On Performing

Beginnings

A prepubescent boy of 12 bathed in dazzling stage lights in 1973 sings Norman Dello Joio’s 1948 setting There is a Lady Sweet and Kind accompanied at the piano by his fearsome teacher, a man named Wallace Tomchek, at some rural high school in Wisconsin for three non-descript oldsters checking off boxes without looking up until the end when it is revealed that one is weeping.

In the beginning, performance is what you make of it. In the end, when you finally become what a lifetime of performing has made of you, you’ve become a means of transmission, an instrument. In between comes the performing. And the bear. More about the bear later.

Public Performing: the ritual for which one dresses up (or not) in concert blacks, hits the deck, and participates as performer or auditor in a transformative exercise facilitated by music-making, is undeniably an opportunity to enjoy and explore peak human and aesthetic experiences that, in their rightness, touch peoples’ souls and enrich their lives.

Christmas 1978, as a tenor in the choir during a recording session of, among other seasonal pieces, Holst’s Lullay My Liking I am moved to secret tears of gratitude and joy by the sudden, staggering understanding of how very much I love all the people with whom I am singing, that we are good and that, no matter where everyone’s paths will take them after graduation, we can take gentle, youthful pride in our performances; that our conductor Kay is excellent, and that she and Tomchek have taught us well; that this is a memory, a peak moment, if I can hold on to it, an instant that, if correctly remembered and left unadorned, might help carry me into the future.

Listening to the recording just now, I can still identify individual voices in that long ago chorus, and I am transported in time to who I was then, able to examine the skein of memories that ties the man I am and the boy I was in a way that consoles and admonishes, celebrates and memorializes.  Memory is what makes us human; it is the Madeleine. But it is performance that activates memory and compels us to act.

Private Performing: composer (and former chef) Carlos Jaquez Gonzalez observed to me during filming of the operafilm 9/10: Love Before the Fall (in which he sang the role of Tony) how alike Family Meal in the restaurant world, chamber music with friends, and ensemble building in the theater are. I have leaned into that with my New Mercury Collective.

I am with stolid deliberation working my way through a new French language edition of Marcel Proust’s À la recherché du temps perdu — a gift from the Camargo Foundation’s resident director, Michael Pretina — side by side with my mother’s nicotine-stained 1934 English language edition. It is November 1989. The Mistral is marching stiffly down the Alps and sweeping across the Côte d’Azur on its way to North Africa, so I am wrapped in jeans and a shocking pink woolen Benetton sweater purchased a few weeks earlier in Venice with money I don’t really have and in which I have sweated. It still looks good, but it smells a little funky. A few days earlier I had set Paul Muldoon’s poem Holy Thursday to music, and have volunteered to perform it, along with a few other songs—some Barber, Rorem, Bernstein, and a couple of my own—at a soiree Michael is throwing for some donors. I can hear the rhythmic crashing of the waves on the limestone cliffs below the villa and, on a lark,  synchronize to them the thrumming chords of the piano part of my setting of Paul’s poem. As I play for an instant I realize the moment for what it is.

The riskiest performing of all, the ultimate gift that performers can offer one another, is the sharing of unfinished drafts or unpolished performances. Complete trust and inclusion of others in one’s creative space. As a composer who performs, mine is the music room at Yaddo, the artist retreat in Saratoga Springs, New York.

Sitting next to David Del Tredici, giddily charging through Mozart Symphonies four handed arms like spaghetti on a summer afternoon in the early 90s; David accompanying me as I roughhouse my way through Now You Know — a song with words by Antler and dedicated to me about, among other things, how male babies in the womb get erections, and how many, and how often — to a roaring audience of guests in summer 1998; David’s exquisite accompaniment as I sing my setting of Gardner McFall’s Amelia’s Song in September 2005 for the rest of the guests after dinner while composing the opera; accompanying Gilda Lyons myself in my arrangement of the hymn Angel Band before dinner during an annual board meeting sometime during the aughts; weeping, a few days after Ray Charles’ death in 2004, while singing and playing my setting of Stephen Dunn’s Elegy for Ray Charles (were Stephen or David aware yet that they had Parkinson’s?) for him in the middle of the night.

I may have thought that I was a pianist, singer, or conductor before I landed in conservatory, but that nonsense was knocked out of me the first time I walked down the second-floor hallway at Curtis lined with the sepia-colored group graduation photos (of Gary Graffman, Jorge Bolet, Leonard Rose, Jaime Laredo and…) to the sound of kids younger than me crushing repertoire that I’d never have the technique to perform. From that moment on, I thought of myself as “a composer who plays the piano,” despite all the piano lessons and some really terrific teachers, with whom I am grateful to have studied — beginning at 7 with a stern Polish Holocaust survivor named Adam Klescewski; then Duane Dishaw at the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music; and then Jeannette Ross at the University of Wisconsin; ending with Marion Zarzeczna, a pupil of Horszowski’s, at Curtis, who taught me finally how to not play “like a composer.”

Just as composing requires a safe, secure space from whence to create, performing requires that you feel safe onstage. Every one of my teachers observed with wonder how comfortable and at ease I was at the keyboard. It was because, when I was fifteen my mother made my father promise that, if I were at the piano, then he could not summon me to perform any of the numerous random tasks that he demanded of all three of his sons when he was home in what we decided was a conscious desire to keep us from relaxing. For me, the result was that the moment I took to the bench I felt safe. In performance, charged with lifting up and protecting a singer, I was always and have remained, entirely in command of myself as a performer because I’m not there for me: I am a man on a mission.

I made the most of the technique that I had. I performed on hundreds of concerts as a collaborative pianist, made records, coached, and put over from the piano a dozen operas to collaborators, producers, and colleagues. I’ve always acknowledged my place. After hearing me premiere some songs with Douglas Hines, Vladimir Sokoloff told me, “You’re a fine collaborative pianist. Soloist not so much.” I am grateful for that.

Middles

Procedural memory is a crucial aspect of being an effective performer. That’s why one practices scales, which, aside from keeping one physically limber (more about that later), create a wealth of repetitive motions that can be executed without conscious management, increasing suppleness of execution, improving one’s technical precision, and even storing history itself in the retained motor skills.

Teachers transfer their muscle memory to their students by passing along to them their personal fingerings. This practical aspect of the oral tradition has a lot of history and poetry to it. Consider that Tchaikovsky was assisted by his composition student Iosef Kotek (a violinist) who provided practical advice that helped his teacher make the solo part more idiomatic. Tchaikovsky offered the piece to Leopold Auer, who rejected it (a ding the piece had to overcome in order to get legs), so the premiere went to Adolph Brodsky; but then Auer picked it up later and passed along his fingerings and interpretation to his students—Elman, Heifetz, Milstein, Shumsky, and Zimbalist, among others.

Hmmmm, that’s nice. No wonder the celli sound so plump there, I muse, hearing a bass clarinet doubling hitherto buried in the orchestration. Looking and sounding good during a rehearsal of Gershwin’s I Got Rhythm Variations with JoAnn Falletta and the Denver Chamber Orchestra in 1987, I’ve relaxed just enough during some passagework to let my mind wander. Up I go, my fingers rattling on by muscle memory, hearing things I’m not supposed to be hearing because I am not listening to myself. Even in the moment I am thinking “this is so cool” until I notice JoAnn glancing at me and I plunge back down into my own brain.

In the operafilm I Hear America Singing I have the composer wonder, “Where do people go when they go ‘up?’ Is it heaven?” If the moment of silence between the final sound and the first clap is where the bear lives (more about him later), then I think that the spirit of whomever composed the piece might live “up there,” with angels like Wenders’ Damien and Cassiel, observing and remembering. That’s why I’ve never “gone up” while performing my own music. If I ever do go up playing my own music, who will I meet there?

Sometime in the aughts a pianist colleague who had never heard me play turned to me just as I was about to go onstage to perform some songs with Paul Sperry on a benefit concert at Alice Tully Hall and said, “Please just don’t play like a composer, okay?” Performers aren’t angels; colleagues can be real stinkers. On the one hand, the legitimate criticisms that recreative musicians have with creators arise from the fact that, when we perform, we’re not listening critically. We’re too used to filling in the blanks, to imagining the stuff that is missing; too interested in the sweep of the argument to be careful about the notes. On the other hand, the anecdote reminds me that, over the course of three decades, Paul taught hundreds of singers at Aspen, Juilliard, Manhattan School, and elsewhere, how he and I preferred (with great exactitude) to perform the dozens of songs that I wrote for us. So I guess I am part of a tradition, after all.

Afternoons every couple of months with Paul Sperry over the years in his studio at the Majestic on Central Park West in New York City reading through the stacks of song cycles that composers sent him, enjoying the adventure, the challenge, the overview of what was happening in the art song world, the bits of wisdom imparted, the thumbnail critiques of the vocal writing, the laughter, the wine, quite simply … the playing.

“Playing like a composer” is one thing. Among serious composers and pianists both there is a stigma attached to the ability to “put a song over” at the keyboard — what composer Tevi Eber reminds me is dismissed as playing like a “theater pianist.” It happens that I am very good at it, though I stopped doing it when arthritis made performing more painful than it was worth. When he first landed in New York City in the early 40s, Leonard Bernstein did some work arranging, transcribing, and notating jazz improvisations for Harms under the pseudonym Lenny Amber. (I did the same thing, for another publisher, during the late 80s.) Distancing oneself from “hack work” is one thing, but LB was a super-practical musician, and proud of the fact that he could “put over” his shows “the way that Marc [Blitzstein] did.”

Putting over Frank Lloyd Wright’s “Balsam fir” aria from Shining Brow for Lenny on his beautiful Baldwin at the Dakota in 1990, knowing it was good stuff; the absolute I-can’t-believe-this-is-happening thrill of hearing him channel my compositional voice and manipulate it without corrupting it, singing and playing through the same material in his gravelly-schmoozy voice, and by doing so, teaching.

The only way I can perform my own music effectively is to convince myself that I didn’t write it. If I can manage that, then I derive tremendous satisfaction from performing with musicians who are interesting to listen to, who never sing or play anything the same way twice, and who require my backup because they are all in and anything could happen.

Orson Welles captures perfectly the effect that performing the same piece in different venues and for different audiences either on tour or over the span of decades feels like to me in the funhouse mirror sequence of The Lady from Shanghai. “Of course, killing you is killing myself,” says Everett Sloane, aiming his pistol at Rita Hayworth, who he sees in reflection with her gun aimed at him, along with his own face. “It’s the same thing. But, you know, I’m pretty tired of both of us.” Every shot that rings out causes another reflected version of Sloane, Welles, and Hayworth to shatter into a million pieces. I’ve had this experience in my own small way with songs like Holy Thursday, which I’ve played, sung and accompanied hundreds of times in different situations. I can’t imagine how Anne-Sophie Mutter or Joshua Bell feel performing the Beethoven Violin Concerto in the hundredth city, or Paul McCartney performing Hey Jude, but I’d make an operafilm about it in a hot New York minute.

Because I came to music first as a singer — that prepubescent boy of 12 bathed in dazzling stage lights in 1973 — I’ve always been entirely at ease as a choral conductor. Hartzell, Tomchek, and Robert Fountain were excellent role models, and I’d been doing it without effort for years by the time Louis Karchin engaged me as his assistant with the Washington Square Chorus at New York University (an interesting bunch comprised of NYU students and community members) during the late 80s and early 90s. When I took over as music director, we had a run of several years during which I joyously deepened my appreciation and love of exploring the rapturously singable part writing of  Monteverdi and Gesualdo by teaching them, week after week; picking up the stick to conduct Mozart — all the great repertoire I had been gifted to sing growing up.

Like most composers, I’ve been called upon to serve as conductor for various reasons, with ensembles large and small, fairly often over the years. I had excellent teachers: Catherine Comet was both terrifying and inspiring; and the help that I got from Lukas made me a respectable technician. Because I’ve only conducted when I needed to, I cannot in good conscience consider myself a conductor.

Stepping off the podium in Milwaukee and shaking the concertmaster’s hand after conducting Suite for a Lonely City— music that, via Bernstein, landed me on the east coast — in 1978 and intuiting that it was the beginning of something; bowing to Norman’s grieving parents in the little balcony in Curtis Hall after conducting the one and only performance of the memorial symphony I wrote for Norman in 1983, crushingly aware of the callow impertinence of my gesture; the feeling of disenchanted vindication I had when stepping off the podium in Las Vegas after having gotten my opera Bandanna in the can in 2000; thirty-eight years after looking down into the faces of my teenage contemporaries and feeling atop Mount Pisgah at the beginning of my story in Milwaukee, leading my fifty-something contemporaries and Gilda Lyons — in music that Bernstein once wrote as a young man for Tourel  — on my birthday in 2016 in Philadelphia, relieved that it would probably be my last time on the podium.

Ends

Once Tin Pan Alley gave way to broadcast pop, songs usually ended by repeating the chorus or the hook while the music faded out, facilitating crossfades on the radio and enabling the band to improvise solos on the “ride out.” Odd how songs just end again in the Internet era. Most importantly, fade outs avoided the dreaded “full stop.” Full stops are downers. Full. Stop. See what I mean?

Transitions are where development and drama happen. Anybody who spins a narrative on some sort of timeline fusses with the transitions between set pieces, the reasoning being that, if you allow an audience to applaud, they’ve been released from the moment and must be pulled back in and their disbelief resuspended. “Exit, pursued by a bear” — the all-time greatest stage direction.

Concert music generally comes to a full stop (either it ends “up” or “down”) when the piece is finished. As a performer one hopes to have been so much in the moment that one’s behavior at the double bar is too crass a thing to consider, just as composers suppose — correctly or not — that the audience will be moved to reflect on what has just transpired and that their anticipation of the opportunity to express their appreciation will mount during whatever silence follows the last note. In that space lives the bear.

Seated at the piano in Curtis Hall in Philadelphia in April 1984, finishing the world premiere of a big song cycle called Three Silent Things, the performance of which would mark my last appearance as a student on that stage, looking up from my finger on the A key as the pitch decayed first at Rob’s face, hearing the B of his cello, then at Lisa’s face, hearing the D of her viola, and then Michaela’s as she held the F# on her violin, and finally at Karen as she sang, “this shallow spectacle, this sense,” on the tonic, I understood for the first time that Wallace Stevens’ poem A Clear Day and No Memories, which I had read as an elegiac, innig meditation on mortality, was in fact a clinical description of existential emptiness, the loss of love, and the end of memory. After I nodded the final cutoff of that simple Gmaj9#7 chord, it felt as though the silence that followed stretched on and on. I hadn’t until that moment had the conscious self-awareness to accept that we were all basically quits, and that, although our narratives would of course continue, they would diasporate.

At that moment, I was eaten by the bear. I was genuinely unprepared for the emptiness, the sense of loss, of, well, what Karen had just been singing about, to feel so viscerally awful. In this place a performer hears not one beat of applause, one word of congratulations; feels not one hug, smells not a single flower in the bouquet that has appeared in one’s hands. Stage Managers are the caretakers of this liminal space, guiding otherwise capable people past the bear and into and out of the wings, gently but firmly telling them to walk slowly or to rush. The bear has a huge repertoire: the imposter syndrome, performance anxiety, the fear of being deemed unworthy, judged, all the feels; for some performers, the hardest part is never having come to terms with the fact that there will never be enough applause, and that the Real World is still out there past the bear, waiting.

Making myself as small as I can at the piano in Philadelphia, sometime in fall 1982, I am aware that I am not here to perform, but to witness. Periodically, I am called upon to play a few measures of accompaniment, but otherwise I am superfluous. I try to commit to memory everything that Szymon Goldberg is saying to my violinist friend during her lesson. He isn’t just passing along fingerings, bowing, style, bow speed and pressure, and tradition, he is summoning the aesthetic world in which Debussy lived for her and gently referencing for her the way that a half dozen other great violinists have played the piece — some for Debussy himself — so that, as she commits the great Sonata in G minor to memory she will inscribe it in her own poetic memory. As she puts her violin to her neck, the spirits of Gaston Poulet, who premiered it, David Oistrakh, who recorded it, and more join her.

“The Germans were advancing on Paris,” I recall Goldberg observing, “and you can feel the end of the world in it.” Like Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du Temps, the Debussy Sonata captures in music some essential quorum of understanding of the actuality of the end of time. Even in my early 20s I appreciated the coolness of her hand in mine as we walked home together that fall evening, and how superficial my grasp of Debussy’s last piece was. Understanding it would require a lifetime of study and experience. “To think he died only a few months after writing it,” she mused. “But he left us some breadcrumbs at least,” I replied.

Ned and I have finished a couple of games of backgammon at the red dining room table in January 1999 the day after Jim died and I say, “I’ll throw together something to eat” and he pushes the board away, saying, “I’m going to play something.” His retreating back. I move to the kitchen. When I hear him playing and singing a Hoagy Carmichael song in the living room, I stop what I’m doing, bow my head, weep stupidly, and listen.

Performing is praying, lullay-ing, baying, and kyrie-ing. Sometimes it even involves playing. In the beginning there is the swaddling band and the infant’s reflexive whimper; then, the Whitmanesque song of oneself; at the end there is the winding sheet and the survivor’s keen. Or is it the other way around? William Blake’s “piping, loud” arrival; Dylan Thomas’ raging “against the dying of the light;” T.S. Eliot’s ending “with a whimper.” In the end, when you’ve finally become what a lifetime of performing has made of you, you’ve become a means of transmission, an instrument.

Thanksgiving 2017, I tease out the first few notes of Copland’s dignified, soulful setting of the great hymn Shall We Gather at the River, look up at my partner Gilda Lyons and wait, contentedly, for her to begin. She raises her hand slightly as she often does when she begins a song. I think of the countless times I’ve held that hand; I think about the anticipation of restoration, and how her love and acceptance has transformed my sorrows into joys. Together we perform.

On Composing

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Daron Hagen in 1976. p/c: Cilento

Small Moves

In the dream my ear is pressed up beside the dial of an enormous safe which I am manipulating gingerly in tiny moves both clockwise and counterclockwise. I am listening for movement inside the inner-workings of the lock. Sometimes my hand is on the tuning knob of a shortwave set.

Never have I considered what I might actually do with or say to whatever was on the other side of the door. I only knew that, in the process of picking the lock, I am, like Ellie Arroway in Carl Sagan’s Contact, trying through “small moves” to reach through the veil between here and what is far.  Like Ellie, I’d have liked to contact a lost parent. But really the unlocking, the deciphering, the listening, the reaching, are all describing the building blocks of artistic and scientific progress.

The dream and its variants have recurred countless times over the past fifty years. It strikes me that in all those iterations I never questioned what (if anything) was within the safe. I am assuming that it must have been precious, or secret, or at least highly-prized because of the effort required to connect with it — the listening, the concentration, the thrill of being on the verge of finding out.

As familiarity with the dream has grown, I realize that it represents not just the desire to reconnect with the past but the desire to connect with the future; not just the importance of perseverance but the promise that even the tiniest of steps forward constitute a positive contribution to the human story.

It isn’t that there is all the time in the world. Being completely in the moment requires that it should at least feel that way. The black and white teeth of the keyboard. Ease. The sense of home, safety, belonging, intense familiarity, of infinite possibility. Physical pain, woe, regrets, all, all accepted; judgement suspended.

Just as the common assumption of what sonata means is falsely specific (after all, it only really means “sounded” in Italian; we take it to describe a piece of instrumental music), the word composing is generally assumed to pertain to the act of creating a piece of music, or poetry when it is really the act of creating anything by putting something together from constituent parts.

The comforting smell of freshly brewed coffee; the faint odor of old, polished wood —the instrument. The light: where does it come from? How bright is it? And the temperature: am I nude because it is hot or do I need to wear clothing? What season of the year is it? Where am I? Do I have privacy, and if I do not, am I comfortable accepting another in this space?

That composing (with a small c) a first-person essay about Composing (with a big one) will by default result in something “personal” is inevitable since an author’s sharing of personal experiences and the use of “I,” “me,” “my,” “mine” and “we” refer to a group to which the author belongs. I only know what has worked for me: Process (with a big P) is personal (with a small one); and any effective Process reflects the values, training, and individual experiences of its implementer. Subjectivity may be boring, but it is subjective to say so.

There will be a couple of what Lenny called his “reddy-blueys,” double-pointed pencils that most composers and conductors have on their worktables and pianos. Possibly some sort of vessel created by childish hands in art class — a reminder of one’s place in the fabric of a family or the simplicity of childhood creativity — with several precious Eberhard Faber Blackwing 602 pencils and the small gold-plated penknife to sharpen them that Diane Doerfler gave me in 1979. A good Staedtler eraser. My lucky Pentel Sharp Mechanical Pencil, 0.7mm, #2 Medium Lead with its teeth-marked plastic blue barrel, and the brass, bullet-shaped German pencil sharpener that Roger Zahab gave me on the opening night of Orson Rehearsed.

The power of comfort objects: the lock of Nakiro’s mane that my violinist friend kept in her violin case; the Saint Jude medal that Richard McCann kept in his breast pocket; David Diamond’s Baccarat crystal paperweight; the leather catspaw of my mother’s keychain that I carried with me until, when it literally began to disintegrate, I threw it into the northeast corner of the Central Park Reservoir, quoting Maude: “So I’ll always know where it is.” In any event, a safe space in which to Create must in itself be created. Having treasured talismans at hand can help.

Then, looking at a blank sheet of manuscript paper, I am like my hound turning in a tight circle and scratching on the couch, chuffing slightly, sniffing the result and finding it satisfactory, unspooling a long sigh while coiling into the shape of a cinnamon bun, and, finally, rooting, nestling her snout between her paws, the eyes fluttering, ready to dream.

And then, what? For a composer working at the computer confronts not the “formless void covering the face of the deep,” (a lot to unpack there) but the lightless pixels of a black screen covering the face of the digital void of ones and zeros. For the analogue composer, a blank (meaning that it in fact reflects all the colors in the visible spectrum) white page — in the West, anyway, probably covered with skeins of five parallel horizontal lines.

Putting Music Behind Bars

Composer David Rakowski, who sketches in pencil, described to me how he settled on his preferred manuscript paper: “In 1984 I asked Mike Gandolfi to make some paper for a piece for … I think … two winds, piano, and four strings. What I got was some perfect paper for that, plus paper for piano etudes, and string quartets. He did every line by hand. Eventually I made my own ‘Mikey paper’ in PageMaker and printed it when I needed it — nice to have the HP 5200 — yes, it was tabloid size and I like that.”

Michael Torke, when I asked him what he sketches on, replied, “I have a Sibelius file — a single page that has three systems of 4 staves each, with blank 8 bars across. I simply print out as many sheets as I need on the cheapest paper I can find so that the ink flows easily and use black and red Pilot Razor Point felt tips pens to write.”

That morning, killing time before a composition lesson with Ned Rorem at his apartment on West 70th Street in October 1981, Norman Stumpf and I had  taken the subway down to Astor Place in the East Village to pay a visit to the Carl Fischer music store. Norman needed to buy a score of something and I needed music paper.

Ned remained a manual typewriter man to the end of his days — never bought a computer, much less learned how to use one. During the 80s-00’s, he typically sketched with pencil in commercially-available, spiral bound, twelve stave manuscript notebooks, occasionally using the 20-stave paper that I preferred, which I would duplicate at a copy shop near Columbia University when I made my own and deliver when I came to work for him. He then transferred his sketches by hand in pencil on to vellum, as was his generation’s preference, since their publishers reproduced these “fair scores” on ozalid machines prior to having hand-engraved published “plates” made for lithographic reproduction suitable for print sale. I quit music copying in 2004 and therefore don’t know how he managed after that, but I, as Imogen Holst assisted Benjamin Britten, typically “set up” Ned’s “fair score” pages by transferring the obvious musical lines for him, at which point he, seated at his red dining room table year after year, would complete the task. Then I would take them to the copy shop to make safeties and then walk them down to Boosey and Hawkes’ office in Midtown. Often, I extracted the performance parts as well and proofread some of the engraved galleys before they went back to Boosey. As he got older, Ned had less energy, took less interest in, and trusted me more, and I gradually assumed a more expansive role, fleshing out orchestrations, crafting piano reductions, and so forth. All very human.

I took a flier and bought a couple of quires of King Brand MSS20 10.5” x 13.5” manuscript paper, extra heavy ivory stock, with “smooth surface for writing with ink or pencil” and a “non-glare finish.” The paper size was a little large for my piano rack, but that problem was solved as though by Deux ex Machina when I dumpster-dived a beautiful, beveled glass writing rack that had belonged to a famous neighbor on 98th Street between West End Avenue and Riverside Drive, where for many years I lived.

Cornelius Cardew and Earl Brown covered truly blank paper with abstract gestures and colors meant to evoke cries, whispers, and sobs with self-invented graphic notation that is in itself a source of aesthetic sustenance.  Ishmael Wadada Leo Smith, the trumpet player and composer, developed in 1970 a fascinating graphic notation system he calls Ankhrasmation;  before Augusta Reade Thomas transfers her musical ideas to standard western notation, she creates beautiful, multicolored graphic scores brimming with Miro-esque exactitude and Chagallian joy. Fluxus scores by composers like Ben Patterson and Mieko Shiomi consist of sets of written stage directions that encourage spontaneity and improvisation.

