Words Without Music: A Memoir (5 page)

Dr. Riesman would have eight or ten students in the class—no more than that—and I liked him immediately. He was, like Urey, a brilliant man, part of a new generation of sociologists who, coming after anthropologists like Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, brought methods of anthropology to bear on an analysis of modern urban life. My connection to Dr. Riesman extended well beyond the classroom. Twenty-five years later, his son Michael Riesman, who was about five years old at the time I was taking his father’s course, became the music director of the Philip Glass Ensemble.

When the ensemble played at Harvard in the 1970s, Dr. Riesman was teaching there. Michael came to tell me, “My dad is here at the concert.”

“Oh, I’ve got to see Dr. Riesman,” I said.

“Dr. Riesman, do you remember me?” I asked when I met him.

“Of course I do,” my onetime professor said.

I didn’t really see any reason that he would have remembered me after all that time, though I had, in fact, caused a bit of a fuss with him once by challenging his ideas in the seminar. I had told him that I thought the three categories of people that he was suggesting were very much like the endomorph, ectomorph, and mesomorph types that had been proposed by an anthropologist who was studying the human body.

“Do you think so?” he had asked me.

“I think it’s absolutely the same,” I said.

He looked at me like I was nuts. It’s funny, whenever I got an idea, if I thought I was right, I could not be talked out of it, and maybe that’s why he remembered me. I was a sophomore in college, sixteen years old, and he was in his midforties at the time. Why wouldn’t I keep my mouth shut? In truth, I never did. The same sort of confrontation I had with David Riesman was repeated with Aaron Copland a number of years later, when he and I got into an argument about orchestration.

In the summer of 1960, four years after I had graduated from Chicago, Copland was a guest of the orchestra at the Aspen Music Festival and School, where I had come from Juilliard to take a summer course with Darius Milhaud, a wonderful composer and teacher. The orchestra was playing some of Copland’s pieces at the festival, and through Milhaud’s class, Copland invited students to meet with him one-on-one to show him their compositions. I took him one of my pieces, a violin concerto for solo violin, winds (flute, clarinet, bassoon), brass (trumpets, horns, trombones), and percussion.

Mr. Copland looked at the first page. What I had done was to pencil in a theme for the violin—it’s so similar to what I do today, I’m surprised that I had even thought of it then—and every low note of the theme, I had played on the French horn. So the violin went da-da, da-da, da-da, and the French horn outlined the bottom notes, which became the countermelody. I thought it was a very good idea.

Mr. Copland looked at it and said, “You’ll never hear the French horn.”

“Of course you will,” I said.

“Nope, you’ll never hear it.”

“I will hear it.”

“You’re not going to hear it.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Copland. I’m going to hear it.”

Mr. Copland got extremely annoyed with me, and that was pretty much the end of my lesson. He’d only seen the opening page of the piece! We never got beyond the first eight or ten measures.

What’s wrong with me? I thought. Mr. Copland was much older than me. He was a
real
composer, a famous composer. He’d invited students to show him their compositions—a wonderful opportunity—and I had totally blown it. I had one lesson with Aaron Copland and we had a disagreement and he basically kicked me out.

As it turned out, I
was
right, at least that time. On a student recording the next year at Juilliard, sure enough, there was that French horn line, outlining the countermelody to the violin theme. You could hear it clear as a bell. I am sorry I didn’t keep in touch with Mr. Copland, for I would have sent him the recording.

THE IMPACT OF SUCH ORIGINAL AND PROFESSIONAL
researchers and academicians on our young minds was enormous. This level of leadership was everywhere—in philosophy, mathematics, classical studies. Oddly, though, the performing arts were not represented at all. No dance, theater, or music performance training was to be found. On the other hand, there were parts of the University of Chicago that were involved in studies so radical that we barely knew what they were up to at all. One of its graduate programs, the Committee on Social Thought was one such group. To graduate from the College and enter the Committee as a graduate student—to be accepted, as it were, by the Committee—would have been their greatest dream for some. Its faculty consisted of writers, scientists, and thinkers. These were men and women that some in the College—including myself—deeply, almost fiercely admired and attempted to emulate as best we could: in those years, Saul Bellow, Hannah Arendt, and Mircea Eliade, among others.

