<![CDATA[The Drapers Guild - My Life in Music]]>Thu, 26 Mar 2026 17:22:40 -0400Weebly<![CDATA[FOLIE]]>Thu, 19 Mar 2026 18:54:31 GMThttps://www.drapersguild.com/my-life-in-music/folie      One evening in the early mid-1980’s Niloufer and I, having arrived that afternoon from Orly and checked into our hotel, wandered the Left Bank.
       Ah, Paris! And on a balmy Saturday night.
       At the Odeon metro newsstand I picked up the Parisian equivalent of New York’s Time Out and checked the music listings. I imagined us sitting in a small smoky bar with our hock et seltzers, listening to jazz or blues — Niloufer drew the line at folk music — with  simpatico Parisians scattered among other small, round tables.
       There was a Dutch jazz group at a nearby club on rue Vaugirard. Why not? At least we would avoid the crowd on the touristico side of Boulevard Saint-Germain.
       We strolled up through the Luxembourg Gardens and crossed to Vaugirard. We found the club because we had the address, but its sign was unlit. Inside it was dark. The club was empty, the door was locked, there was no enlightening sign on the door.
       We were jet-lagged; perhaps it was much later than we thought. I checked my watch, which I had set at Orly. It was not even ten o’clock.
       Looking around, we wondered why the streets were so empty on a Saturday night.
       I think our awareness of how quiet Paris was had come on gradually. We had remarked on how so many tables were free at Les Deux Magots and decided the iconic cafe had finally become unfashionable. On seeing so few people milling about the Odeon metro stop we concluded that there must be a problem with the trains. The realization that there was almost no one around had only just now reached our consciousness. We had seen a few people — walking their dogs, making their quiet way home — and here and there knots of tourists, noisily returning to their hotels from restaurants, but where were the crowds? Where was the usual throng roaming the Latin Quarter for a good time?  
       It was a puzzle. We discussed it. “Maybe the clock at Orly was wrong.” “It feels like it’s three in the morning.” “Maybe it was set to another time. It is an airport, after all.”  “Even then, you’d think a few places would still be open.” “I guess Paris isn’t a city that never sleeps.” “Would the Village be this quiet at three am?” “Columbus Avenue wouldn’t be.”
       We stopped a man out walking his beagle. Niloufer, whose French is down pat, asked what time it was. He showed us his watch; it had the same time as mine.
       “I wonder if something happened?” “Maybe the President died.” “Reagan?” “Mitterand.” “But would everything be shut like this?” “He was quite popular.” “I think the police would be out. This is Paris.” “Someone else?” “A philosopher?” “Sartre’s already dead.” “Simone De Beauvoir?” “The Left Bank might shut down like this for that.” “On the right bank things are probably perfectly normal.” “Probably a little more subdued than usual.”
       Having applied Occam’s razor (although one with an admittedly dull blade) to the problem, the most likely reason why the Left Bank was almost deserted on a Saturday night and everything but the big cafes was shut was that Simone de Beauvoir had died.
       We somberly made our way back to the hotel.
       The next day, from a glance at a newspaper on our way out onto Saint-Germain, which was bustling, we learned that it was not a Sunday morning in Paris, as we believed. It was a Monday morning. We had been wandering around le Quartier on a Sunday. 
       Despite all the clues, it had never occurred to us that we had gotten the day wrong. How did that happen? We had changed our departure date at one point; perhaps having discussed the various exigencies, pleasant and unpleasant, of arriving in Paris on a Saturday, we had not re-calibrated our expectations. Perhaps a confusion over time zones had led us to believe we would land at Paris on the same day we had flown out of New York. Whatever the reason, we had been convinced it was Saturday — the conviction of each supporting that of the other.
       We had been the victims of a mini-folie à deux.
      
      
 
        

]]><![CDATA[INTERESSANT]]>Tue, 29 Jul 2025 20:03:58 GMThttps://www.drapersguild.com/my-life-in-music/interessant        If I think of myself as hitched for life to the U. S. A., then France is the dear friend I once had an affair with and Italy is that pretty zany who flirts with me and then eludes me at parties. That analogy stands in for the tediously witty paragraph (of pop-socio-politico-ethno-psychobabble) I would otherwise have written as an introduction to my six-month sojourn in Italy, 1961-1962.
        I lived in a villa in Fiesole, the hill town above Florence. The family I was renting it from, who lived in an elegant modern home down the driveway, called it a “villa;” who am I to argue? It was a small stucco house, two rooms plus an open kitchen, with much more length to it than width since it was built across the steep southwesterly slope down to Florence. Its two winning amenities, as far as I was concerned, were a large picture window that looked out over a descending cascade of cultivated terraces—olive orchards,  a vineyard, a field devoted to an unidentifiable dark leafy vegetable and, closer to Florence, flower gardens, swimming pools and lawns which on week-ends were dotted with huge dining marquees—and a fireplace.
        Not that I spent much time there. I had come to write, but soon after I arrived I learned I had won an important short story contest and my soul told me it was allowed a vacation. So, almost every day, instead of writing, I would get in my MG-A and toodle down to Florence.
         Charlotte Novitz was in Florence at the time. She had rented a charming house surrounded by vegetable patches below the Piazzale Michaelangelo. Our relationship, which had reached an on-again, off-again stage, was off-again in Florence. Charlotte had just begun an amour with the writer, Mauro Sinesi. So.
          Nevertheless, two or three times a week I would stroll across the Ponte Vecchio and trudge up the hill to Charlotte’s, emerging from a pleasant shaded lovers’ lane into the unpleasant heat of the sun or the unpleasant dribbling of an afternoon rain shower to wend my way through the vegetable patches—as melancholy as I could be—toward the little yellow house, flowers nodding over the gravel walk, a tomato patch on one side, a small arbor with a table on the other, pot herbs or pale blue curtains in the windows through which you could look up at the sweeping Piazzale Michaelangelo or gaze down at the Arno and Florence below—the Duomo, the Palazzo Vecchio, and all the rest. It was the house that one of the Impressionists, having decided to come live and paint in Florence, would have chosen.
      Mimi Gross, who had been in Florence since 1960, left about the same time I arrived.  But just as she did in New York and Provincetown, Mimi had generated a Florentine coterie that continued to gather at parties, at openings and at concerts after she had gone. I fit right in and became the buddy of an American composer whose name, I am embarrassed to say, eludes me.
       Here is a letter, as yet unanswered, I sent to the editor of the newsletter of the Society of Composers: 
Dear Society of Composers Newsletter Editor,
         I am writing a memoir of Florence in 1961.
         I attended a concert of contemporary piano music there with a composer friend of mine, an American. I have forgotten my friend’s name and was hoping you could help me remember it.
         In 1961 he was, or recently had been, a student of Luigi Dallapiccola in Rome; Jewish; in his thirties, I’d guess. I believe he went on to a career in academia. I have perused Wikipedia’s list of American composers, its list of Dallapiccola’s students, even your membership list, but no name rings the right bell.
         While in Italy he may have composed music for a chamber orchestra based in Rome, one of whose members was an American flautist who lived on the Piazza Navona in Rome.
         Assuming that you, yourself, are a composer, I think you will appreciate what made that that 1961 concert in Florence so memorable.
         One of the pieces performed was John Cage’s “4’33””. The applause that followed “4’33””, Cage’s most ineffable composition, was tentative at first but gained in force as we, the members of the audience, showed each other that we could respond to the koan posed by Cage, or that we were in on Cage’s joke, or whatever.
         When this extended demonstration at last began to taper off, an elderly man in the second row stood up, picturesquely waved his cane about, and addressed us (in Italian, of course).
         I asked my composer friend, whose Italian was excellent, what he had said.
         “This is nothing new,” my friend translated, “the Futurists were doing this in 1914.”
          Is there anyone in the Society of Composers who knows who my friend might have been?
Yours truly,
 
