Words Without Music: A Memoir (9 page)

In between these “public” events you could hang out with the crowds in the open hall, or, for a little rest and recuperation, retire to your own
atelier
. The
ateliers
corresponded to the classes and year of the École des Beaux Arts itself, and it was considered proper to remain mostly with your own
atelier
. For Karen and myself, though we had just been thrust among them, they had become our friends and companions for the evening.

It was a wild, wild party, with a lot of nudism, and the crowds flowed constantly between the
ateliers
and the main hall. The main events were always punctuated by a finale of sorts. The chosen winners, including the king and queen, were seated on a camel—a real live one!—and paraded around the circumference of the hall, waving and blowing kisses to the rest of us, their approximately eight hundred enthusiastic admirers.

A small, highly energized ensemble played music throughout the night, the main music (and in fact, I remember no other) being the “Triumphal March” from Verdi’s
A
ï
da
. I remember a clarinet, trumpet, trombone, violin, and a trap set for percussion. There must have been replacement players throughout the evening, for the music never stopped. I saw something similar years later when visiting south India in the town of Cheruthuruthy, when I was present for an all-night performance of the Kathakali—one of India’s dance-theater traditions. There, too, the music was uninterrupted from evening until dawn, with drummers and singers alternating throughout the night, thereby sustaining a continuous musical presence. That summer of 1954, in Paris, the music of Verdi was played in a stately manner—perhaps a shade slower than you would hear in an opera house. It filled the hall and never stopped until the doors were unlocked from the outside by the gendarmes in the morning. The celebration concluded with a parade through the streets. When we came near the corner of Boulevard Montparnasse and Boulevard Raspail, Karen and I recognized our dormitory and we quietly slipped away. When the concierge saw us walking in like this, she knew right away.

“So,” she smiled, “where did you come from?”

“We’ve been to the Beaux Arts Ball.”

“Of course, of course!”

My hair was red, and there were people at that time who thought I was a redhead because I couldn’t get it out of my hair. I don’t know what—paint of some kind—they put on us, but it didn’t come off very easily. For that summer, I remained a redhead.

That was my introduction to Paris. The rest of that summer was spent roaming around the city and studying very little. Paris is an easy city to walk around. I met artists, writers, and all manner of travelers. Ellie Childs, a student at my school, introduced me to Rudy Wurlitzer, another American who was also coasting around Paris. Rudy and I were to become lifelong friends, and when I arrived in New York City several years later, he was among the first people I knew. Later we bought property on Cape Breton in Nova Scotia together, and over the years we began working together as well, with Rudy writing librettos for two operas,
In the Penal Colony
and
The Perfect American
.

So many seeds were planted during that summer sixty years ago. In the mid-1970s, I met Ellie Childs’s younger sister, Lucinda Childs, whom Bob Wilson and I saw performing at Washington Square Church with her dance company and invited her to work with us on
Einstein on the Beach
.

On my way home from Paris, I stopped in London for a few days. While I was there, a new play by a then little-known Irish playwright was being presented at a London theater club. It was Samuel Beckett’s
Waiting for Godot
. I wasn’t able to get a ticket but I remembered the name and found the play in print not long after I returned. A decade later, when I had returned to live and study in Paris, I began to compose music for Beckett’s plays. Eventually, I contributed music to eight of his works.

One of the most important moments for me in Paris that summer was the realization that I would have to return to live there at least for a few years. That plan began to take shape in my mind at that time, and it was settled for me, even before I went to Juilliard.

I initially took the events of my first evening in Paris as an omen, but now I see it as something more definite, in fact as an actual marker—a line of demarcation that I had crossed. In retrospect, I think those people dressed in costumes walking up Montparnasse must have seen something before anybody else did. When they looked at me and said, “This guy comes with us,” I think it wasn’t just an accident, it was as clear a sign as I would ever get that I was going to enter the life of the artist. I was going to disrobe myself, I was going to put on a new identity, I was going to be somebody else. It took much longer for that transformation to take place, but in time it did happen. I returned home to the United States feeling for the first time the wind at my back. I suppose it had been there for quite some time. But this time I felt it for sure.

