Words Without Music: A Memoir (12 page)

I’m sure that David had never met John. I knew David from Paris and John from New York. Anyway, the message from John was that he had been present at some recent concerts of mine and wanted to tell me what he thought of the music.

For me that was the end of the conversation. I told David that I had a message for John, and would he please pass it back to him through the psychic. My message was that I had no interest at all in talking to dead people. Any more conversations would have to take place in some future time when, perhaps, we might meet. I never heard from the psychic or John again.

BESIDES JOHN, THERE WERE A NUMBER
of other artists in the Front Street building. One with whom I became most friendly was Mark di Suvero, who occupied the space directly above me, on the third floor. I met him soon after I moved in. I was at home working one afternoon and heard a loud clanking moving up the stairs. I went to the door and saw a wiry young man with a reddish, scraggly beard being carried up in a wheelchair by a couple of men. He seemed very pleased to meet me, so I invited him in for some coffee. I found out then that he was a sculptor and had recently had a crippling accident—he had fallen down an empty elevator shaft. It had obviously slowed him down but he was far from stopping. He was delighted to find a musician-composer living just below him, and we had a great time together. On his way home, he would often stop at my place, and we would talk and sometimes listen to music, beginning a friendship that has lasted until the present.

At that time, when Mark was just back from the hospital, I heard some pretty heavy work being done above me. However, until the afternoon when Mark invited me up to his loft, I didn’t know what to expect. After all, this was someone in a wheelchair, so what could it be? What I saw were a number of very large, bold pieces made from giant beams of wood formed into freestanding sculptures, accented throughout with huge iron chains. I think I almost fainted. It was very strong, it was abstract, and near overwhelming, crammed into a studio that, though twice the size of mine, could barely accommodate the work. Mark sat there in his wheelchair with a huge grin on his face. He couldn’t have been happier when he saw my amazement.

I knew he was getting ready for a big show uptown at Dick Bellamy’s Green Gallery. I went to Mark’s opening and was again impressed. At the time, Dick Bellamy was also a young man, slim and soft spoken, and known for having a great “eye” for young artists and new work. I would not meet him again until almost ten years later, when I was working for Richard Serra as his studio assistant and Bellamy was one of the first people to notice and appreciate Richard’s work.

It would not be until 1977, though, that Mark and I finally worked together, when I contributed the music for a film made by François de Menil and Barbara Rose about Mark and his sculpture. The film follows him making a number of large outdoor pieces, and my job was to compose music for each of the works that were a subject of the film. It eventually became one of my early recordings under the title
North Star
(
Etoile Polaire
being the original name of one sculpture in the film). But all that happened almost twenty years after we first met. Once the film was completed and the music I had composed was available on LP and tape, Mark told me that he took particular pleasure in listening to that music with headphones while he was in his crane working on new sculpture.

I would stay on in Front Street for another year before moving into a small house on Park Street in Chinatown (that whole block is gone now, having been absorbed into a parks development project across from the Tombs—the affectionate name New Yorkers give to the temporary jail set up across from the city’s criminal courts building). Before then, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, all manner of artists lived near the Fulton Fish Market. Rumor had it that Jasper Johns and Cy Twombly had lofts down there, though I never saw them in the neighborhood. I recently read that Robert Rauschenberg had been on Front Street in the mid-1950s, after his Black Mountain College days. I didn’t meet him there, but did so only a few years later when he was on Lafayette Street, just above Houston Street. By then (and this was much later, in the mid-1980s), I was nearby on Second Avenue, while Robert Mapplethorpe and Chuck Close were on Bond Street, Robert Frank and June Leaf were on Bleecker Street, and Jasper was in the Bank on Houston Street.

In short order, I had adopted the living style of the artists I knew, and this as early as 1960. I learned an enormous amount about art, performance, music, dance, and theater from being part of that world and, when I returned from Paris in the spring of 1967, that was the world I returned to.