                          ~

       Tonalità Gioia was a contemporary music ensemble based in Rome in the early ‘60’s. (How am I supposed to remember what its real name was? And it’s not worth the time and effort involved in a likely fruitless search.) Tonalità Gioia regularly performed pieces by my composer friend. Through him, I became friends with a pair of musicians in the ensemble—a couple, unmarried—an oboist (m.) and a flautist (f.) with whom I began to flirt.
       By happy coincidence, Tonalità Gioia was giving a concert the very evening that my mother and her new husband, George, were to arrive in Rome for their honeymoon at the Hotel Excelsior. (Note: In 1961 Rome was all Cinecittà and “La Dolce Vita”; the Hotel Excelsior and the street it was on, the Via Veneto, were central to the film.)
       My mother had reserved two rooms for the night before their arrival—one for my sister, Cynthia, who would come down from Paris, and one for me—so we would be there when they arrived and could be in the lobby to greet them, to greet George for the first time as our stepfather. Then we were to spend a couple of evenings with the newlyweds, celebrating.*
      I calculated that I could attend the Tonalità Gioia concert, go out with the musicians to a trattoria afterward, and still be back at the Excelsior by the time Martha and George were dropped off by a cab from the airport. I could not foresee that, having drunk more red wine than usual, having pressed my flirtation with the flautist beyond the limits of what was civil and, having accepted the oboist’s challenge to a round of fisticuffs, right there in the Piazza Navone, I would straggle into the lobby of the Excelsior, where George and Martha impatiently and Cynthia and her boyfriend Horst** bemusedly awaited me, with a black eye so fresh that it still was surrounded by a rosy aura of broken blood vessels, tie awry, shirt torn, and jacket wine-stained. (A bottle of wine had somehow been involved in the Battle of the Piazza Navona).
       To the question, what happened? I replied, I got in a fight. As for the details of the fight? They were not worth talking about, I said.
       It was so remarkable***, my getting into a disheveling and disfiguring fracas the night I was to meet George as a stepson, that a Freudian explanation for it loomed as most likely—even though I was already well on my way to realizing that Freudianism was just cocaine-fueled mumbo-jumbo.
       My dismay over ruining my mother’s honeymoon—she couldn’t smile without looking grim—was somewhat offset by the fun that Cynthia and Horst seemed to get out of my mishap. Cynthia probably was pleased that Horst could get a view of my usually hidden beatnik side.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
*Celebrating, for example, by having a Caesar salad prepared for us at our table by the owner of the very restaurant where it originated. 

**I had met Horst once before, a few months earlier.
         A girl in Florence needed a ride to Paris, so I phoned my sister, who had an apartment on the unfashionable side of the Boulevard Montparnasse, to tell her I was coming.
         The door was opened by an unshaven, somewhat dissolute version of the smug rich American on his post-graduate Grand Tour. Four others of his ilk were lounging around the living room, drinking beer and watching a soccer game on the teevee. They were all smiling that particular kind of smiles that’s set in being stoned. I was not smiling. One of them motioned toward the door to Cynthia’s bedroom and I stormed in.
         Cynthia was lying on the bed, reading ”Molloy”.
         “They have to go, Cynthia,” I growled, gesturing toward the other room. “I’m kicking them all out, right now.” After a moment’s thought, I added, “Unless there’s one you want to keep.”
         At that moment the bathroom door opened and Horst, slim, blond and ur-German, appeared with a towel wrapped around his waist.
        “I’ll keep that one,” Cynthia said.                

 ***Remarkable, since I had been in only two other physical altercations since grade school:
         1) A similar desultory scuffle over a girl. Instead of the Piazza Navona, the venue was the hallway outside the girl’s apartment at the top of a steep narrow stairway of a building on Hudson Street right across from the White Horse, where José Garcia Villa’s big Friday night table in the back room, which had included me and the girl, but not the guy who pushed me down the stairs, had just broken up.
        2) A pummeling more than an altercation. The pummeler was a man with a family and a little business, who had just been called up as a Marine reserve after the Bay of Pigs debacle and who had been complaining loudly about it to his audience of fellow subway passengers.
        Such was the pummeler from the pummeled’s point of view. The pummeler’s impression of the pummeled was just as accurate: a smug, rich college student draft-evader, without a job, without a wife and kids, who should have been called up instead of him.
        He had me down, straddling me, on the subway seat. (It was one of those old subway cars, with two long rows of inward-facing seats under the windows.) He could have really hurt me, he could have killed me—he was in the Marine reserves, after all—but he was basically a nice guy. Drunk, pushed over the edge by circumstances, still railing against his fate, he gave me a severe cuffing, nothing more, between 72nd Street and 42nd Street. There, as soon as the doors opened, a busybody fellow-passenger burst out to find the cops. (No cell phones sixty years ago.)
         I didn’t press charges. After all, the whole time he was pummeling me I was saying “You’re right, you’re absolutely right.”


