Words Without Music: A Memoir (13 page)

I now had my own piano at home. While living in the West Ninety-Sixth Street apartment I found upright pianos, free to be taken away, in a local Buy-Lines (a popular “for sale” newspaper). All that was needed was a small rented truck for a few hours and three or four friends. We only had to wrestle the pianos down several flights of stairs, onto the truck, and when we arrived at Ninety-Sixth Street, up six more flights. I recall now that after a few months I was offered a better piano, and we did the same thing again, ending up stacking the second piano in front of the first. The problem was that my place was a railroad apartment and the hallway, being part of the rooms, was quite narrow. So a double stack of pianos was as far as you could go.

The discipline needed for composing was a different matter altogether and required more ingenuity. My first goal was to be able to sit at a piano or desk for three hours. I thought that was a reasonable amount of time and, once accomplished, could be easily extended as needed. I picked a period of time that would work most days, ten a.m. to one in the afternoon. This allowed for my music classes and also my part-time work at Yale Trucking.

The exercise was this: I set a clock on the piano, put some music paper on the table nearby, and sat at the piano from ten until one. It didn’t matter whether I composed a note of music or not. The other part of the exercise was that I didn’t write music at any other time of the day or night. The strategy was to tame my muse, encouraging it to be active at the times I had set and at no other times. A strange idea, perhaps, undertaken as an experiment. I had no idea whether it would work.

The first week was painful—brutal, actually. At first I did nothing at all during those three hours. I sat like an idiot without any idea of what to do. When the three hours were up I bolted for the door and practically ran out into the street, so relieved was I to be away from the piano. Then, slowly, things began to change. I started writing music, just to have something to do. It didn’t really matter whether it was good, bad, boring, or interesting. And eventually, it
was
interesting. So I had tricked myself into composing . . . something.

After a few weeks I found the transition from near madness and frustration giving way to something resembling attention. It probably took a little less than two months to get to that place. I wouldn’t say it was easy, but it was pushing me toward a place I wanted to be. From then on, the habit of attention became available to me, and that brought a real order to my life.

The second part of my plan worked as well. That is, I was never tempted to compose outside of times I set for myself. At the beginning I was not at all flexible about my work times. For example, if I would wake up at night with the thought of writing music, I simply declined to do so. This somewhat strange habit persisted as part of my working life for more than forty years. Only recently have I begun to work in a more casual way—sometimes going to my music room in the dead of night for a few hours of unscheduled work. And now I no longer follow any particular schedule at all. In terms of my overall productivity, I haven’t noticed any change whatsoever. As far as I can tell, the amount of music produced and the general quality is about the same.

Once I was accepted in the composition department, I began to make friends all over Juilliard. There was a very active dance department led by the Martha Graham Company as well as by José Limón, developer of the “Limón technique,” who was often present in the school. The resident teacher of choreography was Louis Horst, a most renowned dance personage. On a number of occasions I contributed music, playing the flute for his dance composition class. He would sit curled up in an armchair, wearing a rumpled beige suit, not looking at all like a dancer. I quickly learned that young dancers are always in need of new music and I eagerly began writing for them.

In the same way, Conrad Sousa, a young composer just my age, began leading me toward writing music for theater productions. He was well connected on the West Coast and also contributed music for theater productions at the McCarter Theater in Princeton, New Jersey. Once, when he was occupied with other work, he sent a job my way: to write music for Molière’s
Scapin
. I was paid a total of twenty-five dollars, and I had to compose and record the work myself. I was delighted to find, even during my first student years at Juilliard, that theater and dance people wanted and needed music in a way that no one else did. In this way, a rhythm of work and collaboration began to take root in me at this early stage.

These works were outside of the regular composing I did with my first Juilliard teacher, William Bergsma, and my second, Vincent Persichetti, with whom I continued after my diploma in 1960, until I completed my master’s degree in 1962. I don’t remember ever showing them these works for dance and theater.