My real introduction to that world had happened years earlier, while still at school in Chicago and visiting Baltimore in the summertime. During that time, Bob Janz, a young painter, and his wife, Faye, were living in downtown Baltimore. I met them through Bill Sullivan, a poet who had been part of the Phalanx group. Janz was an American born in Belfast. I suppose he was largely self-taught, but he was able to talk about paintings—their structure, content, and history—in a most articulate way. He is still painting today and living in New York.

When I first encountered him, I was only fifteen years old and Bob was four years older. I often joined him when he made regular visits to Washington, D.C., which was only forty miles from Baltimore. He would find someone to drive us or we would take a bus—either way it took an hour. Our destination was the Phillips Collection, which was located in a large private home near Dupont Circle. The Freer Gallery, a part of the Smithsonian, with a collection mainly of traditional Chinese and Japanese paintings, was also nearby. Janz could also speak quite elegantly about the Asian paintings at the Freer, but the paintings at the Phillips were the main attraction for us. Duncan Phillips had built up a private collection during his lifetime that turned out to be a most remarkable selection of contemporary work, ranging from the impressionists and early Picasso to ground-breaking work by American painters of the fifties and sixties. Besides a roomful of paintings by the Swiss artist Paul Klee, the Americans included Milton Avery, Arthur Dove, and Georgia O’Keeffe, all of whom I admired. The painters, however, whom I loved and who were wonderfully represented in the collection were Morris Louis, known to us as a Washington painter, as well as Kenneth Noland, and Mark Rothko.

For me, Rothko was a revelation. There was a small room at the Phillips that had three of his beautiful paintings. These did not resemble the dark paintings he would make later for the Rothko Chapel in Houston, but were huge amorphous squares, one above the other and only two to a canvas. They were painted in warm shades of orange and red. The effect was of an organic pulsating canvas. I could, and did, sit in front of these paintings for long stretches, bathing in their strength and wisdom.

The works of other younger Americans such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Franz Kline were not easily seen in Baltimore and Washington. I didn’t see full, life-size paintings of theirs until after I came to live in New York in 1957. Though the Phillips did have a few small paintings of Franz Kline, they were not on the scale of the large dynamic works I saw later.

Janz knew the work of these young abstract expressionists, and he made sure that I knew them as well, even if only through catalogues and reproductions in art books. I was entranced. Janz, himself an accomplished and sensitive painter, tried some action painting of his own. He would take a large roll of brown wrapping paper, lay out a six-by-four-foot piece of it on his studio floor, paint his body red, and lay down, twisting left and right until he had made a good impression on the paper.

About that time the
Baltimore Sun
had gotten wind of Pollock’s revolutionary painting techniques, dripping and squeezing oil paint over an entire canvas. The art critic of the paper, like many people in those days, was shocked and outraged by this latest affront to Art. He went to the Baltimore Zoo and somehow got permission to work with one of the chimpanzees in the monkey house. The chimp was given a large canvas and tubes of oil paint. It didn’t take long for him to squeeze the paint onto the canvas. This was photographed and put on the front page of the newspaper with a headline that read something like “Baltimore’s Own Jackson Pollock Is Alive and Well and Is a Chimpanzee in Our Own Zoo.” This kind of thing was going on all over the country, especially among art lovers. Usually it was left as a simple claim such as “My two-year-old daughter can paint better than Pollock.”

I rushed over to Janz’s studio to show him this latest attack on Art—on the front page of my hometown newspaper, no less. He studied the newspaper photo for a while. Then in a calm and dismissive manner he said, “The trouble with the paintings is that the chimp is not a very talented painter.” The humor of that moment calmed me down.

I remained a great fan of these abstract expressionist painters for a long time. However, a show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York during the winter of 1959–60 titled “16 Americans” made me, once again, rethink the limits of modern painting. The exhibition included works of Jasper Johns, Bob Rauschenberg, Frank Stella, and Louise Nevelson—a long and excellent list.