Bellow’s big novel at that time was
The Adventures of Augie March
, the story of a man’s life and search for identity from childhood to maturity. I was a big reader, and the two writers from Chicago who interested me were Bellow and Nelson Algren, author of
The Man with the Golden Arm
, about a heroin addict’s struggles to stay clean, and
Walk on the Wild Side
, in which Algren tells us, “Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never eat at a place called Mom’s. Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own.”

What I admired about Bellow and Algren was that they took absolutely colloquial language—and not just colloquial language but vulgar language—and used it as a medium of expression. Until then, I had been very taken with writers like Joseph Conrad, who wrote in a very eloquent early-twentieth-century prose, but these new writers were using the vernacular of the street.

I never saw Bellow on campus, but we all knew about him. Both he and Algren were idolized by the young people in Chicago because they
were
Chicago. They were not New York, they were not San Francisco. When I went to Chicago, I picked up Chicago writers, I picked up Chicago jazz, I picked up Chicago folk music—people like Big Bill Broonzy and Charlie Parker and Stan Getz. All these people worked in Chicago.

As often happens around a great school or university, the University of Chicago projected its aura well beyond its Hyde Park neighborhood and, for that matter, the rest of the South Side. Writers, poets, and thinkers would come to live in the shadow of the university. This larger world included theater groups and cutting-edge bebop jazz clubs, like the Beehive or the Cotton Club on Cottage Grove. There was even a rumor, and perhaps a true one, that Alfred Korzybski, the scholar and author of
Manhood of Humanity
and
Science and Sanity
, had lived and worked in Hyde Park. He was an early proponent of the study of semantics and a radical thinker who, for some reason, appealed to me. Perhaps it was his ideas about history, time, and our human nature I was drawn to—he originated the concept of time-binding, that human culture is the result of the transmission of knowledge through time. I haven’t seen his books in years or even heard tell of him. Perhaps just another great soul, an American Mahatma, if you will, to be found somewhere in our libraries and collective memories.

As I learned early on, the academic arrangements made for the College were especially striking. We were assigned to courses (there were, famously, fourteen courses, each three quarters long—Fall, Winter, Spring). However, attendance was not required or even noted. There were quarterly exams that students could take. These exams were strictly optional, and the grades given were not counted toward failure or success in the course. The courses that were considered the core of the curriculum consisted of three levels each in science, sociology, and humanities. Five other courses made up the fourteen. Completion of these were the only requirements for graduation.

There would be, though, a “comprehensive” exam for whatever courses the student had registered for at the end of the year, in May. Each of these exams would take an entire day and include at least one essay to be written in the examination room. Needless to say, the subject of the essay would be unknown to the students before the exam, so of course this could be, and often was, a terrifying experience. However, the reading list for each course was available at the beginning of the academic year. The readings themselves were to be found at the U of C bookstore, either as individual books or as a collection of readings in a syllabus.

Now, the simplest and most straightforward way to prepare for the comprehensive was to buy the books and syllabus for each course and simply attend the seminars, lectures, or laboratory classes in the normal unfolding of a three-quarter course. To be truthful, I never once followed that path. Perhaps there were some who did, but in all my years there I never met them.

There were several problems that made the ideal plan difficult to follow. The biggest problem was embedded in the culture of the university itself. It was like this: though we were assigned to specific seminars, we were free to “audit” any course in the College we liked and even many courses in the university. To audit a class, you simply asked the professor for permission to attend. I never heard of a request being refused. Of course, we were encouraged to attend our registered courses, but it was not required, and in the end, the only grade earned and which actually counted was the comprehensive exam. So, in theory, one could skip all the classes and exams and just take the comprehensive. But almost no one did that, either. I think many of us took a middle road. We emphasized our regular course work, but freely “grazed” through much of the university curriculum.

