Words Without Music: A Memoir (10 page)

At least for the first few months, until I had a part-time job and a bigger home, it meant that I had no piano, but the Juilliard practice rooms were available. Since I was not a piano major or even, as yet, a matriculated student, it meant I could not reserve a regular time for using a piano. I would have to find an empty room and hold on to it until evicted by its assigned occupant. There were plenty of rooms, but there also were plenty of pianists, singers, and conductors. I was hard at work improving my piano playing and using the time to play through my compositions and exercises, but finding a room was not easy. As the Juilliard school building was open by seven a.m., my solution was to get there early and find whatever piano I could, since the good ones were so much in demand. With luck I could manage to get about three hours free, often changing rooms as the scheduled occupants arrived. Juilliard students are as driven a group of young people as you can find, and unused practice rooms would sometimes not be available.

I had registered in October, a month late, but it didn’t make any difference in the Extension Division. At the same time, I began taking other classes as a nonmatriculated student in music theory and history, known at Juilliard as L & M—Literature and Materials of Music. You were allowed to take the regular courses of the school, so I could do everything I wanted, except I didn’t have a private teacher in composition, as I was not officially in the school. In fact, I was in the adult education department, which provided a possible entrance to the school even without an undergraduate music degree.

In the late 1950s, before the construction of Lincoln Center, Juilliard was located in a building at 122nd Street and Claremont Avenue, backing onto Broadway. The first and second floors were ringed with practice rooms, above a big cafeteria on the ground floor, while the dance studios were up top. There were a number of classrooms that could hold fifteen or twenty students, with big blackboards that had the staves with five lines on them for writing music. Someone might be teaching how, say, the German sixth worked, and they would write it on the blackboard so everyone could see it.

While I was living on Eighty-Eighth Street, I found a little diner on the corner where in the evenings I could sit at a table with a cup of coffee and fill notebooks with harmony exercises and my own music. The owner and waitresses liked me, and I was left alone there to do my work.

One night I noticed an older man, perhaps in his sixties, in another booth doing the same thing—writing music! He was often there when I arrived and remained when I left. I don’t think he ever noticed me, so absorbed was he in his own work. After a while my curiosity got the better of me and I quietly approached him, looking over his shoulder to see what he was writing. It was a piano quintet (piano plus string quartet) and, from my few quick glances, it looked very well thought out and “professional.” That was a most remarkable thing for me to stumble on—an older man composing in a coffee shop exactly as I was doing.

Now, here is perhaps the most remarkable part of the story, and something I didn’t understand until many years later: I wasn’t at all upset by this nonencounter. It never occurred to me that, perhaps, it was a harbinger of my own future. No, I didn’t think that way at all. My thought was that his presence confirmed that what I was doing was correct. Here was an example of an obviously mature composer pursuing his career in these unexpected surroundings. I never knew who he was. Perhaps he was there, escaping from some noisy domestic scene—wife, kids running around, too many guests at home. Or, like me, perhaps he was simply living alone in a single room. The main thing was that I didn’t find it worrisome. If anything I admired his resolve, his composure. It was inspiring.

My first “day job” in New York—found through the placement service at Juilliard—was loading trucks for Yale Trucking, an outfit on Fortieth Street and Twelfth Avenue, facing the Hudson. The business isn’t there anymore, but for a long time, if you drove down the West Side Highway, which was elevated at the time, you would see an actual truck suspended in the air in front of a billboard that said “Yale Trucking.”

It was a very good job. I worked from three p.m. to eight p.m., five days a week. The setup was simple: they had bays with trucks in them, and each truck would go to a different place. I was given the Orange, Connecticut, truck; someone else had the one to Boston; someone else had the one to Stamford, or wherever. My only job was to take care of all the freight that went to Orange, Connecticut.

