Words Without Music: A Memoir (15 page)

The activity of the listener is to listen. But it’s also the activity of the composer. If you apply that to the performer, what is the performer actually doing? What is the proper attitude for the performer when he is playing? The proper attitude is this: the performer must be listening to what he’s playing. And this is far from automatic. You can be playing and not pay attention to listening. It’s only when you’re engaged with the listening while you’re playing that the music takes on the creative unfolding, the moment of creativity, which is actually every moment. That moment becomes framed, as it were, in a performance. A performance becomes a formal framing of the activity of listening, and that would be true for the player as well.

When I’m playing a concert now, I know that what I must do is to listen to the music. Now, here are some curious questions: When does that listening take place? Does it take place in the present? Do you listen to what you’re playing, or do you listen to what you’re about to play? I don’t really have a prepared answer, except my intuition is this: the best-case situation is that I’m playing, and I’m almost hearing what I’m about to play. And my playing follows that image. In other words, it’s like a shadow that precedes the object, rather than follows it. If you start playing the piano, and you’re thinking
that
way, and you’re hearing
that
way, you have a very different engagement. You’re not just playing a piece because you practice it—there are pieces that your fingers can play for you, everybody knows that. You can train your fingers so that you can even find yourself thinking about something else, which is not a good way to perform. The ideal way of performing, to my way of thinking, would be when the performer allows the activity of playing to be shaped by the activity of listening, and perhaps even by the activity of imagining listening.

ALBERT FINE DIED IN 1987,
one of the early victims of AIDS in those years when there was no known treatment. His musical legacy was left in the hands of others, like myself, who were inspired and deeply influenced by him. He was trained as a conductor at Juilliard, but I saw him conduct only once and, then, with a student ensemble.

Albert once described his whole life to me in the following sentences: “I began playing the clarinet when I was six, the piano when I was eight, composing when I was twelve, conducting when I was sixteen. Then I gave up conducting, then composing, then piano and finally clarinet.” Such a strange story in one way, but in another way, genuine and all too believable.

Albert’s death was a personal tragedy for all his friends. It was also part of what was really a worldwide tragedy. The world I knew well and lived in and worked in—the world of dance and music theater, as well as the world of painters, composers, writers, and performers of all kinds—was decimated. During the 1980s it was as if the loss of life and talent were an unrelenting wave of pain and death to a degree that was literally unimaginable to most of us. I will give a simple list of irreplaceable artists whom I knew well, and some of whom I worked with. It is meant to represent the depth and breadth of the disaster and, though small, might help to illustrate:

Albert Fine
, musician and artist, died 1987, age fifty-four

Robert Mapplethorpe
, photographer, died 1989, age forty-two

Charles Ludlam
, playwright/director/actor, died 1987, age forty-four

Ron Vawter
, actor, died 1994, age forty-five

Jack Smith
, filmmaker/playwright/actor/performer, died 1989, age fifty-six

Arthur Russell
, composer/musician/performer, died 1992, age forty

David Warrilow
, actor, died 1995, age sixty

I was personally close to four of them—Mapplethorpe, Fine, Russell, and Warrilow—sharing music and music projects together. I also knew Ludlam, Smith, and Vawter, but did not work with them. The quality of their work impressed me and had become part of the downtown theater landscape where I thrived. No doubt, if you asked anyone working in the arts during those terrible years, they would give you seven completely different names. The amount and depth of the talent lost was continuous throughout every day, week, and month of that decade. It was as if a reign of terror had been inflicted on a generation—really, it was cross-generational—of performers and art makers. It was a catastrophic time, for sure. Slowly, slowly, medicine and therapies began to appear to ease the worst of those days, and now, AIDS seems far less the death sentence it once was.

The AIDS epidemic blunted the tremendous surge of the fifties, sixties, and seventies, which had been an incredible period of sustained growth and innovation in the arts. It could not have been otherwise. Too many artists and too much talent had been lost to the disease. The loss of idealism and energy that came with the lives lost became a decisive fact. The gay community suffered most heavily. Progressive art-making has always been the haven for non-conformists and innovators, and not surprisingly the gay community has contributed splendidly and with terrific commitment to the arts.

