Words Without Music: A Memoir (8 page)

These first encounters with “modern” music, none of which was written near my lifetime, were overwhelming. It took a huge effort just to visualize it, even with the help of a piano—which was in the common rooms of the Burton-Judson dormitory and pretty much ignored by the other residents—because it lacked a familiar tonality and the usual modulations. When you listened, it was hard to remember the melody because it was hard to remember the harmony. It didn’t mean that it wasn’t lovely music. It could be gorgeous. For example, composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen later on would create more modernist versions that were very beautiful.

Still, I was able to get the idea of how twelve-tone music was put together. I bought some blank music paper that found its way into the university bookstore and composed my first music—a string trio in one movement. I wrote it in my dormitory room. Since I didn’t have a piano with which to test the notes, I played it on the flute. I could play all the lines on the flute, and I could try to imagine how they sounded together, and over the course of two or three weeks I actually completed a composition seven or eight minutes long. I knew how to make it sound modern because I avoided triadic harmony. I avoided anything that sounded consonant. I wrote all the parts so that nothing sounded like it was connected to anything else. I think it sounded rather like any ordinary piece of twelve-tone music. No one ever played it, but I could play all the parts and I could hear them, without knowing what I was hearing. The ability to hear with clarity and judgment came only through real practice and study, and most of that was accomplished later, partly at Juilliard and then completed with Boulanger.

My string trio wasn’t particularly good or bad, but it was my first composed music and that was good enough. I have no idea where that music is today. I thought it might have been in a box of early compositions that had ended up in my brother’s house in Baltimore. But about ten years ago he delivered to me a box of music he found in his basement and this composition wasn’t there. What
was
there were Juilliard pieces that I had long ago forgotten.

In any event, that was where I began, in the library at the University of Chicago, studying the scores, and in my dormitory room, struggling to put together my first composed music. I had as yet no teacher of composition, but I found two sources of instruction. The first was a harmony book by Schoenberg. I had heard that there was such a book, but couldn’t find it in any bookstore. I finally sent away for it, and it arrived several weeks later by mail. It turned out to be a very clear, well thought-out book on traditional harmony. Not at all what I expected, but actually what I really needed. From that book I began learning music “theory,” as it is called.

Then, following my freshman year, I worked in Baltimore as a lifeguard at a summer camp for children and spent my entire pay, perhaps two hundred dollars, on my first real music composition lessons, which I took from a Baltimore composer, Louis Cheslock, whose name I had gotten from the Peabody Conservatory. He was a real, living composer and even had his symphonic music played, though only occasionally, by the Baltimore Symphony. At Mr. Cheslock’s home, he would give me harmony exercises and counterpoint exercises, and that was my introduction to real music training. He was quite a good teacher and easily answered questions that had arisen from my initial understanding of the Schoenberg book. With him I felt at last that there was solid ground under my feet.

In the early 1950s, the only door that appeared to me to be open for a composer was to carry on in a European tradition of modernism, which really came down to twelve-tone music. Now, I didn’t know about other modernists who were not using the twelve-tone system, among them Stravinsky, the French composer Francis Poulenc, and the Czech composer Leoš Janáček, not to mention the Americans Henry Cowell, Aaron Copland, and Virgil Thomson. These tonalists were related in one way or the other to the folkloric roots of classical music. For example, the first three ballets of Stravinsky—
The Firebird
,
Petrushka
, and
The Rite of Spring
—are all based on Russian folk music. I knew this because in my early years at Juilliard I used to exchange music with a pen pal in Russia. He sent me a collection of Russian folk music that was arranged by Rimsky-Korsakov, and in that book, I found all the melodies of
The Firebird
and
Petrushka.

I had heard some of the music by these tonalist composers in Chicago—because Fritz Reiner played Bartók—so it wasn’t so much that I didn’t know their work, it was more that their work was not considered in academic circles to be important. Of course, it wasn’t long before I became acquainted with other kinds of alternate new music, including, among many others, Harry Partch, John Cage, Conlon Nancarrow, and Morton Feldman.

