Feb 4, 2008 10:43 am US/Pacific
Berkeley Professor Dies Under East Bay BART Train
BERKELEY (BCN) ―
Composer and University of California, Berkeley, music professor Jorge Liderman, 50, died Sunday underneath a Richmond-bound Bay Area Rapid Transit train, officials said.
The train operator told BART police that he saw a man standing alone on the platform of the El Cerrito Plaza station. At about 9:42 a.m., when the train was about five feet from the man, the train operator said the man jumped in front of it, BART spokesman Linton Johnson said.
Liderman's death, however, was still under investigation and the Contra Costa County coroner's office has yet to determine what killed him.
"Just because the train operator said someone jumped, that doesn't mean the train killed him," Johnson said.
"He could have had a heart attack and fell. He could have had a stroke," Johnson said.
The coroner's office was planning to conduct an autopsy on Liderman's body Monday morning to determine the official cause of death.
The El Cerrito Plaza BART station was closed for close to three hours while police investigated the incident and the coroner removed the body, Johnson said. It was reopened at about 12:30 p.m.
UC Berkeley officials were not prepared to give a statement on Liderman's death Monday morning, but his biography on the university's Web site paints him as an accomplished composer.
Liderman, a Richmond resident, was born in Buenos Aires. He studied music at the Rubin Academy of Music in Jerusalem and then received his doctorate in composition from the University of Chicago. He joined the composition faculty at UC Berkeley in 1989, according to the university's Web site.
Liderman's works have been commissioned and performed by renowned orchestras and symphonies, including the London Sinfonietta, the American Composers Orchestra and the Netherlands Wind Ensemble.
His opera, "Antigona Furiosa," which was commissioned by Hans Werner Henze, won the 1992 Munich Biennale International Prize in Composition.
He has also received awards from the Guggenheim, Harper, Gaudeamus and Fromm foundations, as well as from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the University of California President's Fellowship program, according to the Web site.
He taught composition, music theory, music analysis and 20th Century music.
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