Cubase, Logic, Pro Tools, Digital Performer, and other digital audio workstations (DAW) enable a composer to collage on a timeline manipulated synthesized electroacoustic sounds, sampled analogue sounds, and virtual instruments (literally anything one can dream up can be introduced) on hundreds of tracks at a time. It’s a bit unwieldy, but you can even add notes by picking and clicking — the onscreen graphic result resembles a piano roll. Factoring in the ability to “play in” ideas on a midi-compatible instrument, the workspace is even more fluid and intuitive. It is a liberating creative space that, unless some sort of interaction with live performers requiring sheet music is required, requires of the composer no traditional musical notation skills. The onscreen display looks like a horizontal bar chart

The very first piece that I sketched on King Brand was Prayer for Peace, a string orchestra piece that ended up figuring prominently in my personal and professional narrative when in 1981 the Philadelphia Orchestra premiered it.

If fliers dream of flying, then composers dream of music. To presuppose even an array of black and white keys rather than a QWERTY keyboard (even that is a parochial presumption) is to forget that most commercially viable music is created at a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) now and, rather than referring to it as “composing,” it is called simply “making music” as it may combine analogue and digital elements (notated, improvised, aleatoric and indeterminate all) and result in a realized performance in itself.

A primary appeal of DAW to some is that it enables one to create music without having mastered conventional western musical notation. One can “play the music in” on a digital piano keyboard or drag and drop “loops” (pre-packaged and self-created) into a timeline, and so forth. If analogue musicians are to be involved in the work’s performance, then a “MIDI dump” (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) of the music created in the DAW can be exported to a musical notation application like Sibelius and then “refined” by a human musician for use by performers.

Severe arthritis in my hands has made it frustrating to grip any writing utensil for long periods, and painful to play the piano, and my eyes aren’t what they once were, with the result that now I sketch a few thoughts on paper and compose everything away from the piano. If it is notation-based, I type the music directly into full score; if it is a floridly electroacoustic score, like Orson Rehearsed or 9/10: Love Before the Fall, I compose directly into Logic Pro. Whether I ever use it up or not, I have about 450 sheets of King Brand on a shelf next to my piano — enough, I murmur superstitiously to myself every time I tap the Baldwin’s case as I walk by, to write the next opera, if it comes.

New Beginnings

“Sonata” literally means “a piece played,” as opposed to “cantata,” which is “a piece sung.” “Opera,” in the original Latin, means “labor,” or “work.” Reddy blueys and Blackwings sharpened, light just so, eraser and treasured talismans to hand, it is time to consider “the next opera, if it comes.” Or opus, if you will. Or nothing, if you won’t.

So, the lock’s been picked, the interior has been revealed. The torrent is raging, and you’re hoping that in drawing from it a tiny cup of water you won’t get swept away and drowned. You’re simultaneously zooming into the zero during the first shot of The Matrix and Moon-watcher now, and the bone Kubrick gave you that you threw in the air has become an orbiting space station. The static has cleared, and you’re picking up, if only for an instant, a strong, clear signal. You’re hearing Franz Schreker’s ferne Klang, and, as John Donne reminds us, it tolls for thee, sweetheart: so get to work.

Creation. The act, not the activity. There is no right way to do it; but there truly is also no wrong way. It cannot be taught, cannot be forced. It is often accidental, always unique. It can be reflexive, like a sneeze, uncontrollable, like a breeze. It is undeserved, like love, and unearned, like grace.

Talent. The resource, not its utilization. Unbidden, unearned, easily mangled, squandered, and overlooked. Beyond understanding, it is immeasurable, uncontainable, and infinitely resilient. It, too, is unearned, a gift.

The activity and utilization of creation and talent is where everything gets mixed together with the humdrum dialectic between creation and destruction. The ego can’t help trying to cut the enormity of creativity and the creative act down to size, trying to put a saddle on it, trying to make creativity a commodity like real estate. Who hasn’t mused to themselves “what I lack in talent I will make up in hard work?” when the futility of clinging to Socrates’ distum that an unexamined life is not worth living becomes unbearable? Don’t forget that Socrates was sentenced to death.

Working Hard doesn’t necessarily improve the Work. Suffering is not a competitive sport; there’s plenty of misery to go around. Keep the academy at arm’s length. Artistic freedom requires more than self-actualization, which can be achieved through selfishness. True artistic freedom involves a broader quest for something larger than oneself: the transcendence of boundaries and the connection of people in a meaningful way. Choose your personal narrative wisely, young Padawan, and don’t let other people define you. Drop the Resentful Genius and Tortured Artist Rastignac schticks. Just get your work done. Finish what you start. Once done, it doesn’t matter what you say about your music; it speaks for itself. Most likely everything you have to say has been said before, and better, just not by you, so have some humility and perspective on what you are doing. And, for Pete’s sake, put it out there, because it doesn’t exist until it is heard by others. If people don’t like your music, it isn’t their faults

At age 64, David Diamond perused an orchestra piece that I sent him when I was 16 called Kamala at the Riverbank and wrote to me, “As of now, I sense enormous facility, no interesting thematic ideas, and little self-criticism.” Paul McCartney wrote the tune When I’m Sixty-Four when he was 16. I realize now that some of the art songs I composed in my teens (published by E.C. Schirmer in 1983) before receiving a single composition lesson are some of the best, and most frequently-performed, of the over 300 I’ve penned. David was right, of course. And now he is dead, Paul McCartney is 83, and I am the one who is 64. That’s Life and Art for you.

How many budding composers’ creative voices have been mangled because the flowering bush of their imagination was pruned in the spring of their lives by the well-meaning mentorship of “experts” who, to be fair, can only teach what they know? Musical ideas are precious. What gives anyone the right to say when one is false? On the one hand, there is the purity of Rainer Maria Rilke’s famous admonition to a young artist that “nothing touches a work of art so little as words of criticism.” On the other hand, subtle musical minds with a profound sensitivity to the aesthetic are often the first spirit-manglers when they succumb to the temptation of throwing around subjective ideas like “taste” and “class,” “self-criticism”, “personal voice” and “originality.”

When she sculpted, my mother, I wrote in my memoir, “used me as her model because she needed a subject, she loved me, and because I was available.” It is as close as I have ever come to understanding how and why people choose their subjects, and the way they elect to express themselves. As I modeled for her as a child, she modeled me in clay while modeling the artist’s mien and methods. She sculpted what she knew, what she cared about, and what she had at hand. Most important, she liked doing it.

Because I am a composer, the rhythm and sound of the words in the previous paragraph tell me more about what the words are trying to express than the words themselves. Verbal rhetorical strategies are a square hole and my mind is a round peg. I am prone to tautological thinking, which is bad for spoken language but great for music. I’m good at logic and bad at math; I’m good at complexity but committed to simplicity. Instinct leads; intellect follows. While I don’t necessarily trust what I’m feeling right now, if I try to express it in words, I’ll fail; if I sing it, it will be true. Music makes people feel things whether the composer felt them or not.  Dogs howl. Why not you? I could have said all that with five notes. And should have.

Keep it in Mind

Jeanette Ross, my piano teacher at the University of Wisconsin in Madison in fall 1980, had assigned me the Beethoven Piano Sonata No. 18 in E-flat Major, Op. 31 No. 3 because, she said, “it isn’t too hard and it is one of the best examples of sonata allegro form in the repertoire.” I loved her, and I loved how practicing Beethoven made me feel. When, of a Monday morning around nine I hied me to her studio, having made some meaningful progress. I had also just pulled an all-nighter copying the orchestral parts for my composition teacher Les Thimmig’s new Amethyst Remembrance and was myself composing a big orchestral blowout called Triptych. Unslept, right hand stiff from brandishing an Osmiroid fountain pen for the past ten hours, I had just enough time to warm up before the lesson. Coordination shot, brain fried, I played as best I could, eyes glued to the printed music, and twice rewrote several of the inner voices in the Menuetto. Gently stopping me, Dr. Ross didn’t admonish me. She asked, “How long is it since you last slept?” Then, “Are you aware that you’ve recomposed the inner voices?” I was not. She played me what I had done and then the correct way. I played it back correctly, saying, “I promise that I practiced it correctly.” “I believe you,” she answered. “These things are what make you a composer,” she said. “I’ll teach you as much as I can, but I know that your own music will always be leading you and requiring the best of you. Now go home and rest.”

In summer 1984, after having been composing steadily for about seven years, my preferred creative rhythm fell into place during a residency at Yaddo, the artist retreat in Saratoga Springs, New York. I was able then to reliably hold about three minutes of my own fully-imagined music in my mind before losing track of, or muddling up, the details. (This isn’t as unusual as a non-musician might think.) Beginning with breakfast and lots of coffee, I’d walk to the studio where, without distractions, I could get those three minutes “out of my head and on to paper” over the course of five to six hours. The time flew, the notes accumulated, and the intellectual outlay would wipe me out. At the end, I would feel like I was tripping on my own dopamine as I walked in a zoned-out, practically post-coital afterglow state back to my room, where I would change and go for a run around the ponds (during which the music I’d written down that day would cycle again and again through my mind) and get even higher on the endorphins unlocked by exercise. Most people unwound after dinner. I’d head back out to the studio to execute the less mentally taxing composer chores like copying out the “fair score” of the just-completed work and making minor, gentle revisions. Then, I’d stop, three or four measures before the point at which the music I had been holding in my memory and had notated on paper ran out. This lagniappe contained the musical threads that I would take up the next morning. An insomniac who had been on the lookout for sheep to count since my teens, I took comfort in the shuffling and reshuffling of musical ideas. The ensuing lucid dreams resulted in what I found then and still regard as miraculous and undeserved: waking up with the next stretch of music in my mind fully formed and accessible.

Four things: first, to each their own. I am aware that my way of working is no better or worse than anyone else’s: all that matters is that the music comes. Second, as a child alone at the piano, I had, because of family dynamics, developed the ability to concentrate despite nearly all distractions, including other musics, and through nearly any emotional distress. Third, bliss is in being able to be flexible and to evolve: having children taught me that one can as though by magic get twice as much done in half the time if one has sufficient skills. Fourth, the act of composing has always been a source of joy to me, despite and still — always.

Ouroboros

Fifteen-year-old me listening for the tumblers to click into place, poised on the verge of an insight. Ellie Arroway with her fingers poised over the tuning dial. The miracle of the word or the sound you were hoping to hear coming into your head when you ask for it. The instinct to pounce on and incorporate a better one when the imagination, without evidence or conscious reasoning, serves up something better.

The drive to develop the skills (whatever they are) required to remove the inevitable distortion and unwanted noise interfering with the pure, ferne Klang inside your head as you transfer it to the page through your heart, eyes, ears, arm, wrist, hand, pencil and then, zooming through the zero and emerging on the other side: off the page and into the mind of a performer who translates it into sound by way of execution through eyes, mind, heart, fingers, lips, breath, intuition, My God, the entire process is breathtaking. What were we talking about? What were we trying to express? Why does Bach’s B Minor Mass inspire such solace, such undeserved grace? How can one resist the temptation to find not the unbearable lightness of being but God’s mercy and forgiveness in such an awesome display?

Robbie’s final monologue in the screenplay for my operafilm I Hear America Singing begins: “The thing is, you put the work out there, you put everything you’ve got into it and then it lands and then — poof — it’s gone. And you learn that that is the way of things ….”

Quick and unpleasant trick question: did you just reflexively roll your eyes? Why does the call to feeling something constitute for some insufficiently self-critical, amusingly middlebrow, cheap sentimentality? Do you believe that some people’s tastes (compared to your own, of course) are truly more refined, their cultural reference points more elevated, their educations more elite, their relative authenticity better established, their social expectations deserved, their sense of entitlement unquestionable than your own? “Who are you to refuse my sugar?” bellows Komarovsky at Lara in Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago,  “Who are you to refuse me anything?”

Revere great work and great talent for the natural resources and awe-inspiring examples that they are and then get over yourself and concentrate on the work. Stop measuring yourself against others. Accept and find a way to deal with the fact that others will judge you and your work. Other artists can give you advice about how to do this. They can’t help themselves.

The creative act is one of love, of faith in the importance of individual conscience, the importance of having the courage not just to be oneself but to accept others as they are, to not sing so loudly that you’re drowning out other peoples’ voices. Countless times over the past forty years I have heard myself say “be brave” to a pupil or colleague, or myself, knowing that, as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote to his daughter Scottie in 1940, “Life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat,” with a chaser of Witold Lutosławski’s comment in Evian to me about my music when he was 69 and I was 21: “It’s all you, of course; it’s all you. How could it not be? Be young. Write like this. Write. Create. Or the Bad Guys Win.”

Finish it. Share it.

Take all the rejection, hurt, pain, and misfortune my children (my heart outside of my body) are bound to receive during their lifetimes and roll it into one toxic pill and you’ve got the dread that I feel when I share a new piece. I know that I can’t protect my children, that I’ve done everything that I can do to prepare them, but that sometimes the reception is just going to suck. Some people will hate them for unfathomable reasons; they will have done to them and do to others and themselves unfixable damage. But they will also find love, and wonder, and do good, and feel awe, and acquire wisdom, move others and be moved.

Having emptied the safe, passed along the transmission, you allow the door to swing gently shut, the signal to fade. You’ll let them grow up and leave you, watch them gallop off in the wrong direction without crying foul. Your piece will become a treasured talisman to a few, an unopened book on a soon-to-be razed library shelf to others, and utterly non-existent to the other 99 percent of the world. You’ll release your memoirs to the sound of crickets, become the lock of mane in a musician’s violin case, and once in a while, you’ll wonder for a moment how the hell that thing you composed touched so many people. It was never about you.

Begin again.

Solitaire with Orson: Art, Politics, and Personal Conviction

I was sitting at the window in my Chicago Loop hotel room on a January night in 2018, looking across the Chicago River at the Trump International Hotel and Tower, a blandly Contextualist glass and steel skyscraper on Wabash with the same big gold letters spelling out the developer’s name on the side as though it was a can of Spam that the tenants of the Manhattan buildings on Riverside Boulevard insisted be removed from theirs’ when I realized for myself that the critical years of the conservative assault on the so-called “liberal consensus” had arrived and that, this time, at least for the moment, it looked as though the oligarchs were going to carry the day.

I looked down at the sheets of ice shuffling and reshuffling themselves like cards in the river and returned to my work on the screenplay of Orson Rehearsed, the “operafilm” I was developing with a local new music group called the Fifth House Ensemble and my own New Mercury Collective as part of a faculty residency at the Chicago College of Performing Arts set up Henry Fogel and Rudy Marcozzi, with whom I had struck an agreement to give composition lessons to a handful of young composers in exchange for the school’s financial and technical support of my projects. Roosevelt would approve of the project I have in mind: polymathic Orson Welles captured in the Bardo between the now and what comes after. An understandable response to the diagnosis of a deteriorating aortic valve I had just received.

The sheets of ice shuffled and reshuffled themselves below. I wrote, “Orson is meta-modern in its disregard for outmoded conceptions of high and low art; it exists after elitism. It isn’t that the music is eclectic, it is that the idea of style is irrelevant. It is post stylistic. As the political tool of the Big Lie roars back into civic life, I want to conjure for the auditor the dread I feel as a citizen and father. I’ll do this by acknowledging the arbitrariness of traditional narrative, seeking Truth in a corkscrew fashion with Möbius strip-like dramaturgy.” I looked up from my sketchbook, where three figures were taking shape on the stage of an empty theater. He's too much a man, truth is too manifold, for there to be a single avatar. There must be three — a sort of Holy Trinity of the Mind. I rose reflexively and pulled the blind shut, thinking, there’s a difference between a magician and a con man. “There’s no happy ending, just death. The curtain falls; the hero simply dies; a solo piano plays a ragtime tune to an empty theater.”

I can see what used to be the American Bar Association’s building from here if I raise the blind. I can see where dad worked when I was a kid, the bridge where I dropped a coin into the river after he died in case he needed the fare for Charon. Instead I put the pen down, closed the sketchbook, switched off the light, placed my mask securely over my nose and mouth, turned on the CPAP machine, and lay back on the bed atop the covers, breathing steadily so the machine could establish the correct air pressure. I’m alone in a hotel room far from home: if I don’t wear this damned thing, then I could die in my sleep. I closed my eyes and imagined, as I had often done while shooting the short “Orson Memory Palace” films, that I was observing as Orson played Solitaire in the house on Stanley Avenue in Hollywood the way that my father played the game the night my mother died.

1. ONE OF SPADES

Oh, how we enjoy cutting our heroes down to size. Type “drunk Orson” into a search engine and an awful video of an aged, bloated, wounded-bear of an Orson Welles, three sheets to the wind, seated at a table gripping a wine glass, slurring advertising pabulum about a mediocre table wine comes up. We laugh. He's ridiculous, worthy of our contempt. Yet, at 29, in 1944, Welles was still beautiful, stumping for weeks on end for Franklin Delano Roosevelt, then seeking an unprecedented fourth term. Welles is said to have coached FDR in public speaking; he wrote speeches for him. Only three years after he and Herman J. Mankiewicz had taken on William Randolph Hearst, the Rupert Murdoch of his time, a gigantic Authority and Power figure, in Citizen Kane, Welles replied to a “get well” telegram from the president (Welles had made himself ill campaigning for FDR) by pledging that, “this is the most important work I could ever engage in.”

2. TWO OF DIAMONDS

Welles’ greatest success as an actor and director in the theater was probably his legendary “modern dress” Caesar, a bare-stage, poor theater reinterpretation of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar that debuted in November 1937 as the Mercury Theater's first production. Born of necessity—there was little budget, and street clothes were free — the genius was in the recontextualization of the play as a critique of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Theatrical lighting pioneer Jean Rosenthal and Welles collaborated on Caesar's lighting, which — since there was no set — shouldered the majority of the emotional and psychological storytelling. A gifted visual artist, Welles knew the importance of not illuminating the most important thing on the stage, as well as light's ability to shape and define physical space with filmic fluidity. That Leni Riefenstahl’s agitprop Triumph of the Will had already thrown up “cathedrals of light” was known — it also happened to be financially prudent, and in step with the flowering of an emergent theatrical technology. Deftly fusing the iconography of religion and politics, he used electric light to take the place of “Divine Radiance” like Prometheus stealing fire. Light, however evocative, is in itself soulless, and he knew that. The result was that he evoked the gestalt of Auden's Age of Anxiety, and Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time existential ennui of the characters in Sartre's Paths to Freedom. That's a lot of illumination to pile on an Everyman Brutus’ shoulders. 

3. THREE OF CLUBS

The first scene of Kane after the newsreel is triply reflective: In a movie called Citizen Kane, able actors portraying Reporters (observers of life; supposedly seekers of truth) watch a newsreel (photographs of a life edited together — “fake” news?) in the dark. They're aware that they are missing something and set out on a search for the meaning of “Rosebud.” The Mob in Caesar is transformed into secret police: they're looking for safety in the wrong place. The reporters return empty-handed; the Mob succeeds in handing power over to exactly the sort of politicians it deserves.

Welles believed in FDR the way Beethoven believed in Napoleon. Albert Einstein, the first publicly intellectual scientist, famously spoke out against nuclear weapons; but it was the popularizer, Carl Sagan, who really captured peoples’ imaginations with Cosmos. He did so by traversing the liminal zone between advanced scientific study and poetry. Welles sought truth, too; but, rather than looking out into the cosmos, or taking to the political bully pulpit, he looked inward, choosing as his vessel of exploration the plays of Shakespeare. He repurposed Polonius’ advice, “to thine own self be true” to read, “to love, Jedidiah, on our own terms” in Kane.

My father quoted the line to me as he poured us each an amaretto the night Mother died. As though that explained anything, anything at all, I remember thinking at the time.

Welles did want to be loved, and he knew how to arrange that. (Leonard Bernstein to Ned Rorem: “Our problem is not that we want everyone to love us; its that we’ll never meet everyone.”) Welles seems to have believed that he'd make a fine politician (he contemplated a run against McCarthy in '43), but he was self-aware enough to have the corrupt politician point out to Kane that looking for love from the Mob will get you nowhere. There's plenty of commentary about Welles’ search for the “Rosebud” of love. Most of it limns a narrative which describes a much-caressed genius-boy of nine who lost his mother prematurely, and his charismatic father soon after. It's easy to pigeon-hole Welles the way Harold C. Schonberg, and even friends like Oscar Levant viewed Bernstein — as the “great popularizer of commonly accepted truths as insights.” But Welles saw past the transaction to what lies beyond acceptance, even admiration.

“Popularity should be no scale for the election of politicians. If it would depend on popularity, Donald Duck and the Muppets would take seats in the Senate,” wrote Welles at some point. What would he have made of Late-Stage Capitalism, Kakistocracy, and the ascendance of the Tech Bros?

Throughout his work, Welles asked whether love is true, or if Love is Truth, and the other way around. Of course we get the politicians we deserve. Does Donald Trump, think about love? Paraphrasing Robert Bolt's screenplay toLawrence of Arabia, “some men lie to others; they conceal the truth. Other men lie to themselves; they forget where they hid it.” True, one cannot write about love with tears in one’s eyes, but Welles was a romantic who did not lie to himself. He spent an awful lot of time thinking about crafting the illusion of love, as manifest in his fascination with magic tricks, for example, his documentary essay F for Fake, and so forth.

Welles points out, through the character of Jedidiah in Kane, “That's all [Kane] wanted out of life ... was love. That's the tragedy of Charles Foster Kane. You see, he just didn't have any to give.” Like Bernstein, Welles had an enormous capacity to give and to get love; that capacity made them both great popularizers and artists. But Welles could have settled into a senate seat about as comfortably as Bernstein the executive directorship of an orchestra.

4. FOUR OF DIAMONDS

Welles’ dramaturgical chops were those of one who, like Bernstein, intuitively knew exactly what the emotional and psychological nuclear reactors powering a scene were, what each relationship sparked from, what powered each work as a whole. If Bernstein had Mahler, Welles had Shakespeare, and both did their finest work in the theater when editing and reinterpreting the Bard — Bernstein with West Side Story and Welles with Caesar.

He sought artistic freedom (as opposed to simple self-actualization, which is easier, because it requires only selfishness and singleness of mind to achieve), of course, and achieved it. While to the outside world Welles lamented that he spent ninety percent of his time raising money, he wisely had Kane lament, “If I hadn't been rich, I'd have been a truly great man.” I believe that Welles’ masterpiece was not Kane, or Chimes, but Moby Dick Rehearsed. Why? Because thirty years after having noted that RKO had given him the “world's biggest train set,” he was able to create a theatrical sandbox in which every performance was different, every evening like a page from Joyce's Ulysses, disconnected from other performances, but connected because the ideas flow from one place to the next like water. He found a way to be paid to do as he pleased.

The enormous self-restraint required to cope with complete artistic freedom (and to therefore not deserve the slings and arrows of every critic who lays it on with the “self-indulgence” rap because it’s easy, and because they can) prompted Stravinsky to point out at the start of the 20th century that, "now that we can do whatever we want to do, we must first decide what we do not want to do." Welles understood that people resent being preached to—hence the Bible's parables, which really are ripping yarns. He understood that, for every Poetics of Music (whether ghost-written by a Robert Kraft or not), Carl Sagan Cosmos, Joseph Campbell Hero With a Thousand Faces, or Bernstein Harvard lecture, there will always be a host of intellectuals smarter, more insightful, more adept at argument, poised to envelop the scene in the smoke of argument, the entanglements of nomenclature, the rules of rhetoric, so that, in a couple of beats, we're all back on “safe” ground, mundanely talking about talking about the thing rather than doing the scary work of, as Wallace Stevens pointed out, grappling with “not ideas of the thing but the thing itself.”

It takes a poet running at full bore to conjoin, as Welles did in Midnight, Shakespeare’s “nimbus floods” with Melville's allegorical mists, and the moral haze hanging over Walt Whitman's descriptions in Specimen Days with a healthy, Midwestern dollop of 1 Corinthians on top, reminding us, like the angels in Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire, that “we see through a glass, darkly.”

Which brings us back to those reporters sitting in the dark at the beginning of Kane, seeking truth in fiction. Manifesting the Aristotelian admonition to grapple with the Art and Life paradigm, Welles staged them as denizens of Plato’s Cave. Behind the fire, the javelin of light stabbing down from the projection booth, is a stage / screen. We're all puppeteers, he reminds us, vying with one another to construct the most viable reality. Remember high school classics class? If you skipped it, or didn't do your homework; or if you did do your homework and you have fallen for the effluvial torrent of the Big Lie, then you have feelings and identify what you see and don't like as “fake news.”

Nevertheless, one person escapes the Cave. He emerges into the sunlight, sees the Cave for the prison and illusion that it is, re-examines his former existence, and determines to return to the Cave to spread the Good News. Naturally, they crucify him.  (Look at him! He doesn't work out; he's obviously not disciplined or in control of himself! He's fat, drunk, doing a wine commercial. He's the object of ridicule who seems to have learned nothing from Falstaff, for there he is, looking and acting just like him! Why should we believe anything he says?) As Andre points out so wittily to Wally in My Dinner With Andre, New York City may in fact be a prototype of the concentration camp of the 21st century, built by the inmates who take a perverse pride in what they've created. “Aren't we schizophrenics?” he asks. “Are these flickering shadows Reality?” asks the returning escapee, the reporters, the audience, the artist.