When I saw Stella’s paintings in the show, I was at first deeply shocked. After all, my head was still filled with Pollock and de Kooning. The next moment I had a deeper realization: the rate of change in the visual arts world was far, far quicker than could ever happen in the music world. The world of painting expected innovation and new ideas, but in the world of music, which was a much more conservative environment, there was no cachet at all in having new ideas. The music world was still obsessed with “new music” that was more than fifty years old. This was a liberating moment for me.

Modern jazz and experimental music
did
offer examples of change and dynamic development. The gifted geniuses of jazz—Charlie Parker and Bud Powell, to mention only two—were, like their counterparts in the abstract expressionist world, playing their music of deep expression with energy and at high speed. In the late 1950s we began to hear the new “cool jazz” as played by Miles Davis, Gerry Mulligan, Bob Brookmeyer, and Chet Baker. It was equally complex but in a very different aesthetic—sometimes more reflective and laid-back and always more distant. On the other hand, Ornette Coleman, a younger player, was working in a more abstract harmonic language than most jazz, yet he maintained a drive to his music in which you could hear blues and contemporary jazz at its root. In this way, he was the most radical.

In experimental music, John Cage, along with Morton Feldman, Christian Wolff, and Earle Brown were offering a music also cooler in feeling and springing from different principles than the twelve-tone school of Boulez, Stockhausen, and Berio. Later I got to know John and his music friends quite well, but that would not be until the late 1960s.

Apart from jazz and experimental art music, it was largely the art world that gave permission to a younger generation to change the rules by which we worked. The difficulty was that at that moment I simply didn’t have the technical musical skills to make the work I wanted to make. It was a lack and a need that I was determined to address. And as soon as possible.

AT THE SAME TIME AS I WAS SETTLING INTO
the sometimes overstimulating art scene, I was up at Juilliard every day pursuing my music education and training. Those Juilliard years lasted until the spring of 1962—five years of determined and intensive work. At the beginning, with my first year in the Extension Division, I was painfully aware of how defective my basic skills were. Whatever I had accomplished in playing the flute or piano, and especially in composition, was the result of youthful enthusiasm. In fact, I had a very poor grasp of real technique.

The school was quite remarkable in one way, bringing together a brilliant, accomplished faculty and an extremely talented and competitive student body. It was very clear to me from the outset that everyone at Juilliard—faculty and students alike—was extremely busy with his or her own work. The environment was ideal for work, but short on real guidance and direction. It seemed in those days that the strategy of the school was to find really talented young people, throw them together for four or five years in a kind of musical pressure cooker, and then to summarily graduate them into the “real world.” We were not given any education courses at Juilliard, and so we weren’t qualified to teach in any New York state schools. But we were in New York City, a real-life sink-or-swim environment. In other words, Juilliard had a very high-standard entrance exam and a rather casual graduating process. The funny thing is, given the passion and eagerness of the students and the example of a highly successful faculty, that the system actually worked as well as it did.

I had two things in my favor. First, I had just come from the University of Chicago—a whole universe of extremely smart, hardworking people. Second, there was nothing else I truly wanted to do. I never decided to become a musician, I simply followed the only path that was available to me, and therefore I accepted a lot of hard work and a lot of what other people would call deprivation. It didn’t bother me at all, because I was so focused on the work itself.

I realized right away that I needed to quickly develop impeccable work habits. In that regard, the University of Chicago hadn’t helped. Though it was similar to Juilliard in having a very bright group of youngsters thrown together, the system of exams-at-the-end-of-the-year didn’t encourage disciplined work habits.

I approached my problem in several different ways. First, I needed to improve my piano playing very quickly. Though Marcus Raskin had been a really excellent piano teacher, the fact that I started with him when I was fifteen, not five, meant I had a lot of time to make up. By my first full year at Juilliard, I had a regular piano teacher and I was in the practice rooms early every day. I needed the sounds of others practicing to goad me into practicing myself. I could get in several hours a day that way, which was all the time I had for that part of my work.