                       ~

                                                                                                     -
         To keep the above two reminiscences from being regarded as binary, as poles encompassing some mysterious meaning, one more story from Italy in 1961 is required.
       Let’s see... How’s this?
       Charlotte and I were in Rome. I can’t remember the reason. Perhaps she’d had a fight with Mauro.
       We went to an afternoon concert in a public park, Orff’s “Carmina Burana”. It was a rousing performance, spirited and good humored. Afterwards we heard one well-coifed Frenchwoman in the audience say to a similarly coifed Frenchwoman beside her, “Très intéressant!”
        Charlotte being a virtuoso in oblique mockery, “très intéressant!” now plays an important role in her repartee.
 
 

]]><![CDATA[Party]]>Mon, 05 Jun 2023 19:44:45 GMThttps://www.drapersguild.com/my-life-in-music/june-05th-2023       In 1988, in a conventional, but charming, example of late 20th century paternal display, I threw a 21st birthday bash for Nelly and her best friend, Astrid Craven. I rented a bar on Second Avenue for the evening (they put a “Private party” sign in the window) and designed a coy and clever invitation (at least I thought it was—still do), which I mailed to about fifty people.
Picture
*For a note on the picture, see below
        
       Eddie Kirkland was the pièce de résistance.
       For thunking knocking funky rocking blues, I put Eddie Kirkland right up there with Howling Wolf and B. B. King but, unlike them, I had seen Kirkland live (adj.) at two or three roadside dives around Kingston and Newburgh, plus at a great gig to a packed crowd on a Saturday night at Speaker’s in the middle of New Paltz where, at that time, the State University of New York students were pretty hip.
       Considering these venues, I figured that, unlike Howling Wolf and B. B. King, Eddie Kirkland might be affordable, but I was not only pleasantly surprised but a teeny bit nonplussed when over the phone (just to remind you: phones then were strictly audio devices) his agent and I agreed that Eddie Kirkland and the Energy Band would arrive at the party around eight‑thirty to set up, then play five sets from nine to midnight for $600 in cash, payable at the end of the gig.   
 
       The party was great. It was an Event, so how could it not be?—even though Eddie Kirkland never showed.
       It was Eddie himself on the phone this time—the phone at the end of Dan Lynch’s bar around nine o’clock: he was stuck in a snowstorm in Canada and couldn't make the gig, but he had called a friend of his who would come over with his band and do it.  
       Except for the snowstorm in Canada, which was an intriguing touch, I wasn’t surprised, nor especially put out. That’s the way the cookie crumbles and, as I had learned long before, the more elaborate the cookie, the more prone it is to crumble here and there.  
`      The replacement band—Igor Mills and the Wheels (I just made that up; I don’t remember what the fuck their name was)—was one of those bands of young blues enthusiasts—90% white, 100% in college—who were good enough to have made it into the blues bar circuit. They got the music down pat, put on a great show and, helped along by the party having become a bona fide Event, seemed every bit as good as George Thorogood.
 
       Dennis Winter was at the party where he met Eddie Kirkland. Eventually—typical of Dennis, with his gregarious charm—he got to know him pretty well, well enough to be Eddie’s chauffeur for a season, driving him around the South from gig to gig.
       Dennis, a virtuoso story-teller, had some good ones about his peregrination with Eddie. For example: In a gap between gigs, Eddie decides to visit his ex-wife, who lives in a split-ranch in a development outside of Jacksonville. As Eddie gets out of the car he tells Dennis to keep the engine running. After a minute or so, the front door swings open and Eddie comes high-tailing it out, pursued by a woman in a white bathrobe with a knife.
       The above story is fictional, based on just a couple of details I happen to remember from one of Dennis’ Eddie Kirkland stories. 
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
                                                Reader survey:
                           My fictionalization of Dennis’ story is
                                                                (choose a or b)
                             a) part of the process of history becoming myth, in which the
                             mortal Eddie is elevated to an avatar of The Hard-Driving Black
                             Blues Singer, something along the lines of Ulysses, who also was
                             known for comical hair-breadth escapes from angry women.
                                                                  
                              b) an example of how stories are forgotten and finally fade away.
 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
      
          Dennis Winter died last year.

                         ~
 
 *Note on the picture.
       Rendered from the image printed on Balkan Sobranie cigarette boxes.
    
      (I have begun to think of myself as a stranger in a foreign country, and here it is, it’s happening again: I have to explain something that wouldn’t need explaining in my own country.
       I’m not referring to geopolitical countries, but countries which, for a while anyway, occupy the same space at the same time. What makes them different is that their inhabitants cannot understand each other.
       I am not saying that everyone in my country would recognize that somewhat esoteric image as being from Balkan Sobranie cigarette box. But most would recognize it as a commercial illustration dating from sometime before 1950. Some, taking note of the woman’s clothing and the landscape, might be able to place the scene somewhere between Greece and the Caucasus. Those who notice the cats would recognize it, for better or worse, as a collage. The word "Kansas" might puzzle some who, if they took the trouble, would probably settle on it being some reference to generic mid-America; only a few (so I discovered) would make the connection (which I had mistakenly thought to be pretty obvious) to the adventures of Baum's Dorothy.
       The point is, everyone in my country knows something about that picture, and that’s enough for me not to have to explain it.
       But the picture evokes nothing to anyone in this country (in which the newspaper of record once referred to Hungary as “a small East European backwater").
       Are those supposed to be a couple of hippie chicks from the ‘60’s in peasant dresses smoking dope? or what?)
 