5. FIVE OF HEARTS

“Rosebud” is whatever you want it to be and then again not. It is the key, but then it isn’t; it’s like the keys in Hitchcock’s films — Notorious, Rear Window, Vertigo, North by Northwest, even Psycho. It’s a McGuffin, that’s all: Rosebud’s a plot trigger. “Let’s go see a film,” said Mother that Christmas vacation, and then having her reveal to me during a screening of the 39 Steps (more keys!) that she had cancer. Lost childhood, lost parents, lost lovers, lost youth, lost dreams, loss, loss, loss. Welles allowed that Kane, the ultimate narcissist, must “at least have loved his mother.” Maybe Rosebud wasn't a sled; maybe Rosebud was just a Head Fake — a  cosmic basketballer looking straight at you while passing off to his teammate.

Jedidiah pans Kane's wife's performance. She, of course, has little talent, and Jedidiah has a choice: he can go easy on her out of compassion and pity, or he can assess her as an extension of her husband’s ego. She's “nothing special,” but she's special to Kane. (“When everyone's special, nobody is.”) Rilke reminds us that Art is never understood by criticism; beauty's beholder’s eye, and so on; but Kane's inability to see his wife as separate from himself is what motivates him. He demands she be perceived as gifted the way that our current president feels that he's a genius because “fate is what happened.” Jedidiah hits the nail on the head. (“Never,” my Uncle Clifford once admonished me, “rub a man's rhubarb.”) Kane must fire him just as surely as the denizens of the Cave must, upon the Hero’s return, reject the bringer of news of the blazing, brilliant, brightly-lit outside world.

“Ask not what you can do for your country,” quipped Welles. “Ask what’s for lunch.” Lucas, Spielberg, and other more “commercially viable” great filmmakers made more money and acquired more Power; but Welles’ Authority has never been questioned.  When he tried to play the game of life on their terms, he couldn’t help leaving the clichés on the cutting room floor instead of cooking them into meta-modernist, self-referential speeches about creativity and the avoidance of responsibility for what you’ve just said. Because he couldn’t help becoming invested. He cared. Even Touch of Evil is an art film flying under the radar as a potboiler with Charlton Heston serving as Hollywood's canary in the cinematic coal mine. Welles had heard the Chimes at Midnight. He had learned that it is more important to be understood, in the end, than it is to be loved.

The night Mother died in my arms, my father, who had been playing Solitaire downstairs, quoted Joseph Cotton's line to me by way of explaining himself and why his wife hadn't died in his arms. When my own personal Jedidiah writes his review and hands it to me, I hope that I shall have mostly kept my eyes on the ball.

Delivering this talk at Amherst College in March 2018.

This essay served as working notes for a public address at the Chicago College of Performing Arts Center for Arts Leadership delivered on 18 January 2018 and on 5 March 2018 at the Center for Humanistic Inquiry at Amherst College.

Occasional Notes: On Music Copying

Movement I (Allegretto)

Along with the obsolescence of the two-thousand-year craft of copying music by hand,  technology has rendered notation itself obsolete, as composers lean into DAW — digital audio workstations. For that matter, as studios like Lionsgate partner with artificial intelligence firms, giving them “access to the company’s large film and TV library to train a new generative model,” A.I. is threatening film composers themselves with obsolescence.

American folklore tells us that the locomotive, what Indigenous Americans called the Iron Horse, made the horse itself obsolete. For some. But not for cow punchers. And certainly the art of riding remained.  Eadweard Muybridge’s series of six cabinet cards, titled “Horse in Motion,” captured in stills the illusion of the horse’s movement, but not its essence. Not its beauty. Not the mutual respect and trust between a person and their steed.

Streetcar locomotives began replacing streetcar horses around 1850; by 1900 electric streetcars had replaced them both as a method for the conveyance of flesh and bone. And then, as the automobile swept across the land on ribbons of concrete, those parallel ribbons of steel that survived did so mainly because they remained useful, at least, for the conveyance of freight.

Hand copying of “scores” with quill and ink on paper for publication gave way in 1851 with the first use at scale of hand (or “plate”) engraving of music on thin sheets of lead. Music typesetting became a thing, and the 1930s brought the Keating Music Typewriter. All these were used for the creation of the scores to be published and sold to consumers. Hand copying of “performance materials,” that is, the individual note-covered piece of paper from which each instrumental performs their “part,” as extracted by a copyist from the full “score” (or “partitura”) for commercial music, music theater, and symphony concert works continued to flourish well in to the twentieth century.

The beginning of the end came in fall 1988, when the software notation program Finale was released. In other words, notation software captured in ones and zeros the illusion of the copyists’ job, but not its essence. For some. And certainly the art of composing (and of hand copying) remained.

The end of the end began in 1993 when the software program Sibelius outflanked its competitor, called Score, by being more “intuitive” as a creative tool for composers. Notation software made possible in ones and zeros a graphic representation so good that it looked better than most hand human copyist’s work: the illusion of the copyists’ job, but not its essence, had been successfully duplicated. For most people. But not for fine art composers. And certainly the arts of composing and of hand copying remained. But not its beauty. Not the mutual respect and trust between a composer and their copyist.

Of course, it is all part of the dialectic relationship between creation and destruction. Old ecosystems are destroyed; new ones emerge. I put my quill and India ink aside in 2002. Though some hand music copyists still ply their trade, the craft and art of it are now relegated to history.

Movement II (Andante)

I had the skills. I had a clear, attractive hand. I was fast and accurate. Because I worked for a living, I needed the money to buy the time to compose the music I wanted to compose (and it is safe to say that I composed a lot); and some of my peers had the money to buy my time. It is ironic that, even though composers once had to come and go through the back door, certain composers were happy to look down upon their colleagues who copied music to make ends meet. As though commercial viability of the music or personal financial security were a measure of artistic success! How composers and conductors treat their copyists reveals everything about them as people.

My life as a music copyist began in 1975 with nights spent copying the parts to my teenage opuses at the kitchen table in New Berlin, Wisconsin as the sun rose. By 1982, while a composition student at the Curtis Institute, I was working as a professional copyist for the Fleisher Collection of Orchestral Music in Philadelphia. When I moved to New York City to go to Juilliard, I began fifteen years as a professional freelance copyist with heavy concert music private clients (including my former teacher, Ned Rorem, whose copyist I was for nearly a decade), before serving a final stint as a union copyist on Broadway.

For several hundred years, serving as one’s mentor’s copyist was an integral component of one’s training. I do recall learning more about how Leonard Bernstein made the “Profanation” of his Jeremiah Symphony go in spring 1981 at the University of Wisconsin Madison by hand copying the parts for my turn on the podium as a member of Catherine Comet’s conducting class (I could not afford to rent the parts at the time) than I had in my conducting lessons with Comet. For, if one is really engaged during the process of copying another composer’s parts, one is “playing” the composer’s process the way a pianist “plays” a composer pianist’s piece — one’s brain and fingers are going through the same motions that the composer’s did when they wrote it.

While a composition student at Curtis, I was able, thanks to the thoughtfulness of Philadelphia Orchestra Associate Conductor William Smith, to connect with the orchestra’s librarian, Clint Nieweg, to attend rehearsals of the school’s orchestra with the PO’s library copy of the piece in hand. Bill collected autograph facsimiles of scores and sometimes brought one for me to follow; and the school’s librarian (my work study boss, as I served as his assistant) Edwin Heilakka used to let me follow in Leopold Stokowski’s score (the school had just been gifted his papers). What a marvelous way to learn the repertoire. 

I guess it is true that I have copied every kind of composer for every musical genre — from pop to film, opera to symphonic, academic incipits to television cues, chamber to salon — and a wide array of composers: Rorem, Leonard Bernstein, Elliott Carter, Ezra Laderman, Enno Morricone, Andrew Lloyd Webber, David Diamond, Gian Carlo Menotti, George Delerue, John Kander, George Perle, Virgil Thomson, Joan Tower, Disney, Really Useful, Radio City Music Hall, and more of my peers than I’d care (or am able) to recall. I just looked at that list and thought of a dozen more but cannot make myself go back and add their names, as it feels unnerving, the way that seeing my handwriting on a set of orchestral parts when visiting an orchestra performing something of mine and not even remembering having done the job does.

In the callouses I still have on my fingers and the damage I did to my vision between 1984 and 2004 as a professional hand music copyist, I have in many ways far more in common with Atticus’ literate slaves than I do their master’s friend Cicero. There’s a lot to unpack there, and it has a lot to do with both earning humility and having it thrust upon one.

My first full scores (ambitious 25 minute long juvenaliæ for chorus and large ensembles called Pastoral Mass and The Creation, 1978) were copied with black felt tip marker and black ball point pen (!) back in Wisconsin on that famously canary yellow Passantino 20 stave (Pad 23) and 24 stave (Pad 25) Since first buying a quire of it at Carl Fischer’s beautiful store on Astor Place in 1984, 20-stave King Brand and writing Trio Concertante, my favorite sketching paper has been King Brand. We used Judy Greene vellum from Los Angeles at the Fleisher Collection in Philly, if I remember correctly, but once I landed in Manhattan I became a denizen of Associated Music Service at 333 West 52nd Street. They sold Aztec vellum, which I used for all of my private clients. It’s closed now, but I remember Eileen (it was a family business) behind the counter — always kind, writing up every sale, as there was no cash register — certainly no computers!

There is still some hand copying to be done, but, overwhelmingly, it is done on the computer now. Many composers’ own workflows have come to include writing in digital audio workstations and the young composers who clean up the notation and format the “midi dumps” for composers who don’t notate have taken the place in the ecosystem copyists once occupied. Soon A.I. will do that job as well.

Movement III (Minuet)

Titus Pomponius Atticus (later Quintus Caecilius Pomponianus Atticus, 110 BC – 32 BC) was a Roman banker, editor, and patron remembered for his correspondence with and (at his own expense copied by the hand of and distributed by his educated slaves) support of the philosophical and oratorical writings of his friend Marcus Tullius Cicero. The letters between them are an incredible testament to their friendship and moving in their candor and agape. The name Atticus is familiar to most people nowadays as the name of the father in Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird. As attorney Finch protected and lifted up his children in the American South in Lee’s book with his stalwart moral courage and sense of justice, the historical Atticus lifted up Cicero.

Authors like Lee name their characters’ with precision, alluding to the characteristics of historical figures to instantly summon an array of associations on the part of the reader. Some parents do, too, when a beloved progenitor doesn’t automatically command commemoration by way of passing along their name. Do they do it hoping that their child will take on those worthy traits? Names and the narrative weight that they carry are important. I am, for example, named after a brother who died in infancy just before me.  In any event, moved by the lives of both of these men – one historical and the other fictional — my spouse and I chose Atticus as the name of our first son.

What father doesn’t dream of a better life for their son? My attorney father, reading Mockingbird to me as a child, voice breaking in the final pages — who’s voice wouldn’t? — lived long enough to see his son live the life of an artist, a Cicero to his Atticus, if you will. Reading Mockingbird to my son when he was small made us both feel the power of names, the sense of belonging and continuum, of history and struggle. I will live to see my son burst into the world as an Atticus.

Would we know today who Cicero was if Atticus had not had his writings copied and carried to the far ends of the Roman Empire? It is impossible to forget that the Gospels were copied by hand — as was every scroll in the Library of Alexandria. The knowledge that survived the Dark Ages did so in manuscripts that were hand copied, mainly by monks.

While I have trouble visualizing Atticus’ literate slaves, it is easy – perhaps thanks to Samuel Barber’s Hermit Songs – for me to conjure the image of a portly friar, his faithful cat at his elbow, a quill in hand, an illuminated manuscript before him awaiting his ministrations.

The years spent as a music copyist have helped me to understand the sense in which the monk’s work was more than a job, more than a sort of literary ablution, more even than a calling. From the modern perspective, the illuminated manuscripts might seem to be more a mandala — a testament to impermanence, an attempt to extend into another dimension the ineffable truth of (in a monk’s case) faith. The manuscript in a music copyist’s hands has as its purpose to facilitate a live performance. Perhaps, afterwards, its existence represents what remains when the animation of human actuation is gone, like a plan for a house built of soundwaves.

As the Bible’s words strive to convey the mystery of faith, musical notation strives to convey the effect of song. “From whence cometh song?” asked Theodore Roethke. “They should have sent a poet,” observes the scientist in the film Contact, realizing that scientific language alone cannot explain or describe something that inspires awe. Composer Slavko Krstic once pointed out to me that his mastery of higher theoretical physics and math were one way to commune with the Divine, but that he had concluded that picking up his guitar gave him a clearer signal.

Notated music serves as an imperfect mirror through which the performer steps to enter the world of the piece itself. The performer turns around and faces outwards, from whence he came, and performs what he has discovered for those of us listening on the other side of the bars, the other side of the mirror. I am amazed that anything comprehensible, let alone moving, results.

I think of my priest declaiming the liturgy on those occasions when, Ad Orientem (celebrating Mass facing away from the congregation), the words of the Mass land differently, the performative, ritualistic nature of the recounting of the Holy Thursday story simultaneously more abstract and requiring of one’s imagination because the congregation, deprived of the facial expressions of the celebrant, is compelled to listen harder.

Movement IV (Finale, Allegro con brio)

Iron horses and fleshly ones; hand copyists and engraving software; composers and “music generator apps” like Soundraw; musicologists and monks. There are mathematician fathers finding bliss by striving to number the stars and sons numbering the stars by finding bliss with a guitar. For every bull a matador; for every scientist a poet. Bring on the Ecclesiastes 3:1.

But before a final goodbye to all that, how about a working song, a roundelay about the joys of the work itself?

The walking into the theater, any theater, and delivering parts, getting a feel from the music team how it is going, the showing up at the reading of a new show, or the bonhomie of showing up for the backer’s audition of a Genuine DOA Flop anyway because you copied the reed books.

Leaning over the orchestra pit’s rail, tapping fifteen, squinting to identify the handwriting of the copyist who extracted the parts as a trombone player reads a paperback novel during the intermission.

The music for a show coming in over the fax machine from London with just lyrics, a melody, a bass line, and chord symbols and the directive to make it go, the cigarette smoke, the diazo machine spitting out ammonia fumes, the electric eraser shavings in your pockets.

Reluctantly giving a pre-performance talk at the insistence of the producer to patrons in an empty opera house in Arizona and looking up to see in the back row for the first time in years my librettist for the show, who, possibly between flights and on his way to somewhere else, has decided to see for himself if the old thing still has legs.

The arrogance of “heavy client” copyists, the gratitude of newbies from the provinces, the surprise of residuals, decades’ worth of canary yellow “Local 802 Music Preparation Invoice” sheets lolling like iris tongues from the file cabinets. And the stories: the stories told by the copyists already in their 70s about Garland, Sinatra, and copying music for the networks: Mutual, CBS, NBC, and ABC….

Six of us laughing and cross-talking in a cab on our way to Manny’s with the just-completed and printed instrumental parts of Kander and Ebb’s sizzling new chart for Liza Minelli’s new Vegas show and spilling out onto the sidewalk across from the Port Authority Bus Terminal like pilsner into a tulip glass.

Copying Lion King parts for the Mouse, who stationed a guy by the front door of the office who looked like he was a member of the Blues Brothers Band who we were pretty sure timed us when we went to take a leak. The Case of the Missing Lucky Electric Eraser that began when Brian Fairtile left his go bag in the Winter Garden pit and ended in laughter and tears when, retrieving it, we read the graffiti on the pit wall that said, “They’ll never get the Cats smell out of this pit.”

Drinking coffee and listening to the Portuguese cast album of Company, wondering how all those syllables could possibly be flying by at the rate that they were while trying to identify who the composers were in some of the older black and white pictures of clients on the walls, the beat-up spinet where emergency songs got written, and, as at Fleisher down in Philly, stories about WPA copyists, hard drinking, and the blacklist.

Atticus commissioned. Cicero orated. The monks illuminated the manuscripts. Those of us who were members of the Local 802 were Teamsters. My copyist colleagues were the most resilient, humblest, kindest, smartest, and wisest musicians I’ve ever known. I am proud that I was accepted by them as a colleague when I finally landed in Gotham. We were more than the batmen to our composers, far more than assistants to our employers. People like Mathilda Pincus and Arne Arnstein were legends for a reason.

For years Brian kept a copy of Wine Connoisseur atop his satchel at the office where we worked until, over seder, he and his brilliant spouse told Gilda and me how he intended to quit music copying and become an import-export buyer, like our friend, composer Stephen Dembski. His personal reinvention, from Broadway horn player to copyist, had now been from copyist to wine expert. The best all-around copyist I ever knew.

We were part of traditions that stretched back to the age of Christ. We were the angels witnessing the act of creation and — when it needed a hand, giving it one. We all remembered every piece we ever worked on until we didn’t. And, you know, even though we were all entirely aware of exactly who our clients were as people and as musicians, and of how little we mattered, and who our clients sometimes thought they were in relation to us, none of us ever ran them down. After all, we all become obsolete eventually. It was an honor to serve. Write on. 

Into the Weeds: On Vocal Scores

On a shelf in a hallway connecting the chorus and band rooms at Pilgrim Park Junior High School in Brookfield, Wisconsin in spring 1976 dwelt 30 copies of the vocal score of Georges Bizet’s Carmen. Wallace Tomchek, our charismatic, terrifying, wildly gifted, somewhat mad chorus teacher, told me that he intended to stage it one spring, “if ever I have the voices.” An opera? I asked, dazzled. “Possibly the best,” he answered briskly, pulling a score off the shelf and tossing it to me the way that, three years later, literature teacher Diane Doerfler would toss to me a copy of John Cheever’s short stories with a mischievous grin, singing, “Here, read these; he mainly gets it right.” I don’t think that the biology of mustering enough teenage choral students to mount Carmen ever worked out for Wally, but I already intuited that I would be an artist, probably a musician or writer, when he told me to keep the score only a year or two before my brother Kevin gave me the vocal score of Benjamin Britten’s Billy Budd for Christmas, thereby cementing my love affair with opera. I treasure both vocal scores to this day.

That year, Wally required that our parents all purchase for us copies of the beautiful 1970 gold-covered Williamson edition of Rogers and Hammerstein’s The Sound of Music. Wally had (rightly) determined that I was at best supporting actor material and had cast me as Max, a role so integral to the show that they cut his songs when the movie was made. “Piano Reduction by Trude Rittman,” I read on the title page.

Over time, I came to know (in my heart and in my hands both) and love the smoothly schmoozy feel of playing Frank Loesser vocal scores; the cooly precise, Ravel-like fussiness of Stephen Sondheim’s; the gnarly, saturated chromatics of Richard Strauss’ own piano reductions, with all the heavy lifting in the thumbs and index fingers of both hands; Kurt Weill’s flinty, Hindemith-y piano reductions to his own (European) scores, followed by the more Gershwin-y feel of his (American) scores; Jack Beeson’s scholarly, sensible reductions of his own shows — especially Lizzy Borden; the richly pianistic vocal scores of Marc Blitzstein for his own shows, which feel as though one should be singing them at the piano whilst playing. Things begin to run off the rails with George Gershwin’s own piano reduction of Porgy and Bess, which requires a real pianist — ironically, the hardest music to play is the transitional stuff, which gets all Gaspard de la nuit and requires real chops — to pull off.

Then there are the vocal scores executed not by the composers themselves but by associates: the practical, uninspired, not particularly singer-friendly Erwin Stein reductions of Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes and Billy Budd, which I love, but which do not feel good to play; the noble piano reduction by composer John McGinn of John Adams’ Nixon in China — a real achievement — both playable and fun; Noel Coward’s marvelous, splay-fingered vocal scores executed by Elsie April, which always made me want to have a martini at hand; the co-blended vocal score of West Side Story, which is harder to play than it needs to be, and requires the pianistic athleticism of a keyboard jock to get through.

One of the most inspiring things about the lyric theater — by which I mean live theater or film in which people start singing now and then or all the time — is its compulsively collaborative nature. “Composer” can mean the person who wrote the tune, supported by an arranger who either adds chords or serves as an amanuensis to a composer playing by ear, as well as a “dance music arranger” who takes the tune and develops it for a dance sequence. Robert Russell Bennett used to write the overtures to the shows that he orchestrated for Rogers, and for Cole Porter (despite having the chops, having studied orchestration with Vincent D’Indy), for example. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights score was powered by Bill Sherman and Alex Lacamoire, who transcribed, arranged and orchestrated the show.

Musical departments gather and congeal based on time constraints and trust: John Williams and Conrad Pope, because of the speed at which musical materials must be generated for film; Leonard Bernstein and Irwin Kostal / Sid Ramin, who were given detailed “short scores” for execution as a 27 piece pit arrangement for West Side Story, freeing up Bernstein’s time so that he could be “in theater” and able to make changes quickly to a rapidly evolving, choreography-heavy show. Or Sondheim and Jonathan Tunick, whose signature sound is as recognizable as was Robert Russell Bennet’s and as important to the success of the shows on which he works. Which brings us back around to the queen of them all: German composer Trude Rittman, whose Sound of Music reduction was just the tip of the iceberg of her involvement in some of the greatest scores in the American Musical Theater.

In fact, the core piano vocal score documents — disciplined, vocally-supportive, easy-to-play while following a conductor’s stick or coaching a singer — of the American MT repertoire are nearly all Trude Rittman’s superb handiwork: Rogers’ great scores (Carousel, South Pacific, Sound of Music, The King and I); Frederick Loewe’s (more ornate, harder to play) Camelot, My Fair Lady, and numerous orchestrations, dance arrangements. What a treat it was to run into her handwriting, and to learn the handwriting styles of all the great orchestrators when I used to hand copy music at Chelsea Music back in the day.

The number of composer executive chefs in the kitchen, the number of sous-chefs, line cooks, and pastry chefs is dizzying and — if one has a taste for playing in a pit or singing on a stage — pretty cool. (The role of composer is entirely different in commercial MT than it is in opera. For example, when Burt Bacharach got the flu and ran behind in delivering songs for Promises, Promises the producer threatened to take on another composer to finish the score.) With all the different crews crafting performance documents in the living theater, there are bound to be myriad variations on what constitutes the best sort of piano reduction for a show. Usually, they come to us like love letters left after the end of a love affair, sitting in a box at a place like Chelsea Music in Manhattan, founded by Don Walker and Mathilde Pinchus, with the name of the show stamped on the side and a big “piano conductor” score bound archivally, leaning hard either to the left or to the right, there to stay until Broadway’s lights (or the office lights) are extinguished for good —  or until the creative teams’ heirs transfer the papers to some university’s archives. Otherwise, they sit, awaiting the next revival.

Piano conductor scores consist of a playable piano part and other lines that contain meaningful countermelodies and “fills” that can be assigned to whomever has been hired for the production at hand. They’re sometimes conducted from (Boosey and Hawkes only brought West Side Story’s conductor score out a few years ago, for example), but, usually, the show’s producers have spent just enough on the music to get the cast album in the can and then — man, I’ve seen shows where the “p/c” and the orchestra parts were just left on the stands at the recording session and then … lost, because the show’s impact was so ephemeral and nobody thought it would ever be revived. Anyone who has played a semi-professional community playhouse production of anything has played out of these books (which have gotten pretty slick — particularly when an outfit like Disney owns the copyright), and which often have the name of the player and the city where the “bus and truck” tour last ended. It is such great insider theater lore.

In the musical theater, pianists accept as a matter of honor that their vocal book is itself a malleable, living, evolving thing, and that errors and inconsistencies will crop up during production(s) over the years as changes for various situations are made and unmade. Cuts are made and sewn up, transitions massaged, songs added and dropped.

American opera composers sometimes emerge from the musical theater tradition and are abashed when pulled up short by opera repetiteurs and rehearsal pianists, who typically expect their scores to have been “frozen” and edited. Opera pianists can’t really be blamed for feeling taken advantage of, since they’re being pulled out of their professional comfort zone if they have never ever coached or played a musical. Their default stance is often (though not always) that the composer didn’t have enough common sense or experience to simplify their short score, either by simply supporting the singers the way Rittman’s scores did or leaving them to their own devices and simply presenting the orchestra parts, as Stein’s did. They can hardly be blamed for feeling that, not only do they have to watch the stick, coach the singers, but also piece together an idiomatic part to play.

There’s a lot to sort out here. Full disclosure: It should be obvious by now that I grew up playing shows and operas from all sorts of scores and truly enjoy coming to terms with the different ways that they come to us. I began my opera career fourteen operas ago by crafting my first piano reduction based on the Britten / Stein model with a dash of Rittman. I’ve come at each score with a fresh ear, hoping to capture the psychology of that opera, but — for better and for worse — I have never “coddled” singers by doubling them in the orchestra unnecessarily and I don’t do it in my vocal scores. Because I have always loved browsing the stacks and learning repertoire from the page, I’ve loved crafting the vocal scores myself to my theatrical works.