AN INFORMAL GROUP OF US SPENT SIGNIFICANT TIME
just listening to music. This might have merely been casual listening, but it turned out to be surprisingly significant later on. My listening companions were, among others, Tom Steiner and Sydney Jacobs—my pals from Baltimore—as well as Carl Sagan, the future astrophysicist and cosmologist. This group undertook a superserious study of recordings of Bruckner and Mahler. It should be remembered that in the early 1950s, this school of music was virtually unknown outside of Europe. In the next decade conductors—especially Leonard Bernstein—would make their work widely popular in the States, but that was yet to come. In any event, we spent hours and hours together listening to recordings of Bruckner and Mahler symphonies, comparing recordings—often difficult to obtain even in Chicago—by Bruno Walter, Jascha Horenstein, and Wilhelm Furtwängler.

Of these three, Furtwängler, a tall, magisterial conductor, was the master of SLOW. He could find gaps between quarter notes that were almost unimaginable. He pushed dynamics and tempos and imposed his predilection for certain kinds of extremes in music. He forced it right onto the music, and you either liked it or you didn’t. His Beethoven was considered highly controversial, because it was so different from conventional interpretations. Toscanini, in contrast to Furtwängler, was very fast. In their readings of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, they could be twenty minutes apart in terms of the timing of the piece. It was astonishing how different they could be.

The other master of SLOW, whom I would know years later, was our own Bob Wilson, my collaborator on
Einstein on the Beach
. In many ways Furtwängler’s Bruckner and Beethoven prepared me for Wilson. With Bob it was a visual tempo that he played with, but in the end it comes down to the same thing. With both Furtwängler and Wilson, the metronome clicks plunge down well below the comfort level of the human heartbeat. And what these truly great and profound artists reveal to us is a world of immense, immeasurable beauty.

With Bruckner and Mahler, I was interested not only in the orchestration but also in the extreme length of the pieces. They could be two hours long, or an hour and a half long, easily. I liked the scale of it. It was extreme in a certain way, but it was a very big canvas that they painted on in terms of time. There were things that, in retrospect, I didn’t like so much: a lot of it was based on folkloric concert material, which I wasn’t very interested in. Mahler was especially like that. Bruckner, on the other hand, composed symphonies that were epic, almost baroquelike edifices of symphonic music. Huge granite objects, but in music. The music reminded me very much of the church and I learned later that he had been a church organist. In his symphonies it was as if he had made an orchestra sound like an organ. He had mastered the orchestra to that extent.

One major, and unforeseen, benefit of the Bruckner expertise I acquired came when my longtime colleague and friend, the conductor Dennis Russell Davies, who had been the conductor of the Vienna Radio Orchestra, became, in 2002, the music director and conductor of the Linz Opera and the Bruckner House Orchestra. Through Dennis, my symphonies were played in Austria. I went to Linz for the first time with the poorly conceived idea that my music would sound better played by an American orchestra, because they would understand the rhythms that I was composing.

To my surprise, the Bruckner Orchestra played these compositions better than American orchestras. Somehow, Bruckner’s sound had gotten lodged in my psyche. I had taken those pieces and digested them whole, and they had remained in my memory. When I was writing the opera
Satyagraha
, I found myself doing a similar kind of orchestration: all the strings played together in blocks, all the winds played together in blocks, and I took these blocks and managed to move them in new ways. I wasn’t consciously trying to emulate Bruckner, but it was only when I heard the live Bruckner Orchestra, an Austrian orchestra, playing my music—my Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth Symphonies as well as other pieces—that I said, “Oh, this music sounds right.” Then I realized that the reason it did sound right was that there were remnants of the Bruckner symphonies I’d heard many years before still in my mind.