]]><![CDATA[Madrigal]]>Tue, 11 Apr 2023 19:49:39 GMThttps://www.drapersguild.com/my-life-in-music/april-11th-2023      
       One day in the early summer of 1955, when a short cloudburst was followed, as cloudbursts often are, by a clear blue sky and sunshine sparkling in the droplets left behind, Lisa Ress, Don Devan and I abandoned a gathering at the Eisners to go for a walk.
       At the bottom of the long flight of steps from the Eisners’ front porch to Adriance Avenue, we turned left, then left again at Lockerman Avenue where, talking of Michelangelo, etc., we plunged into the Eighth Ward. There we ambled past clipped hedges framing lawns and rose gardens glistening like English china, and high fences of rustic slat over which hung branches of Japanese exotics whose damp white and pink blossoms brushed our heads and left the occasional petal in our hair.
       A few puddles had formed in the declivities of the paving stones. We only had to lengthen our stride to avoid them. One puddle, though, Don failed to notice.
       My level of sophistication having reached the level where a juvenile remark, well-chosen and well-timed, could pass as wit, in a mocking sing-song I intoned,
 
                 Donny stepped in a puddle
     
       In a burst of inspiration, Lisa joined in, in tune, trilling,
 
                 Stepped in a puddle puddle, stepped in a puddle puddle
 
       Dropping a couple of octaves, I chanted
 
                 Puddle puddle, (and a fifth lower) puddle puddle.
                 Puddle puddle, puddle puddle.
 
       Then Donny’s voice rang out,
 
                  Donny stepped in a puddle, he stepped stepped stepped
 
       Soon—soprano, tenor, bass-baritone—with “Donny stepped in a puddle” as our text, we were improvising a gleeful intricate madrigal (redressing, at last, the neglect of the form by J. S. Bach).
       Passing around the melodic line—Lisa warbling it, Don pouring it out with the eloquent conviction of a heldentenor (heroic indeed, since he soldiered on with his right foot soaking wet), I flinging it upwards from a stentorian rumble to leap and dance like an acrobatic clown—we paced down Lockerman and up Willow Bend, tossing it back and forth with increasing rapidity on Whitehouse for a virtuosic coda, then bringing it back to the tonic and close harmony as we turned into the Eisners’ driveway and finally—aware that we had had an experience that would never be repeated—finishing in a soft, wistful minor chord.
 
       For many years I would refer to those three quarters of an hour as the happiest moments of my life. Then, noticing a shimmer of consternation on Nelly's face as I rhapsodized about that summer afternoon in 1955, I realized I would have to refine my terms: if not necessarily the happiest, they were the most purely happy moments.
       No joy can compare with what I felt on seeing my daughter enter the world, I told Nelly, but in the background lay other feelings, more complex; I had just become a parent.
       The dark seams of time lurk within virtually all of life’s moments of great happiness. The joy of “Donny stepped in a puddle” was unalloyed; without the taint of the looming future and inevitable mortality, those moments had been pure gold from Mt. Olympus, showered down on Lisa, Donny and me in honor of our youth, if nothing more.
 


]]><![CDATA[Hanon]]>Tue, 14 Mar 2023 17:38:22 GMThttps://www.drapersguild.com/my-life-in-music/hanon9873565       The first piano teacher I was sent to dropped me after six weeks because I didn’t practice.
       I knew that if I practiced, eventually I would play the piano better, but that meant nothing to me. I wanted to play better now. My mother was beautiful and intelligent, my father was handsome and charming, and they didn’t have to practice.  I couldn’t imagine that Milton Berle or Maury Amsterdam had to practice to be funny, and I assumed that the first time someone put the score of Grieg’s Piano Concerto in front of José Iturbi he immediately knew how to bang his way down through that pretentious opening, hitting all the right keys, and then swan through the rest like a maestro. I couldn’t even do that with a simple melody written by Mozart when he was six years old.
       My next piano teacher was Ginny Schwartz.
       In one particular, Ginny Schwartz was the most startling, exotic person I knew: even though her name was Schwartz, she wasn’t Jewish. Proof of this fact, which had all the weirdness of something out of Ripley’s “Believe it or Not,” was that Mr. Schwartz was the pastor of the Lutheran Church. Otherwise, Ginny Schwartz was a florid, brassy imposter, who maintained a high level of cheerful exuberance, which sometimes shaded into manic hysteria, to keep her customers – that is, her pupils’ parents – reassured.
       Ginny Schwartz was able to teach us some basics – fingering, sharps and flats (up or down to the next black key), the three-in-one mystery of triplets, the difference between ppp and fff – but nothing beyond them. She sent us home with Hanon’s exercises, hoping (beyond hope) that they would make up for her pedagogic deficiencies.
       I liked the Hanon, which made them frustrating. It seemed to me that once I knew what the pattern of an exercise was, I should be able to play it, up and down the keyboard, without having to keep peering at every note, and even then hitting the wrong key or two keys at once and tangling up my fingers. And, forget about maintaining a regular beat – even a very slow one: I didn’t even try. I never reached the point where if I saw a G#, I automatically played a G#; I had to pause to think where G# was on the keyboard. In my hidden inner world, I was so gloriously nimble that after I had discerned the pattern of a Hanon exercise I could see how to make it even more interesting, and funny, as well; in the real world, I was an inveterate klutz.
       I couldn’t even catch a softball, much less prance my fingers through Hanon.
       Ginny Schwartz’ only contribution to my attempts to master Hanon was to bang a rhythm on the piano top with the flat of her hand, while I tried to keep up. A true piano teacher would have played the Hanon to show how it should be done, but Ginny Schwartz's piano skills could not guarantee a flawless, stumble-less run-through of a Hanon exercise.
     Someone’s parents once complained that their child, after years of piano lessons, did not even know what a key signature was, so Ginny Schwartz had a group session where she played us a series of chords and scales, announcing what keys they were in and intimating that different keys had different moods. She knew little more about music than we did. When she did assign us pieces (ones that she had down pat) – minuets by Mozart and Bach, Offenbach’s Barcarolle, and the pièce de résistance of her repertoire, which she could play feelingly as well as correctly Beethoven’s Für Elise. None of the pieces we played had more than three sharps or three flats. Beyond that, for me anyway, and perhaps for Ginny Schwartz too, all is chaos.
       What I most enjoyed about piano lessons was sitting at the Schwartz’ dining table, while waiting for my fifteen minute lesson, making lists of composers from A to Z, one for each letter. (We were allowed to skip “X” – Iannis Xenakis not yet having veered from architecture into music – but, completist that I was, I always wrote “Xavier”, thinking that someone of that name must have put some notes on paper sometime.) Ginny Schwartz was stricter about our making our lists of composers than about anything that happened at the upright in her living room – as well she might be, with the anxiety of leaving two or three unsupervised pre-teens in her dining room.
       It’s a game I still play, sometimes, when I can’t get to sleep. Alkan, Bach, Chopin, Dukas, Elgar, Franck, Gershwin.....

