Words Without Music: A Memoir (16 page)

It was a time of awakening. The culture encouraged you to make a profound change in your life through the way you saw the world. The reason Hermann Hesse was so interesting was his vision of a transcendental life. He was in between the East and the West, and he was talking about a path, a way of life, that took you beyond the visible world.

Up against the suggestions of transformation and transcendence to be found in Hesse’s work, there were only two other European movements worth acknowledging. The first was led by the existentialist writers, known popularly through the writing of the French authors Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. Their work was heavily nihilistic and oddly narcissistic, and these sentiments simply did not play well to the aspirations of a new and powerful generation of Americans who came up after World War II. Their books struck me as full of self-pity and despair at the meanness of their lives and their inability to find value therein, and my generation was impatient with all that. Though they were known and even somewhat admired, they were, like the romantic but gloomy films of Ingmar Bergman, simply too dark and hopelessly lost for the new American spirit that was about to make itself known.

The second and quite formidable influence following the war was the work of Bertolt Brecht, often accompanied by the neo-cabaret music of Paul Dessau and Kurt Weill. I don’t mean to be dismissive of these composers. They are both wonderful, and very little theater music today can match the expressivity and power of their music. I am referring to their largely mannerist style, which, though very popular, sets a limit to its emotional range. In any case, Brecht, in my opinion, was largely misunderstood. His idea of epic theater was always fundamentally political in nature. His main characters in
Mother Courage
or
Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny
, for example, were not meant to be heroic figures, but poor, lost victims to the unfeeling power of a capitalistic state. Brecht, who died in 1956, never lived to see the failure of his own Communist ideology as it played out in Eastern Europe and China. It’s a strange irony that his most popular works in the States,
The Threepenny Opera
and
Mother Courage
, themselves ironic in nature, are now presented as triumphs of the human spirit. I truly don’t think that was what Brecht had in mind.

The more radical authors—in particular, Jean Genet and Samuel Beckett—were a different matter altogether. I would get to know their work much better in Paris, but I had already been reading them in New York. By the end of the 1950s I already knew Beckett’s novel trilogy of
Molloy
,
Malone Dies
, and
The Unnamable
, and his plays
Waiting for Godot
and
Endgame
.

What I liked about Genet, author of
Our Lady of the Flowers
(a novel) and
The Balcony
,
The Blacks
,
The Maids
, and
The Screens
(plays), was his exuberance and his complete disdain for all things conventional. There was a vitality in his writing that appealed to me, and it was certainly true as well of Beckett, an Irish writer who was the most dire, the very grimmest of the modernists, but even so, had a joyfulness about him. What you found in Beckett that was so refreshing was a clearing of the decks. He wasn’t interested in any kind of artifice or pretense at all. What you ended up with was a joy in his writing that I
loved.
It was also very, very funny. What I embraced was the way he swept past the cobwebs of so-called modernism and just got rid of it. Dumped it. Cleaned the table off and said, “Okay, what’s really here?”

In spite of my constant reading, I wasn’t a literary person. I didn’t study books and I didn’t take courses in literature. I pursued literature as a personal refreshment. My opinions didn’t need to be authenticated or verified by anyone else. I read books for pleasure and their transformative power.

For me, Beckett’s and Genet’s worldview was much closer to Hesse’s—being more radical in intent and closer to Hesse’s ideas of transformation and transcendence. Though there was a strong political dimension to the Beats’ activism, it was, at heart, a philosophy of “going beyond” the ordinary world and, at its root, a strategy for transformation. As Hesse is not read much these days, the impact on young people some fifty to sixty years ago may be largely unknown. But missing his profound impact on that moment is missing a vital part of that story. And that is my story as well.