Back in Baltimore, I saw my Uncle Willie.

“Well, what’d you think?” he asked.

“Still going to music school,” I replied.

JUILLIARD

N
EWLY GRADUATED FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO, I SPENT
the summer of 1956 working with my brother, Marty, for Uncle David and Uncle Willie, unloading boxcars of plywood for their lumber supply company in industrial downtown Baltimore. Working at Central Building Lumber and Supply was a mild preview to my work in the steel mills in that the workers were mostly Southern and poor, but this was a family business, which separated us automatically from the other laborers.

In the fall, I went right back to Chicago. I needed to think things over, and I felt freer to do that in a place where I had been living independently for some years already and was far away from any parental influence. Even though I registered for a few philosophy classes at the university, most of my time was spent planning my entrance to New York.

I had settled on Juilliard as my goal. Marcus Raskin, my piano teacher, had studied there, but he hadn’t told me much about it. I picked the best music school in America and decided I was going to go there. I applied to only one school, and it was the best I could find. I made no second application. I made no third application. I already had an academic degree from one of the best universities and I had no further interest in academic pursuits. I was really looking for a trade school, and that was Juilliard par excellence.

Young as I was, I had a tremendous confidence that I could do what I wanted. Still, when I thought, I’ll go to New York, I didn’t
quite
know how to do it. I wrote away and found out when the auditions were held. Back then, arrangements like these were not made by phone. You would write a letter and you’d get a letter back. My appointment for an audition was for the flute. At that point, I didn’t want to show them my first compositions. I knew they would not be good enough. By then I was already past my early twelve-tone Alban Berg–inspired music. I don’t think I was particularly good at it. The aesthetics were foreign to me. It sounded like overcooked German expressionism and far too abstract to stimulate my own imagination. In time, and much later, I came to love the music of Stockhausen, Hans Werner Henze, Luigi Nono, Luciano Berio and even Pierre Boulez, but in 1957 I was listening to Charles Ives, Roy Harris, Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, and William Schuman.

Once my audition at Juilliard was scheduled, I left Chicago by train for Baltimore, where I had the conversation with my mother in which she warned me what I was getting myself into—a life of traveling and living in hotels—and took the bus to New York. As I described earlier, the audition took an unexpected turn and resulted in my accepting the suggested plan—that is, I would spend one year in the Extension Division in Stanley Wolfe’s composition class, and in the following spring of 1958 I would reaudition as a composition student. Then, if accepted, I would be able to enroll as a composition student that fall.

The only problem to solve was, as always, the material question, so I went back to the Port Authority Bus Terminal at Eighth Avenue and Forty-First Street in Manhattan and bought a ticket back to Baltimore, with Bethlehem Steel as my goal.

IN ITS HEYDAY IN THE 1950S, THE NIGHT SKY
at Bethlehem Steel in Sparrows Point was a splendid sight. I would drive from my parent’s home in Clarks Lane, off Park Heights Avenue, to the steel plant. Ben and Ida had finally arrived close to the suburbs after twenty-five years of struggling to be out of downtown Baltimore. Driving from their house, I would bypass the city, going southeast to Sparrows Point. From a good fifteen miles away, the sky glowed from the light of open-hearth furnaces, where iron ore was melted and rolled out into thick steel slabs. At first the light would be seen as a shimmer—less colorful than a sunrise, more like an inverted sunset, gradually filling the night sky with a fiery white light.

I was working a swing shift, meaning that in the course of three weeks my workday shifted from 6 a.m.–2 p.m. to 2 p.m.–10 p.m. and then 10 p.m.–6 a.m. The night shift was my favorite. I would borrow the family car, a pale blue Simca, leaving home at nine, and after about forty minutes I would see the first sign of the furnaces. It never failed to thrill me. The air was filled with light and power, only outshone by the morning sunrise, hours away. It didn’t matter whether it was raining or clear. The white heat of the open hearth prevailed.