]]><![CDATA[Star]]>Wed, 08 Mar 2023 18:52:37 GMThttps://www.drapersguild.com/my-life-in-music/star
           Although my parents were not unappreciative of music, I wouldn’t call them music lovers as I would the parents of many of my friends. Sitting and listening to music, whether at home (in our den where the radio-record player was) or in a concert hall, was not something they did.
          My father did have a penchant for Sigmund Romberg and Victor Herbert. He knew many of the old songs his parents must have listened to on their Victrola. Once in a while, casually, but perfectly in tune, he would insert the opening bars of one of them into a conversation.
          Give me some men who are stout-hearted men.
          When I grow too old to dream.
          Ah, sweet mystery of life.
          On certain mornings my father would sashay down the circular staircase in our front hall merrily singing, “Every day is ladies day
with me.”
          Hearing him, my mother, in the kitchen, would smile and shake her head. Once, as my father descended singing Every day is ladies day with me, my mother went out into the hall. “You may look like Rudy Vallée, Nathan,” she said, “but you don’t sound like Rudy Vallée.”
          “Looks are what count,” said my father, preening a bit.
          “Oh!” exhaled my mother, and went back to the kitchen to finish fixing breakfast.
          (I had no idea why some mornings my father sang that particular song, nor why it embarrassed my mother. It was twenty years before the penny dropped.)
 
          While they weren’t music lovers as such, Martha and Nathan Reifler loved to dance. When they were courting, they were regulars at the Cotton Club, where they danced to Cab Calloway. After they married they sometimes spent the week-end at the Hotel Pierre in New York, and went dancing at the Copacabana.
          Although there were no nightclubs in Poughkeepsie—at least, no respectable ones—there were still opportunities for them to dance. There was the Rotary Club Gala, the Vassar Hospital Fundraising Banquet, and the Republican Party Donor’s Ball (thanks to a check from my father) and the Democrats’ Donor’s Ball (thanks to a check from my mother), where they would join the County Executive and his wife, the president of Central Hudson Gas and Electric Company and his wife, a state court judge and his wife, a congressman and his wife, or perhaps even Senator Javits and his wife or Senator Lehman and his wife, on the dance floor.
          Those were the evenings that my parents underwent a fairy tale transformation. My mother, whose style was generally tailored and discreet, would appear in an elegant dress—always one I had never seen before—of a rich silky blue or deep lustrous red, set off by a pearl necklace, a small, sparking brooch and shoes of silver or gold. My father, who usually wore suits of grey or sedate brown tweed, would be in dark blue and instead of his signature bow-tie would sport a Countess Mara necktie. If it was cold out, before leaving, my mother would slip on her grey mink stole. They clearly weren’t going out for dinner at the Goldbergs or to play bridge at the Rosens or for lobster at Nick Beni’s.
 
          I saw my parents dance only once.
          Usually, after one of their evenings out, the reverberant thud with which our front door shut on their return would wake me, but in a moment I would be asleep again. One night though, only a minute or two after the front door thudded shut, a loud male voice filled the house—a single syllable. It was quickly modulated down, but it was enough to shock me wide awake. Curious, I left my bed, opened my bedroom door and stood listening. I heard the faint, but unmistakable, sounds that meant someone was twirling the dial, searching for a station, of the radio in the den: a barrage of static relieved by a snippet of dialogue, three rollicking beats of an advertising jingle, a burp of audience laughter.
          From the little experience I’d had of the phenomenon of grownups agitatedly searching the radio dial, I deduced that something important had happened: the President had died or a war had started or Mickey Mantle had broken his leg.
          In my bare feet I tip-toed to the front stairs and quietly, slowly descended. By the time I reached the bottom the sought-for station evidently had been found and from the den, through the living room, out into the front hall came the music of Benny Goodman. (It could have been any of the big bands; it was all Benny Goodman to me then.)
          I could hear my parents moving around in the living room, and then my mother’s voice. “Now,” she said.
          I approached the archway that separated the hall from the living room. Peeking around the corner I saw, in the dim light of only the lamp at the far end of the sofa, my mother and my father fox-trotting. They not only were dancing with grace and precision, but seemed to be performing, like a couple dancing in a Hollywood musical: the tall, handsome heartthrob and the beautiful raven-haired star.
          “Now,” said my mother. Then she spun away from my father as far as she could without letting go of his hand, then spun back into his arms, the hem of her dress swirling up around her legs.
          Abashed, I scurried on tiptoe upstairs and back to bed.

]]><![CDATA[Cherub]]>Sat, 16 Feb 2019 19:53:51 GMThttps://www.drapersguild.com/my-life-in-music/cherub 
       “I suppose you want to go ‘on the road,’ ” said the Dean of Students when I went to his office in 1958 to ask formal permission to take a year’s leave of absence.
       The beatniks were the antithesis to my literary pretensions and I could have taken the Dean’s reference as an insult. Instead, I saw it as only further justification for my taking a holiday from the English Department’s incessant process of categorization – intriguing, but necessarily historical, and therefore inert. I wanted to hang out in the now with new friends, downtown, a group of painters, steeped in German expressionism, who clustered around a beaming cherub, a cherub with black curls: Mimi Gross.
       Her face shining with the sly wit of one of Raphael’s cherubs,       Mimi, like any cherub, radiated charisma. Hers was intensified by the fact that she was Chaim Gross’s daughter, just as an empyrean cherub’s charisma is intensified by the fact that he or she has a nodding acquaintance with God.
       Mimi’s art was an expressionist statement of the childlike response. (See also Miro, Klee, Picasso between the wars, Chagall, Calder, et. al.). Its playfulness and ingenuousness was a tempering source of refreshment for her friends, whose expressionism sometimes tended to be overwrought.
       As befits a cherub, the tragedy that eventually befell Mimi was Miltonian. While the thieving lovers of mortals such as we, after stealing our hearts, steal our money or our homes, or steal our friends or even our children, Mimi Gross’s demon lover, Red Grooms, stole her candid, mischievous soul and clothed himself in it.
 