Decades ago, David Diamond asked me to orchestrate his opera The Noblest Game for Christopher Keene but I said no; Bernard Rands asked me to make a piano reduction of his opera Vincent — ditto, no. Lenny asked me to try to complete Blitzstein’s unfinished Sacco and Vanzetti but there just wasn’t enough of a torso there to flesh out. Back then, I did do the rehearsal piano reductions (still another set of traditions and protocols) of Ned Rorem’s English Horn, Cello, and Flute Concertos for Boosey, but that’s where my career as a latter-day Rittman came to a close.

I myself never, ever use arrangers or orchestrators. Well, I did once and, regretting it, determined to never take that route again. It’s just not my way. I have always composed into full (or, if rushed, a detailed short) score, even when the commissioning agreement calls for a piano reduction first to facilitate workshops. Perhaps, one day I will leave making the piano reduction of one of my operas to someone else, because it is a lot of work, or maybe just to see how it feels. It will probably be done better than I could do it. Maybe when I write an opera without words.

In any event, here are a couple of anecdotes that illustrate the level of mutual forbearance, respect and trust required of opera composers and opera coach / repetiteurs to get the work done.

I remember the conductor of an early revival of my opera Shining Brow who added thirds and (often) unresolved 7ths and 9ths to the piano reduction I had made when coaching. He explained that it helped the singers to find their pitches (I had followed the Britten / Stein model). At the first orchestral read-through, the singers had trouble finding their pitches because they had relied on the extra notes he’d been feeding them.

Another time, during a revival of Amelia, for which the original commissioning contract had stipulated that there would be two pianists for rehearsals, the pianist took me aside and said, “With all due respect, you could have given me a piano reduction instead of a short score to coach from.” The next revival, the pianist, playing out of the newly simplified score, admonished me to put in instrumental cue names so that he could tell the singers “what to listen for” when coaching. (In musical theater scores, such cues are common, and I often put them in, but, for that generation of the vocal score I had removed them.)

Coaching the original cast of Vera of Las Vegas from the keyboard (as I had my previous shows) in Las Vegas, I had delighted in getting every articulation right, every musical style just so, every mannerism notated. Twenty years later, during a European tour, I laughed with the band over beers when they said, “Jesus, you were specific. We know what you want. Trust us. Take them all out.” Too late, the score had been “frozen” years previous.

Some operas, like Orson Rehearsed, are modular, and incorporate lots of un-notateable electronica. Imagine my brilliant conductor’s consternation when the otherwise beautiful vocal score he was using to coach his singers didn’t capture exactly what the electronics were doing. “Once I figured that out, I was fine, but before that, it was touch and go.”

The vocal score of The Antient Concert was, first and foremost, a document of the string quartet arrangement with which the work was first premiered. Jocelyn Dueck, the coach and repetiteur for the original workshop at the Princeton Atelier, was comfortable “dropping” phrases when she needed to so that she could support the singers. The result was that she played an opera score like a musical theater score. She really “got” what I gave her, and I was grateful. When the score was published, I wanted to make sure that the fact that it was not a piano reduction was made clear, so I placed on the title page “Vocal Score by the Composer,” which some clever librarian somewhere catalogued as “Vocal score by [sic] the composer.” Everyone’s so smart.

Recently, I returned to the 2013 piano reduction of A Woman in Morocco to transform it into a Rittman-style score that could be used by traditional opera coaches. In my original development score I found notes given to me by Kathleen Kelly during a developmental workshop of the piece years ago in Texas. An extraordinary pianist, coach, and conductor, she had done such an excellent job preparing the singers before I got to town that, when she asked me about some of the French that I had set in the score, I trusted her enough to ask her to “fix” my French prosody as she saw fit and to teach me afterwards what she had done. I remain grateful.

The musical director (conducting and playing out of a “piano / conductor” score) of a revival of Vera of Las Vegas revealed to me that he had had no problem cueing the drummer in one city, but that the current drummer had sworn that the part was unreadable because several of the instruments were on different lines than he was used to. (He was fired and another person engaged.) “He came to look at his part in the piano / conductor score, laughed, and said, ‘this isn’t an opera, it’s a cabaret. I shouldn’t have to play exactly what’s written!’”

One time, during staging rehearsals of another show, I was asked to step in to accompany a staging rehearsal in which the conductor was consistently behind the beat. I took it as long as I could before (I was younger then) started accompanying the singers and ignoring the stick. The scene, which had been slow and aggravating, sprang into motion like a racehorse. I was thrilled. Finally, I had to admit to myself that I was doing the production a disservice because the conductor had just started following me; as soon as I resumed my place on the sidelines, the old tempi returned.

What have I learned? That every vocal score should be accepted on its own merits because it is the result of the development process by which it was wrought. There is no correct way to execute a vocal score, though a “piano reduction” should be idiomatic and only go to three staves when there’s no other recourse. If a pianist is looking at a “piano conductor” score, then they should know going in that they’ll be required to make a lot of decisions about what to play and what not to. There’s no blame to go around.

Our mission from the piano bench is to prepare the singers, protect them, and support them as best we can. We can’t afford to get lost in the weeds. Our job is stressful and for the most part thankless, but we’re working out of living documents created by people in the thick of creating. Mistakes in vocal scores rarely occur out of ignorance; usually they occur because of lack of experience or time. As a retired Teamster copyist, I’d be the first fella to simply blame the copyist — everyone does. As Lukas Foss used to tell me, “Daron, the ink is wet until you die.” Play on.

What Dave and Hal Saw: Truth, Lies, and Art

I am reading the news — essays about the transience of power, observing as the clegs orbit Ozymandias, and suddenly what is running through my mind’s ear is my old friend Robert Orth singing, “Has a, has a, has a sort of…” You know the rest: “mystery.”

Does the news have a sort of mystery? Is the news truly “beyond understanding?” The Bible tells us that mysteries can only be revealed through revelation. Stephen King says that “news is an emotional resonating device.” I adore a libretto penned by a priest — just my speed — Alice Goodman, for John Adams’ opera Nixon in China. Richard Nixon, a Quaker, careening into “yesterday night” aboard Airforce One, succumbing to the thrill of the unknown – and presumably unknowable – our Presidential Rumi-nator in Chief.

At least Tricky Dick was a tortured, alcoholic Machiavellian with a J.D. and not a wannabe jailhouse lawyer. Raw, undigested data (new information, or news) can “mean” whatever one wants it to. Librettist Goodman gave the lawyer from Yorba Linda a soul by placing the observation in his mouth; composer Adams provided the inexorable orchestral music that provided the sonic gesso over which one-note-Nixon ejaculated “News, News, News.”

Several bars from Nixon in China (Adams / Goodman)

There’s inarticulate reportage in the head of the snake; the body is a probing “has a, has a, has a,” and the tail, well the tale is in the tail, of course: the masterful, willful elongation of the last syllable in the word “mystery,” the sound of those Nixonian emotional and psychological gears grinding as he struggles impotently to land the melodic line. “Reeee-eeee-eee-eeee-eeee.” Nixon intuits the magisterial poetry of the moment, even that a revelation is being teed up, but, in this telling at least, he’s still the guy who has gotten the yips because Leonard Bernstein’s MASS is going up across town at the Kennedy Center and all those condescending liberals will be there making him feel inadequate and, and … well, 37 was man enough to leave well enough alone.

I’m naming the musical gesture the “Willful Elongation of Ry.” It feels like an apt metaphor. History itself, with the 1980 launch of CNN and the 24-hour-news-cycle, seemed to “speed up.” Now, the “flood-the-zone” news cycle makes everything a smear of information that makes as much sense as did the lurid images streaming past Hal and Dave at the end of 2001. Alvin Toffler’s “shattering stress and disorientation” has been institutionalized. “History is a mystery (to some),” quipped a valued mentor recently when I pointed out that a mutually beloved institution once proud of its institutional memory had … forgotten something. (I immediately thought of George Orwell: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”) Well, I replied, “I’m done.” “Reeee-eeee-eee-eeee-eeee.” But am I? I’m not naive. I have lived long enough to experience the deaths of my mentors and the empowerment of my contemporaries. No wonder Nixon sang, “We live in an unsettled time,” in Goodman’s libretto.

In all its precious, quicksilver malleability, the truth inconveniently abides. Unlike Wenders’ angels Damiel and Cassiel, artists are not passive witnesses; we memorialize, we leaflet the heart. We don’t just work here. Honestly, “Reeee-eeee-eee-eeee-eeee” is beginning to sound more and more like the shriek of a siren to me.

Nixon was no Captain Vere, but he was a good writer, an avid reader, and an intelligent man; he assuredly knew his Transcendentalists and Goodman knows her Melville, so Nixon and Adams are led briefly toward the “infinite sea” before he settles into an acknowledgement that the “yesterday night” of the nation’s heartland will “skip a beat” and he closes, as do we all, on the verge of an insight. “Bruegel, Pat said.” Pat said. Pat.

Dormiveglia in Venice

First, the familiar ritual of crossing from the real world via the Ponte della Libertà to the Floating World; next, disembarking at Santa Lucia Station, thinking of the old violin professor’s farewell; finally, the people streaming down the graceful marble steps to the canal like water gushing in slow motion from a sluice. Limbo. At this point, stepping into any vaporetto, any ferryboat, will do: spoken Italian, German, Russian, very little English, the powerful, brutish diesel engine’s snarling as it is thrown into reverse, laughter trampolining off the water. I look up. Across the canal I see not a woman in a blue pea coat but a young girl in a white dress with a red ribbon holding an old man’s hand, her other hand shielding her eyes from the midday sun. Will I get off in Murano and visit the graves of Stravinsky, Nono, and Diaghilev at San Michele? Not this time; this time, only life in Venice. If a montage beat is notated in a screenplay with ellipses, then what is the musical equivalent?

The picture you always see on tourist websites: the Basilica della Salute. (p/c: Daron Hagen)

Welcome back then, to the transience of Venice; ave to its addiction to suggestibility; a nod to our old acquaintances misattribution, and the persistence of forgetting. A toast to memories receding and growing more untrustworthy — particularly here, where the sweat that pools at the base of your spine when you’re late, rushing, and lost feels like sickness, the hand pressing on your chest is not hot, but cold, infinitely patient and macabre. “Is this how this story ends?” you ask yourself just at the moment you’ve become pre-syncopal and you’re about to accept that you’re trapped in an M.C. Escher engraving where the tops and bottoms of the stairways meet up, the last of a dozen sunless, serpentine calles suddenly opens up to the Canal Grande and the full force of the sun hits you and you stop dead, you lose your place, the narrative derails, you go up, you hear something for the first time in the orchestra that you shouldn’t have because you’re not playing your assigned part, your clammy shirt seizes up around you like a moist, limp handshake, and you suddenly understand, after all these years, what Dylan Thomas meant when he wrote that “old age should burn and rave at close of day.”

Fondamente Nove. Not the acqua alta in which I saw stars but the bright blue sky, dazzling sun scattering diamonds on the Adriatic wave tips. Not cheap rye from a silent Acheron-type bartender on a cold, windy, rainy night, but a cappuccino on the house from the waiter at the charming café that has replaced it. Pointing to my phone: “è morto,” I tell him, drawing my finger across my throat. Then, I didn’t have a phone number; this time the phone (and its GPS) died on the vaporetto from Santa Lucia, forcing me to be here. This spot. “Prego?” he asks. “No. Grazie.” Not lire, but euros on the table in front of me. I pull out my book. This I must remember on my own.

The very light pressure I use when sketching with my lucky mechanical pencil. Deep breath. Very long exhalation. Eyes closed. Focus pull. First the faint, straight tic tac toe of a map, then, opening my eyes, I attach the names I can remember: R to next street. R on Boteri. L on Cordoni. L on del Volta. R on 1st street (on R). Boca. Scanning the page, thinking, did I even know what a Rack Focus was back then? Yes, but I didn’t think that way then: it was all raw and wet and cold and febrile.

No laptop; just this book. Checking in to the Casa Boccassini, I hand over my passport. “I’m sorry – Scusi,” I say, without thinking. In English she replies, “you think you’re sorry, I’m Russian” and we leave it at that. A cat jumps on the counter in front of me, purring. Ariel, who has succeeded the polydactyl mouser Muse, who got out the front door one night never to return, and who I learn was in fact not blind, it was the dog who was blind, but I never knew him, so I had combined them in memory.

Ariel, Casa Boccassini’s house cat. (p/c: Daron Hagen)

In the absolute silence of 4 in the morning, awakened by the dings of my sons bidding me sweet dreams as they go to bed in New York six hours earlier, I think of Katherine Mansfield’s critique of Woolf’s Night and Day not reflecting the atomizing effect of the war. But now there is no night, no day, no Day for Night; the 24/7 news cycle and the Internet has ended all that. And here we are, now hurtling once again nella fauce del cane. I send them both heart emojis and mute the phone. But I’m up. The fear of forgetting. Scribbling, fast, in this book: working the whole thing out as a screenplay in my dreams. Closing the book, I try to get back to sleep, but remain hypnagogic.

Dings from the group chat of my colleagues at the Bogliasco Foundation, where I’m writing a book about making operafilms. They’re sharing pictures of the sunrise in Liguria. Now I am experiencing dormiveglia (the liminal zone of being half-asleep or semi-conscious). I can access my dream, which is as clear as a film: it is Carnevale and, earlier today, the angry vendor who hisses, “you wait for the priests to pass” as he holds the lapel of my leather jacket as I try to pass him; the real priests first, then the people beating taiko drums, then the celebrators dressed as celebrants, then the plague masks. “Now you go.” A slow walk to the Accademia to buy a book and pastries for the gang back in Liguria at Pasticceria Toletta, touching the trunks of the sycamores and noting the unchanging changing light, and then a fermata to light a candle at the Chiesa di San Moise for Bernie before walking to San Marco, stopping for dinner at Ristorante da Ivo, specials written by hand on the wall, everything unchanged, reading Bazin’s essays and arguing in the margins as I have since my teens, the long walk back by memory to the Cannaregio, stopping to watch people and to catch my breath and….

The Courtyard at Casa Boccassini (p/c: Daron Hagen)

The rosewater used to launder the sheets gives the room “the loved one” smell. I can no longer bear it. The sun has risen. I must get out. Like the old days, I’ve nothing to pack but my book bag, so I draw the sweaty sheets up on the bed, check for my passport, and pick up the key I’ve accepted for decades. I descend the steps to the garden and sit by the empty fountain to write about the female pilot throwing the lever earlier on the vaporetto: Charon, I think, which is pronounced Karen, I muse, asking her for her name, which is Serena. Had to be. “Serenissima,” I laugh, “were you born here?” “Of course,” she says. I raise my left hand to orans position and silently offer a greeting to the spirit of my old friend Frederick Hammond, who first introduced me to this hotel when we taught together at Bard College and, year after year, stayed here while working on his Frescobaldi treatise. It occurs to me that I was right when I wrote in my memoir, “Yes, this is how this story finally ends.” This gentle riff is enough. Not Muse, but Ariel, marks my legs and I reflexively reach down to scratch her neck, seeing that breakfast has been laid in the room just off the garden. All here is as it was and shall ever be, though the names and people will change.

Ariel means lion of God, I recall while standing in the Basilica di San Marco on my way back to Santa Lucia, about 24 hours after arriving. Soundtrack cue Monteverdi's Lasciatemi morire mixed with Welles V.O. “Maybe a man’s name…” from F for Fake under slow pan east-to-west looking straight up into the basilica’s cupola as I recall the conversation I had with Ford Lallerstedt in 1998 about the way that this specific physical space shaped Claudio Monteverdi’s counterpoint and how that effect might be reproduced visually. I take a picture with my resurrected phone of the sun shining through the stained-glass windows. Why try to put this moment behind bars? I think, erasing it. “You wait for the priests to pass,” he said. “All used up,” Dietrich said to Quinlin. “So, then, why not?” sigh the stones of Ruskin’s Venice, and I take another picture, one with which I will begin a new story, a new sequence of shots, a new tune whose cumulative effect will be … will be to be.

Earning the Tune

Granted, melody is but one of the strands that make up musical expression; further, what constitutes a beautiful, or even “memorable” tune, is in the ear of the beholder. Factor in that tastes change: we’re always swinging back and forth, pendulum-like, generation to generation, from romanticism to modernism, like drunks sobering up after a binge, staying sober, and relapsing. After Wagner’s hyper-emotional Tristan und Isolde comes Debussy’s emotionally cool Pelléas et Mélisande where most of the frank emotionalism (summoned up by his utilization of all the music elements at his disposal—harmonic and melodic tension and release, dynamics, texture) is in the orchestra and, in an opera about love, “Je t’aime” is sung as though spoken, and in silence.

I recall for two reasons a composition seminar at Juilliard in fall 1985 at which I presented my String Quartet No. 1. Present were our teachers, Milton Babbitt, Elliott Carter, Vincent Persichetti, and David Diamond, as well as about twenty fellow graduate composition students. I remember it primarily because Diamond chewed me out afterwards for “trivializing my work.” I was genuinely surprised by the admonition at the time because I had trusted that the work’s sturdy craftsmanship would speak for itself; that my breezy, self-assured presentation of my musical analysis (I was proud of the fact that every note could be justified both through serial and tonal procedures) would be interpreted as simply unpretentious, and not anti-intellectual. I’m afraid that I never quite embraced David’s advice to “be more respectful of the excellence of your own work in public.”

The second takeaway I recall because it came from an unexpected source. Milton had raised only one point during the question-and-answer portion of the presentation: he had observed that, on the chalkboard behind me, I had mislabeled one of the pitches in my tone row. Chuckling, I had taken no offense, but rather had simply made the correction and sallied into my analysis. Observing my dressing down by the furious Diamond, he came up to me and said, “You know, Daron, it seems to me you pay mightily for that soaring tune in the finale. Maybe ask yourself why.”

I believed then that great talent can and should present itself as “easy.” As an upper-class socialite once asked me in a green room, “Why else would we all call what you musicians do ‘playing’?” Of course, I was not giving our shared labor the respect it deserved, so David was correct. But Milton’s point is the one that stays with me now that age and the years have made David’s advice moot.

The “soaring tune” to which Milton referred had been the third, most “ironed-out” version of the rondo’s fugue subject. I had intended that it trigger something close to what Milton had felt. I had felt it when I wrote it, and I trusted myself enough to commit to it. So there it was, a big wet Dionysian kiss in the middle of my highbrow Apollonian string quartet. Milton knew that it took “courage” to share a good tune, and that the first thing that someone looking to put you in your place does is to call it derivative. Why do I feel even now as though tunes have to be “earned?” Raised Lutheran—and, like many composers of my generation, taught to temper tunes with just enough “abstract” wrong notes to keep them from really taking off—I’ve always wrestled with the “unearned” bliss of unabashed, emotionally-frank lyricism. Early on, during the 90s, a New York Times critic wrote of my first opera that I had “a gift for big, sweeping tunes;” thirty years later, another Times critic thought that my latest opera contained “too much lyricism.”  Right.

I thanked Milton for the observation and sort of forgot about the advice that had followed. But, watching my son row with his mates in a shell on the Hudson in the driving rain from the safety of my car this morning, I was reminded that even the bliss of rowing at dawn on the Hudson on a perfect day has got to be earned by also putting out when the weather is inclement.

Back in the day, Ned Rorem’s primly sober Air Music (a terrific piece in which “there’s not a tune you can hum-bum-bum-be-dum,” though there are a couple of really juicy “licks.”) won a Pulitzer, while his Sunday Morning (closer to his heart, more effusively melodic) garnered more love than respect. Some composers might say that it takes more courage to dish out a “big tune” with “soaring horn calls” than it does to craft honorable, abstract pieces just tuneful enough not to rile anyone up. After all, the old conventional wisdom runs, pieces with “good tunes” belong on pops concerts. A highly-tuneful work on a major orchestra’s subscription season can provoke conductorial winks to the audience and players. Diamond accused me of “not enough self-criticism” when what he meant was that I shouldn’t indulge in writing memorable tunes. In Tim Robbins’ Cradle Will Rock gloss, John Cusak, portraying Nelson Rockefeller (in this scenario, the upper class baddie), pours money into abstract art with Sarandon (as the amoral art dealer Sarfatti) on his arm because Rubén Blades’ Rivera (the dangerous artist moving between classes) makes art that riles up working class folks. Cue the Blitzstein. Next on our show: was Modernism a State Department / CIA Psy-Op? I enjoy the off the rails nature of that sort of read, whether it is true or not.

So what’s a tune if you denature it? Parlando. Gian Carlo Menotti pointed out to me once that “recitative and parlando are just foreplay.”  I recall attending a performance of Jack Beeson’s opera My Heart’s in the Highlands and growing steadily more irritated that every time he was about to really break out into a memorable tune he cut himself short. Laughing, Bernstein described this affliction as “Tuneus Interruptus.” When Burt Bacharach died, I recalled Babbitt’s advice to “ask myself why” again. Bacharach’s tunes, seemingly bubble-gummy, are actually tricky to sing; it is the composer’s struggle to be both catchy and smart that gives them their zest. The quip that Peter Shaffer puts into Emperor Joseph II’s mouth in Amadeus that there are “too many notes” shifted in the 20th century to something more insidious: now one runs the risk of putting in “too many pretty notes.” 

Howard Pollack’s biography of Samuel Barber describes the upper-class Main Line Philadelphia society into which he was born. Ned, born into a middle-class Chicago family, composed increasingly modernist music as he aged. Like Ned, I was born into the middle-American middle-class. Unlike Ned, I found the acquisition of a Mid-Atlantic compositional accent (the whole “abstract” thing where textures and colors take the place of tunes so that other, less confrontational, factors can come to the fore) and the role of arriviste beside the point, as I was steadfastly committed to the pursuit of emotional nakedness, regardless of … “taste.”

The subjective conflation of taste and class is a bit of mischief still managed (even after everything that has happened in the past forty years) by a generation of composers and critics to put down colleagues, and competitors. (The intellectual chauvinism of complacently considering one’s personal taste to be superior to others’ once underpinned entire careers.) Compare and contrast the “middlebrow” way that the music of Richard Strauss, who, in 1947, apparently referred to himself as a first class second rate composer, lands; and the way that Gustav Mahler’s Proto-Modernist internationalist worldview combined Jewish folk music and Christian religious music; and the “highbrow” way that Elliott Carter’s indispensable music lands. While Mahler’s and Strauss’ music is still programmed a century after their deaths, Carter’s music is not despite its excellence, because he didn’t throw any “tuneful” bones to the musically uninitiated.

A still from Humoresque, the lachrymose, under-rated camp classic starring Joan Crawford, Oscar Levant, and James Garfield, whose screenplay by Clifford Odets contained some delicious late-40s social satire.

An artist who labors to conceal his craft is, when successful, often described as an “effortless” melodist and derided as a “tunesmith” rather than as a composer. A “tunesmith” is a tradesman; a composer is an artist. In The Agony and the Ecstacy, novelist Irving Stone has testy Pope Julius shout up to Michelangelo, “When will you make an end?” The maestro snarls back, “When I am finished.” Crawford’s contempt as the dissolute patroness Helen for Garfield’s vulgar “striver” virtuoso violinist Paul in Humoresque, for all the arch camp with which it is presented, is adroitly mixed by someone who had been around and seen a thing or two (playwright Clifford Odets) with envy, self-loathing and lust. Humoresque, the ditty by Antonín Dvořák, was clearly chosen because its a bit of “high class”, "cheap” sentimentality — the sort that works incredibly well in the concert hall. Artists move freely through classes, it is true; but we’re still servants at play; we are meant never, ever to forget who owns the house, and the way to the kitchen door. We’re still talking about how talent intersects with class, aren’t we, Milton? You old fox.

A digression, perhaps, but it is important to mention that it isn’t just “melody” that comes in for the class-related slap down. I recall the casual condescension with which a professionally cosseted colleague whose cultural reference points (and social aspirations) were shaped by their years at Harvard and Columbia dismissed within my hearing the first movement of my Koto Concerto. Why? Because, for them, “serious” meant “saturating the chromatic” and I had, as a compositional challenge, based it entirely on a simple pentatonic pitch group. Consciously or not, because of his allegiance to a musical style that would land best with the gatekeepers from whom he wanted things, he considered poor taste an aesthetic strategy I employed knowingly for effect because I wasn’t speaking to him.

When the American Academy gave me an Academy Award a few years ago, the citation noted that I was being honored for having “achieved my own voice.” Grateful as I was for the recognition, I admit that I was a little puzzled by the citation. Stephen Sondheim’s smart, tart lyric from Anyone Can Whistle came to mind: “What's hard is simple. / What's natural come hard.” I think my songs are harder to sing than they need to be. I’m still —still! — after forty years, struggling to make them “easier” to sing. (Not to mention play: operas with sight-readable vocal scores get programmed more often than complex ones for many reasons — an easy vocal score is a symptom, not a cause.) I still believe that anybody can, in fact, whistle; I believe, as Marc Blitzstein used to famously scrawl, in “peace, justice, and good tunes.”

Why? Because, in the final analysis, good tunes are the surest, most generous, most intimate way a composer has to share unconditional, unearned love with an audience. That’s why tunes move us so deeply; why they threaten some people, console others, and embarrass others. As Milton admonished me so long ago, “Maybe ask yourself why.”