Persichetti was a very lively teacher, much sought after by the young composers. He was a short, muscular man, brimming with talent and energy. Unfortunately he had a habit of taking an unfinished piece that I would bring him and demonstrating to me, with his marvelous piano technique, how it could be completed. I soon stopped bringing him “unfinished” pieces, which was not good for either of us. It meant he didn’t get the fun of finishing them for me and I wasn’t able to benefit from his suggestions—which he was not generous with anyway. Apart from that, Vincent, as he liked to be called, and I got along very well. In my last years at Juilliard, he steered several pieces of mine to the small music-publishing company, Elkan-Vogel, where he was the editor. That firm eventually became part of the Theodore Presser publishing company and those early works—juvenilia, really—are still there today.

Persichetti was a formidable pianist who often played concerts of his own music. Yet at Juilliard there was a division between music theory and music practice. Once I was officially in the composition department, I was told I wouldn’t need to play the piano anymore, as there were very good players at the school who would perform my music for me. I was given a piano teacher for several years, but no one in the composition department was in the least interested in the possibility that I might want to be a composer-performer. I have no idea where the notion came from that performance need not be an essential part of a composer’s skills. Making the practice of music and the writing of music separate activities was poor advice. It’s a misunderstanding about the fundamental nature of music. Music is, above all, something we play, it’s not something that’s meant for study only.

For me, performing music is an essential part of the experience of composing. I see now that young composers are all playing. That was certainly encouraged by my generation. We were all players. That we would become interpreters ourselves was part of our rebellion.

THE CAFETERIA AT JUILLIARD WAS THE PLACE
to meet people and make new friends. My fellow student composers were all young men—at this point, there were scarcely any women composers around, in or out of school.

Peter Schickele, a year older than me, was one of my best friends there. He was a hilariously funny guy as well as being a very talented composer. It was at Juilliard that he developed his alter ego, P. D. Q. Bach, the illegitimate twenty-second son of J. S. Bach. Every spring at the Juilliard end-of-the-year concert Peter would appear on stage in period costume and wig and play his baroque, Bachesque compositions. He always made sure that they were well written and well thought out, and if you knew anything about music, they were doubly funny because he did it so perfectly. It wasn’t just that he sounded like Bach, or like a version of Bach—P. D. Q. Bach was clearly gifted, and Peter
was
P. D. Q. Bach.

Peter’s brother, David, was a filmmaker, and David and I would help build the invented instruments Peter used in his concerts. Peter would come up with the title of a piece and then write the piece. For example, in New York there used to be a chain of automats called Horn & Hardart, where the food was dispensed from behind small coin-operated glass doors. You’d put in a nickel or a dime, you’d turn the handle, the glass door would open up, and you would take out your coffee, sandwich, or dessert. I ate there all the time because they had a thirty-five-cent lunch special.

Well, Peter wrote a Concerto for Horn & Hardart. We knew what the Horn was, but no one knew what a Hardart was, so David and I had to build the Hardart. Peter decided that the Hardart looked like a keyboard, but the keyboard would be made of toy instruments: little whistles and harmonicas and accordions and triangles—whatever could make pitches. Each note would be made from a different toy, but Peter could look at the keyboard and see what the note was: it would be an F or a G or a C, but it might be coming through a whistle or a claxon or a horn.

“Okay, you guys,” he said. “You build the Hardart. I’m going to be in this room over here writing the piece for it.” He would run in and look at what we were building, and then he would run back and write in the other room.

Peter was full of such jokes, but we were full of jokes, too. We made a two-octave chromatic instrument that looked like a keyboard, but we didn’t tell Peter that it was a transposing instrument. We did not use a common transposition, like a French horn in F, or a trumpet in B flat. We chose a transposition to an imaginary instrument in E. That meant a C would sound as an E, and an F would sound as an A, and so on.

“It doesn’t work!” Peter exclaimed when he finally tried to play the Hardart.

“Peter!” I said. “You didn’t ask us. It’s a transposing instrument. It’s in E.”

“Oh my god,” he exclaimed.

So not only did he have to play the Hardart, he had to transpose it at sight, during the performance. That was one of the funnier things that we did with him.

