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Yaddo Story
 Every artist’s Yaddo Story is as personal, as different, as meaningful, and as true, as every woman’s Birth Story. This one is mine. I think I have always felt more at home at Yaddo than anywhere else in the world because my Yaddo story is also my story, a story about the presence that absence makes; how everyone we thought we lost is, in fact, still here.
I believe that Yaddo was created by the Trasks for the same reason my parents created me, in an effort to transform sorrow into joy. When my mother gave birth to me, she was still mourning the baby she had just lost; so much so, that she gave me his name. In the natural course of things, children outlive their parents. Katrina Trask, the strong, idealistic, caring woman whose creative spirit pervades every corner of this lovingly hodgepodge, lived-in Upstate New York estate, endured, as Allan Gurganus has written, ‘four inexcusable child deaths.’ In time, she lost her husband too, in a railroad accident. She outlived them all. An alliance with Mr. Peabody, her husband’s partner, heroic hires, years of dedicated service by scores of selfless supporters of the dream of what Yaddo could and has become have ensued; but those stories are recorded elsewhere.
When, at the turn of the century, Katrina and her husband Spencer decided to transform their hearth and home into a place where the artistic Birth Story would be nurtured and cherished for as long as the Corporation could be made to survive, they were attempting to build a living monument not just to their dead children, but a tribute to the human spirit (something they knew a thing or two about) itself. Every brittle, defensive young artist who has arrived at Yaddo with a chip on her shoulder cannot help but feel the Trask’s love as they sit down to work, and then to a decent meal. Each and every work created here is both a memorial to those dead children and a testament to their parent’s determination to transubstantiate loss into works of art.
Ned Rorem, a favored son of Yaddo, a longtime member of the Corporation, from whose studio at the Curtis I had just matriculated, had telephoned the President of Yaddo, Curtis Harnack, that wonderfully humane man, and his brilliant, wise wife, Hortense Calisher to arrange for my first visit. He had advised me to ask David Diamond what books I should read before beginning my studies with him at Juilliard the following September. David had instructed me to read Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus and Romaine Rolland’s Jean Christophe while at Yaddo.
I first arrived during the summer of 1984, a few months after serving as Charon to my mother’s Eurydice (she died in my arms); having fled, resolved never to return, the house in which I was brought up; having just severed ties with my father. I held within me all the love of place and persons that ‘home’ signified to me: I was entirely ready to transfer those feelings to the Trasks and to Yaddo, and I did. Although I did not realize it at the time, I arrived with a desperate need not to be Rastignac, but Orpheus; I needed to sing my mother’s spirit out of the Underworld, bring her back to life.
 Expecting nothing, knowing nothing, and having been told nothing by Ned except ‘You might not like it; these places are not for everyone,’ I took the train from Philadelphia and was met at the Saratoga station by the ever-courtly James (who addressed me as ‘sir’ long before I had any claim to the honorific) in the beat up old company station wagon. I had moved out of my apartment a few days earlier and hadn’t yet begun looking for one in New York; my violinist girlfriend had begun, although I had only begun to intuit it, the process of dumping me in order to begin a dead-end liaison with a famous flautist over twice her age. Consequently, I arrived with the clothes on my back, Mann and Rolland in my backpack, four shirts, three pair of underwear, two pair of jeans, four pair of socks, mechanical pencils and erasers, thirty dollars, and lots and lots of music paper.
Tears inexplicably, spontaneously flowed as beloved, infinitely capable program director Rosemary Misurelli (who I had never before met) bundled me up in her Rabelaisian Earth Mother arms at the front door of the office. ‘I feel as though I have come home,’ I burbled into Rosemary’s generous breasts. Weeping, she covered my face with kisses, and then took me in to meet Curt, who asked me why I was crying.
‘I have no idea,’ I said.
‘Are you okay?’ he asked.
‘I think so,’ I said. ‘I don’t know why I’m crying.’
‘I do,’ he said, with one of the kindest, most open Midwestern smiles I’d ever seen.
Every artist, upon arrival, is escorted to their studio and bedroom by a Special Assistant to the President. That summer, Doug Martin and Nancy Brett served. I can’t remember which one of them gave me the tour and showed me to my room, or which room I was given – probably it was Oratory, at the top of the main staircase, next to Spencer’s study. (I suppose that somewhere in the office there is a file that could be consulted, but I don’t want to know what is in it, and I doubt that Yaddo’s current elegant, sensitive, and entirely discrete Program Director, Candace Wait, would show it to me, anyway. After all these years, it would make me writhe as much as reading a grade school mash note: changing ‘who to call’ emergency numbers as friendships and marriages began and ended, copies of thank you notes and entreaties, the usual ‘thank you’ notes from the president one received when you presented a copy of your latest published work to the library, notations of bad behavior – who knows? Maybe the time, during Myra Sklarew’s presidency, that I cherub-napped the statue of the winged angel from beneath the stairs in the Mansion so that he could preside, perched on the mantel, over my martini party in the Pink Room had been reported? The skinny-dipping, alone and with others in the lakes, during Michael and Nina Sundell’s tenure? Is there a blot on my record because of the midnight game of naked touch football I instigated – inspired by the story of a nocturnal sighting of a nude John Cheever, but that’s someone else’s story – on the lawn behind West House at the beginning of Elaina Richardson’s presidency? Not to mention a hundred other semi- or better-forgotten misdemeanors, real and imagined.) I recall, however, that I was given Woodland Studio to compose in, and that Nancy and Doug sat on either side of me during my first dinner in the intimidating baronial dining room. I was feeling pretty fragile at the time, and dinner conversation at Yaddo, when one can suddenly find oneself struggling to remain afloat in a sea of egos, witty (or not) repartee, cagey recitations of accomplishments, good plain fun, and intellectual gamesmanship, can be pretty rough; they made me feel both loved and protected.