Now You Are Ready

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Eyes closed, I felt the tissue paper hugging my neck’s nape, the shawl nestled at my Adam’s apple, the occasional pressure of a single finger adjusting the angle of my head gently, but firmly, like a pianist giving an A. I smelled the orange spice opening of hand-mixed shaving cream, the sandalwood follow-up of hand soap, the tang of Barbicide, the masculine smell of Pinaud Clubman. The shears snipped in thoughtful bursts at a moderate walking tempo. Andante, I thought. “First I do the beard,” he said. “Yes,” I murmured, not opening my eyes.

There had as yet been no electric razor’s angry buzz, no rushed swipes of a “number two” doing the thinking—it had all been done by hand. It has been decades since I’d last heard the intimate, conversational cadence of old-fashioned barbering. It made me think of the rhythm of my mother’s work sounds as she sculpted me when I was a boy.

Pausing, he asked, “Will you check my work on your beard?” I opened my eyes, reached for my glasses, performed the universal male gesture of running my thumb down one cheek, the rest of my fingers down the other, and closing them, like a prayer, below my chin while turning my head left, then right. “Perfect,” I smiled, taking off my glasses and placing them back on the shelf beneath the enormous mirror. 

His jacket was as white as his hair. About eighty, I thought. “I am finding this haircut oddly comforting,” I remarked. “That’s good,” he said. “Something about not using the razor.” “Ah,” he replied, “you noticed.” The silence for a few beats that feels so natural between a good barber or barkeep and his client. “It was not the way I was taught to cut hair, you see,” he explained. I closed my eyes again as he began trimming my sideburns.

On a hunch, I asked, “Where was that?” He stopped. “Palermo,” he said, quietly. “I learned to cut hair by apprenticing for six years in a barbershop there until, one day, my boss said, ‘now you are ready,’ gave me a pair of scissors, a manual clipper, straight razors, and a brush, and showed me the door.”

I recalled my composer friend Norman Stumpf asking Ned Rorem during a lesson in the early eighties whether Ned thought that he was “ready” to begin his career, and Ned responding, “You’re ready whenever you decide that you are.” My barber performed the customary blessing of matching the length of my sideburns with his knuckles. “Italy,” I mused. “Yes,” he said, reading my mind, “it is a shame about Venezia. Have you been there?”

The waves of emotion, followed by a simple, “Yes, many times.” “I have been only once,” he replied. “I took my wife to La Fenice, do you know it?” “Indeed I do,” I smiled, answering, “Venice’s jewel. One of the peak experiences of my life was visiting Ricordi in Milano and seeing the various performance sets for Verdi and Puccini.” His scissors stopped. “Ah.” Intense, shared emotion. “The opera.”

He worked on in silence, struggling with what to do with the thinning fistful of my hair fecklessly splayed across the exposed scalp growing like the hole in the ozone layer. “When did you come to the States?” I asked. “I was 18. My father applied when I was 13. The U.S. government would only allow him to bring one other family member. He chose me. My grandfather had to put a thousand dollars in the bank in order to show that we would be supported if we didn’t get work.” “Did you?” I asked. The scissors stopped. “I have always worked,” he replied. “Me, too,” I said, quietly. “Yes,” he said.

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A new haircut.

“You are a musician,” he observed, simply. “Of course,” I replied, gently. “My three sons all played instruments. They are in their fifties now. Music kept them out of trouble, and at home.” “Yes,” I replied, “that is good. You must be proud of them.” A caesura in which pictures were drawn down off the mirror. I pulled some snaps of my sons up on the phone. Silence. He reached for his tools. The smell of the talc, the pat-pat-pat as he worked it into my hair; the scraping of his comb; the slight twinge of pain as he hit a blemish.

I thought of an astonishingly personal, cruel, intellectually facile, and factually inaccurate review of my memoir onto which I had recently stumbled. (In its next issue, the magazine took the remarkable step of correcting the factual inaccuracies and apologizing.) Most kinds of writing don’t require any bravery—criticism least of all—but publishing a memoir is scary; it is one of the kinds of writing that requires courage. I found mine. My book wasn’t confessional—there were no surprises in it for people who knew me—but it was intended to be a work of art that would, in Cesar A. Cruz’s words, “comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.” Reading the review, I had recalled the story of the senior composer who, having just played a recording of their work for an impertinent student in a masterclass, responded to his surfacy vitriol with a mild, “Next time, you write it.”

I thought of a visit to the cardiologist, who, after examining the various diagnostic tests that had been run on my heart, said, “Your heart is getting larger.” When I smiled ruefully, he replied, “That’s not a good thing.” As I do every holiday season, I reminded myself that dealing with grief and depression is not a competition; neither should it be concealed or denied; there’s plenty of anguish to go around.

I thought of my youngest, at the doctor’s office with his mother; my oldest, at school grappling with adolescence. The barber loosened the tissue paper at the nape of my neck and applied a little shaving cream. “Your boys are handsome,” I observed, handing him back the pictures as his straight razor scraped across my jugular. “We are lucky men, yes?” He accepted the snapshots, wiped my neck clean with a warm, wet cloth, spun the chair around and whipped the shawl from my shoulders. “So are yours,” he smiled, “and, yes, we are.”

I looked at the barber’s honest work in the mirror; I took in the aging, soul-weary face of the man who looked back at me, and reached for a way forward. You are not Aschenbach, and he is not the hotel barber; this visit to your barber tells a profoundly different story. I nodded affirmatively to my reflection, and said, “Right, this is how a man does it.”

“Now you are ready,” he said.

Johannes Changes Trains

Johannes Brahms in 1853. Public domain photograph from the Wikipedia Commons.

Summer 2023. A good French meal nearly demolished sitting between us, family (musical and otherwise) discussed, the unending conversation about life and art recommenced. “You promise that there will be no xylophone, right?” asked Alexander Platt, only very slightly over half-way serious, fork poised in midair. He had just asked me to dream on the idea of crafting an arrangement for the La Crosse Symphony Orchestra of Johannes Brahms’ great Opus 34, the final iteration of which – after the original quartet version had been withdrawn and turned first into a sonata for two pianos before being recast a second time for piano quintet – was premiered in 1866.

In the dream I was standing in a beautiful, high-ceilinged, book-lined private salon the size and shape of Grand Central Station’s Campbell Apartment. In the middle of the room sat a gleaming grand piano. Somehow I intuited that the sound filtering through the thick stone wall was that of a passenger train pulling into the Wien Nordbahnhof.

Alexander reminded me that we first met at a New Haven Symphony rehearsal of Schoenberg’s 1937 orchestration of Brahms’ First Piano Quartet led by his mentor Murray Sidlin in February 1986. I immediately recalled that I (who had not heard the arrangement before) had at the time looked up at him in shock at the point at which a xylophone entered, so out of character was it. Otto Klemperer is said to have liked Schoenberg’s arrangement so much that he declared, “You can’t even hear the original quartet, so beautiful is the arrangement.” 25-year-old me, arrogant in my youth, declared to Alexander, “that’s the moment when Schoenberg’s temerity is revealed—a xylophone? Really?” 

In waking life I had spent the previous weeks subsuming my own creative voice, consciously giving over to the unambiguous genius of musical mind in order to undertake the new orchestration of Brahms’ great Opus 34, the final iteration of which (after the original quartet version had been withdrawn and turned first into a sonata for two pianos before being recast a second time for piano quintet) was premiered in 1866.

Consequently, thirty-seven years later, extremely reluctant, I told Alexander that I would dream on it; but, inside my own head I had already said no. A year went by. Again, we faced each other over a demolished meal at the same restaurant. “So,” asked the maestro, “are you up to the challenge?” I told him that I was. What had changed? Over the course of the intervening year I had come to view Brahms’ great Opus 34 as a musical / historic inflection point—so musically sturdy, so filled with past, present, and future—that even the slightest instrumental nudge one way foreshadows the music Mahler would compose in only a few years; an instrumental nudge in another direction brought Beethoven back to life. 

I reached down to the keyboard and tentatively picked out DO FA SOL LA-flat FA RE-flat FA DO. As though in response, through the door strode a handsome man of thirty-three with straight, shoulder length blond hair combed straight back from his high forehead, exposing steep widow’s peaks.

“I’m on my way to Leipzig,” he said, running his hand through his hair as he barreled down on me. His eyes were a brilliant aquamarine. “I’m sorry!” I said, reflexively snatching my hand away from the keyboard and, to cover the movement, extending it out toward him. He shifted his portfolio from one hand to the other. The sound of a train leaving the station. “Mein Gott, ich brauche ein Bier!” he laughed, gripping my hand.

“Am I in your head; or, are you in mine?” I asked, pleasantly. “Yes,” he laughed, “why else would I be here? You are orchestrating my opus 34, yes? We play it in Leipzig tomorrow at the conservatory. How is it coming along?”

It’s a balancing act, I thought: you push the dissonant passing tones in the winds (as in bars 42-55 of the second movement) and it sounds like Mahler; you make the arpeggiated passagework in the strings too repetitive (and leave out the two-against-three that gives us a proper romantic sturm und drang rhythmic churn, say in the coda of the first movement) and it sounds like Harmonielehre; alternate instrumental choirs of the orchestra without enough timbral connective tissue and it sounds like Stravinsky; populate the lower octaves and Mussorgsky comes to mind.

So how did I muster the temerity to approach the project? I sublimated my so-called “creative ego / voice” and used my skills as an orchestrator to join Brahms not in the sacred moment of inspired creation that is rightly between him and his inner voice, but in the conduit of expressing those musical ideas.

“It sounds like it is you who could use a drink,” he mused. “I don’t drink anymore,” I sighed. “That’s good. It will make you fat,” he observed. But I was on a roll: add bass drum (as in bars 392-3 of the fourth movement) and you’ve got the Verdi Requiem. And then there is Death and the Maiden lurking in there, waiting to burst out—but you kept that under control, didn’t you? “It was hard to resist,” he admitted.

I impulsively picked out FA FA SOL-flat, the first three notes of the visionary “Poco sostenuto” opening of the final movement. “What is that?” I asked, excitement making me brash. “Is that some sort of ‘muss es sein?’ or something? Which century are you in there? What’s going on? It all makes sense contrapuntally—Dr. Lallerstedt would approve—but it’s Late Beethoven, or is it the beginning of Haydn’s Creation, a lucid couple of bars of Gesualdo, or a transitional passage in Mozart? The harmonies don’t add up: you’re a madman, a seer there; it’s like you’re looking into the future. It’s like you’re between trains: one’s headed backwards and the other forward; another keeps you here in Vienna and you end up maxing out with Gurrelieder!”

90 percent of the time I executed (based on his very clear orchestral style as it comes to us in his published symphonic works) an orchestration as he would, and 10% of the time I made subtle “pushes” toward the way that Mahler would dress the same ideas a decade later, or Beethoven a few years earlier, and, yes, how the young Schoenberg might have stressed a dissonance more than another set of ears.

“Ahem,” he said, pulling out a few pages of manuscript from his portfolio and spreading them on the broad expanse of the closed piano lid in a surprisingly graceful, balletic manner. I’m working on a requiem of my own right now, which I’d like to show you. And don’t mention Gurrelieder: I can’t imagine what Arnold was thinking adding xylophone to my opus 25 when he orchestrated it. You’re not thinking of pulling any specious batshit moments like that, are you?”

“I’m sorry, I can’t look at the sketches of your Deutsches Requiem right now—I simply can’t bear it,” I said. I can’t without thinking of Borges and his short story, of how the magnificent chain of secondary dominants triggering a fall one to the next like dominos in the last movement that once thrilled me also make me think now of how Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s assassination triggered the fall of dominos that led to the Great War in 1914, and how my country played geopolitical post-colonial dominos in Southeast Asia when we took the French government’s place at the table after Dien Bien Phu in 1954. I just don’t seem to be able to escape the weight of history.

And then, with the slightest addition of a doubling here or there, or the elimination of a traditional woodwind underpinning elsewhere, the gestalt of Schubert might emerge, and then evaporate; Schubert, whose ghost I somehow sensed in nearly every transition.

“That history is not in my head,” said Brahms, quickly retrieving the manuscript pages and putting them back into the portfolio. I had pushed the lucid dream too far. “None of that is in my head. You’ve brought all of that here with you. I can hear my train pulling into the station. I’ve got to go.” Brahms turned away and began walking briskly to the door.  “Did you know how dangerous the political situation already was when you wrote this Piano Quintet of yours?” I asked his back. “In only thirty years, your friend Dvořák will pen his glorious New World Symphony, but, at the moment we Americans were in the middle of our Civil War, inventing faster and bloodier ways of killing more people than ever before.”

Sometime during the 90s I led the Orchestra Society of Philadelphia on a concert with several of my own pieces that opened with Richard Wagner’s Meistersinger Overture. I shall never forget how much I disliked rehearsing and conducting Wagner. I was repulsed by how, physicalizing it, the sheer power of the musical expression made me feel as though I was being ensnared and incorporated into it the way that Tasha Yar was killed off in the “Skin of Evil” episode of Star Trek: the Next Generation. (Now there’s a sentence Ned Rorem would never have written.)

Orchestrating Brahms, on the other hand, made me feel as though I were a pilgrim enmeshed in the warp and woof of a work saturated in the self-critical wisdom of a spirit conversing with his peers. I felt ennobled, not enlisted; invited by the music to take a knee as a colleague, not bend the knee as an executant. In Wagner I sensed (most likely projected, but still) the impulse that might drive the human-driven disasters that would soon sweep over Europe and the world. In Brahms I felt only wisdom, a vaguely poignant nostalgia, and agape.

He stopped, one hand outstretched, holding the door open. I heard “Fahrkarte, bitte!” from outside. “How close are you to having the orchestration finished?” he asked, not looking at me. “I have it in my head,” I answered. “I finish tomorrow.” His arm dropped to his side as he turned to me. From across the room, quietly, he asked, “Do you remember the day thirty years or so ago when a colleague who had written another octatonic orchestra piece asked you why the chords “glowed” in your orchestral music when theirs didn’t and you said it was because all you have to do is look at Brahms to see that a D-sharp is sharper than an E-flat?”

“Yes, maestro,” I said. He shook his head. “That wasn’t kind, was it?” A beat. “No, it wasn’t,” I answered quietly. Another beat. The train for Leipzig was being called. “Go home,” he said. “You are no longer welcome here.” Shostakovich silence after the door closed behind him. I had never had the chance to thank him for the honor, to express my respect. And then I woke up.

Farewell to Little Pete's

Little Pete's Restaurant. Cash only. A Philadelphia treasure, in October 2014. (Photo: Daron Hagen)

Closure #1: OCTOBER 2014

This is a piece about Closure and the closure of Little Pete's, a belovéd greasy spoon across the street from the Warwick Hotel in Philadelphia. A wrecking ball is set to fly through Little Pete’s. Progress commands that a 300-room hotel must take the place of the parking ramp at 219 South 17th Street in whose corner nestles one of Center City Philadelphia’s treasures. We’re not talking Bookbinder’s (which is now, ignominiously, an Applebee's), chock full of tourists and overpriced, or the smattering of trendy boutique restaurants that surround Rittenhouse Square like hipsters lounging on the margins of a poetry reading. We’re talking about a Genuine 24-Hour Greasy Spoon, Home to Collars Both White and Blue, an Insomniac’s Oasis in the Night, a Caffeine Addict’s Last Resort, a Trusted Purveyor of that mysterious mélange of grill top odds-and-ends, Scrapple. We’re talking about Little Pete’s, for Pete’s sake. I'm afraid that the news is grim.

I’ll forever associate Little Pete’s with my youth, not just as a composer coming into his own, but also as a person whose world was opening up in one Big Bang. My life as it was then, almost impossibly full, was discussed, vivisected, celebrated, dreaded, and mourned at Little Pete’s.

Autumn 1981. This Wisconsin Boy, a tender nineteen years old, had only just moved to Philadelphia. The Grace of Whomever had handed me a lottery ticket in the form of an invitation to study at the legendary, preposterously intimidating Curtis Institute of Music. I was a Brooks Brothers shirt and blue jeans sort of guy. I grooved to Stockhausen more than Rorem, Berio more than Barber, and Bernstein even more than the Beatles. 

Little Pete’s was the setting for countless post-lesson symposia. During my lessons, my mentor Ned Rorem casually dropped priceless aperçu and dry, acerbic criticisms while slashing through my compositions, his pencil waving this way and that like a rapier. Afterwards, a bit shell-shocked by the enormity of Ned’s self-assurance, my best friend, and fellow Rorem pupil Norman Stumpf, and I would head for Little Pete’s, where we would debrief. “Did he tell you that you succeeded in being boring?” I asked Norman, over Pete’s wretched, perennially burnt Joe, one afternoon. “Not this time,” Norman replied. “But he told me that William Flanagan wrote my song better in the late 50s.” “Who was he?” I asked. “That’s what I said,” replied Norman. I already knew what Ned’s answer had been: find out.

I didn’t yet have a telephone in my apartment. I’d use the payphone in Little Pete’s to call home for reports of my mother’s gradual submission to cancer back in Wisconsin, and then drink with a cellist friend until four or five in the morning, attempting to slake the thirst for silence in my head. I cannot recall how many dawns I greeted, my body still young enough to absorb the alcoholic gut punches dealt it during the previous hours, doing my counterpoint exercises at Pete’s lime green counter, “scrambled eggs and“ a few inches away, untouched, the dread of disappointing Ford Lallerstedt in class a few hours later by presenting mediocre work pulling me back from the edge.

I celebrated my first critical triumph as a composer at Little Pete’s; I also received my most gratuitous wing clipping by a music critic there. In 1983, the Philadelphia Inquirer’s august music critic, Daniel Webster gave my string orchestra work, Prayer for Peace, which William Smith had just premièred with the Philadelphia Orchestra, a glowing review in the paper. I’ll never forget my brother Kevin, who had come to town for the performance, spreading the newspaper on the table between us, skimming it before reading it to me, so that, if necessary, he could spare me the worst bits. Seventeen years later—a lifetime, really—my alma matercommissioned a piece to celebrate its 75th anniversary called Much Ado. Made careless by the standing ovation the piece had received the night before, I spread the Inquirer out on a table at Pete’s expecting at least a casual nod from the critic. Instead, my frothy showpiece was dealt a pasting. Composers do read reviews. Well, I used to—until that day, anyway.

I courted my girlfriend for months by walking her each day from Curtis to her train at Suburban Station. The day that she allowed me to carry her violin for her was the equivalent of moving from “vous” to “tu.” Afterwards, a little giddy, downcast, yet hopeful — the way you can be when you are in your early ‘20s and in love and have time and health and just enough money to get by, I bought the Daily News and the New York Times and worked my way through them at Pete’s until I felt the urge to compose percolate up within me like a welcome fever. Then, a man with a mission, I’d head for a practice room at Curtis and spread notes on music paper like jam on bread. God, that felt good. In time, the love affair sputtered. Music did not.

This morning, an old school chum posted the news on Facebook that Pete’s shall soon be no more. The comments following her post were lovely, and they’re still coming in. I shouldn’t be amazed by how much the place meant to all of us. 

No more sentimental reveries over crab cake sandwiches when I return to Philadelphia for the occasional master class, performance, or lecture. One less skein of memory holding me to one of the few places on the planet, and one of the few times, when I was able to summon both the elegia of James Agee and the earnest and callow drive of Thomas Wolfe. “Aw,” a Philadelphia-based friend told me on the phone just now when I called him to confirm the news, “just drive on, old friend. It was inevitable. It had to happen. And it all began the day that they let people throw up buildings taller than William Penn’s hat.”

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At "Little Pete's" on 27 February 2017. The restaurant got a reprieve, and is now scheduled to close in May 2017. (Photo by Neil Erickson)

Closure #2: February 2017

Fully three years after I first contributed the article above to the Huffington Post, still accepting "cash only," the diner holds on. The final closing date has been officially announced and accepted by management, and a steady stream of customers has been coming in to say goodbye for months, said the owner when I stopped in this morning.

Enough time has passed that the Warwick Hotel across the street has passed back into private hands and out of the clutches of the chain that had demolished its once elegant lobby and replaced it with a hideous, Euro-trashy, neon-blue fishtank affair.

My wife and I had checked into the Warwick the day before, our two sons in tow. I'd returned to Philly to hear a performance by the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia—Michael Ludwig had given a lovely account of the violin concerto I'd written for him a few years earlier. After Michael's vivid, glowing performance of my concerto with Dirk Brossé and the orchestra, I'd dined with my belovéd writing mentor (whom I'd first met as a student at Curtis in 1982) Emily Wallace and her husband Gregory and discussed my memoirs; I'd enjoyed a quick brunch with my good buddy, rising composer and Curtis faculty member David Ludwig, at Pete's the next morning.  I'd even taken a moment to stretch my legs out before me in a favorite chair in the Common Room at Curtis for a few moments before walking to Little Pete's, spreading the Inquirer out on the green formica countertop, and reading a respectful review of my concerto by the same critic who had panned me all those years back. 

June 2017. The original Little Pete's is literally no more. (Photo: Daron Hagen)

A few nights before, I'd sung my "Elegy for Ray Charles" at World Cafe Live in University City, a few blocks away, putting over my good friend Stephen Dunn's lovely words breathily into a hot mic and accompanying myself publicly in this town for the first time since the last time I touched the keys as the lounge pianist in the Barclay Hotel lobby in fall 1982. Then, I was about to make my Curtis debut, conducting my music with the Curtis Orchestra next door, Mother dying of cancer, my life just beginning. The other night, my wife and young sons sat at a nearby table. First, she took the stage and rocked the joint with a spiritual, and then rocked it again by singing the trumpet part(!) of Charles Ives' Unanswered Question in an arrangement by local composer Andrew Lipke.

Still ensconced at the Warwick, I was awakened of a February morning in 2017 by the sound of my son's voice: he was singing the trumpet solo of the Ives as he relieved himself in the bathroom. I knew at once that it would be a good day. After checking out, we celebrated by visiting Little Pete's a final time. The four of us squeezed into the booth in which I first sat during the early hours of a September morning in 1981 — the day I first hit the east coast — and ordered breakfast. The waitress who had presented me with a free piece of blueberry pie and said, "Welcome to Philly, honey," had long since passed away, and the boy I once was had become a man who can no longer eat most of what is on the menu. I couldn't resist introducing my eldest to the mysteries of Scrapple.

I love him anyway.

In Rittenhouse Square, May 2024.

Closure #3: May 2024

And now that boy is six inches taller than me, I think, barely registering the parking garage where Pete’s once stood as the two of us walk past it on our way to a rehearsal of his mother’s new piece, commissioned by the Esperanza Arts Center. David Ludwig is now dean and director of the music division at Juilliard; I now make “operafilms” and – after fourteen operas – I wonder if I’ll ever compose strictly for the stage again; I’ve never met the composers who teach at Curtis now and probably never will.

A child of about seventeen with a violin case strapped to their back tears westwards up Locust Street, presumably late for a rehearsal. I glance to my left as they pass and see my face reflected in the window of Michie’s, framed by the outline of a violin minus its front and back hanging like a feckless scarecrow by its neck among its siblings. We reach Rittenhouse Square, and my son reminds me that I used to tell him that there are Sycamore trees in heaven. I grab him by the shoulders and hug him tightly. “Let’s grab an Uber to Esperanza,” I exhale, “we don’t want to be late for your Mama’s rehearsal.”

Car arranged for; he immerses himself in his phone. It occurs to me that he is nearly the age I was when I lived in this place. The grace has settled in of having forgotten more about those years now than I can remember. I look up into the canopy at the watery May sunlight as it is filtered, coming from so very far away, through the brand-new leaves as we wait, and I feel entirely whole, entirely here, entirely at peace, as my old friend Rolland Flint once wrote, and which I finally understand, “resuming green.”

This essay originally appeared in its original form the Huffington Post on 31 October 2014. Click here to read it there.

You Sing Beautifully

“YOUTH, large, lusty, loving—youth full of grace, force, fascination,
Do you know that Old Age may come after you with equal grace,
         force, fascination?

Day full-blown and splendid—day of the immense sun, action,
         ambition, laughter,
The Night follows close with millions of suns, and sleep and
         restoring darkness.”

— Walt Whitman

Long have I unpacked Walt Whitman’s lines, which I first read when assigned Leaves of Grass by a beloved English teacher but which I — all of sixteen and enmeshed in the white-hot burn of the first four words of the poem — sped by without taking note. A year later, reading through Ned Rorem’s “art song” setting with a friend as an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, I’d grown slightly more mindful, and at least made note of the next six lines.

Two years later, during a lesson at his apartment in New York, Ned presented me with a sheet of yellow foolscap on which he had typed (with his trusty Royal portable) the same poem, decreeing that I should “have a go at it.” I had miraculously left Wisconsin behind and settled in Philadelphia where, setting the poem to music myself, I realized that, in life, at least, I had of course skipped lines two and three and was living — at full bore — lines four and five. As the decades passed, the poem stuck with me. My appreciation of lines two and three grew. At the age of sixty, I revisited the poem, and created, with Gilda Lyons, a new setting of it called Restoring Darkness for solo voice, which filmmaker H. Paul Moon and Gilda captured in an extraordinary single shot soon after its completion. The final two lines, of course, were now my focus, and the key to my understanding of this sturdy, wise piece of writing.