In books of this kind, stories about talented and clever, famous and charismatic people are expected. Yet, some of the most important people to us may never have lived long enough to become famous or generally known. And perhaps they didn’t care for that kind of fame anyway. Leaving that aside, I knew so many people who died too young, and not only from AIDS, though sometimes it could have been that. John Rouson, Ray Johnson, the writer Kathy Acker, the artist Gordon Matta-Clark, and many more were like that for me. Some readers may have heard of some of them, but others remain entirely unknown. I do miss them all the same.

AT THE END OF EACH ACADEMIC YEAR
Juilliard gave out prizes to its students. As there were very few composers in that department—eight at the most—and as there were numerous annual prizes set up by former students and successful musicians, it was almost a cinch to get a prize or two. That meant $500 to $1500 every May or June. I suppose we were meant to use the money to allow for a summer of work and practice, but I didn’t always do it that way. At the end of my third year as a full-time student, when I won a $750 prize, I immediately went to a BMW motorcycle shop in the Eighties on the West Side and bought a used BMW R69 500-cc motorcycle, all black and, though used, in great shape. I must have learned to drive it on my way home that very day. I don’t remember ever having any lessons. For me, the bike offered a quick way of getting around the city and also a recreational escape from the intense job of preparing for an uncertain future.

I was living in Chinatown by then and I had a basement in the tiny house I rented. It was really only two rooms, one on top of the other and a basement big enough for the bike. I found a wide, heavy wooden plank that I would lay down on the basement steps that led to the sidewalk. I would start the bike in the basement and leave it running in neutral, then run up the steps to the sidewalk to make sure it was clear of pedestrians, then run back to the bike and ride it up the plank to the sidewalk, park it at the curb, and go back to lock the basement door. From there I drove to West Street and onto the West Side Highway. I could get to the 125th Street exit to Juilliard in twenty to twenty-five minutes.

Some of my Juilliard friends had also taken up an interest in motorcycles, and during the academic year, we kept our bikes in shape with fairly regular evening runs from 125th Street in Manhattan to Coney Island. The route was highway all the way to Ocean Parkway—West Side Highway, the tunnel to Brooklyn, and then the Belt Parkway. Except when there was snow or ice on the road, we made the trip all through the winter, though, with the wind in your face, it could be quite cold. Once in Coney Island, we would stop at Nathan’s near the boardwalk and park our bikes with the other motorcycles that lined the curb. On many nights there could be fifteen or twenty bikes parked there. Everybody had a hot dog and a Coke but me—I had a knish and a Coke because I was already a vegetarian by then. The way out was maybe thirty-five minutes, max. Then, a brief walk on the boardwalk after our stop at Nathan’s and the return ride would bring our outing to less than two hours. The regulars were Peter Schickele, Bob Lewis (a Russian language major at Columbia but practicing to become a professional oboist), and me. Sometimes we were joined by John Beal, an excellent double bass player, then a student at Juilliard.

We mainly had German bikes but there were a few British (BSAs) and Italian (Moto Guzzis) bikes among us. For no particular reason, no Harleys. But for sure the BMWs were great road machines. Nothing could be better for the long flat American highways than a BMW 500-cc or 600-cc. I made the cross-country trip—New York to San Francisco, out and back—twice in the next two years. Going out I favored the northern route—the turnpike from New York to Chicago and then pretty much Route 80 straight across Iowa, Nebraska, and Wyoming (staying on Route 80) then heading down through the top of Utah, straight across Nevada on Route 40 and, finally heading south for San Francisco.

The way home was a little different. We called it the southern route. We would pick up Route 70 just east of Los Angeles and stay on that through Arizona, New Mexico, and the panhandle of Texas. Then we headed northeast on Route 66 through Oklahoma and into St. Louis. Starting from Route 40 out of St. Louis, we would drive northeast until connecting with the Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey turnpikes. I made the journey with Michel for the first time in 1962 and the second time in 1963 with my cousin Steve.