Along around late March or April, when we discovered we had fallen behind in our reading lists, we started frantically reading the missing texts. It could be helpful, too, if you could find someone who had taken good notes of classes missed and was willing to share them, but this was not likely. Basically, I did a lockdown. I would go to the bookstore and buy the books, and I began reading them
slowly
. I read everything. The advantage was that when I went into the exams, everything was fresh in my mind. I hadn’t forgotten anything because I had barely learned it to begin with. So I never failed the exams. My very first year, I had four exams, and I got an A, B, C, and D. My mother was horrified, but I pointed out that actually that was a B-minus average

The next year everything resolved into As, Bs, and Cs. I got rid of the Ds, but I never got all As. I wasn’t that kind of student. I wasn’t concerned with having a good grade point average. I wasn’t going to medical school—what did I care? I didn’t think the grades mattered. They weren’t a systematic appraisal of what I knew. I was more interested in hanging out with someone like Aristotle Skalides, a wandering intellectual and would-be academic who wasn’t a student but who liked to engage young people in the coffee shop in discussions about philosophy. Spending an hour with him at the coffee shop was like going and spending an hour in the classroom. I was more interested in my general education than the courses. It almost didn’t matter to me whom I studied with, as long as I found the right teacher, and that was pretty much my attitude. In fact, I think that has persisted. I’ve found teachers all through my life, people I knew who were otherwise unknown.

Another distraction from the regular course work was that there were some professors who offered informal classes, usually in their homes, on specific books or subjects. For these classes, no registration was required, no exam was given, and no student was turned away. This practice was, I believe, understood and tolerated by the university itself.

Now, why would you spend your time as a student (or professor, for that matter) this way, when there were reading lists that needed to be completed? Well, the answer is that some of the classes were unique and otherwise not available. They were not offered officially, were known by word of mouth, but were quite well attended. I went to an evening class entirely on one book—Homer’s
The Odyssey
—once a week for at least two quarters, taught by a classics professor named Charles Bell. These kinds of “private” courses given within the university community, though not generally known, could be sought after and found. That in itself probably accounted for their appeal.

A third distraction, and perhaps the biggest one of all, was Chicago itself. For example, during its season the Chicago Symphony Orchestra offered Friday afternoon concerts to students for a fifty-cent admission price. From the South Side, it was a quick ride on the Illinois Central train to downtown Chicago. I had been a regular concertgoer to the Baltimore Symphony practically from childhood. The editor of the Baltimore Symphony concert program, Mr. Greenwald, taught at my mother’s high school, and he often gave us free tickets. The Baltimore Symphony was quite good, but the Chicago Symphony was in a class by itself.

Fritz Reiner, the famous Hungarian conductor, was fascinating to watch. He was somewhat stout, hunched over with round shoulders, and his arm and baton movements were tiny—you almost had to look at him with binoculars to see what he was doing. But those tiny movements forced the players to peer at him intently, and then he would suddenly raise his arms up over his head and the entire orchestra would go crazy. Reiner knew the classical repertoire, of course, but he was an outstanding interpreter of Bartók and Kodály, both countrymen of his. Of course, Bartók’s music was already familiar to me through my father. There was also the Art Institute of Chicago, the Opera House, which I only occasionally visited, and the downtown jazz clubs, which, for a time, were still off-limits to me because of my age.

I mentioned earlier the influence of the Great Books of the curriculum, but it extended far beyond that. Whenever possible, which turned out to be all the time, the books we studied would be firsthand, primary sources. We were never given summaries to read or even commentaries, unless they themselves rose to the level of a primary source. So, for example, we read Darwin’s
The Origin of Species
in the biological sciences, and we reperformed Mendel’s fruit fly experiments. In physics we reenacted the experiments with rolling balls and inclined planes of Galileo. We also read Newton and followed physics up to and including Schrödinger, while in chemistry we read Avogadro and Dalton.