       The persona I was affecting in the late 50’s – the poetic roué – obligated me to make a pass at Mimi. She fended it off with a swift, charming smile, after which we became friends – good friends while she was a student at Bard College. With Mimi just up the road, I could come home to Poughkeepsie and enjoy the material comforts of the family nest and, in less time than it took me to get from my grungy sublet on 103rd Street to the Grand Street subway stop, I could, in Mimi’s room at Bard, return to the intense, absorbing, important (seemingly) drama of the downtown New York art scene. 
       Often someone else from the city would be paying her a visit and one or two of Mimi’s devotees among the students might be there as well. However, one lovely day in early Spring, I found her alone. I proposed that we put the top down on my MG and take a drive across the new bridge. (The bridge had replaced the ferry between Rhinebeck and Kingston a few years earlier but, since I had not yet driven on it, it was new as far as I was concerned,.)
       My father occasionally recounted how his father once pulled their car into a layby on old Route 9-W, on the edge of a high promontory overlooking the river and, gesturing upstream and downstream, extolled the beauties of the Hudson, calling it more magnificent than the Rhine. I had never seen the Rhine (nor had my father); driving across the Kingston-Rhinecliff Bridge that day, I felt I didn’t have to. The broad river flowing between tumbling green hills brought to mind Paul Goodman’s famous poem, The Lordly Hudson. (Well... it was famous around Columbia, anyway.) The view we beheld from the lofty bridge infused Goodman’s “lordly” with a Wagnerian stateliness.
       As it happened, WQXR was not playing Siegfried’s Rhine Journey as Mimi and I drove across the river. The music that accompanied us was Ravel’s La Valse            
        I wrote this poem about our drive:
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]]><![CDATA[Bolero]]>Tue, 26 Jun 2018 00:27:32 GMThttps://www.drapersguild.com/my-life-in-music/bolero              My parents were intelligent, educated, reflective, but not very interested in the arts. They subscribed to The Book of the Month Club, but I don’t think they read the novels it sent them. They just ended up on the bookshelves. (I may have been the only one in the family ever to remove a book from the bookshelves.) As for music and painting, they were cultured enough to recognize the high points of the canon (as it was then) – Beethoven’s 5th, Claire de Lune, The Last Supper, Picasso’s Blue Period – but as far as I know, they never went to museums and seldom attended concerts.
       While my friends’ families owned fairly extensive record collections – the Goldbergs owned dozens of Broadway show albums, for example (it still was the 78rpm era, mind you) – we didn’t have very many records. We probably would not even have had a phonograph, but since phonographs were among the products distributed by Electra Supply Co., we had to have one, a top-of-the-line model, and a few records to go with it. Among them was a performance of Ravel’s Bolero, conducted by Arthur Fiedler. It filled three sides of two twelve-inch records. (On the fourth side was Falla’s Fire Dance.)
       I first heard Ravel’s Bolero when I was six. It drove me crazy, almost literally. I was fascinated by it, but it was a tormenting fascination, painful and pleasurable at the same time. I wanted to listen to the Bolero again and again, yet it clapped my brain into an excruciating, inescapable – disagreeable, to say the least. Fortunately for my mental health, the phonograph was considered too complicated a device for me to be allowed to operate it on my own. 
       Evidently, I was not such an outlier when it came to my reaction to Bolero.
       From today’s Wikipedia:
       The premiere was acclaimed by a shouting, stamping, cheering audience in the midst of which a woman was heard screaming: “Au fou, au fou!” (“The madman! The madman!”). When Ravel was told of this, he reportedly replied: “That lady… she understood.”
       When I was seven, I contracted a severe case of measles. I must have been on death’s door – kids occasionally do die of measles – because when my fever was at its worst I was moved to my parents’ room, to my mother’s side of the bed. At night she slept beside me; my father took the chaise lounge. Dr. Rosenberg, usually pretty sanguine, must have conveyed to them that the threat of my measles was dire, otherwise they never would have disrupted the cherished and guarded intimacy of their bedroom life. (My sister and I always had to knock before entering. Often we were turned away and often the door was locked.)
       At height of my fever I became delirious. My delirium consisted of hearing in my mind’s ear Ravel’s Bolero, the same agitated melody, again and again, louder and louder, more and more insistent, a torture I could not escape, sending me spiralling down into a clamorous infinity. Accompanying this auditory hallucination was an image, a landscape – not hallucinatory like the music, but a backdrop to it.  As Bolero swelled and thundered, three Mexicans on donkeys slowly plodded across a high rickety wooden bridge spanning a deep, steep-cliffed canyon. (I knew they were Mexicans because they wore sombreros and serapes and rode donkeys.)
       (This exotic vision was a composite of scenes from cowboy movies and comic books, and from my own secret life as a dashing shooter of bad guys and a rescuer, usually while still on horseback, of pretty girls. This Superman-like transformation was accomplished by buckling on my most precious and talismanic possession: a pair of fringed white leather holsters hanging from a wide white leather belt, in which nested a pair of exquisite long-barreled cap pistols with pearl handles.)
       On they plodded, the three Mexicans, hunched over their drooping-headed mounts, never progressing beyond the center of the bridge. Watching how deliberately, stoically, they withstood the surging, maniacal melody, I saw that, unlike the heroism of Gene Autry or Roy Rogers, here was a heroism that was within my capabilities. Here was a kind of courage I could call on to defend myself against such terrors of life as Ravel’s Bolero.    
      