Everyone who has lived and worked at Yaddo over the past century has heard stories about the ghosts. There’s the Puritanical one that keeps watch in the bedroom on the second floor of the mansion opposite the stairs that opens the windows when something naughty is happening in the room. There’s the Testy one that slams the closet door in Katrina’s bedroom when the current occupant spends a little too much time on the fainting couch. There’s the Angry one in the Tower (it was definitely a composer, but I can’t imagine who, even in death, could mange to be that obnoxious) who, in the mid nineties, scared the hell out of me one night while I was locking up. Near the end of my first visit, novelist Doug Unger was sitting on the second floor landing, around eleven-thirty in the evening, reading the New Yorker. Across from him sat a third person, whose name escapes me. That reassuring, late-night quietude (the plashing of water in the little fountain next to the front door, the soughing and whispering of the pines, underpinned by the steady hum of automobile wheels on the Northway) particular to this house surrounded us. I didn’t know at the time that Doug was up there. I was reading in the Great Hall, next to the fireplace with the phoenix on it. (Did I mention that this family also endured the destruction of their house by fire?)
 Katrina Trask’s was one of what Rick Moody calls the ‘momentous and astonishing and beautiful deaths’ that have taken place at Yaddo. I had spent the last several weeks composing a requiem, what Richard McCann might call a ‘ghost letter’ to Katrina. Richard wrote, in one of his poems, ‘Quiet! Don’t you know that the dead go on hearing for hours?’ I submit that they go on hearing for days, months, weeks, years, lifetimes – forever, if they want to.
I less ‘saw’ her than ‘felt’ her there, when we met; the way that I don’t so much ‘hear’ music when I compose, but ‘feel’ it. In the same way that one might glimpse a child streaking out of a suburban front yard and into the street, and with the same terrible wave of heart-in-the-mouth dread, perceived peripherally, intuited while focusing elsewhere, a woman descending the main staircase in what John Cheever mischievously described as ‘poor Katrina’s shower curtain’ came before my mind’s eye. It was without question some kind of manifestation of Katrina Trask. Her right hand was slightly raised, as it is in the portrait, and in it was a telegram, a poem, or a letter. Allan suavely describes what I think I saw as ‘some essence quorum of our souls’ intensities.’ At the instant that I noticed the apparition, I heard a cry from the second floor. I leapt to the foot of the stairs to see what the matter was. Looking up, I saw ashen-faced Doug.
‘What did you see?’ I asked.
‘A woman in a white dress, I swear to God,’ he said. From behind him in the darkness the third person – who couldn’t possibly have seen the staircase – said, softly, ‘It was Katrina.’ We coughed, laughed, looked at our feet. I used to describe the feeling I took away from the moment as being exactly like the way I used to feel when I heard the crunch of gravel in the driveway that meant my mother was home; now a father, I recognize that the feeling was more like the way I feel when my son is sleeping in his crib in the next room, yet I am in every way but physically with him.
Anyway, that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.
The next morning, everyone at breakfast had something to report. A limb had fallen on the front stoop of Pine Garde (there had been no wind); the front door of West House had been discovered swinging wildly (again, no wind); someone had heard whistling near the Tower, stepped out to see who it was, found only darkness (no one would touch that one). It had been a busy night.
I have returned to Yaddo many, many times over the years. My ghost story is no longer mine; the incident has been repeated to me by other people over dinner as having happened to them, or to someone they know. As Rick writes of his ghost story, ‘I support the addition of any lies, fibs, whoppers, and extraneous characters to my tale, by which I mean that the work done [at Yaddo] is done by the community as a whole.’ My relationship to Yaddo has become in a way too precious to me to describe, except in music.
For two vagabond decades, Yaddo was my home, wherever I actually slept or received my mail. When I married happily at last, Yaddo became my parents’ house. Of course, it remained, and always will be, a place where I could go, as people do, and as Yaddo poet Theodore Roethke described it, to ‘learn by going where I had to go.’
The first and most important of the many meaningful friendships that I have made at Yaddo began that summer. Gardner McFall was writing The Pilot’s Daughter, a volume of poetry about the process of coming to terms with the disappearance of her father and the birth of her daughter. I could relate. Over the course of three summers at Yaddo twenty years later, we worked together on Amelia, an opera based on her personal story, carried along by music inspired by my inner journey, which began with the death of my mother and ends with the birth of my son.