I was told that I needed some training, so for the first two hours on my first day, I was trained by an older worker. I was young and strong, so I didn’t have any trouble moving the stuff around. “Okay, son, this is how we do it,” my trainer explained. “This is your truck. You start loading it in the afternoon, and you’re done when the truck is full.” The instruction continued: “The first thing you need to know is you got to put the big, heavy things on the bottom, because if you put the light things on the bottom, the big, heavy things’ll start chasing you out of the truck. There’ll be a wall of boxes falling down on you, and you got to get out of there.”

He watched me load the heavy boxes until they were stacked almost chest high.

“Okay. Now you got the heavy ones on the bottom. You look strong, so take this one”—he picked up a smaller, lighter box—“and you see the back wall there?”

He pointed to the far back wall of the inside of the truck.

“Throw it as hard as you can at the back wall.”

He showed me how to do it—
whack
!

The box bounced off the wall and landed with a dent in it. He looked me straight in the face and said, “We don’t give a damn.”

That was my training.

I never did throw the boxes into the back of the truck. I didn’t get that big of a kick out of it. I just loaded the Orange, Connecticut, truck and went home. I had that job for a year, and that was how I made a living my first year in New York.

I found my first music friends in Stanley Wolfe’s composition class. It appeared that anyone was welcome. The class was, in fact, fairly small, and we soon knew each other quite well. There were a handful of serious and aspiring young composers like me who hoped to use the class as a way to enter the composition department of the school, but there were also amateurs, some quite elderly, who were there to pick up whatever skills they could for their composing. One man, clearly retired, was only interested in waltzes. The class was run in an open seminar fashion, with students bringing their music for comments and advice from Mr. Wolfe and reaction to their work from fellow students. I was impressed by how seriously all of the students’ work was addressed by our teacher. The “waltz man” brought in a new waltz for every class and was offered serious and good advice.

Mr. Wolfe, tall, with black hair and eyebrows and a thin face, was an excellent teacher, and by the following spring, when my audition before the composition department came around, I had composed ten to twelve new pieces that the faculty composers looked at. I was anxious more than nervous. Stanley Wolfe had already let me know that I was doing pretty well. He had really guided me in what I should be doing in order to prepare for that audition, which was, in effect, an entrance audition.

The letter of admission didn’t come for about ten days, but when it did, not only was I admitted to the school, I was also given a small scholarship. It was very encouraging: in other words, they wanted me to come. This scholarship was a special nod of approval that let me know that I didn’t get in by the skin of my teeth. From then on, I had part scholarships, part fellowships, and, somewhat surprisingly, a little bit of money from Uncle Willie, who finally relented and began sending me a couple hundred dollars a month, which was a big help.

I knew by then that moving from the Extension Division to the regular school curriculum was not at all common, but I had worked very hard that year and had been able to make a good case for myself to the composition faculty. I was accepted as a regularly enrolled student in the composition department for the fall semester of 1958. Once admitted, I took only music courses and worked directly toward a diploma, which I accomplished in two years.

William Bergsma was my composition teacher. No more “classes.” One-on-one instruction was available now that I was in the department. Bergsma was still a young man when I knew him. He had made a name for himself with an opera
The Wife of Martin Guerre
, as well as a host of orchestra and chamber works. Bergsma and I got along well and I was soon absorbing everything I could in the school—the L & M classes, a second major in piano, and regular attendance at the orchestra rehearsals, as well as permission to audit conducting classes taught by Jean Morel, who was a regular conductor at the Metropolitan Opera in New York and himself a superb musician.

Bergsma was considered an up-and-coming composer in the Americana school of Aaron Copland and Roy Harris. I was already a tonalist by then, so he was the right teacher for me at that time, and was highly encouraging. He showed me what he called tricks, which often were very simple things, like how to set up a page of music so that it was easier to read, and how to review a piece by taking all the pages, putting them on the floor, and standing on a chair and looking down at the whole piece at once. That way you didn’t have any page turns. I had a great affection for him because he took it so seriously. In fact, I would compose my first string quartet with him.