The Austrian players were amazed that I knew that literature and cared for it so passionately. It smoothed the way for us in our composer-player friendship. And I absolutely loved the way they made my symphonies sound—quite a few were composed for them. This became clear to me through Dennis’s interpretations and their beautiful performances. My connection to these musicians, their conductor, and the orchestra altogether formed for me an empathetic link to my own history—my present and, surely, my future. I doubt whether many other American composers would have had that experience.

MY MOTHER’S BROTHER, UNCLE WILLIE,
had often talked to me about becoming a part of his business. He owned a company with my other uncle, David, which had been started by my grandfather, the ragpicker. They had taken over, and it became a very successful business called the Central Building Lumber and Supply Company.

Uncle Willie had no children. He hadn’t liked my idea of going away to college in Chicago and, like the rest of my family, he wasn’t in favor of my going to music school. He wanted me to come back to Baltimore and eventually take over his half of the business. When I told him I wasn’t interested, he said, “Do you think you could think about it?”

“I’ll think about it,” I said, “but I’m not interested. That’s not what I’m going to do.”

Uncle Willie didn’t want to give up the idea. “Why don’t you go to Paris this summer, take a course in French, have a look around, and think about what you really want to do.”

It was the summer of 1954, and I was seventeen.

“Okay,” I said. “I will.”

So, the summer after my sophomore year, I found myself on the
Queen Mary
on my way to France. In 1954, that’s how you traveled to Europe. No one took the plane. There was a French-language summer class given for Americans in Paris, and that was where I was headed. The
Queen Mary
docked in Le Havre in the morning. I got on the train, and by three in the afternoon, I was in Paris. After leaving my bags at the dormitory, I went to register at the school and then I was ready to go out to see something of the city. At registration, I met a girl my age named Karen Collins and I said, “Karen, let’s go get a drink,” so we went to a café. It was about nine in the evening.

While sitting at the café, we suddenly saw a mob of people in costumes walking down Boulevard Montparnasse.

“What is this?” I asked.

“This is the night of the Bal des Artistes,” someone sitting next to us said.

We were told that every year the École des Beaux Arts had an all-night party for graduates, current students, and, indeed, anyone who had been part of the École des Beaux Arts—a huge range of people: some artists, some kids, but also older graduates in their forties and fifties.

When this fantastically costumed group saw us—two kids really, a very nice young woman from Kansas and a nice young man from Baltimore—they must have seen something that said, “These are our children, and we need to take them with us.” It was all very high-spirited and good-natured. They were having fun playing around with us. They pretended to speak English but of course they couldn’t, not really. They just grabbed us and took us with them. I knew very little French at that time, but Karen and I were whisked away with these people and taken to a huge armory like the Grand Palais.

We arrived at ten or eleven o’clock, and basically we were with them until eight the next morning. The artists at the Beaux Arts were considered to be very rowdy, so at a certain point the gendarmes came and locked the doors and no one was allowed to leave. The reasoning was simple: they were afraid all these people would go running amok all over Paris. So the doors stayed closed until sometime after dawn, and once the celebration was over, there was a grand parade through the streets of Paris. This was my introduction to the bohemian life of Paris, and it was quite an introduction.

First of all, we had to have costumes. The armory had been set up in such a way that there was a big open space in the middle, and along the sides were large rooms, where each
atelier
had its own party with its own wine and food, mostly bread and cheese and fruit. At different times, the various groups would all come out from these rooms and congregate in the big open space in the center for all kinds of communal activities. But the first thing they did was take me to one of the studios where they took all my clothes off, painted my body completely red, and gave me a piece of gauze to put on around my waist. It was almost nothing to wear, but I wrapped it around my body as best I could. They did the same thing with Karen in a separate studio, and when we came out, both of us were red. We stayed painted and “dressed” like that for the rest of the night.

There were set events throughout the evening, contests for the best costumes for men, and a separate one for the women. They also had to elect a king of the ball and a queen of the ball. A jury made up of some of the older people made the selections, and the winners of each event were greeted with tremendous enthusiasm by the crowd.