 I won't inflict Ravel's Bolero on you in its original glory. Here is Benny Goodman's version:
]]><![CDATA[Masterpiece]]>Thu, 01 Mar 2018 21:20:01 GMThttps://www.drapersguild.com/my-life-in-music/march-01st-2018       Most artists have a self-defeating streak. The self-defeating artist is a cliché: Van Gogh, Verlaine, F. Scott Fitzgerald. Of course, we know who they were, so they weren’t really all that self-defeating. Artists we’ve never heard of were much better at sabotaging their careers than they were. Van Gogh’s alienation of Gauguin was a classic self-defeating gesture. But if Van Gogh had been as self-defeating as some artists I’ve known, he would have made sure to alienate his brother, Theo, too.
       David Johnson, the composer friend of Charles Wuorinen, was the most dedicated and most thorough practitioner of artistic self-defeat of anyone I’ve come across. His acts of self-sabotage were works of art in themselves:  a muttered nasty word, carefully chosen and well-timed, that would ruin a party; a bitter diatribe in response to a friendly gesture (not friendly enough was often its nub) by someone in a position to help him with his career. Johnson’s alienation of Henry Brant was a classic of performance art.
       Brant, who was then a pretty big deal among academic composers, had somehow been cajoled by Wuorinen to visit Christopher St. to take a look at David’s work.
       I was there. (I can’t remember whether I’d been specially invited or if I had just happened to drop by.) As we waited for Brant, Wuorinen and Johnson were in a state of nervous tension – an unusual frame of mind for them. David kept growling that Brant wouldn’t come; Charles insisted he would, but clearly was worried he wouldn’t.
       Brant was late, but eventually footsteps on the stairs signaled his arrival. By the time he knocked on the door Charles was in jovial, companionable mode (also uncharacteristic) and David was grinning demonically, which was the most amiable facial expression he was capable of.
       Brant carried a leather portfolio, with a music manuscript which he had been working on in the train down from Bennington. Admiring that, of course, was the first item on the agenda.
       Wuorinen, in an imitation of Uriah Heep that tottered on the cusp of lampoon, which redeemed him somewhat in my eyes, made ready the drawing board. He knelt (that gesture, in itself, was atypical) more than once, to adjust its height to Brant’s short stature. He moved aside a portfolio of David’s music, some dip pens fitted with music-writing nibs, and a bottle of india ink. He angled the goose-neck lamp to fall just so.
       Slowly, fussily, Brant laid his manuscript out. Wuorinen and Johnson drew near, their heads already bobbing in delighted affirmation. David murmured something about the lamp, He raised his arm to reposition it and, in doing so, knocked over the ink bottle. The ink ran down the drawing board and over and into the pages of Brant’s music.
       Wuorinen rushed into the bathroom and came out with a roll of toilet paper, with which he tried to blot up the ink. All David could do was shrug his shoulders at Brant, his grin more demonic than ever. Brant, furious, gathered up his music which, still damp with ink, no doubt ruined the leather portfolio it had come in, and stormed out the door.
 
       Most of David’s self-defeating act were conscious and pointed. This one, possibly because Charles had arranged the Brant visitation, was, or appeared to be, accidental. Nevertheless, it was a tour-de-force of self-defeatism.
       Slapstick as that event was, and as uncomfortably anti-social most of David Johnson’s self-defeating behavior was, he also was responsible for a coup of self-sabotage so subtle, so exquisite, that even now, thinking about it, I have to smile and shake my head in wonderment.
       Somehow – either through Wuorinen’s influence or some remarkable confluence of connections – the renowned violist, Walter Trampler, commissioned David to write a concerto for him.
       David was no longer living at Christopher St., but was sub-letting a basement apartment further west, on Bank St. I bumped into him one night at The White Horse, where he was enthusiastically describing, to all in earshot, the large flying South American cockroaches which, he claimed, the couple he was sub-letting from kept as pets. I was dubious, so he invited me to come around the corner to see for myself.
       Yes, there they were – three large bugs, easily two inches across, roosting on some gauze curtains on a small window looking out onto the sidewalk. I didn’t see them fly, but I was sure they could, if they felt like it. I remained dubious about their status as household pets.
       After the etymological viewing, David sat down at the piano to play me the melody he had written for the opening theme of the viola concerto for Trampler. “It’s lovely,” David said, “it’s perfect for him. It’s the viola concerto that Mozart never wrote.”  
       This is the melody I heard. You have to imagine it played sweetly. This robotic kerthumpery is the best I could manage.
       (This melody – measures 1-6 – has stuck with me for sixty years. Measures 7 through 9 only approximate what I heard David play.)
 
       It was – it is – lovely. It could have been composed by Mozart. (In fact, for years, I suspected David of plagiarizing it, and kept expecting to come across the melody in some obscure Mozart piece.)
       Trampler, of course, hated it and cancelled the commission.
       That melody – so lovely, yet so unacceptable – was a masterpiece of self-defeatism – surely one of the greatest acts of self-sabotage that the art world has ever known or, rather, that the art world would never know about. 
 

]]><![CDATA[Wit]]>Mon, 26 Feb 2018 00:49:36 GMThttps://www.drapersguild.com/my-life-in-music/wit        I enjoy the company of egotists, if they are witty.  Blowhards whom others find obnoxious – acerbic, snide, nasty, even cruel – delight me. Persons whom others see as narcissistic put-down artists, if they are intelligent and entertaining, I see as comedian-philosophers in the tradition of Diogenes. Just such a one – at least, when I knew him – was the composer, Charles Wuorinen.  
         Unhappily, I can’t remember a single one of the thousand witty things I heard Charles say.
       Actually, I can’t remember anything anyone said back then, verbatim. If I use quotation marks, it means I am confident I am conveying the gist and tenor of something that was said, not the exact words. I can’t rise to that criterion when it comes to Wuorinen’s repartee. I am not witty enough to convey the subtleties of the gist and the appropriateness of the tenor of one of Wuorinen’s wisecracks.
       I met Charles Wuorinen in a “Health Education” course required of all Freshmen at Columbia College. It was a sex education course, actually. I already had mastered the basics, or thought I had, just as most of the fifty other Freshmen sitting around me had, or thought they had. While the professor – one of the assistant mathematics professors had drawn the short straw that semester – educated us about the actuarial data for venereal disease and such physiological details as the fact that vaginas and penises come in different sizes, while trying to keep a straight face, we pointedly fidgeted and rolled our eyes, like a bunch of Einsteins in a class on addition.
       On the first day of Health Education, I heard someone sitting behind me sum up, in a few words, its absurdity. I turned around. There was Charles Wuorinen – dressed like a grown-up, in a dark suit and tie, with a grown-up supercilious smile swimming beneath his high, pale, grown-up forehead.
       What was it he said? Let me try. “A refund, please. I bought tickets for Aeschylus, not Ionesco.” Sorry, that is the best I could do. Wuorinen would have scoffed at it, and improved on it. In fact, that kind of exchange became the basis of our relationship. I would say something I thought was clever, and Wuorinen would scoff at it and improve on it. I became Wuorinen’s straight man (pun sort of intended and sort of not) and, for a year or so, his sidekick.
 
