Words Without Music: A Memoir (20 page)

Alla Rakha was the one who caused me the most anxiety but also, in the end, provided the solution. The “problem” occurred with the very first piece we recorded. Immediately Alla Rakha interrupted the playback, exclaiming very emphatically that the accents in the music were incorrect, to which Raviji quickly agreed. I had already set the metronome to the tempo Raviji wanted and I began writing out the parts again, grouping and regrouping the phrases to get the accents the way they were supposed to be heard, a very tricky business.

Each time, Alla Rakha would interrupt and, shaking his head, say repeatedly, “All the notes are equal.”

I then tried moving the bar lines around.

“All the notes are equal,” he declared again.

By now the musicians had joined in and the session was becoming chaotic, with the players shouting and playing suggestions to solve the problem. In the midst of all this and in desperation, I simply erased all of the bar lines, thinking I would just start all over again. There before my eyes I saw a stream of notes, grouped into twos and threes. I saw at once what he was trying to tell me.

I turned to him and said, “All the notes are equal,” and his response was a warm, big smile.

A few moments later I saw there was a regular sixteen-beat cycle that governed the whole of the music. Later I learned from Alla Rakha that this was called a
tal
and that this
tal
in sixteen beats was called
tin tal
and, finally, the very first beat of the
tal
was called a
sam
(downbeat). All this is something any world music class would learn at the beginning of the first class on Indian classical music. But learning it at such a public, high-pressure event gave it a special, unforgettable meaning. I didn’t realize at the time the effect it would have on my own music, but at that moment in the recording studio on the Champs-Élysées, I now had the conceptual tools that were needed to carry out the work.

The rest of the week went by quickly. I notated all of Raviji’s music for the players accurately, conducted them during their actual sessions and even contributed some wildly dissonant music (just bits and pieces) for places in the film that Conrad wanted to sound incoherent and scary. About a year and a half later, I would study with Alla Rakha in his private percussion class in New York City and come to understand in more detail about how the
tal
and raga (melodic system) work together, which is very much the way that harmony and melody work in traditional Western concert, popular, and commercial music.

It was altogether a wonderful and inspiring week with Raviji. During the breaks in the film-scoring work we were engaged in extensive discussions on Western modern concert music. His curiosity was deep and his musical intelligence so highly developed that he easily grasped the principles of harmony, tonality, atonality, and orchestration. In addition to all that, by the end of the week he was so fluent in the solfège system—whereby musicians, especially in France, can verbally and with accurate pitch sing a melody—he then could communicate directly to the players, though I was still needed to write it out in standard—though bar-less—notation.

I kept in touch with Raviji. Soon after working on the film, I was in London again on one of my short visits, and Raviji was there playing concerts in a club setting, which he didn’t like very much. It was at the beginning of his time with George Harrison, which was very important to him, but there were also parts of the pop culture world that were anathema to him and which he never got used to. The casual drug use by young people particularly upset him. Sometimes he would lecture me about drugs, and I had to remind him that I was drug-free.

After the concert, I went to visit Raviji in his hotel room. He was sitting cross-legged on his bed and I was in a chair. I asked him the same question I had asked myself when I first began to compose, the question that I had long thought about and was most interested in what the answer would be.

“Raviji, where does music come from?”

Without hesitation he turned to a photograph on his bedside table. It was of an elderly Indian gentleman, dressed in traditional clothing and sitting in an armchair. Raviji folded his hands and bowed deeply toward this man.

“Thanks to the grace of my Guru, the power of his music has come through him into me.”

It was a stunning moment. The simplicity and directness of the answer made a deep impression on me.