We would decide together what I would write, and then I would work on it until it was complete. Then we would go on to the next piece. With him, I was composing a piece every three or four weeks. There was one student at the school, a dedicated dodecaphonist, and he could spend a whole semester writing two pages of music. He almost got kicked out. At the end of the year, you were supposed to hand all your pieces in to a jury of composers, and you could flunk out at that point. It was impossible for me to flunk out—I had written too much music. I had the naïve but probably correct idea that if I wrote enough music, I would start to get better.

My compositions at Juilliard sounded rather like those of my teachers. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, composers had to make a big decision, whether they were going to write twelve-tone music or tonal music. I had already made that decision in Chicago, so it was no longer an issue. I was not going to write twelve-tone music any longer. I had done that already. As far as I was concerned, I was over it. Now I was interested in the music of Copland, Harris, Schuman, and Thomson. They were very good composers who dominated the American music scene at the time, and they were my models. Their music was tonal the way a popular song would be. It had melodies that you could sing. It could be beautifully orchestrated and have surprising harmonies in it—it didn’t use routine harmonic phrases. It could be polyrhythmic and polytonal, but it was always meant to be heard and remembered, which was very hard to do with the European twelve-tone style of music.

During the period I was coming of age, these two schools—the American tonal school and the European-American twelve-tone school—competed for dominance. There were bitter arguments fought out in the academies, magazines, and concert halls. For a while, it appeared that the twelve-tone school had prevailed. However, almost any young man or woman now writing music in the new millennium has embraced an openness and tolerance to fresh and new musical styles that make those earlier battles seem distant, quaint, and ill-conceived.

Though I was a very busy and dedicated music student, that wasn’t all I was up to. I had become quickly engaged with discovering New York City. After moving out of my Eighty-Eighth Street room, I ended up moving all over the Upper West Side, usually within walking distance of Juilliard. Soon, I was spending twenty dollars a week for a larger room with a small kitchenette. Along the way I met a young man the same age as myself working as a super on West Ninetieth Street. Michel Zeltzman had just emigrated from France with his mother and (new) American stepfather. As a young Jewish boy with red hair and blue eyes, Michel had spent the war years hiding in a Catholic boarding school somewhere in the South of France. His stepdad was an American soldier who had been stationed in Paris after the war. His own father had been deported from Paris by the occupying German army and sent to die in one of the death camps set up to exterminate Jews, gypsies, and other “undesirables.” In exchange for putting out the garbage and keeping track of the people in the building on Ninetieth Street, Michel had gotten the ground-floor apartment there free.

We became friends on the spot. He was then an undergrad at Columbia with an aptitude for acting and a love of literature. Michel had an inborn reverence for culture, history, and art, and it was a very European point of view. He began teaching me French right away, so that by the time I went to Paris seven years later I had a working knowledge of the language. He would also introduce me to the work of Louis-Ferdinand Céline and Jean Genet, both of whom used a French so rich in
argot
that I never was able to read them in the original. Besides French and literature, Michel and I discovered all sorts of things together—motorcycles, yoga teachers, vegetarianism, anything to do with India or music, as well as many new friends who were musicians, dancers, actors, writers, and artists. For a time he worked at the French Cable Company down on Wall Street. It was a night job and during countless evenings we roamed around lower Manhattan before he was off to work at midnight.

From the time I moved to New York in 1957 until I left in 1964, Michel was part of my life. Whenever I talk about the things I was doing during that period, he was always there. During the time I was away from New York, from 1964 to 1967, living in Paris and traveling to India, Michel moved to Baltimore to work as an assistant to my cousin Steve, by now a young doctor doing research on fish brains. After some time, Michel decided to become a nurse and began taking courses. It was only years later that I found out that part of Michel’s nursing education was taken care of through the organization that my mother, in the years just after the war, had become involved with, working to resettle families, mainly Jewish refugees, in the States. This organization provided scholarships for children of the emigrants for university education. Michel and his family weren’t emigrés from the war years, but came a bit later. Ida never mentioned her involvement to me, but my sister, Sheppie, knew about it and later told me of the connection. Then I remembered that Ida would frequently ask about Michel, wanting whatever news of his life I could give her.