       Wuorinen lived with his parents on Morningside Heights, but spent most of his free time in Greenwich Village, in an apartment on Christopher St. where, besides a piano, there was a large drafting board on which he would compose his music.
       Most of the time David Johnson was there too. Johnson, from California, was as rugged and handsome as a Hollywood cowboy, but forever petulant, not like a child, but petulant like a drunk throwing out nasty remarks from a table in a dark corner of a saloon. Johnson also used the drafting board to compose on, and I was never sure whose apartment it was, Wuorinen’s or Johnson’s.
       Charles and David probably were more than close friends, but the possibility that they were a couple never entered my mind. My bravado in Health Education notwithstanding, I was still a naïf, who assumed that homosexuality was a discernable trait, one that marked its practitioners as denizens of Fairyland. I was aware, for example, that Benjamin Stein, who occupied the apartment below Wuorinen’s, was queer. (“Gay” had not yet been purloined from its neat place in English usage). Benjamin was a flamboyant Village queen. He was the first I had encountered, so he seemed to me as much of a witty original (less wit; more originality) as Wuorinen.
 
       Sometimes Wuorinen, sitting at the piano, would play works in progress, singing the orchestral parts in a countertenor more raucous than sweet. Never having heard the term “countertenor,” I thought Wuorinen was singing in falsetto – until Alfred Deller broke into the classical radio stations’ playlists and his albums began to appear in the Early Music bins of record stores.
       One day, on my way back from Sam Goody’s with my first Deller record – Purcell’s Come Ye Sons of Art – as I crossed the campus I bumped into Charles. After making his de rigueur snide remarks about Deller, Purcell, and early music and English music in general, with the exception of the towering John Dowland, whose songs no one knew how to sing, Charles came up with me to my room in Livingstone Hall. There, sitting cross-legged on the floor, he warbled along with the music –  Come, come, ye sons of art, come, come away-ay-ay-ay – merrily integrating the innocence of Purcell’s birthday serenade for the Queen of England with the naughty decadence of New York in the ‘50’s. (How innocent that naughty decadence seems now.) 
 
       While the rest of us artistic types at Columbia College had just begun to sniff around the edges of the real world, Wuorinen was fully immersed in the New York music scene. He was its youthful prodigy.
       The Columbia Music Department, due either to good judgment or the necessity it felt to distinguish itself from the herd, had rejected the influence of atonalism, which had most academic music in its cold, ugly grip. What form this rejection of serialism should take split the Columbia composers into two camps: a progressive one, led by Otto Luening and Vladimir Ussachevsky, which was experimenting with electronic music, and a conservative one, inspired by Bartok’s poetic pursuit of new tonalities (instead of non-tonality). Wuorinen was in the latter camp.
       The unhappiness of Bartok’s New York years, responsibility for which rested in large part on the disregard paid to him by the Columbia Music Department in whose charge the distinguished refugee had been placed, swelled Bartok’s aura of neglected genius. There was never a hint of Wuorinen’s usual deprecatory irony when Bartok was mentioned.
       However, very little of the music I heard, when I tagged along with Wuorinen to Carl Fischer Hall, to new music concerts put together by John Cage and the pianist, David Tudor, could be described as Bartokian. It was either what I thought of then in my ignorance and, because of a lacuna in my musical taste that persists today, I still think of as plinkity-plunk, or conceptual works which I then ascribed to a gleeful nihilistic Dadaism, but I now know drew on profound metaphysical paradoxes of the East. Whatever. While I found the concerts loads of fun, putting me plump in the middle of an avant garde New York scene at the side of a friend who was on first name terms with everyone in it, I cannot remember hearing a single piece of music there that I enjoyed just for itself.
       One evening, Charles and I and David Johnson took seats in the first row of the balcony, where we could look down on the luminaries below, grinning at Wuorinen’s acerbic running commentary.
       Suddenly, Johnson whispered, “There he is.”
       “Ah,” is all that Wuorinen could find to say. My friends were clearly star-struck.
       “Who?” I asked.
       “Morton Feldman,” they whispered reverently.
       I had never heard of Morton Feldman, but if you had asked me to come up with a name for the bulky, swarthy man in the crumpled dark suit shambling down the aisle, “Morton Feldman” is exactly the name I would have come up with and, if we had been anywhere else, I would have tagged him – based on my acquaintance with similar types back in Poughkeepsie – as a lawyer with a dingy office across the street from a courthouse and clients too poor to pay their attorney’s bills, or perhaps as the owner of a women’s underwear factory.
 
       Soon Wuorinen’s music was being performed around the city and being reviewed in The New York Times. He sluffed off his bohemianism and, partly because I was finding his egotism less entertaining than before and partly because he was finding me too jejune and provincial for the company he now frequented, we stopped hanging out together.
       When, in the early 1970’s, I came across an album with a Wuorinen piece on it, I purchased it, of course. What I had heard fifteen years earlier, as Wuorinen, at the piano on Christopher St., played and warbled, were Bartokian motifs, refined by Wuorinen’s own peculiar insouciance. What I heard on the record I’d bought was plinkity-plunk.  
       Unfortunately, Wuorinen had become an all-or-nothing serialist. That is exactly the same “unfortunately” I would use to describe the influence on Stravinsky of the serialist Svengali, Robert Craft.
       Wuorinen’s wit also declined. It is not impossible to remain an enfant terrible as one ages – take Jean Cocteau, for example – but it is difficult. If, as he matures, the enfant terrible begins to take himself and his world more seriously, he becomes simply terrible.
       [I spent 1971 in London, and missed the hullabaloo described below. I heard about it later, but only in vague terms. What follows is the result of current internet research.]
       The same year that Wuorinen won the Pulitzer Prize for Music, he was refused tenure at Columbia. It was an academic scandal of the highest order that reached not only the Arts Section of The New York Times, but the pages of middle-brow magazines like The Atlantic.
       The Times published an op-ed piece by Wuorinen, complaining about his treatment at Columbia. This prompted a lengthy rejoinder by a member of the music department (“Mr. Wuorinen's arrogance, ruthlessness, and contempt for anything outside his bailiwick increasingly irritated his colleagues”) and a raft of anti-Wuorinen letters. The Times printed a dozen of these, and Wuorinen’s response. Also lengthy, it begins, “Often when you overturn a stone, you cause the little creatures crawling beneath it to scurry around furiously in indignation and alarm.”
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