Over the next decade I spent a lot of time studying and experimenting with the ideas, new to me, that I learned during the time with Raviji. Some things very soon became incorporated into my music. When only a few years later, in 1968, I began writing for my own ensemble, I dropped completely the practice of composing a full score before writing out the individual parts for the players. I could easily keep a composite “sound picture” in my head without having to write it out. So even the longer, complex works composed in the early and mid-1970s were composed as individual parts that I handed out to the players. That included some very long pieces as well, such as
Music in Twelve Parts
and
Einstein on the Beach
. As a general practice, as these were all performance works for the ensemble, I would write out my own part first and then compose the other music or individual parts for the players. Later scores were made by other people who made a composite from all the parts. I am not alone in working this way. I suppose that could easily have been a Renaissance and baroque practice as well, though I don’t have any solid information about when and where it might have happened. However, it is well-known that Schubert’s
Trout Quintet
for piano, violin, viola, cello, and double bass was composed in just that way. It certainly is convenient for the composer, as it eliminates a whole step in the process (composing a “master” score), which may be unnecessary. I thought of the music I was writing in those years as being for performance or, perhaps, recording only. It never occurred to me that someone else would want to look at the score. It wasn’t at all a matter of being overly modest. It seemed to me, as a practical matter, that all the effort of producing a score simply wasn’t worth the time.

The second thing I brought away from
Chappaqua
was a new way of looking at possible rhythmic structures in music. I had seen right away that even complex patterns of music could be understood as groupings of 2s and 3s. Virtually any compound pattern can be reduced to a succession of 2-note and 3-note phrases. On reflecting on this recently, I see that Raviji’s 2s and 3s are, in fact, a binary language and identical in structure to the 1s and 0s in a digital language. Not too long ago, I was in Zurich giving a public talk with the Indian tabla player Trilok Gurtu. I suggested to him that the long history of a binary musical language was a part of the tradition of today’s Indian concert music. He understood and quickly accepted the idea.

NADIA BOULANGER

I
REALIZED FROM MY FIRST MEETING WITH HER IN HER APARTMENT IN THE
Rue Ballu that Mademoiselle Boulanger was certainly one of the most remarkable people I had ever met. I would know only two of the rooms in her house, but both had the imprint of who she was—a renowned teacher in the world of concert music, ancient and modern. Her waiting room was a small library with music scores and books lining the walls from floor to ceiling, and when I had the good luck to arrive early I would be free to browse through the music. Among the scores were any number of original manuscripts signed over to her by the composers. Stravinsky was prominent among them, and I remember seeing there the original piano score, written in his hand, of
Petrushka
. Stravinsky, I knew, had written three of the pieces—
The Firebird
,
Petrushka
, and
The Rite of Spring—
that changed the way a lot of people thought about modern music. He had given the score of
Petrushka
to her and she had bound it into a book. What I was holding in my hand was the first draft of the ballet that to this day is considered a masterpiece of music. It was a humbling moment.

There was also an abundance of literature, many in first editions. I noticed, however, that there was not much there that was modern and certainly very little literature that came after André Gide, the renowned writer, or Paul Claudel, the poet. No Beckett and certainly no Céline or Genet. I suppose that would have been true of the music scores as well. She always dressed the same way—floor-length dresses, all handmade for her. She told me once that as a young woman she would submit to whatever was the fashion of the time. Then, in the 1920s, she found the style of clothing that suited her. From then on all her clothes were made especially for her and, frozen in time, never advanced past that period.

Her music studio was quite large. It had a small pipe organ and a grand piano. On Wednesday afternoon there was a class that was open to all her current students, whose presence was required. In addition, any former students who lived in Paris or happened to be there were welcome. It was customary for the room to hold up to seventy people on most Wednesdays. There would be one topic for the whole year. During the two academic years I was there, we studied all of Bach’s
Preludes and Fugues, Book 1
, in the first year, and the twenty-seven Mozart piano concertos in the second. We were also expected to learn and be able to perform the “Bach prelude of the week.” Typically the class would begin with Mlle. Boulanger calling out, without as much as looking up, the name of the one chosen to perform that morning. “Paul!” “Charles!” “Philip!” God help you if you weren’t prepared or, even worse, not present. If she was expecting you to be there and you didn’t show up, you probably would just have to leave town. She would say, “I think you should come to the Wednesday class. Of course, it’s voluntary.” But of course, it wasn’t voluntary. You had to be there, and you had a week to get ready.