Peter later developed P. D. Q. Bach into full-length concerts, and he toured the country. Within two years, he was actually making a living with it. Long past our Juilliard days, after my opera
Einstein on the Beach
had appeared in New York, Peter called me up and said, “Look, Phil, would you be offended if I did a piece called
Einstein on the Fritz
?”

“No, no, Peter, absolutely not. Go ahead and do it.”

“Would you come and hear it?”

“Of course.”

What I didn’t reckon on was that Peter reserved me a seat in the center of the audience at Carnegie Hall, where everyone could see me. And then he had a spotlight on me. So not only did he do
Einstein on the Fritz
, but I was there, and everybody knew I was there, and everyone was watching. The music turned out to be a concerto in three movements that Peter made sound like P. D. Q. Bach’s music, but a minimalist version of it. And the piece itself—would you believe it—kept repeating itself. It seemed to never be able to get past the first measure.

THE STUDENT BODY AT JUILLIARD WAS NOT VERY LARGE,
numbering perhaps five hundred students. This included instrumentalists, pianists, singers (mainly in the opera program), and conductors. The dance department was not that large, with certainly no more than sixty students at any time. The composers never numbered more than eight in any year and the conductors perhaps a few less. There were always enough players for several orchestras, and the chorus was made up of singers, composers, pianists, and conductors.

For us, the chorus was a two-year requirement. That meant there was a pretty good-sized regular chorus available every year, and it allowed the school to prepare three or four large choral works with chorus and orchestra. This could, and did, include complete performances of the Verdi
Requiem
, Masses by Mozart, Beethoven, and Bach, and usually several modern pieces. I also first heard and performed the music of Luigi Nono, the son-in-law of Arnold Schoenberg, and Luigi Dallapiccola, both Italian modernists. As well, we often read through new works by the faculty composers and even William Schuman, the school’s president.

At first I resented the three chorus rehearsals every week. I soon got over that and began to take a keen interest in the music we were singing. I was in the bass section but, as there was plenty of rehearsal time, I passed the hours also singing the soprano, alto, and tenor parts, displaced by an octave as necessary. Nobody seemed to mind, and in this way I came to have a complete understanding of vocal writing for a full chorus.

Abraham Kaplan was our young, charismatic conductor. As he often segregated vocal parts when working on the intonation (pitch), I was able to hear very clearly how the voice movement and part writing was realized. These were the great choral classics, mind you, and all in all some of the best training to be had at Juilliard. However, you had to know this and pay attention to benefit from the rehearsals. Almost twenty years later, when I was composing the choral music for
Satyagraha
, I became gratefully aware of those lessons. By then I knew absolutely how to make a chorus “sound,” where to “divisi” the voices, how to support them with the orchestra—all manner of techniques of a necessary and deeply musical nature. All the choral music I made for operas—
Einstein on the Beach
,
Satyagraha
,
Akhnaten
—symphonies, and a cappella (voices alone) choruses grew out of those experiences during my Juilliard chorus years. I had acquired, without intending to, an early and reliable knowledge of basic vocal writing. The skills and craft of writing for solo voices was something I learned later and with the help of the singers I worked with. Vocal writing is not easily learned. Time and quite a lot of coaching and practice were necessary for me to arrive at a reasonable degree of ability.

I began another lifelong study—writing for orchestral instruments as soloists or as players in chamber or full orchestra. In this case, I did have personal experiences playing in orchestras, from playing in church orchestras or in high school musicals. Most of that was flute-playing, which I could handle pretty well. During my two years of high school, I had also played in marching bands—my way of getting into football games and having a very good seat at the games themselves. I was not big enough to make the team, so music was my form of participation. In the marching bands I sometimes played a bass trumpet—a one-valve instrument probably only used in bands of that kind. However, that did give me a physical, real-life experience of playing in a brass ensemble. That kind of firsthand contact with an instrument is invaluable and really can’t be deeply learned or duplicated in any other way. Writing for percussion instruments, all of them, came easily to me, as I had been part of a percussion ensemble from the age of eight, when I was studying flute at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore. That left the string sections—double bass to violin. Being able to write well for string instruments was high on my list of skills I needed to acquire, though this list was made by and for myself.