Michel and I were very much in the sway of these ideas, so fresh at the time. We were eager to make them an active part of our lives, to begin our own “journey to the East.” Accordingly, we decided to take up the study of yoga. The problem was that in 1958 there were simply no public yoga studios in New York, let alone reliable teachers of any competence. From time to time, starting after the World’s Parliament of Religions in 1893 in Chicago, where Swami Vivekananda had created a sensation with his opening speech, there had been visiting swamis and yogis in North America. But few schools had emerged, and no reputations had been established. Better known, perhaps, was Yogananda, whose
Autobiography of a Yogi
appeared in 1946. It was a wonderfully accessible book but, again, in terms of a wide audience, largely unknown at the time. However, it is probably Yogananda’s book that Michel and I had read and had led us to search for a practicing yogi in New York.

Finally, after having had no success in finding such a teacher, I had the idea to look in the white pages of the New York City telephone book under the letter
Y
. There we found one entry—Yogi Vithaldas! We called him, made an appointment, and a few days later were at his apartment door in a high-rise on the Upper East Side. We had no idea what to expect. “Yogi” at that point was just a word to us. We had no idea what a yogi did or how or where one might live.

Yogi Vithaldas answered the door, a man in his late forties, barefoot and in loose-fitting Indian-looking clothes.

“Ah, my
chelas
have finally arrived,” he said when we walked in, greeting us with open arms.

Chelas
means “students” or “followers,” but Michel and I didn’t know that at the time. He marched us into his living room and gave us our first yoga lesson on the spot. In time I came to realize that his clients were mostly Upper East Side ladies looking for an exercise program, so he was delighted to have us as his students.

It was a decisive meeting. We both now had a yoga program we followed every day. Yogi Vithaldas was a teacher of hatha yoga—the yoga
asanas
or positions—which was the only branch of yoga most people would have known about. After our lesson, he invited us into his kitchen and begun instructing us in vegetarian cooking. My conversion to a vegetarian diet was immediate, and it has been a cornerstone of my personal life ever since. Only years later did I discover that Yogi Vithaldas was the main yoga teacher of the famed violinist Yehudi Menuhin.

My second teacher was Dr. Ramamurti S. Mishra from India, who was at that time a resident psychiatrist at Bellevue Hospital. Dr. Mishra taught raja yoga, normally taken to mean, simply, meditation. Michel, Albert Fine, and I found him a few years later, perhaps 1960, teaching a small class in his apartment on Twenty-Eighth Street near Second Avenue. He was quite a handsome man, in his forties, extremely gentle, with dark penetrating eyes. The classes were detailed instruction on meditation practices, bringing the mind to a point of clarity and steadiness. Mantric repetition of sacred syllables and
pranayama
(breathing exercises) were a normal part of the training. I was not a close student of his, but I was a regular one. Albert, on the other hand, became very involved with Dr. Mishra as his meditation teacher, and he went much further in his practice than either Michel or I. Soon Albert was going on solitary retreats in the country, and sometimes, in New York, he observed long periods of absolute silence.

Some years afterward, I came across Dr. Mishra’s book
The Textbook of Yoga Psychology
. Firmly based on Patanjali’s
Yoga Sutras
, I do not know of a better book or a more fully outlined account of the Indian yoga system and its philosophy. Just remembering his intelligence and the depths of his attention to his students is a warm thought for me.

AS MY YEARS AT JUILLIARD WERE WINDING DOWN,
I told Albert I wanted to go to Paris and study with his teacher, Nadia Boulanger. He agreed that it was an excellent plan, and he offered to write a letter recommending me. I applied for, and received, a Fulbright to study with her in Paris, but at the same time I had applied for a fellowship from the Ford Foundation under a program for newly graduated composers to become “composers in residence” in U.S. public school systems. The program involved no teaching by the young composers, only composing for the orchestra, vocal ensembles, and instrumental chamber groups in the school system.

About ten young composers a year were awarded these positions in cities like L.A., Pittsburgh, Seattle, and St. Louis, and when I was chosen I decided to accept. The Fulbright committee informed me that I would have to reapply, and the next year I did just that, reapplying for Paris while spending that academic year of 1962–63 in Pittsburgh.

