Tupper Saussy

Who was Tupper Saussy?

Frederick Tupper Saussy III was an American composer, musician, author, and artist. He was born in Statesboro, Georgia; grew up in Tampa, Florida; and graduated from the University of the South at Sewanee, Tennessee, in 1958. His jazz combo there put out a university-subsidized album, Jazz at Sewanee, which included several original compositions. Thereafter Saussy taught English at Montgomery Bell Academy in Nashville, Tennessee, co-founded an advertising agency, McDonald and Saussy, and kept his musical career alive with recording dates and club sessions. With the Nashville Symphony, he composed a work called The Beast with Five Heads, based on "The Bremen Town Musicians", designed to replace Peter and the Wolf as a work to teach schoolchildren about orchestration, which continued to be used for the next fifteen years. For its 1968/69 season, the Nashville Symphony commissioned him to write a piano concerto for Bill Pursell; it was performed by the Symphony on January 14, 1969, with Thor Johnson conducting.