That’s where I wanted to work, but the job I landed next door was different. I was running an overhead crane, guided by rails hung to the ceiling, in the nail mill. My work was to pick up full bins of nails, weigh them on a giant scale, and deliver them to the door of the mill to be packed and labeled. The floor of the mill was lined with row upon row of machines that took steel wire cable and punched out nails at an astonishing speed. It was noisy and dirty as hell.

This was piecework, which meant that the machine operators were paid according to how much they produced. Effectively, they left their machines idle as little as possible. These were very tough men in their thirties, forties, and fifties looking for good-paying jobs who had come up to Baltimore from the Carolinas, Florida, Alabama, and Louisiana. Sparrows Point was the first heavy-industry stop on their way north, unless they had taken the route to Chicago. They were all incredibly strong and hardworking. One man—tall, lean, and all muscle—was said to be from Florida and was known to have wrestled alligators. He didn’t talk much, so I never actually heard it from him, but I believed it. He was one of the ones who could stand at his machine and work nonstop for a full eight-hour shift. Another was famous for building a small hunting lodge in the Maryland hills, using exclusively materials he took home from the plant—boards, wire, nails, even broken windows. He was a well-known “hero” in the plant.

I must have been quite a sight to these men: slim, with a barely shaved fresh face and a ready smile. And why shouldn’t I have been smiling—I wasn’t paid as well as them but it was a hands-down easy job. I would have intense periods of less than an hour when I was weighing and recording the nails produced in the nail mill. In between, I would sometimes have two hours while I waited for the bins to fill up again.

Despite my youth, the workers were very friendly to me. I suppose being the weigh-master assured me of a friendly greeting throughout the mill. The only untoward event that happened to me occurred on my very first day at work, when I mistakenly walked into the “colored” bathroom. I was promptly and bodily thrown out amid a roar of hooting laughter. It wasn’t mean or vengeful, just, to them, very funny. Anyway, I got the point. All in all I got along pretty well with the men in the mill, though they were unlike any of Ben’s employees or customers in the record store. I guess that fewer than half of them had more than a grade school education.

In the rural South there were plenty of young men leaving school to go to work as soon as they were able. These men were, most of them, not even working-class, but right off the fields and farms that not that long before had been part of the Confederacy. I was curious about them and they were curious and friendly to me. By gender, it was all men and by race, mixed—black, brown, white. They wore rough clothes, some with long hair, some short. The amazing thing to me was the parking lot—full of new cars and a surprising number of big Cadillacs, complete with radio aerials, leather seats, and huge fins in the back. It would be some years later before I too drove a Cadillac—not until my film-score-writing days in L.A., when I would pick up a Cadillac as a car rental. I’m sure the Bethlehem Steel parking lot was still in my mind. Not unlike those fellows I had known long ago, it gave me a quick, easy feeling of accomplishment to command a big car like that.

Luckily for me, I never minded earning money as best I could, and I actually enjoyed working at the mill. It’s a good thing, too, because I would not make a living working full-time as a musician-composer until 1978 when, at the age of forty-one, I was commissioned to compose
Satyagrah
a for the Netherlands Opera. Still, all the years of day jobs—twenty-four years—never bothered me. My curiosity about life trumped any disdain I might have had for working. So if this was a reality check, then I had happily signed on at a fairly early age.

After five months of working at the mill, I had saved $1200. Ida and Ben now knew of my plans and though dismayed, didn’t in the least attempt to dissuade me. There was also no discussion of help, either. After all, they had already helped me through the university. Now, on my own, I went to New York to begin my music studies in earnest.

MY FIRST HOME IN NEW YORK
was a small room on the fourth floor of a brownstone on Eighty-Eighth Street and Columbus Avenue. It cost six dollars a week and had a small bed, a dresser, and one lightbulb hanging from the ceiling. More humble conditions would have been hard to find, but the price was right.