As an American composer born in 1961 I am a Latchkey child—a member of the first year of what is typically referred to as Generation X—sandwiched between the Millennials and the Boomers, my relationship to what constitutes “beautiful singing” has matured along lines parallel to my maturation as a person.

As a sixteen-year-old composer manque, I was enmeshed in the white-hot burn of the first four words of the poem. Singing was just that. I was taught to sing “correctly” and “well” in the Lutheran and Anglican choral traditions by superb chorus teachers, but I also grooved to (and appreciated the artistry of) “off the voice” folk singers, Bob Dylan, and the first generation of amplified rock musicians whose vocal training was often nil. By the time I landed in Madison, I was earning beer money plowing through the Twenty-Four Italian Songs and Arias with voice majors, having for years appreciated the exhilarating vocalisms of Cathy Berberian, the magnificently balanced tone of Barbara Streisand, the splendid phrasing of Frank Sinatra, the emotionally undeniable wisdom of Maria Callas, and the nuanced, Fellini-esque meta-authenticity of Peter Pears.

Two years later, studying with Ned, I learned (but was not taught) why Samuel Barber’s vocal writing was considered more “elegant” than Gian Carlo Menotti’s, and, with gently relentless reminders, encouraged to find Menotti’s vocal writing somehow “theatrical” in nature and therefore less refined. I had already accompanied many of Ned’s early, Billie-Holiday-meets-Francis-Poulenc songs (which I adored) and had begun to process why, when prominent “vocal coaches” were invited to coach Rorem or Barber, they usually chose Barber. But I was in the full flower of lines four and five, composing my first big opera, Shining Brow, and, from today’s standpoint, the vocal writing that I consciously emulated combined Benjamin Britten’s muscular modernism and Stephen Sondheim’s theatrical practicality.

Age came to me “with equal grace” when I rejected the hierarchization that vocal partisans place on “singing styles.” I remember the moment. It was in Texas sometime during the 90s. I had been engaged to present a masterclass at a college that was producing one of my operas, and was coaching a young singer on a performance of Ned’s “Early in the Morning,” which I had been coached on by Ned a few times over the years with various singers. The delightful vocalist was crooning away at a moderately slow clip (I approved—after all, the Holiday factor, on which Ned doubled down when he sang his own music at the piano), finished, and it was time for me to speak up. I recalled that Ned — every single time I played it for him — always had two things to say: “play it faster, and don’t ‘sell’ it.” So, I told the singer the same thing, making it clear that the comment came from Ned, not me. The singer sang it again, faster, and without the Holiday vibe. It sounded more like the way Ned would have liked it; but it didn’t sound the way that singers like to sing it, and audiences, by and large, prefer to hear it. Behind me, in the back of the room, the singer’s teacher (or coach—I don’t recall which) nodded vigorously “no-no-no.”

Ever since, all “singing styles” have had, to me, “equal, grace, force, fascination.” There is “beauty of sound” and there is “beautiful singing.” The two can coincide, but don’t have to; they can co-exist. I mix “singing styles” not only as an efficient way to help mainstream listeners to differentiate characters and to subvert the conception of what constitutes “class,” but to invite audience members with preconceived notions of what constitutes not just “good” and “bad” singing, but “good” and “bad” taste out of their intellectual and aesthetic complacence—to move them to embrace a broader conception of what constitutes “beautiful singing.”

Although the difference between musical theater acting singers and operatic singing actors is not absolute, musical theater acting singers typically lean into characterization and operatic singing actors focus, because their audience requires it, on beauty of sound. A musical theater singer can be a Stanislavskian, or a Method actor, literally feeling the emotions that the character is experiencing, because their audience interprets their “getting choked up” as emotional authenticity. 

To maintain proper alignment of the instrument, most opera singers are taught that they cannot risk allowing a Strasbergian remembrance of experience to get them literally verklempt. Consequently, Classical acting is their usual go-to, as it requires “sticking to the script,” which composers and conductors appreciate. The chamber musician in them cottons to the sort of finding of truth through ensemble building of the Meisner method. Authenticity through collective imagination allows the muscles to remain aligned, and the voice to emerge, physically “unaffected” by the emotion conveyed.

So, what’s the point? I don’t compose for the singers that I can afford, I write for the people singing. Sometimes I get it wrong. But I try to learn from the experience. Once I wrote a role for a Big Star who, in the practice room, sang the role for me as I wrote it for them, but—when they stepped on to the stage—reverted to the way they had sung the role before I had coached them. It was a heartbreaking moment, because I had given them material that would have changed the course of their career, paving the way to the character roles that would have continued to feed them artistically into their sixties, even seventies. But they had mouths to feed, management with which to contend, a public that had decided who they were. Singing is a brutal profession.

Now I am at the “millions of suns” stage of my life as a vocal composer. Long as my stance has been that there is only singing that lands and singing that doesn’t, and that abstract “beauty of sound” is a precious thing, but it is not the Only Thing, I have come to feel a bit like Gusteau in Ratatouille, who feels that “everyone can cook.” No, I am not a gourmand; of course I can tell the difference. But I am drawn to authenticity above all. The rest is exquisite artifice. If I hear you sing, and I tell you that I think you sing beautifully, I mean it.

Time and David Del Tredici (1937-2023)

It was always time with David. He bent it; he warped it; he turned it around back on itself; he lived outside of it; he could practically stop it with music; in life, he ran with it until he ran out of it.

The day in March 2019 that my memoir was published and offered up to the crickets I put all my handwritten diaries—over thirty years’ worth of scribbling—into banker’s boxes and sealed them up. I traded the false specificity of reportage for the even more subjective truth of memory. Now I must pour, as Ned Rorem and his teacher Virgil Thomson used to, through the index of my book to fix events in time. I recall reading the words that I wrote about David to him over the telephone and asking whether he thought they were okay before sending off the manuscript. (He did.)

So, on this March 2024 morning I tried to find my letters to David (and his to me) and discovered that I’d have to move two portable air conditioners, a box fan, and two suitcases to get to the file drawer in the storage closet in which letters from all the D’s in my life ended up so I gave up. They’re in there—all the postcards with Mad Hatters and March Hares stamped on them, words jumping off the page limned in multiple colors (he always had a glass or peanut butter jar filled with different colored pens and pencils on his desk at whatever artist colony or home he was working) with little, crazy asides added in at the last moment. Anyone who received a letter from David knew they could expect an illuminated manuscript of sorts. He took time to write them. They were vibrant, gossipy, funny, and sweet. His communications were always labor-intensive; details mattered: sometimes a sentence would march on in blue ink and end with a single bright red exclamation point.

Since I no longer particularly trust my own memory, I paged through my “Work Log and List of Themes,” a notebook I’ve kept since July 1976 (and which, ominously, is entirely filled up, with no more blank pages to accommodate new work—a nightmare scenario for someone as superstitious and obsessive as me), to determine which artist colonies (and when) David and I had had overlapping residencies over the years (since I always finished something and made note of where I was when I finished it) to fix some dates in advance of a chat with his biographer the other day. So, the chronology of this Mad March through Time is underpinned by the several vignettes that I included in my memoir and the (many more) exactly-dated marginalia (“Sang through this with DDT in the music room,”  or “Bowings revised per DDT,” and the like.) from my “Work Log.”

The central pillar of our relationship was our shared love of Yaddo, the storied artist retreat in Saratoga Springs, New York, at which we met during June 1984. I was between studies at Curtis and Juilliard, footloose, fueled by an entirely impractical sense that it was my time. While being shown around the place by painter Nancy Brett, who was serving that summer as a Special Assistant to the President, I was led into the mansion’s Great Hall to the sound of a Mendelssohn “Song Without Words” wafting out of the spacious music room. I had arrived just before dinner and David, as was his custom, was relaxing by running his fingers through the piano repertoire for the pleasure of our, as he announced when Nancy introduced us, “fellow inmates.” That infectious, unforgettable smile! The mischievous grin. A sparkle in his eyes second only to Otto Luening’s. Nancy left us, and David, reaching for a well-worn edition of Haydn symphonies reduced to four hands, asked archly whether I wanted to be on the bottom or the top.

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Photographed by the New York Philharmonic at Lincoln Center in 1990.

I was, as so many other musicians were, enchanted. I took the left side, hoping that hitting an occasional bass note properly might keep me in the game, and we were off. After a few minutes, I realized that he was gradually speeding up and that his left hand was dropping down between mine and adding bits of my right-hand part that I was leaving out to (let’s face it) survive. It was an exhilarating, joyous display of raw talent. My heart began racing. For a few more minutes I survived on adrenaline until, suddenly, he simply began playing everything up a step. That was it: I was thrown from the horse. He’d exceeded my keyboard skills and, laughing so hard that I teared up, I got up and told him that I had to unpack. “Welcome to Yaddo,” he said, laughing.

Former president of PEN, poet and author Richard McCann, filmmaker Sharon Greytak, painter Michael Flanagan, David and this young composer immediately became constant dinner companions. Over the years, David, Richard, and I remained close friends, and served for decades together on the board of Yaddo. It turned into quite an important summer for me, as I also met poet Gardner McFall, who graciously allowed me to set her poem, “Sonnet After Oscar Wilde,” which I sang immediately upon completion, with David accompanying. Twenty-three years later, Gardner, who was also by then a board member, bravely mined her own life story when she wrote the libretto of our opera Amelia for Seattle Opera.

David and I overlapped several times during the 80s at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and MacDowell—always the four hands, me sight-reading through whatever song he was working on and ending up laughing with joy; him sightreading whatever song I was writing and me singing them. “Why do we have to write for singers?” he would ask, “We know they can sing it beautifully; but isn’t it more fun to hear someone who can’t sing perform it?” (I couldn’t help but notice that the thought had come to him after accompanying me.) In 1990, David was serving as composer-in-residence for the New York Philharmonic, and, although he never took credit, likely made possible my music’s debut with the Philharmonic—a piece called Common Ground, which had recently been awarded the Kennedy Center Friedheim Prize.

The Tower Studio at Yaddo, where David Del Tredici often worked. p/c: Daron Hagen

When David went away on sabbatical during the 90s I’d teach for him at City University of New York. Composition lessons, of course; but also counterpoint and orchestration. I was also on the faculty of Bard College at the time (and for a couple of semesters, the Curtis Institute), and he enjoyed, I think, the fact that I, like him, didn’t consider myself an academic. “Teaching gives me physical pain, doesn’t it you?” he once asked as we packed his station wagon—he off to another colony, and me back to the Upper West Side and a semester of filling in for him. He was only partly serious. David could be a superb teacher. And when he went to artist colonies he—like me—always worked like a dog. We’d run into one another raiding the refrigerator either very, very late or very, very early—the only two “inmates” still awake and working and ask one another how it was going. “I can’t tell you or it will turn to shit,” I would say. And he would say, “I know. Hide the erasers.” If there was cheesecake or dessert of any sort to be had, we’d finish it together. Always, the next day, I’d be jogging it off; David would be pumping iron at the local gym.  I sent him five or six of my students when it was their time to move on over the years and don’t regret it.

Time together at the keyboard was something he shared with lots of other musicians, and I am sorry if I give the impression I was the only one who enjoyed the privilege. I loved him for the force of nature that was his talent, the grace with which he carried it, and the super-hard work that he did, year after year, to honor it. He modelled a working composer to me more than Ned or Virgil because he kept revising and improving everything. Like everyone who knew him, I am devasted by the irony that a man who exulted in the lifelong physicalizing of his music at the keyboard became afflicted with Parkinson’s Disease.

During a visit to Sag Harbor in the mid 90s, I recall him playing the entirety of his opera Dum Dee Tweedle and experiencing more keenly than ever how his obsessive use of melodic and harmonic sequences (either telescoping them to run faster through diminution, or more slowly through extension or metric modulation) skewed one’s perception of time. My memory’s a little foggy, but I think that when he finished, I felt as though he had been playing for about forty minutes only to look at my watch to see that 90 had elapsed. Repetition was talismanic for him as a composer, I think; it could summon emotional lightness or darkness. If tonality was redemptive to him, then his compositional apotheosis came through such a profound compression of harmonic and melodic movement that it felt dissonant—Liszt on steroids.

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DDT 80th Birthday Concert, Joe’s Pub, New York, NY March 2017. p/c: Tevi Eber

By the late 90s, we were performing fundraisers together for Yaddo—he would be paired with the extraordinary, luminous John Kelly; I’d pair off with Paul Sperry, or whomever was singing in whatever opera I was working on. I recall an event at Harold Reed’s, for example, where he performed his Acrostic Song (literally all over the keyboard) and I followed by accompanying myself in some simple, tender settings of Paul Muldoon’s poetry. “How can you be so simple?” he asked. “That terrifies me.”

When Muldoon and I underwent the premiere of our opera Bandanna in Austin in April 2000, David wept afterwards, told me that he knew what it had taken to summon so much darkness in the final scene. “Of course, nobody is going to get it,” he said. I was astonished when he said, “Tonight, you are my hero.” Stephen Sondheim is said to have decreed that, on opening night, one should simply note that a work is “brilliant” to the author. “Criticism later,” he is supposed to have said. I agree. I was touched that David stood by his assessment of Bandanna. I recall—listening together to the entirety of my latest opera, A Woman in Morocco at his apartment in Westbeth—David pointing out exact measures that I had forwarded musical arguments begun in Bandanna fifteen years before. “Diminished seventh chords are very dangerous because they can go anywhere,” he observed. “Yeah, either they can go Salome or Salome at the Super 8 Motel,” I replied, which made him giggle.

One of my treasures remains the fragment of manuscript that he gave me after a particularly athletic read-through of a song in 2002-ish that he subsequently dedicated to me called "Now You Know" during which I had broken down, laughing with tears of joy & disbelief. I think that he wrote "pre-Hagen sketch” on it because I told him that he was absolutely nuts to ask a singer to do something. Over dinner: "Do you DARE to accept the dedication of this song?" he asked. It is my ardent hope that he didn't change a thing on my account.

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I began to sense time beginning to run out on us as early as July 2005, when Gardner and I were at Yaddo working on Amelia and David accompanied me in the music room where we first met as I sang our first, trial aria to see how it landed with the other guests. In the aria, a father pictures himself as looking down on his loved ones from the stars after his demise. By the time the aria had been folded into the opera and premiered, my first son had been born. Came along another, and a move from Manhattan to the country. David and I saw one another less frequently. He still went to concerts—what a champ! But I had stopped. They didn’t feed my work the way that they did his. Ours became primarily a relationship of letters and telephone calls.

Still, Gilda Lyons and I would catch up with David every year at Yaddo’s annual meeting. Lord, how David loved Gilda, and how deeply they intuitively understood one another. We performed a version of David’s Acrostic Song together for him on a concert in Gilda’s Phoenix Concerts series in New York (alongside the world premiere of “Emily’s Aria” from Ned’s Our Town) that I had confected and he observed, with mock horror, “Now that you have had your way with my music, shall we continue to speak?” “Was it okay?” I asked. “It was wonderful, but why did you reharmonize me?” “Because I could,” I replied. The twinkle.

At the premiere of David Del Tredici’s “Herrick’s Oratorio” in New York City, 20 May 2023. p/c: Tevi Eber

I am still having trouble coming to terms with the fact that David is not down in the Village, pulling reams of notes out of his piano at Westbeth, or making little forts with walls comprised of different sorts of jelly jars and vitamin bottles at the breakfast table at Yaddo, or jogging in the woods at MacDowell, or lurking by the driers at VCCA in the wee hours looking for leftovers in the fellows’ refrigerator. When Cantori premiered his Herrick Oratorio in May 2023, it was a chance to say goodbye. David, a Catholic, ever the subversive, had woven Martin Luther’s Mighty Fortress into the finale of what was effectively his final public statement. I had driven in from the country for the premiere and was shocked, but not surprised, by the toll that Parkinson’s had extracted. As ever, his talent dazzled, and I told him so. “You’re up to your old tricks, messing with my sense of time,” I said. He had been, but the path we had traveled together, our shared Mad March, was running out. Nothing between us had changed, but everything around us had. He pulled me in close and said that he loved me and that I should take care of myself and Gilda and the boys. The twinkle was still there.

If I had not been walking out of the church with a friend I would have had to have stopped to steady myself, because, for the first time since hearing David play Mendelssohn before meeting him in June 1984, I felt that David’s time had run out. I was gutted. It wasn’t until an hour later, driving up the Palisades to the country, that I was able to reconnect to the fact that I am blessed to actually have some more time in front of me, with skinned knees and tree forts having given way to basketball and  girlfriends for my sons, and mid-career engaging Gilda. Music remembers absolutely everything, I thought, and it has its own relationship with time. Messiaen knew it; David lived it. To me, a talent like David’s is evidence of the Unseen. And now it is time for me to learn how to let David go. Because there are among us many more forces of nature like him who can use a hand: some of them are very young not just in spirit, but in fact. Help them; lift them up, I thought, the way that the simple fact that talent like David’s existed lifted me. I’ll close with that.

Being Frank: Composing "Shining Brow"

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p/c: Karen Pearson

In 1989 I  began composing Shining Brow, an opera in two acts and a prologue about architect Frank Lloyd Wright. It explored the intersection of Life and Art, self-actuation and selfishness. At the time,  I asked my librettist to make this conundrum one of Wright's foremost concerns. Consequently, our Man asks a question that the actual One may never have asked himself: “Can a man be a faithful husband and father and still remain true to his art?”

My librettist Paul Muldoon was born in 1951 in County Armagh, Northern Ireland, and educated in Armagh and at the Queen's University of Belfast. The Times Literary Supplement described him as “the most significant English-language poet born since the Second World War.” From 1973 to 1986, he worked in Belfast as a radio and television producer for the BBC. Since 1987, he has lived in the States.

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Robert Orth and Brenda Harris as Wright and Mamah Cheney in a concert performance by the Buffalo Philahrmonic released by Naxos. p/c: Chris Lyons

I met Paul at the Saratoga Springs artist retreat Yaddo during summer 1988. He was brilliant, ambitious, quick to skewer pretension, and impatient with mediocrity. Already it was obvious that he had every intention of becoming a celebrity poet. His hair back then looked as though it were trying to escape. He did not speak English; he produced it. You could practically hear him listening to himself as he talked. Paul was and is a virtuoso performer of his own poetry. He could read a list of names, or ingredients, and, through line readings alone, move an audience in any direction he pleased. 

In summer 1989 I received a call on one of the MacDowell Colony pay phones from conductor and artistic director of the Madison Opera Roland Johnson asking whether I might consider composing an opera about Wright. Paul was reading the newspaper a few feet away. Without thinking, I leaned out of the booth and quipped, “Say, Paul, do you want to write an opera?” A beat later, he replied, “Sure.”

When Paul and I began Brow, we first read everything we could lay hands on about Wright. We reconvened a few months later to co-author at Paul's home in Amherst, Massachusetts a filmic treatment consisting of a dozen pages describing what would happen in each scene. 

I then determined how long each scene (and each section of each scene) would last, and the sort of musical form I would use to underpin the action of that scene. Giving the outline to Paul, I asked him to create a number of core images and literary motifs that I could then graft to musical ideas, along with some “parallel” poems for related characters, so that when I shared their music, the words would be easier to adapt. At one point I needed a straightforward hymn, and he responded by creating his beautiful Goethe gloss, Hymn to Nature.

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Carolann Page, creator of the role of Mamah Cheney.

Over the course of eight weeks that winter at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, I composed the music for the first act. I wrote the most important sections first, beginning with the last three minutes; then the music that would be associated with the four or five most important dramatic spots (what I call the “emotional nuclear reactors”) in the act; after that, I wrote the connective sections, which could and should be the least musically interesting. Each character existed in a “home” key: Wright in B-flat major; Mamah in E major; Edwin and Sullivan in A minor; Catherine in C major. The lovers’ keys were associated, of course, by the tritone, the “forbidden” interval, and the harmonic fulcrum on which modulation depends.

The most affecting, emotionally expressive tool in an opera composer’s kit is the ability to modulate. Aside from being crucial to maintaining large formal structures, it unlocks “gateways” to new emotional states and signals emotional evolution. I did not really learn how to modulate fluidly until I composed Brow, each of whose characters needed to interact with one another harmonically. I have used the modulatory practices used by Richard Strauss and Richard Wagner in their operas ever since I realized just how eloquent they really are, no matter what the surface style of the piece.

When composing opera, my compositional process has changed little since the early 80s. I retype and reformat the libretto to reflect the underlying musical form in which it will be carried, storyboard it on the wall, and illuminate it with various colored pens and pencils—say, red for one character, blue for another, orange for another; musical / poetic themes and motives that I want to “track” also get colors. Standing before the entire opera tacked up on the wall and dreaming on its entirety is as close as I’m likely ever get to understanding how a painter must feel working on a mural. A real sense of the pallet of ideas at hand is literally rendered in the colors arrayed on the storyboard.

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Kevin Kees as Wright in the "Fallingwater Brow."

Once the entire opera is “on the wall” I decide what the most important dramatic moments (the “emotional nuclear reactors”) are in each scene; I specify what the climactic moment of the opera is, work downwards in triage fashion to the least important moment. I do not compose “from left to right.” I compose the music for the most important half dozen moments in the opera first. The music for the rest of the piece then spreads outwards from these key moments like concentric ripples.

Paul and I accepted an invitation from Richard (Dick) Carney, Wright protégé and then managing trustee of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, to stay at Taliesin West in Scottsdale, Arizona, for a few days. After lunch with members of the Fellowship (during which Wright’s recorded lunchtime conversation from decades previous played on a boom box), Paul and I settled into the little house Wright built for his daughter. The sun set as we traded impressions and prepared for a formal dinner at which I sat beside architect and Wright protégé Wes Peters, with whom I had a long, intense conversation about Wright’s relationship with Olgivanna. “Was Mamah Cheney the love of his life?” I asked Wes. “She must have been,” he replied, “but I can only say that after her death, for the rest of his life, he never allowed her to be discussed in his presence.”

After dinner, Dick and I took a long walk in the desert and discussed the sort of opera I intended to compose. A fatherly bear of a man, he gestured to me to sit down on a boulder with him. Sighing, he said, “Well, Daron, I don’t think any of us here want you to compose a dishonest piece. Mr. Wright could be a bastard. Promise me you’ll try to convey his essential ‘greatness’ along with the rest.” I didn’t tell Dick that anybody who sings is rendered sympathetic. Instead, I shook his hand. “A promise, Dick.” He picked up some dirt and threw it. “Fine. Come and stay with us as long as you want to. Soak up the feel of the place. Make Mister Wright sing. I promise you that we’ll not stand in your way.”

Daron Hagen and Stephen Wadsworth at the premiere of "Amelia" by Seattle Opera in 2010. p/c: Alan Alabastro

Shortly before Christmas, I finished the vocal score of the first act. I needed a “green light” from the Madison Opera board before beginning the second. The next step was to present it to the commissioners in Madison.

“Just two hours ago,” President Bush began, “allied air forces began an attack on military targets in Iraq and Kuwait. These attacks continue as I speak. Ground forces are not engaged.” It was 16 January. The United States had just invaded Iraq. In a huge rehearsal hall customarily used for symphony rehearsals, halfway through playing and singing the first act of Brow for the members of the Taliesin Fellowship and the board of Madison Opera, conductor Roland Johnson asked me to stop at 5:45 so that we could all gather around a portable radio to listen to our President address the nation. “Tonight, as our forces fight, they and their families are in our prayers.”

"Shall we continue this another time?” I asked Ann Stanke. She looked to Dick, who asked me, “Do you have a problem with moving ahead with this presentation?” It seemed absurd to me, under the circumstances, but I needed the money, and would not get paid unless, by pulling off this presentation, I fulfilled the terms of the commissioning contract. “No,” I lied, resuming my seat at the piano and picking up where I had left off.

Dick then pledged that the Fellowship would support my creation of the opera, and Roland “green lit” my moving on to the second act. It was my first taste, at twenty-nine, of what the life of a viable opera composer might be like, and I relished it.

The cast and production team of Urban Arias’ chamber version, “Usonian Brow” in Washington, DC in 2017.

I spent some time at Taliesin, in Spring Green. Edgar Tafel, the best known of Wright’s disciples, decided that he was going to see to it personally that I experienced what it was like “really to live in a Wright House—to duck when you pass through doorways, discover your feet hanging over the bottom of the bed at night, feel the rooms flowing from one to the next in the dark.” He conjured for me the poetry that Wright seems to have been able to spin for clients.  His impersonations of Wright’s speaking voice were—aside from being incredibly funny—crucial to shaping my vocal characterization—particularly Wright’s stilted line readings, and what David Diamond, in a letter to me, described as “…the pontification, the affected dress-ugh-y, like Stieglitz.”

My friend photographer Pedro Guerrero’s reminiscences of Wright’s gentler moments also helped me to firm up the conviction that part of his appeal must have been the ability to project immense vulnerability in private. Dick Carney's descriptions of the tenderness that Wright could display also informed my decision to create the gentle music that underpins Wright’s soliloquies. Dick was a humane and generous man. My treasured former pupil and copyist Christopher Hume had a degenerative spinal condition that required his settling in a town with excellent medical facilities. I suggested Madison. I asked Dick to look out for Chris. He took him under his wing. They remained close for the rest of their lives.