On those long drives we always wore helmets, leather jackets, and boots, because if you fell down and you were in your shirtsleeves, you could lose the skin off your arms. The leather jacket was offered as a sacrifice to the demons of the asphalt streets that were waiting to devour you. Same thing with the shoes: the boots were to protect your ankles and your legs. If you went down and you ended up with a bike on top of you, which could happen, the leather boots would protect your feet. It would have been crazy not to wear the gear, and we weren’t crazy people. We liked riding bikes, but we were going fifty, sixty miles an hour on the highways. Basically, you’re traveling through space on nothing, really, and if the bike goes down and you go hurtling off by yourself into the ditch, you better have the right clothes on. We didn’t even consider not being equipped like that.

I only went down twice during those years, both on wet highways, and, luckily, just sliding into a ditch. The bike was not so big and, with a little help, I pulled it out and, in a few minutes, was on the highway again. We would ride for about two tanks of gas. You stopped and filled up once and you went another two hundred miles, so you could do about four hundred miles in a day. That could be about six or eight hours.

On the Road
by Jack Kerouac had just been published, in 1957, and we all had read it and no doubt were inspired to make the journey ourselves. You got a sense of the vastness of the country from the extreme distances that you had to travel. The
huge
lacunae—hours and hours and hours of empty landscapes—and the power and the beauty of the American landscape were what we were involved with, much more than the kind of people that Kerouac was writing about. His book is full of interesting characters, but that’s not what happened for us. We weren’t interested in having those kinds of experiences, we were out and abroad in America, consuming the country visually and experientially by driving through it.

On the way out we would stay in the little hotels that follow the Pacific Northwest Railroad. They were always near the train station and so were easy to find. A completely clean, decent room could be had for ten or fifteen dollars a night, or we would just stay in the town park. In those days, every Midwestern and Western town had a park, and when we came to a small town, we found out the best thing to do was to go to the police station and say, “We’re traveling across the state and we camp at night—where do you recommend we stay?”

They would say, “It’s good that you came and told us you’re here. Just go to the town park. No one will bother you there.”

The southern route on the return wasn’t so easy. The deserts were cold at night and not as inviting, but Route 70 had plenty of little motels, gas stations, and diners. Going out we would take two days to get to Chicago, two or three to get to the Rockies, and from there about two days to get into San Francisco—six or seven days in all and the same thing going back.

I HAVE SO FAR WRITTEN ABOUT TWO
important threads that were central to my learning before I went to Paris. The first was the downtown world of art and performance. The second was the uptown conservatory world of Juilliard. The third thread was no less significant for me.

During the spring and summer of 1957, when I was working at Bethlehem Steel, I would have intense periods of less than an hour when I was weighing and recording the nails produced in the nail mill. In between I would sometimes have two hours or so while I waited for the bins to fill up again. During that five-month period I read all the works of Hermann Hesse that were available in English. These included
Siddhartha
,
Steppenwolf
,
Journey to the East
, and
The Glass Bead Game
.

The late 1950s produced an important literary and cultural moment in time. As I mentioned,
On the Road
was published in 1957, with Cage’s
Silence
coming in 1961. I knew the Kerouac and Cage books almost from the day they were published, and I was far from alone in reading Hesse, who had won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946. These were all staples of the beat generation poets, readers, and activists. And, in their own way, they were also deeply connected to the music world of the time.

I want to go over this literary background because it is essential in understanding the intellectual and emotional world in which I lived. Alfred Korzybski and Immanuel Velikovsky (the iconoclastic thinker who wrote
Worlds in Collision
and
Earth in Upheava
l
) were authors, for example, whom I read while still only fifteen or sixteen. By 1957 I had become an avid reader of Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and Paul Bowles. The work of Hesse, a Swiss German writer, had, however a huge, though generally unnoticed, impact on the young Beats.