of directors of the school’s alumni society as a member of its grants program. A grant from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and the Surdna Foundation makes about $100,000 available to the association each year to be used for grants for a variety of purposes for which Department of Education funds are not available.

After high school Gabriel found himself in the Army at the age of 19 and headed for Manila on a transport ship. His soldier shipmates were all expecting to take part in an invasion of Japan. Instead the atomic bomb ended World War II. In the Philippines the Army took back Gabriel’s rifle, issued him a trombone and assigned him to a band. It turned out that the band already had three trombone players, so the colonel directed him to fill its only open position – conductor.

“I was tall, I was thin, and I was available,” Gabriel said. “He handed me a book, How to Conduct an Army Band, and sent me on my way.”

A week later Gabriel conducted the band at a parade in Manila before 36 generals to celebrate the war’s end. Subsequently much of his conducting career focused on bands until he took over Music and Art’s senior orchestra. In 1967 he resuscitated the New York All-City Band after a period of dormancy and then led it for 20 years. “We played concerts at Carnegie Hall and City Hall and even at the launching of an atomic submarine,” he said.

Gabriel looks a bit like a conductor as he tells
of his experiences with Army and NYC bands.

After the war Gabriel reconnected with civilian life at New York University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in music and a master’s in music education. In 1952 he married Carol Lenhoff of North Adams, Massachusetts. He met her at the 92nd Street "Y" when she was an usher at concerts there and Gabriel, along with his late twin brother Raphael, were serving as head ushers. They have two children and five grandchildren.

From graduate school Gabriel moved on to teach in junior and senior high school in Audubon, New Jersey, and later in the Vocational High School for Girls in Jamaica, Queens.

Hearing of an opening at Music and Art, he interviewed successfully and returned to take over the instruction in brass instruments. “I felt right at home immediately,” he says. He was the first graduate of the school to get a permanent fulltime appointment to the staff.

There were memorable moments in the years ahead. During a subway strike in 1961 students were unable to get to school for rehearsals for an important appearance of the school’s wind ensemble at a New York State Music Association conference. Space was found at a City University of New York building, but there were only 10 rehearsals instead of the planned 25. The performance went better than well. “We knocked them out,” Gabriel said.

On another occasion 200 students performed the difficult choral and orchestral work Belshazzar’s Feast by William Walton at a Music Educators National Conference in Atlantic City. “They’re still talking about that one,” he said.

A plaque awarded by the New York
Brass Conference for Scholarship.

Diplomatic skill proved important. It was especially needed at the time of the merger of the High Schools of Music and Art and Performing Arts in 1984. Some students, and especially parents, were offended when the consolidation of each school’s top orchestra left fewer places for players. “We worked it out by putting the kids who were left out into top positions in the band,” Gabriel said.

Nowadays the school faces different problems. Incoming students are generally not as well trained musically as they once were, he said, although they are no less talented. They have to make up for lost time in musical training. Music course offerings and the time available for instrumental work are less generous than they once were, because of financial constraints and stiffer academic requirements.

In retirement, Gabriel has kept up to date with a collection of stamps from all over the world focused on musicians and composers. It now runs to 15 books with an estimated 1,200 to 1,500 stamps. And through his work with the Mr. Holland’s Opus Foundation he has also kept in contact with some of the most inspired music teachers in the country, who received awards from the Foundation.

One of those was Cynthia Leiby, a teacher in two elementary schools in Pitman, New Jersey. She developed a love for the Celtic harp, a plucked-stringed instrument held on one knee, and wanted to start a Celtic-harp orchestra. She bought a book, learned how to make one, and built a dozen for the children. Another teacher, Dr. Steven Pelkey of Kansas City, Missouri, ran an innovative after-school string program for his elementary school students and invited parents to join in. Each teacher was awarded $10,000 from the Mr. Holland's Opus Foundation, as well as instruments to enhance their programs.

The satisfaction Gabriel feels from the years spent training young people in musical performance is strengthened by his belief that orchestral participation teaches the players more than music.

“When you fail in the orchestra, the whole orchestra fails with you,” he said. “This is the principle you learn. When you have forgotten that X plus Y equals Z, you will still remember the part you played in Brahms’s Second Symphony.”

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