Hagen and librettist Paul Muldoon attend the Arizona Opera revival in 2019. p/c: Stephanie Weiss

The following autumn, in a tiny efficiency apartment at the corner of Amsterdam and 74th Street just off Verdi Square on Manhattan's Upper West Side, over the course of a few months, I wrote in one long delicious stretch the second act. Darynn Zimmer, the soprano who years later recorded the role of Mona in Bandanna under my baton for Albany records, was kind enough to sing through the role of Mamah for me as I composed it.

Like baseball pitchers, most composers have rituals. Mine consisted then of making my world very small and simple when I was writing so that I could keep all of the various motives and ideas suspended in my mind. My scrupulously maintained routine began with morning coffee and a chocolate chip scone from the Korean Market just below my apartment at 303 Amsterdam while reading the New York Times seated on a particular bench in Strawberry Fields. While composing—for exactly four hours by the stopwatch—I drank two bottles of San Pellegrino. Then I would run around the Central Park reservoir (twice: 3.2 miles), and then drink a bottle of San Pellegrino afterwards while walking home. I’d devour two slices of Freddy and Pepper’s pizza (an excellent joint in the basement which is still in business) sitting in Verdi Square, and then spend the evening making a fair copy of the sketches I had made during the day.

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Robert Orth as Frank Lloyd Wright in Chicago Opera Theater's revival, directed by Kenneth Cazan.

I've written elsewhere about what it was like to consult with Leonard Bernstein while I composed parts of Brow. One example of how he “got” the musical rhetoric of the opera merits repetition, I think. During Wright’s Act 1, scene one pitch to his future mistress, I quoted the New York, New York rising fourths motive that he had first used in Trouble in Tahiti, and then in On the Town, on the word, “suburbia.” Bernstein chuckled appreciatively.  “Nice lift,” he said, “very Strauss. But you followed it up with stuff that sounds like Ned’s [Ned Rorem] little Frank O’Hara opera. Did I steal that from him for Tahiti or did he steal that from me? I can’t remember. In any event, I know you’re talking about theft by putting stolen music in his mouth, so you should come up with something else there.”

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Tim Petty as Wright in the Tulsa Opera revival.

At some point, I pointed out that I had been modeling the character of Wright musically on him, and the relationship between Wright and Sullivan on him and Blitzstein. He got it: “That’s Maria. No, it’s the orchestral play-in to the first scene of Marc’s Regina,” he mused aloud. “Well, yes, I stole it from Marc.” Silence. Sudden grin: “But he stole it from Aaron!”

The Madison Opera had asked me to suggest a stage director for Brow. I asked Bernstein to suggest one. He suggested Stephen Wadsworth, with whom he had just written an opera called A Quiet Place.

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The Fallingwater premeire by Opera Festival of Pittsburgh in 2013.

“I’ve written an opera about Frank Lloyd Wright,” I told Stephen on the phone. “I’m looking for someone to bring it to life on the stage. Lenny says that you’re that person. Would you like to come over for coffee and talk about it?” I knew that would get his attention.

That April, we sat cross-legged on the floor of my tiny studio more or less under the piano and in front of the six linear feet of opera scores on the bookshelves and began sounding one another out by pulling scores at random from the shelf and discussing them.

It helped that we both had been compelled to figure out how to work with Bernstein—Stephen as collaborator, me as pupil. Stephen could survive (even enjoy) Bernstein's intellectual death marches; I thrived on his musical pop quizzes. We shared an appetite for conversations that functioned on multiple levels.

Michael Sokol as Wright in the 1993 Madison Opera production.

I know now that our first meeting was typical of Stephen’s special way with everyone—warm, clever, completely at ease, and intellectually competitive. His probing eyes habitually sought out mine; his compassionate face was extraordinarily expressive. His long fingers moved restlessly when he spoke. I found charming his ability to italicize what he was saying by giving you a hard, quick stare, and then releasing you. He was fun.

At first, it was the confidence and maturity of his opinions as we stuck our thumbs into scores and played “what’s the most important moment in this scene” that impressed me most. In time, as we grew to know one another better, I realized that what I had interpreted as competitiveness was instead an urgent desire to understand: if an idea intrigued him, he reflexively craved an explanation.

The talents that have served him so well in his illustrious career were already in full play as, over the course of six very long work sessions at the apartment in the Village he shared with baritone Kurt Ollmann, I played and sang through Brow’s score. I was defensive, and needed to be “sold” on every one of the dozen or so alterations to words and music (I had to my mind “finished” the score months previously) that he suggested. I’m not certain now why I fought him so hard—especially since I knew even then that his criticisms were always spot on. Possibly, it was because I wanted to see just how right he thought he was.

For the workshop, the cast and company of Brow gathered at the Bernstein family’s apartment at the Dakota to give for Madison Opera’s donors and staff a workshop performance (piano and two dozen singers) of the complete score. Ann Stanke, The company's founde and the driving force behind the commission, worked the room as Roland powwowed with the singers.

Daron and Arizona Opera revival director Chas Rader Shieber in 1993. p/c: Stephanie Weiss

At my suggestion, the company had capitalized upon the New York press’ interest in visiting the apartment one more time to fill the room with eyes and ears (particularly the national press) that might not otherwise have had any interest in a commission, however laudable, of an unknown composer by a small Midwestern company.

The boundary between life and death blurred in a familiar—even comforting—fashion as I listened to the music I had provided for the character of Wright—consciously referring as it did to Bernstein’s music at key points—was performed in Bernstein’s home. It had been impossible, strolling around Taliesin with Dick (like me, an insomniac) in the wee hours, not to feel Wright’s presence. It had been impossible at Yaddo not to feel the Trask family’s. It had been impossible to walk through the Common Room at the Curtis Institute as a student without feeling the benevolent spirit of Mary Louise Curtis Bok. And it still felt, at the Dakota, as though Bernstein slouched still in the chair in the den, sipping a scotch, pulling on his plastic cigarette holder, growling one of the last things he said to me: “Play and sing that part again, baby—the part that sounds like Marc.”

Everyone involved with the April 1993 opening night of Brow knew that it was going to be a success. 25 years and 7 operas later, I now am acutely aware of how rare that is. That night, at “the rail” of the house, behind the audience, where authors traditionally are allowed to pace, fret, enjoy, and suffer, performances of their work, with Stephen, as the tragic ending of Madison Opera’s première production unfolded.

Frank Lloyd Wright’s final aria. Arizona Opera 2019 revival.

Stephen said, “Look!” “Eh?” I said. “Look at them,” he said, sweeping a hand over the audience, who were experiencing the last few minutes of the opera. “They’re all weeping.”

“Yes, that’s where we want them,” I said. “No,” he said. “That’s where they want to be. You did it. I did it. Paul did it. The performers did it. Communion. We all did it. Together.”

The next morning a telegram from Ned arrived at my hotel, saying, “I always said that you would arrive at twenty.” The reviews were strong, and the consensus was that my career had begun.

"Can a man be a faithful husband and father and still be true to his Art?” In the years since I've come to my own conclusion about the Life vs Art paradigm. Art is to my Life as the MacGuffin is to a Hitchcock movie. While I have become music, my family is my Life. So much so, that I've experienced a parting of ways with most of my colleagues who’ve concluded otherwise. Perhaps Wright came to that conclusion sometime after the point at which our opera left him, pledging to rebuild Taliesin in Mamah Cheney’s memory. Perhaps not. In the long run, it shall probably only have mattered  to the people he loved and who loved him. 

First published in the Huffington Post on 8 August 2016. Read it there by clicking here.

Louis Krasner and the Second Viennese School

Summer 1985, DH at Tanglewood with Leon Kirchner and Adrienne and Louis Krasner following the premiere (coached by Louis and dedicated by me to him) of my revised String Quartet No. 1 by a fellowship quartet. It was a great honor to work with Kirchner & Louis that summer, and to eagerly take in all the oral history Louis had to offer about Berg, Schoenberg, and Webern.

Louis Krasner was the shortest person in the room, but he undoubtedly cast by far the longest shadow. The summer’s fellowship composers (of which I was one during summer 1985) arrayed themselves easily, thoughtlessly, like bolts of cloth, with the bodily flexibility available only to the young, over, and around sticks of furniture in the living room at Seranak—onetime home of Serge and Natalia Koussevitzky, and by that time, serving as a venue for the Tanglewood Festival. We were gathered for an oral history lesson (one he’d clearly presented before and would present again) from the person who had premiered not only Alban Berg’s, but also Arnold Schoenberg’s monumental violin concertos—a man not only present but literally instrumental in bringing about their existence.

Observing as a child that my parents customarily inscribed the date and place that they had acquired books on the title page, I had long followed suit; so, I knew that the Universal study score of the Berg concerto I was holding had been purchased at Patelson’s (lamented emporium behind Carnegie Hall) on 18 April 1983, after a lesson with Lukas Foss, whose astonishment that I did not yet know the piece (there certainly was a lot that I didn’t know then that I know now—and I have learned the obvious fact that the more you know the less you know) transformed in a beat to wild enthusiasm and joy as he sat down without a score in front of him and played for me at the piano the climactic moment—the hochpunkt at measure 125 of the second movement—singing in his own octave the solo violin part. 

Nobody had a cell phone back then, and I don’t think that it would have occurred to any one of us to bring a tape recorder. We were surrounded by history: Leon Kirchner was our teacher; Maurice Abravanel perambulated and dispensed wisdom every afternoon; John Adams listened to our music one afternoon before attending a rehearsal of his brand new Harmonielehre; Bernstein was due in a week or two and would listen to our music and spend the evening in this same room, cross-legged on the floor, talking about Art and the Bomb. Knowing that I was a witness to something important I pulled a ballpoint pen out and began to transcribe Louis’ words; the only paper at hand was my study score, so I wrote on that.

“The Schoenberg concerto is certainly the equal of the Berg,” he began. “Though not as popular, even if it takes a hundred years, it will become the pride of violinists. The Berg, sentimental, with a requiem story, had everything going for it. The Schoenberg, when Stokowski finally programmed it, was rejected twice before being accepted. There was no fee involved; Stoki paid me out of his own pocket.” 

“Stoki,” he continued, “was the ‘Glamorous One,’ but he forced the check on me and made the subsequent performances possible of the Berg and Schoenberg concertos in the States. People should know that. Stoki was really the first performance of the Berg in the States—before Koussy. Mitropoulos was one of the greatest proponents of contemporary music. He would sleep for only four hours a night. He got his reward—by dying on the podium at La Scala.”

 I looked around. It was plain that we all knew that we were hearing something special. Louis had known Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg. He had been there. “These three men were complicated, but the period in which they lived was the fermentation of world calamity—in a way, we are still in that time. Webern was gentle, humble, frail (like Bartok)—very intense.  About Webern all you could see were suspicious, blazing eyes. Devoted to his family—religious, with a family stretching back to the 1500s. I went with Webern from Vienna to Barcelona at a time when Berg died—December of 1936—I was in New York and involved with a new string quartet. I withdrew in order to play the Berg for the ISCM in Barcelona. I dropped everything and went to Vienna. Webern came and was to conduct it but withdrew. No one knew it but him. I said ‘let me go’ to Webern and they said, ‘No! He’s in too emotional a state’.”

“Finally, I went to him and played through it with him. He finally relented. One ticket to Barcelona went through Germany. In Munich we got off the train and he bought me a beer. Back on the train he said, ‘so has anybody harmed you?’ He was so naive. And of course, we talked about it for the rest of the night after we’d gotten to Switzerland.”

At this point, he read a statement of Arnold Schoenberg, which he had translated himself: “We believed with sacrificial readiness in ideals once perceived and we never would/could have left these. Or given them up. Even if one had succeeded in misleading us. One must always think of us as Webern, Schoenberg, and Berg together.”

Putting the paper down, Krasner continued in his own words, “Schoenberg had great reservations about Webern as he had been taken in by the Nazis. In 1938, just before the war, I got back to the US from Vienna; I was told that Schoenberg was looking for me. Schoenberg had written an effusive dedication to Webern and I lied when asked whether Webern had been taken in by the Nazis. Steuerman and Schoenberg knew I was lying, but I am glad that I lied…. The terrible torment one can suffer in such a situation—the political situation was terrible, the Fascists wanted to overthrow (putsch) the Socialists. The city of Vienna (Socialists) supported Webern-s music. These Socialists were not Communists. And all his friends—Jews, Gentiles alike—were still there. His daughters’ husbands were both high-ranking Nazis…. Think of the suffering of this sensitive man being torn between the supporters of his music and his family.”

“I saw Webern several times after that and once I was playing the Schoenberg concerto and the 4 o’clock broadcast where the prime minister announced the German invasion of Austria and Austria’s capitulation. He said, ‘Get out as fast as you can!’ and I barely escaped.”

“After the war, I went back to Schoenberg’s house in Vienna and heard about Webern’s life during the war. I was told about the self-torture and guilt he went through. He saw that it wasn’t like that Munich restaurant at all. In ’37, the Vienna Philharmonic was already [filled with] undercover Nazis. Klemperer programmed Berg and many refused to play. The concert with Klemperer came off because Rosé came and played concertmaster. As soon as it was over they left the stage, leaving me, Klemperer, and Rosé alone on stage. Webern was in this position during the war.”

“Right after the Anschluss these men came with their armbands to rehearsals. All this Webern witnessed. Schoenberg’s son told me this—and his guilt (he hadn’t done anything) was terrible. When the Russians came into the city, Webern fled to Salzburg. Webern stepped out to light a cigarette during curfew and was shot…. Schoenberg’s son said that it was ‘suicide by a third hand.’ I see in that, for Webern, it was his redemption—when he was able to die by a bullet from the other side, he was freed.”

“Webern did not go to Barcelona, Scherchen did. In London Webern did a very good job with me on the BBC who gave him as much rehearsal time as he needed. The three of them didn’t have a jealousy—I wish there were a better word—but when I got Schoenberg’s concerto he said, ‘This is no Berg concerto; this is much more difficult!’ I asked Webern when he would write a violin concerto but he didn’t get to it. I found a letter six years ago from Webern to me where he suggested beginning a solo violin sonata (which I had suggested). Part of my strength with these men was that I was not filled with awe and trepidation of them. I was too stupid to know better. So I said to Webern will you write me a solo piece?”

“So, somewhere in Webern’s papers there may exist a solo sonata.”

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Onegin: the Perfect Libretto

“Dear Maestro,” dazzled, seven-year-old-Daron wrote to conductor Kenneth Schermerhorn, then music director of the Milwaukee Symphony. I bit the end of my pencil, wracked my brain for the perfect word: “Your performance last week was simply superfluous!” Decades later, over lunch, I asked Kenneth if he remembered the boy who couldn’t find a word big enough to described how impressed he was. As he shook his head, laughing, I marveled at how indispensible Kenneth had made himself to the Nashville Symphony, what a noble example of service his career represented. We laughed until we wept. Afterwards, we wiped our eyes, and sighed. I called him “an indispensible man.”

We raised our glasses. “To Art,” I began. “To Life,” he replied. “To the collision of the two,” I said. “Ah,” he sighed, smiling, “now there is where the trouble begins.” And, to that, we drank.

And then, as one does, I fished for his opposite. I immediately thought of Eugene Onegin, perhaps the most famous “superfluous man.” The eponymous, Byronic hero of Alexander Pushkin’s magisterial novel — a man who had it all, squandered it, and lived to regret it. No arriviste he, Onegin was a man of substance, well-educated, with access to culture, power, and the easy cynical ennui of one who understands firsthand that power corrupts. Poor Onegin, and his generation of noble young 1840s Russian men — so like the young Ivy-educated Masters of the Universe with whom I rubbed elbows as a young composer in 1980s Manhattan!

1879. Thomas Edison patented the light bulb. AT&T and Bell Telephone divided up telecommunications, creating the framework for todays’ information-driven world. One hundred years after the “shot heard round the world” in Concord, “A Doll’s House” opened in Copenhagen, and Henrik Ibsen’s Nora perpetrated the door slam heard round the world. Her proto-feminism was also embodied in the character of Tatyana, as brought to life by Tchaikovsky in his great opera based on Pushkin’s verse novel. Another woman struggling to be herself in a male-dominated society, Tatyana, once her heart has been broken, evolves from her youth as a romantic, empathetic introvert into a coolly glittering, wise, ruthless, mistress of society.

Tchaikovsky subtitled his work “an opera in lyrical scenes.” This was to highlight the fact that, in fashioning the libretto from Pushkin’s 389 stanzas in iambic tetrameter with Konstantin Shilovsky, Pushkin’s dialectic was so ironclad that it made it possible for them to excise all the narrative linking material in order to focus on the dramaturgical “hot spots,” the nuclear reactors powering the drama. This distillation to the story’s essential human drama is (or should be) the aim of every poet-librettist, since brevity is only his visa at the opera world’s border, and getting directly to the point (without drawing attention to oneself) is his passport to greatness.

Pushing the idea of art mirroring life, the “Pushkin Sonnet,” or “Onegin Stanza” form is itself a tightly restrictive scheme that strikingly manifests the binding structures of society, of “social convention.” Form—in this case the characters—mirrors function—their symbolic and dramatic transits. Only sixty years later, in “Wozzeck,” the wretched disconnect between society and its denizens are made achingly manifest in the music often going in one direction as the drama moves in another.) Pushkin’s rhyme scheme, comprised of alternating “female” and “male” rhymes, is a suave poetic correlative to the characters’ gender dance.

Here’s one reading of the structure of Pushkin’s story, and of Tchaikovsky’s opera, a rough sketch of the interrelationships between characters and themes. It’s why I think the structure’s so—for lack of a better word—perfect.

A diagram used for the lecture to the Russian Opera Workshop on which this essay is based.

At “true north” in the diagram is Tatyana, a deeply caring person who learns not to care. At the opposite, southern pole is Onegin, a selfish extrovert who learns to care. In the east is Olga, Tatyana’s biological sister, a party-girl, young, extroverted, fully alive in the moment. She is affianced to Lensky, Onegin’s metaphorical brother, at the western pole. Lensky is a smart, introverted poet, living a life of the mind. Between Lensky and Onegin, at the southwestern pole, is the subsidiary, Judas character of Zaretsky. Repeatedly, he betrays Onegin by depriving him of an opportunity to apologize to Lensky, thereby forestalling the duel in which Onegin kills him.

Now, draw a line from the southwest up to the northeast and call it the border between Art and Life, with Lensky and Tatyana on the Art side, Onegin and Olga on the Life side, and Zaretsky, the explosive catalyst, straddling the two.

Now, draw a line from the northwest down to the southeast and call it the demarcation between Female and Male, with Tatyana and Olga on one side, and Onegin and Lensky on the other.

Draw a line due south from Tatyana to Onegin; draw another west to east from Lensky to Olga. The east-west line between Olga and Lensky intersects the north-south line of Tatyana and Onegin. The slantwise lines delimiting Male and Female, and Art and Life, also intersect at the axis of the compass.

That axis, the core of the drama, the point where all the lines meet, is the existential cauldron for which there are countless names. To attach one, like Society, or another, like Sanity, is to miss the point.

I imagine that Tchaikovsky, when introduced to the idea, at first reacted negatively to its rather banal superficial story of a dandy’s rejection of a young country girl. My hunch, as a working opera composer, though, is that the famous sleepless night Tchaikovsky is said to have had prior to sketching out, again in a single night, the entire structure of the opera, was the sort that a working opera composer has when they realize that a perfect dramatic structure is in the offing.

I’d like to think that Tchaikovsky, a dramatist extraordinaire, recognized in Pushkin’s formal engineering a “perfect libretto.” He grasped that he had in his hands a structure, or a cauldron, or a nuclear reactor, so durable and perfect that Life and Art could be brought into collision. A vessel in which could take place the fusion of the two into a wise and useful new opera that confronted issues that he and his audience could only intuit. A living work of art that could help us to make sense of our lives, which so often seem to be a messy, seemingly futile fission of the two.

 This essay appeared originally in the Huffington Post on 30 July 2014. To read it there click here.

Too Much Footage

Joseph Cotten in “Too Much Johnson” (1938).

Filmed in 1938, Orson Welles’ unfinished (and unscreened) silent film Too Much Johnson was shot to serve as the film component of a staged production of William Gillette’s 1894 comedy. It was meant to be shown between acts of the play, and not to stand up as a narrative on its own. The ceiling of the Stony Creek Theatre, in Connecticut—where my own film Orson Rehearsed was screened in August 2021 and where Welles was staging a rare “out of town tryout” before moving the production to Broadway—was apparently too low to allow for its projection, and so Welles’ production debuted without film.

Evidently, there was also the matter of an attorney’s letter that Welles received from Paramount informing him that they owned the film rights. Ironically, both of Paramount’s film versions of the play are now lost. The footage for Welles’ film, shot only three years before Citizen Kane, his explosive cinematic debut, was also believed lost, but in 2008 a work print was found in a warehouse in Italy.

Members of the Wintergreen Festival Orchestra affectionately dubbed the “Tramp Orchestra.”

The original score for the film was by Paul Bowles, who published fragments of it as the suite Music for a Farce. My score builds on the array of themes and gestures that I have built up over a five year period composing scores commissioned by, and premiered by members of the Wintergreen Music Festival Orchestra (which adopted for these ongoing projects the name “The Tramp Orchestra” over the years) under the direction of Erin Freeman, artistic director of the Wintergreen Music Festival, where it has become a tradition to have a silent movie evening in a tent high up in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Previous scores that I have provided include The Tramp, City Lights, A Dog’s Life, and a score to the Barrymore classic, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Out of that process also grew the score to my “operafilm,” Orson Rehearsed, which is available on DVD and CD.

I determined not to watch the public domain footage available for download on the internet before scoring it. The result was that my sense of it grew as I scored it, from left to right. For Too Much Johnson, I crafted simultaneously the film score and a free-standing concert music work called Moviola that celebrated the traditions, concerns, techniques, aesthetic, and ebullient joy of scoring to picture. Really, it is for me something of a composer’s holiday, and I relish it. (The score to The Tramp, of course, also serves as a piano concerto, but that’s another matter, as is The Passion of Jekyll and Hyde — with which I am still tinkering—which serves as the instrumental spine of a combination live opera performance and screening.)

“Listen for a mashup at one point of “The Star Spangled Banner,” Ethel Smythe’s “March of the Women,” “Frére Jacques,” as used in the Mahler Symphony No. 1, “Three Blind Mice,” and Nino Rota’s “Godfather Waltz.”

Marc Blitzstein, author of The Cradle Will Rock, in an uncredited role in “Too Much Johnson.” (Wikipedia Public Domain image)

I flew through the Welles third, started feeling the “padding” of unnecessary extra “beats” (the footage was pretty much in “stringout” form—laid back to back) in the second, and, upon reaching the “Cuba” footage, realized that I was going to have to take a heavier hand by cutting out some of the duplicate takes. I decided not to provide intertitles, as they exert a powerful influence on narrative design and structure; I had music for that. Unless one knows the play, the film will make only the sort of surreal sense that many early silents do—it’s a chase, you know? And there’s a bad guy, and a Harold Lloyd-like (very) young Joseph Cotten, Welles’ wife, his friend and producer John Houseman obviously having a ball, and an uncredited bit part for Marc Blitzstein as a Stevedore.

I have followed the lead of previous film editors who’ve taken a hand to cutting it with the important difference that I cut it to work best with music. Only the first third had been closely edited by Welles. Acutely sensitive to the death by a thousand cuts inflicted on Welles for the rest of his career, I left that third alone, of course. There were no intertitles (which Welles had planned), and alternate takes were placed back-to-back for future reference in the second third. I omitted most of the alternate takes and chose the one that I liked best in this part of the film. The final “Cuba” section of the film consisted of long, repetitive, unedited establishing takes; closeups and reaction shots were made for only the last few beats in the pond. I took a scissors as I scored the film to the last twelve minutes, cutting about ten minutes of repetitive coverage, and emulating the Chaplin and Keaton leavened with Soviet montage editing voice that Welles himself used in the first section.

p/c: Michelle Merrill

The film as I have cut it runs 48 minutes; the concert work runs 24—exactly half as long. The music? I would describe it as a nostalgic love song to the artistic world of the 1930s, disarming, affectionate, and gleefully subversive in the technical virtuosity with which it manipulates themes, allusions, history, and style. I know that my dear friend Lukas Foss would have been delighted by the fact that the more one understands how music functions, the more fun the score is to listen to. I really, really enjoy provoking snobs who feel entitled to call out what they subjectively deem cliché; those who conflate “classism” and “taste;” and those who contrive through those conflations to twist music to chauvinistic, or exclusionary effect.

Maestra Freeman and the Tramp Orchestra will premiere Moviola, my score to the public domain silent film Too Much Johnson, to film on 22 July as part of the Wintergreen Music Festival. Popcorn, mountain air, dusk falling as the orchestra tunes up, dogs running in the fields, young children wandering about, and a top-notch chamber orchestra of terrific players playing challenging (but satisfying to play) music joyfully composed to a fascinating and funny silent by one of the greatest filmmakers of all time made in the months before international fame came to surround him: that’s my idea of fun.

More about Too Much Johnson here.