 Meeting the composer David Del Tredici during my first Yaddo visit in my twenties remains one of the most important events of my life. His marriage of flawless compositional craft, superb pianistic technique, extraordinarily clever mind, and hugely generous spirit, were (and remain, a quarter century later) a genuine inspiration to me. I joyfully joined him at table, observing how he treated other artists, how he handled younger composer colleagues, teased stories out of him, and joined him at the piano, where, when playing four hands with him, I tried, but never could really keep up because of how giddy with happiness watching his flying fingers always rendered me. David is the Mozart of his generation. His was and is perhaps the purest musical talent I’ve ever witnessed. I’m proud to call him friend, still.
In my thirties, I spent more of my social time at Yaddo with my contemporaries. I shed ‘rabbit-hood,’ talked a lot, drank a lot, laughed a lot, and worked like a dog. In my forties, I find myself again sitting mainly with older artists at dinner, because I am one, and because it is more comforting after a hard day’s work to speak with people who have read and value the same books, witnessed the same careers fall and rise, shared the same departed friends. First a rabbit, then a dog, now I think of myself as a draft horse in harness, pulling my compositional plough.
I was honored with election to lifetime membership in the Corporation by my brothers and sisters in my late thirties, and now stay for a very short time, for two reasons: first, there are so many composers who want and need to go to Yaddo, and I don’t feel that I have the moral right to deprive them of the opportunity I’ve enjoyed; second, because I simply miss my wife and child, and the home and life we are building together, and don’t feel the need to ‘retreat’ from it in order to get my work done.
Yaddo is a place where a sane and humble person can see ghosts and believe in them, a place where one can be transformed by talent and the magic of being a guest there into heightened creature, and a place where one is made better than one is. One is borne aloft - no matter who one is, or who one thinks he is - by the conviction that Art matters. The sole qualification for coming remains that an artist shall have done, is doing, or gives promise to doing 'good and earnest work.'
Yaddo is a safe haven for souls painfully familiar with the deafening solitude that is an intrinsic part of our corporeal existence. It is a Genuinely Good Place in which artists create things of beauty and goodness which attempt to bridge the gap between souls. Artists whoa re invited to Yaddo aren't 'colonists,' they are guests of the Trasks, who wrote 'we desire to found here a permanent Home to which shall come from time to time ... authors, painters, sculptors, musicians and other artists both men and women, few in number but chosen for their creative gifts and besides and not less for the power and the will and the purpose to make these gifts useful to the world.'
Yaddo is a place where the fierce discipline of having to fill not only the empty page or canvas or computer screen (insert technology here) but the wastebasket reigns. It is a link to the artistic continuum not only for the artist who has, as Paul once described it to me, 'solved the money problem,' but for newcomers and those who have been living hand-to-mouth because they were compelled to create something that, while artistically nourishing, was not trendy or commercially viable. Yaddo is a place of rebirth for the heartsick artist wondering whether it is worth going on. It is a safe haven from whence one can confront life's most terrifying conundrums. Fashions change, political movements flourish and fail, one decade you're hip and the next your passé.
 In a world that can seem preoccupied with earning and spending, dividing and dominating, loving and losing, Yaddo is a place where for a brief spell money isn’t an issue, communion and fellowship prevail, and our beloveds are forever with us. In May 2007, seated before the upright piano in the Acosta Nichols Stone Tower studio at which Marc Blitzstein composed Regina, writing with trepidation the title Amelia over what would become the first page of over four hundred pages of piano sketch of my opera about flight and rebirth, a bird flew in through the open door and flew frightened circles high above me in the white cone of the ceiling. I got up and spoke quietly to the bird, ‘You’ll be okay, friend. Everything will be fine. The door is open. Fly through it.’ As though on cue, the bird swooped down and glided back out through the door and into the surrounding forest. To me, it was the plainest sort of blessing, a perfect expression of the sort of thing that happens at Yaddo.
Yaddo is about the work, first and foremost. My work book lists the following pieces composed all, or in part, at Yaddo between 1984 and 2008: three major operas: Amelia, Bandanna, and Shining Brow; two cantatas: A Walt Whitman Requiem and Light Fantastic; my Third Symphony; and nearly a hundred art songs and chamber works, large and small. But it is also about friendship and staunch collegiality: how incredibly poorer my life would be without the stalwart souls I've had the privilege of spending time with at Yaddo; there are far too many to list since any list would imply completeness.
'Don't worry;' sigh the trees of Yaddo, 'you are all Trask children, now.' One may not return for a very long time, but Yaddo abides. Absolutely every person you have ever known and loved who has died is here. My mother isn't in some hole in the ground in Wisconsin any more than she is on some hill outside of Grover's Corners; she is a Trask child, just like Daron, and can be found in one of the deep shadows here. Of course she went into what Paul described in his libretto for Brow as 'the built up dark.' At Yaddo, astride the liminal zone between reality and imagination, loss and recovery, death and life, anything is possible; so much so, that every one of the departed with the slightest interest in the matter whispers, 'Honey, roll up your sleeves, share your Birth Story, 'learn by going where you have to go.'
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