Betts (Donald) papers

Donald Betts was born in Absecon, New Jersey, in February 1929. He graduated from Pleasantville High School and studied piano with Hedwig Rosenthal and Clarence Adler in New York City. He attended Mitchell College in New London, Connecticut, and received his Master’s degree in Music Performance from Indiana University in Bloomington, where he was the only piano student granted a studio and a roster of music students to teach.

Betts made his debut as a pianist and composer at age 21 in New York, performing his own music alongside works by Prokofieff, Liszt, and Schumann. Musical America praised his “tremendous technique and bravada style,” and The New York Times described him as a pianist of “imagination and poetic feeling,” noting that “he put his soul into performances.” Soon after, he won the prestigious Concert Artist Guild Award and gave two additional New York recitals at Town Hall and Carnegie Hall.

During the Korean War, Betts served in the Army in Japan, where he played clarinet in a military band and performed as a soloist with the Yokohama Symphony Orchestra.

In 1959, he became a professor of music at Macalester College, where he taught piano, music history, literature, and composition. Early in his career at Macalester, Betts performed nine different concertos with members of the Minnesota Orchestra, then known as the Minnesota Symphony. He co-founded the Macalester Trio with Joseph Roche and Camilla Heller. The Trio’s recording Chamber Works by Women Composers was recognized by Newsweek in 1980 as one of the ten most important recordings of the year. The Trio performed widely, including a concert at the Library of Congress. Their repertoire included standard works as well as unusual and forgotten pieces, and they premiered several commissioned 20th-century compositions. Betts continued teaching at Macalester until his retirement at age 77.

He received several honors during his career, including Macalester College’s Thomas Jefferson Scholar Award and the Schubert Club teaching award. At Macalester, he served as Chair of the Music Department for nine years. In 2016, he self-published a book titled Interiors. For many years, Betts lived and composed at his home in Afton, Minnesota. In his mid-80s, he moved to southern California and later to the Hartford area of Connecticut to be closer to family. Donald Betts died on May 31, 2021, in Simsbury, Connecticut.

As a composer, Betts produced over a hundred original works, including piano pieces, songs, and chamber music. His compositions were performed both nationally and internationally. He had a broad repertoire as a pianist, with a special interest in Romantic composers such as Beethoven, Schumann, Brahms, Chopin, and Liszt. While Betts considered his own music rooted in the Romantic tradition, his compositions often employed twelve-tone techniques and emphasized texture, rhythm, and dynamics over traditional melody and harmony.