On Ned Rorem's Our Town

When Thornton Wilder’s 1938 meta-theatrical triptych of portraits of American Life Our Town (which, no matter when it is staged, always takes place in 1938) was produced at the McCarter Theater in Princeton, twenty years had passed since the American Dream had been convulsed by the “War to End all War.” That which burns away any Rockwell-esque nostalgia and powers the drama of the play is the “Damoclesian sword” that was the rise of fascism and the impending outbreak of World War II—only months away. The audience was invited to grieve for the characters from the moment that they met the omniscient, fourth-wall-piercing character of the Stage Manager. It was in the air: Marc Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock, (with Blitzstein and Orson Welles on stage essentially splitting the role that Wilder would transform into the Stage Manager for his Our Town) had electrified the American theater during summer 1937. Louise Talma (the only composer besides Hindemith to convince Wilder to pen a libretto, in German, no less—for her earnest, turgid Alcestiad—in the ’50s) told me at Yaddo during the ’90s that “Thornton certainly knew Marc’s opera. The Depression was winding down. We saw Hitler coming to power. People were mourning Good Old Days that never were.”[1]

Arguably, Wilder’s “continual dryness of tone”—as he described it in the introductory note to the 1938 “acting edition” of the play—found its ideal composer in Aaron Copland’s seminal 1940 musical score (dedicated to Leonard Bernstein) for the original film.[2] Copland, according to Vivian Perlis, stated, “For the film version, they were counting on the music to translate the transcendental aspects of the story. I tried for clean and clear sounds and in general used straightforward harmonies and rhythms that would project the serenity and sense of security of the story.” Rudolf Bing, then general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, approached Copland in 1951 with the idea of expanding his score into a full-length operatic version. Wilder, according to Perlis, quashed the idea, responding, “my texts ‘swear at’ music; they’re after totally different effects.”[3] What was required, as Wilder wrote in his introduction to the play was, “the New England understatement of sentiment, of surprise, of tragedy. A shyness about emotion ... a sharpening and distinctness of the voice.”

Fast forward. Wilder said no to many composers during his lifetime, though he did permit Jerry Herman and Michael Stewart to turn The Matchmaker into Hello Dolly and, in 1965, did grant rights to Leonard Bernstein, Betty Comden, and Adolph Green to adapt The Skin of Our Teeth into a musical. Musical theater collaborations are fickle—everything’s got to fall into place or the producers bolt and the soufflé falls. Everything didn’t, and the project collapsed. When Lenny returned to Wilder, seeking operatic rights, Wilder shut him down. We are the poorer for his decision.[4]

I studied with composer Ned Rorem during the early ’80s while a student at the Curtis Institute, and served as his copyist for half a decade after that. I knew his music from the inside out, and I knew particularly well his short operas. Art song composer nonpareil, he and Kenward Elmslie had adapted August Strindberg’s Miss Julie in 1965 with mixed success, and many thought him not suited to the demands of large-scale lyric theater. But Ned persevered, and garnered universal praise from opera stalwarts when, in 1994, he returned to Miss Julie, trimming it into a “taut and persuasive” 90-minute one act, according to James Oestreich in the Times.[5]

J.D. (Sandy) McClatchy, the svelte poet, erudite editor, and versatile librettist for Little Nemo in Slumberland (Daron Hagen), Miss Lonelyhearts (Lowell Liebermann), 1984 (Lorin Maazel), Dolores Claiborne (Tobias Picker), and A Question of Taste (William Schuman) among others, and I met when translator William Weaver commissioned me to compose some songs in memory of James Merrill—Sandy was Merrill’s executor. I admired his libretti and told him so. He said that Tappan Wilder had agreed to loosen the bonds on the Our Town rights, and that he, Sandy, was looking for the right composer. How, he asked me, would I proceed if I took on the job? I don’t recall now what I said, but I do recall ending the conversation by saying, “You know, the man you’re looking for is really Ned Rorem. Ned’s Quakerism provides the proper emotional repose; his age the appropriate cultural reference points. Most importantly, he’s entirely secure in his own voice, and will be comfortable letting Wilder’s play take the lead.”

I doubt that Sandy chose Ned because of what I said, but I knew then (and now) that I was right.Our Town the opera was premiered by Indiana University Opera Theater with student singers and orchestra on February 25, 2006. Its professional debut was at the Lake George Opera on July 1, 2006. Intended from the start to be a chamber opera, the orchestration is small, and the scoring is light and transparent throughout—consistent with a work best suited to young voices. The formal structure follows Wilder’s play closely. Minor deviations from the original play seem to have been made (the fleshing out of the role of Simon Stimson, the creation of choral numbers, for example) to provide opportunities for musicalization. Rorem moves in and out of speech and utilizes more elevated recitative (parlando) than in his previous theatrical works.

Playing through Ned’s first manuscript vocal score with Gilda Lyons shortly after he finished his first draft, we pounced upon the opportunity of giving the concert première of the (now classic) aria for Emily. (Notably, the opera’s only freestanding set piece.) In it, the ironic union of opposites that make the opera Our Town the immediate American classic that it is were on full display—economy of construction, absolute, unwavering resistance to unnecessary emotionalism, frankly open textures, wisps of Poulenc at his driest, and the sort of stunning Protestant hymns that only an atheistic alcoholic Quaker whose life partner was a church organist can pen. Everywhere in the music there is a sort of cool, self-contained regretfulness—the regret so central to the play’s initial impetus, a regret so intense as to border on dread—that perfectly underpins and undercuts the sentimentality of the portraits.

Rorem uses three compositional strategies to hold the opera together structurally, track the story’s narrative, and to keep his musical rhetoric coherent.

First, he manifests Wilder’s “emotional shyness” with abrupt stylistic cross-cutting (in mid- thought, sometimes in mid-musical phrase) between Americana (Thomsonian faux-Protestant hymns, plush sustained cinematic strings, Copland-esque woodwind solos, Ivesian collages), transatlantic modernism (the tartly-scored “sting” chords, jagged, off-kilter ostinatos in close- canon, denatured melodic fragments in place of memorable tunes), and Gallic lyricism (rapturous string obbligatos, sudden snatches of emotionally-vibrant melody, Debussy-esque orchestration).

The first sixty seconds of the opera deftly arrays all three techniques. The pungent bell-tone chord that strikes 5AM declares that Our Town is part of a continuum of American operas that frankly destabilize traditional harmony by thrusting, like a billy to the ribs, an unresolved fourth into the triad. Blitzstein’s poisoned capitalists, Bernstein’s tragic suburbanites, my tormented architect, and Rorem’s dread-filled citizens of Grover’s Corners all inhabit the same American operatic landscape. Ned immediately crosscuts to another of his favorite tropes—the faux Protestant chorus underpinned harmonically by parallel unresolved sevenths in the bass—before overlaying a sudden, Gallic, sensually-arresting obbligato in the high strings. When the action begins, the parlando (passages of elevated speech that do not quite rise to song) section that follows is typical of the handling of dialogue throughout the opera: The characters unpretentiously skitter halfway between speech and recitative over a plush, comforting pad of sustained, Copland-esque strings.

Second, throughout the opera, beginning in the background during the first moments as a woodwind obbligato like a nettlesome foreigner, is a “deedle-dum” figure that unmistakably evokes the falling motif associated with the doomed nuns in Poulenc’s Dialogues of the Carmelites[Fig. 5]. Rorem’s personal association with the motif inspired him to quote it in his own song, “For Poulenc” [Fig. 6], and, over the years, a dozen instrumental works, large and small. In the score of Our Town, it completes its transit (in Ned’s life as a composer and in his catalogue) in his characterization of Emily [Fig. 7].

The motif evolves inexorably over the course of the opera, generating tension the way that someone playing with their hair during a serious conversation is at first slightly distracting and, over time, enervating. It begins to take on a life of its own as the second act unfolds, the curling of melodies in the background behind the characters’ parlando turning in on themselves in an Ouroborus-like way, transforming the fragments into slowly unraveling ostinati that are both claustrophobic and comforting—like the family life Rorem’s music limns. Characters begin taking on the background ostinati and incorporating them into their parlando in odd melismatic passages that heighten words in a baroque fashion. As the second act closes and the young couple marry, the dread given us by the first acerbic chord of the opera returns, literally underscoring the fragility of their happiness. A violin solo gives another fleeting taste of sensual pleasure before Rorem snuffs it as, again, “too much” to close with an anything but comforting, dread-filled, Ives-ian mash-up of the “Mendelssohn Wedding March.”

Pedal points in the strings, quizzical quasi-chorales in the winds and brass, the “deedle-dum” curling wind obbligati, all return in the third act; the opera continues to unfold, but all the vocal lines are heightened above parlando (they’re taken closer to “song” and effusive tunefulness by making their tunes less abstract and more traditionally singable and giving the phrases more melismas) in a way that they weren’t in the first two acts. This “gradual emotional warming” manifests Ned’s third, and most subtle, strategy for giving the opera emotional depth, the character of Emily emotional verifiability, and the piece a satisfying emotional trajectory.

This is how he did it. Gradually, Rorem invests the chorus with more and more emotional warmth so that they—in death, but not in life—create the sort of musico-emotional landscape into which Emily can step. The apotheosis of the opera is, of course, Emily’s aria, wherein Rorem combines at proximity all the musical gestures laid out in the first two acts. In this, the “eleven o’clock” spot, he gives Emily the only unabashedly rapturous music in the opera, and on the most regretful sentiment: “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it—every, every minute?” The composer’s self-control in finally allowing us to “feel” is masterful; the effect is devastating. His obvious identification with Emily, Poulenc, and the nuns is an astonishing personal revelation for a composer so famously public in his prose and yet so resolutely private in fact. Emily concludes, as Ned (a writer who eschews exclamation points and composer who famously hates repeating words, breaks his own rules) sums up a world-view, “That’s all human beings are. Blind!”

But why did Our Town need to be made into an opera? Just 80 years have elapsed since the 1937 premiere of Wilder’s play, yet a 1938 audience’s dread is like that felt in many quarters in 2017. Spring 2017 may find Americans in greater need of the sort of narrative that Our Town provides than they have been since the ’30s. The “Damoclesian sword” of rising fascism has returned with a vengeance; we’re told that we’re not experiencing a Depression, yet unemployment isn’t being measured in a way that considers how many people have simply stopped looking for work, or the fact that retired people are working at Walmart to supplement their pensions. The Peterborough, New Hampshire, that Wilder used as a model for Grover’s Corners had faded to the margins by the time I began visiting the MacDowell Colony during the early ’80s. Nobody in Wilder’s play could afford to live in the Peterborough of today.

Ned has told me that Satie’s Socrate may be “the greatest of all operas.” Certainly, he exploits in his score for Our Town the same kind of baroque cantata textures and affects as Satie did in his 1920 masterpiece and that Wilder (according to Mabel Dodge)[6] most preferred. But the Rorem and McClatchy Our Town also contains—in the propulsive, off-kilter ostinati percolating uneasily beneath the Nantucket matter-of-factness of its musical surfaces and its stubborn unwillingness to wear its heart on its sleeve—an astonishing undercurrent of unanticipated, and highly effective dramaturgical fury.

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This article originally appeared as the liner notes to New World Records 80790-2 [2 CDS] world premiere recording of Ned Rorem and J.D. McClatchy’s opera Our Town, based on the play by Thornton Wilder.

Footnotes

1. Louise Talma in conversation with the author at Yaddo, summer 1995.

2. Thornton Wilder’s “Some Suggestions for the Director” from the 1938 “acting edition” of the script.

3. Vivian Perlis quotes Aaron Copland in a letter to the New York Times, January 31, 1998.

4. Tappan Wilder, program notes for “Thornton Wilder and Music,” a program by the American Symphony Orchestra, December 19, 2014.

5. James Oestreich, New York Times review of the Manhattan School of Music production of the revised Miss Julie, spring 1994.

6. Mabel Dodge is quoted by Tappan Wilder in his American Symphony Orchestra program note.

And the Music Was With Him: Burt Bacharach (1928-2023)

ABC Television, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The bit was in. I had spotted bliss—far off in the distance still, but real enough to enthrall. Fifteen years old, summer of 1976, body vibrating, ablaze with youth and hormones at the kitchen table at three in the morning with the radio on listening to Ron Cuzner’s overnight jazz show on WFMR and copying parts to Together, the musical I was writing for my friends.

Cuzner introduced the six-minute-long 1971 Polydor recording to his listeners as though disclosing classified information over whisky to a fellow agent in a smoky bar near Checkpoint Charlie. I remember the words clearly: “He hails from California. (beat of silence) Marlene Dietrich (again, the silence, to let the enormously important intelligence land) is reported to have (beat) loved him. He married a glamorous movie star (beat), Angie Dickinson. But he was a student of Milhaud, and Cowell (I knew who these guys were and was impressed) who, shall we say, went off the railswith the likes of (he paused, as though about to invoke a Holy Trinity) Warwick, Jones, and Alpert. This (Cuzner’s ultimate seal of approval) very cool orchestral work describes the moment you first see (long beat) her.”

Five years earlier, my brother Kevin had brought the Columbia LP’s of Leonard Bernstein’s MASS home and I had scandalized my fellow ten-year-olds by playing “it was goddamn good” (listen to Alan Titus sing it here) in class at Linfield School to the horror of Principal Buege (pronounced “Biggy,” of course) and to the delight of my mother. (Kevin had provoked similar outrage by bringing Jesus Christ Superstar to school a year earlier.) But my mom also adored Ella Fitzgerald, Barbara Streisand, and Frank Sinatra—the exquisite Nelson Riddle arrangements of the Cole Porter songbook especially. I was immersed in the Beatles songbook, of course; I had read Twilight of the Gods, Wilfred Mellers’ terrific book about their songs, the previous summer. My brothers and I had wept in 1970 when the announcer introduced the first local broadcast of The Long and Winding Road on WOKY by revealing that the Beatles had decided to split up.

Intuiting that something interesting was about to happen, I slipped a cassette in to tape it, missing the first few bars. I would listen to that recording of And the People Were With Her a hundred times that summer. I still have it.

My literature teacher, Diane Doerfler, knew that the one thing I was sure I was going to do was leave Wisconsin for the coast at the very first opportunity. Which coast was very much up in the air. My father favored the west coast: he recorded movie soundtracks by way of a jack he had installed on the back of our television. I’d spent a lot of time listening to dozens of them—particularly to Elmer Bernstein’s majestic Great Escape, Magnificent Seven, and To Kill a Mockingbird. Doerfler was in favor of the east coast: she had tossed me a copy (which I still have) of John Cheever’s collected short stories about life in the Hudson Valley and quipped, “Here. Read these. They will help.” (They did. Doerf was right; after decades in Manhattan, I now live in the Hudson Valley.)

From the moment that And the People Were With Her (listen here as you read this piece) ended, my “Killer B’s” for the rest of summer 1975 became Beatles, Bernstein, and Bacharach and the west coast became a real contender. John Williams’ pealing orchestral main title to Star Wars in summer 1978 hit me like a hammer, and I was certain — according to my diaries — that I would move to Los Angeles and start work as an orchestrator, perhaps even graduate in time to scoring. The decision was made when mother sent my orchestral Suite for a Lonely City to Helen Coates and in return received a letter — a sort of unexpected musical golden ticket — from Leonard Bernstein which she would open a few feet away from where I was sitting. East it was.

In a few months, Kevin would put Britten’s Billy Budd on the record player, and my future as an opera composer would be set: Bacharach was supplanted by Britten. By the time I graduated high school, the earthy authenticity of Bartok supplanted the Beatles. College in Madison brought Homer Lambrecht’s influence; he introduced me to the Italianate suavity of Berio, and my musical trinity became Berio, Britten, and Bernstein. When I finally landed at Curtis, Lukas Foss got me into Stockhausen — a needed antidote to the polishing and professionalizing I was receiving in my lessons with Ned Rorem — and my world was turned inside out. I dedicated myself to Beethoven, Brahms, and Bach as far as the school and my peers were concerned — heaven knows I had enough to learn about that repertoire! — and holed up at the Free Library with Stockhausen and the eastern bloc modernists in the afternoons. Though I toyed with a career in LA during summer 1988, I ended up moving to Europe instead, returning to New York City for good in 1990.

Being a pianist and devotee of the American Songbook helps one to truly credit the subversive power of Bacharach’s music. Gershwin, Arlen, Kern, Rogers, Porter — the lot of them — were only a few years past. Like Bernstein, Bacharach’s chord choices could be deliciously “classical” (I hear the harmonic choices of Bill Evans), with modulations, shifting meters and phrase lengths. Some of his bridges (my favorite is the wandering and wonderful, take-that-Kern-and-Arlen bridge to A House is Not a Home — listen here) are pure bliss. Like Stephen Sondheim and Bernstein, his tunes could be tricky. But during his Warwick-Alpert years, I sense that something in him led him to craft surprisingly memorable (though, again, deceptively simple yet more than quirky and smart, I’d say inspired) tunes.

I have read that Bacharach will be remembered compositionally as a transitional figure bridging the methods perfected by the 50s Brill Building bunch and rock and roll. Or maybe as the American Michel Legrand. Maybe, but I think that takeaway unfairly diminishes his accomplishment. He was a master of instrumental MOR. (“Middle-of-the-road,” a commercial radio format that includes “easy listening” and can even cover cool genres such as Shibuya-kei and show tunes and not so cool ones like Countrypolitan.) MOR makes musical snobs crazy—particularly when a gifted composer writes it. I love that. It’s subversive, and musical chauvinists just don’t get it.

Bacharach brilliantly subverted commercial music clichés and practices by marrying them (thereby freshening classical tropes and supercharging pop music tropes) to classical chops and compositional procedures not to accompany the dissipation of the valium and martini hazed Greatest Generation, but to underline their societal disillusionment. When James Coburn steps into William Daniels’ den (watch it here) in The President’s Analyst (1967) and Daniels’ character (a gun-toting “liberal”) flicks a switch, filling the room with “total sound,” the music supplied by Lalo Schifrin captured the essence of what I have described elsewhere as that which is “heard in the waiting room of a dentist’s office while awaiting a root canal.” It’s MOR, it’s the seamy underside of the American Dream, and it is glorious.

When Cory, a 35 year old arbitrageur who works at the World Trade Center, arrives and lets rip with a big aria in my operafilm 9/10: Love Before the Fall, he’s characterized by the sort of virile Mike Post television theme (here, or here, or here) from the 70s-90s he’d have grown up with—who knows, maybe watching LA Law as a teenager was what inspired him to become a lawyer! When Bibi, a 21-year-old singer brought up in Los Angeles, remembers her childhood there, she swings into music that could have been lifted wholesale from Nikki (listen here). MOR had served as the background music to their suburban childhoods as much as shag carpeting had comforted their bare feet in the den—one on the east coast, the other on the west. It is my honor to characterize them with the music with which they would have identified. Editing the film, I’ve watched again and again (as only one strapped to a moviola must) as people in the room reacted with everything from delight to contempt to these musical moments, depending on who they think they are or what they think music ought to be.

Bacharach was who he was, and his honor — whether it be in South American Getaway (listen here, where he out swingles the Swingle Singers and puts a pin in Berio’s magnificent Sinfonia), or Pacific Coast Highway (listen here, from 1968) in which he captures the dread-filled determination to be carefree that I still picked up on while driving on it during the 90s to Stinson Beach — was to contextualize his time.

To me, though, the most incorruptible facet of Bacharach’s compositional gift remains the gleaming horizontality of his melodies from which the chords seem to hang like icicles from the eaves of an irregular roofline. Hal David’s lyrics were middlebrow — another thing that made the songs easier to digest than Sondheim’s — but heartfelt and soulful. I was never crazy for the collaborations with Bayer Sager. Elvis Costello’s verse — smart, dark, and probing, was a great foil for the late Bacharach as a songwriter. Bacharach set lyrics as an art song composer would poetry (or as Elton John treats Bernie Taupin’s words, though he is liable to override the lyrics entirely for the sake of a good hook or tune) — permitting the rhythm of the unevenly proportioned lyric lines to generate melodies more like those from an art song than a popular song.

Perhaps, if he had been the sort of man who could have been contained by the eastern seaboard, he would not have toured with Dietrich, courted commercial success, or married Dickinson, or encountered his singer muse Warwick (his Leontyne?) and created I Say a Little Prayer (listen here to it as not just a love confection but as the cri de coeur of a woman whose boyfriend is in Vietnam and you get how his songs can be simultaneously winsome and wise) and a host of other great Motown-influenced gems. Maybe he would have surpassed Alec Wilder’s expectations and created a new American art song repertoire. Maybe he would have been America’s other Samuel Barber. Maybe he did. Maybe he was.

Composers and Their Careers

One afternoon in Chicago a composition student at Roosevelt University where I served for a spell as a member of the Artist Faculty asked me how to “cultivate his career.”

I closed my eyes for a moment, listened to the radiator in the grand old Chicago Auditorium Theater Building clank, and realized with a start that the look on my face was probably pretty close to Marlon Brando’s in his final scene with Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now. “Are you okay?” he asked. I rubbed my chest, sighed, and smiled.

“Tell me about your value system,” I replied. “Are you a mindful individual? What are your goals as a person? How does making art manifest those goals? If you aren’t yet clear about those goals, then asking yourself what you want to be doing in five, ten, or twenty years is putting the cart before the horse just as surely as a child’s finger painting is precious, but it hasn’t the same intrinsic artistic value as a Da Vinci line drawing.”

“I envy you your passion,” he replied. “So why did you look so pained when I asked about how to ‘cultivate my career?’”

“One cultivates a garden, not a career,” I replied, warming to the subject. “Art doesn’t need Us, but we need Art. I, for example, am obsessively shy and private, yet, when I talk about Art, I feel only humility and passion. This is typical of people who are committed to something larger and more important than themselves and their personal actuation.”

“But I want to be a ‘success’,” my young friend persisted. “How can I be one?”

“Well, bearing in mind that only you can define what constitutes ‘success,’ I can tell you that you’re on the wrong track if you think that receiving and executing high profile prizes or commissions constitute anything but a limited sort of ‘success’—a fleeting, superficial kind. I’m all for ‘creating opportunities’ but that ‘cultivation’ must be in the service of a vision / project greater than simply piling on another ‘commission’ to write another piece: running around at top speed taking meetings and generating interest in your work that will evaporate the moment you stop hectoring people is the worst misunderstanding of what ‘cultivating’ people is, or at least ought to be.”

“Success to me means people loving my music,” he said, a little hurt.

“Now, there you’re on the right track,” I reassured him. “For me, connecting through music with other human beings is everything. If I can emotionally connect with one person in the room and move them to do good, I’ve made a start. People rarely ‘love’ a piece of serious music—it’s not a popularity contest, after all. But antagonizing people who’ve handed over precious moments of their lives to you is the height of arrogance and selfishness. Furthermore, simply pasting some sort of ‘socially relevant’ message on top of an otherwise abstract musical utterance (and all music is essentially abstract, whether one wants to admit it or not) does a disservice to the cause—whatever it is.”

“You make ambition sound like a bad thing,” he said, quietly.

“Not at all. I’m all for drive. Drive and, above all, resilience. Taking risks in your Art is the only sure way to generate rejection from certain quarters. And, since ‘rejection’ is about the only thing an Artist can really count on in the long run, learning how to tolerate it is critical. Artistic ambition is crucial; professional ambition is, in the long run, sort of a bore after one has figured out the relationship between their Art and the Marketplace. Profitable music isn’t better; it’s just more profitable.

“Do you compose every day?” he challenged me.

“Of course. I’m composing right now. The goal is to ‘become music,’ not Me. I achieved this through the acquisition of comprehensive musical technique and countless hours writing, practicing, reading, listening, and performing music and literature. People change, situations are fluid, money comes and goes. I’ve told people for two decades that all I want to do is to learn how to write a decent opera. I expect Anton Coppola, aged 103 and conducting his latest opera, feels the same way. That’s when the irony of the situation becomes the most bittersweet: just as you begin to figure out how its done, you’ve run out of time to do it. When people tell you that they know ‘how it’s done,’ or that they ‘know what they’re doing,’ you should take them at their word and distrust most of what they say, because they have stopped learning.”

“Aaron Copland once wrote that he answered every letter within 24 hours and that that was a key to being a good professional,” he said.

“What a good man he must have been,” I responded warmly. “Again, it’s a values thing: simply be kind to people. I have learned that, for me at least, figuring out which letters to ignore has been helpful. Turning things down. Knowing when to walk away. When to stop. Avoiding toxic situations. Letting people be who they are and not who I want them to be or to have been. In the end, being a composer is a vocation, not a career. We are both secular priests and simple entertainers who speak truth to power. Not for nothing did a certain real estate magnate belittle the ‘Queen of Soul’ as ‘someone who worked for him’ when she died. We exist as an antidote to people like that. That’s a calling worth cultivating.”

I looked out the window at the El as it swept by and wondered if the young composer sitting in front of me had read Heart of Darkness or heard Brando’s line reading of “The horror.” I drew the music for the lovely piece he’d brought with him toward me, pulled my glasses down to the tip of my nose so that I could make out the notes, and his music filled my brain as I read. “So beautiful,” I said aloud. I scanned ahead. “So many trivial notation problems that you should clear up before this music goes on the stands. Now let’s talk about the difference between Power and Authority.”