I found a loft–living space on Baum Boulevard in a lower-middle-class to middle-class neighborhood not far from downtown. Pittsburgh reminded me of Baltimore. Both towns were close enough to the South that there was a strong presence of Southern culture, with Baltimore not that far from Virginia and the Carolinas while Pittsburgh was in close proximity to Appalachia. The cities were similar in size, and both had good schools and universities, large Jewish and Catholic populations, and Bethlehem Steel plants. Living in Pittsburgh revealed almost nothing to me that I didn’t already know from growing up in Baltimore.

The city of Pittsburgh had an administrator for instrumental music and one for vocal music who were responsible for all the music in all the schools. I had just come out of Juilliard, and now I was given basically a school system with tens of thousands of children, a huge number. I wasn’t teaching, I was only composing. There were orchestras all over the town, there were brass bands, there were string quartets, there were choir ensembles—they played everything. Being the early 1960s, this was the heyday of music programs in public schools. You could be a kid with not a dime in your pocket and you could go to a school in Pittsburgh—or, in fact, most big cities in the United States—and they would give you an instrument and you would start to take music lessons. Public schools in those days had instruments and conductors, and we had people coming out of high school and going right into conservatories. It was a tremendous time for music education in America. These days such programs have pretty much been gutted. Some public schools may provide them, but the money usually has to be supplied by the parents in order for music teachers to be hired.

In Pittsburgh, I wrote some music for children in grade school and some for high school orchestras. These were young people who could actually play. I wrote a huge amount of music when I was there. I usually completed a piece in three weeks, then I’d follow up with yet another piece. I would go to the rehearsals and performances, too, because that was part of my duties. I had a car and what I thought was a huge salary in those days, which was probably around $7000 a year—maybe $600 a month. But you have to remember, you could get a good apartment for around $80 or $90 a month at that time.

We never forced music on anybody. Stanley Levine, the administrator of instrumental music, would say, “There’s a high school in South Hills and they’ve got a woodwind quintet. Could you write a piece for it?”

“Sure,” I’d say.

Or I’d go to a high school football game and sit in the stands and listen to the marching band play the march I had written for them. At the end of the year we had a big concert, where all the music I had written was played. It was very satisfying. Here I was, twenty-six years old, and I was having a complete concert of my own music.

In the spring of 1963, near the end of my first year in Pittsburgh, I reapplied for the Fulbright and was awarded it a second time. However, the Pittsburgh school system asked me to stay a second year and I accepted. But before starting the 1963–64 academic year, I made my second cross-country motorcycle trip. In San Francisco I met up with my friend Jerry Temaner, whom I hadn’t seen since our college days. Jerry was in the Bay Area visiting JoAnne Akalaitis who, like us, was a University of Chicago graduate.

When Jerry introduced us at a coffeehouse, I was immediately enchanted by this young woman. JoAnne was then twenty-six years old, very beautiful, and very, very smart. She was working in San Francisco with Alan Schneider, a charismatic new theater director famous for championing the work of Samuel Beckett in the United States, and who was leading a small company of young actors.

After barely thirty minutes of the three of us talking over coffee, I asked JoAnne, “Do you want to ride on my bike?”

She said yes, and we got on the bike, and we then drove up and down and around San Francisco’s hills. By the time we got back to where we were having our coffee, she had told me that she was on her way to New York with some other actors.

“I’m going to be living in Pittsburgh,” I said, “but I have the bike and I’ll drive to New York and come and see you.”

And that’s what I did.

In fact, this was the first great romance of my life. It led to a marriage two years later in Gibraltar, our two children—Juliet and Zack—and, even after the end of our marriage, a lifetime of theater work together. In time, JoAnne’s skills as a theater director and author would enable her to play a leading role in the new theater that would emerge in New York City in the seventies, eighties, and nineties, but already in 1963 both of us were working in the theater. I had been writing theater music and dance music since I was twenty, so I was very interested in the work she was doing. Within two years we would take part in forming our own theater company in Paris and be working directly with Samuel Beckett.