“Next week we’ll be playing Concerto no. 21. Please be ready to play the third movement,” she would add, and if someone said, “Mademoiselle Boulanger, I’m not a pianist,” she would say, “It doesn’t matter, play it anyway.” People who were violinists or harpists or whatever would have to sit down and demonstrate that they had learned it. If they couldn’t really play it, if the person didn’t have a piano technique, the notes would still have to be in the right place. It wouldn’t be a good performance by any means, but you were supposed to overcome the difficulties.

The first day I met Mlle. Boulanger, she ushered me into her music studio and took the handful of compositions I offered her. These were the very best ones out of the forty or fifty I had written in my five years at Juilliard.

She set them on the music rack of the piano and proceeded to speed-read her way through them, silently without comment—just very quickly working her way through page after page. Finally she paused and, stabbing one measure of music with her long pointed finger, proclaimed triumphantly, “Ah, this was written by a real composer!”

That was the last compliment I heard from her for the next two years. I left that day with an assignment to write a fugue and return in a few days. We hadn’t practiced composing fugues at Juilliard, but I wrote one anyway, practically overnight. When I returned two days later, she glanced at my poor effort and set a very rigorous agenda for me. I would have one private lesson with her a week and we would begin with first-species counterpoint—that is, the very beginning of the study of counterpoint. Then I would come to the public Wednesday analysis class, another private lesson with her assistant, Mademoiselle Dieudonné (for Renaissance music, sight reading, and solfège) and, finally, every Thursday morning, a class with five or six of her other private students. During the private lesson, when time allowed, she would herself take care of training in figured bass.

I was expected, within the first month, to master all seven clefs, and thereafter I should be able to transpose music from and to any other key at sight. I accomplished this through brute memorization. I read music using all the clefs over and over again until it seemed easy. Moreover, another weekly exercise was to thoroughly learn a four-part Bach chorale in open score. That involved three or four clefs already, so only three clefs were left to learn from scratch, as it were.

The lesson in counterpoint also required a high level of preparation. For example, if the lesson was first-species counterpoint—and I was made to begin with that, all my Juilliard years and earned degrees notwithstanding—I was expected to bring in twenty pages of completed exercises for each weekly lesson. First-species would cover “note on note” (two lines of music). Normally, four weeks of exercises would be required before graduating to second-species, which introduced the practice of alternate entrances of lines. Then, you would continue the process with third-species, fourth-species, etc., until you reached eight lines of music, maintaining as much as possible the independence of each line. The baroque period is replete with examples of this kind of composing, Bach’s
Art of the Fugue
being perhaps the most famous example. As a compositional technique, it continues to be used up to the present day, including the third movement of my own Symphony no. 3.

Studies in harmony, figured bass, and analysis would be carried out in similar ways, but with special exercises and emphasis depending on the topic. In Mlle. Boulanger’s training there was no disconnect between foundation studies and professional achievement. Through her students, she changed the very way music was taught in the United States. Virgil Thomson had studied with her and famously remarked, “Every town in America has a drugstore and a student of Boulanger.” Indeed, she had thousands of students, though perhaps only a handful became well-known for their music. Her enduring gift to American music must include the many fine teachers she trained, Albert Fine being one of them.

I would describe it this way: If you wanted to be a carpenter, you would learn how to use a hammer and a saw and how to measure. That would be basic. If someone said, “Here, build a table,” but you had never done it before, you would pick up the tools and maybe you could build a table but it would be shaky and probably a mess. What Mlle. Boulanger taught was how to hold a hammer, how to use a saw, how to measure, how to visualize what you were doing, and how to plan the whole process. And when you had learned all that, you could build a really good table. Now, she never thought the “table” was itself music composition. She thought her training was simply about technique. Basically, when you left her, if you had studied with her diligently, you would end up with a toolbox of shiny, bright tools that you knew how to use. And that was a tremendous thing. You could build a table, you could build a chair, you could put in a window—you could do anything that was needed.