Words Without Music: A Memoir (54 page)

As a composer, I think we develop techniques in a kind of desperation to find a way of making something new. My sense of what happens next is “Where is the paddle that’s big enough and strong enough to power me through that moment?”

Perhaps I’ve wandered into a discussion that’s too abstract, but the truth is that, though these ways of thinking about music may seem abstract as I write them, I think about such things all the time.

CLOSING

O
PENINGS AND CLOSINGS, BEGINNINGS AND ENDINGS. EVERY
thing in between passes as quickly as the blink of an eye. An eternity precedes the opening and another, if not the same, follows the closing. Somehow everything that lies in between (the events of this book included) seems for a moment more vivid. What is real to us becomes forgotten, and what we don’t understand will be forgotten, too.

So I save this closing not for thoughts but for images, memories which, by writing them down, are no longer mine alone.

I had met Allen Ginsberg many times after I returned from Paris and India in 1967. He, of course, was close to William Burroughs whom I knew from the
Chappaqua
film work when I was assisting Ravi Shankar. We had shared the stage quite a few times at music-poetry events and at the Nova Convention in 1979 in New York City, a celebration of Burroughs’s work. But we didn’t do any work together until 1988. It then happened that a theater group that emerged from the Vietnam Veterans Against the War was organizing a fund-raising effort that had, as its major event, an evening at the Shubert Theater on Broadway. Tom Bird from the theater company called me and asked if I would participate. I agreed but really had no idea what I would do.

A few days later I was in the St. Mark’s Bookshop and Allen happened to be there, in the poetry section. I was inspired to ask him if he would perform at the event. He immediately accepted. I then asked if we could perform together, using a poem of his and new music which I would compose. In a flash he picked up a copy of his
Collected Poems
off the shelf, deftly opened to the section “The Fall of America” and in a few seconds his fingers pointed to the lines, “I’m an old man now” from “Wichita Vortex Sutra.” I went home and, starting with that line, in a few days had composed the music, stopping after the line “Stop for tea and gas.” We only had a few weeks before the Shubert performance and we rehearsed at my house, where I had the piano. This, our first collaboration, came together quickly. After that, we began to see each other often, and since we lived not far from each other in the East Village, our regular visits were no problem.

The first performance went very well and we were beginning to think about a longer work. I suggested an evening-length event for my own ensemble with a small vocal group. He agreed and we took up the challenge of selecting the poems from his
Collected Poems
—itself a colossal body of work. For the next half year, we had frequent sessions in which he read poems to me that he wanted to consider for our “song” opera. By then we were talking about staging, design, and décor. Allen was very excited by the prospect, as was I. While he didn’t read every poem in his
Collected Poems
, he read a lot of them, and we also considered other poems written after its compilation. Allen suggested
Hydrogen Jukebox
as the title. It was a phrase from
Howl
and worked perfectly for our project. The work, when completed, was a collection of twenty songs for an ensemble of six singers, including “Father Death Blues,” and “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” which I left as a spoken piece and which Allen and I performed together when he could manage to join us on the tour.

We began to meet often in Allen’s apartment, along with Jerome Sirlin, the designer, and Ann Carlson, our director. The six singers eventually were set as six archetypal American characters—a waitress, a policewoman, a businessman, a priest, a mechanic, and a cheerleader. The themes of the poems reflected a good range of Allen’s favorite topics, including the antiwar movement, the sexual revolution, drugs, Eastern philosophy, and environmental issues. Jerome’s designs were colorful, powerful, and sometimes almost stark in their directness.

I had already been presenting some solo concerts in the 1980s, but in the 1990s I became serious about piano playing and began devoting some regular practicing and composing time to it. In a way it grew out of my performing with Allen, because after
Hydrogen Jukebox
had run its course, we began presenting music-poetry concerts. We did a fair amount of work together and that meant new music for some of the poems that had not been part of
Hydrogen Jukebox
. “Magic Psalm” was one such poem, as were “Footnote to Howl” and “On Cremation of Chögyam Trungpa, Vidyadhara.” I also composed new piano solos for these concerts, which included Allen’s solo readings as well as poems with which he accompanied himself on a small Indian harmonium. He considered Bob Dylan his teacher in this area of performance. He said he learned everything he knew about music composition from Dylan.

My Tibetan friend and teacher, Gelek Rimpoche, who lived in Ann Arbor, Michigan, had founded a center there called Jewel Heart, which was devoted to traditional instruction in Tibetan Buddhism. When he asked me to do a fund-raising concert in 1989, I invited Allen to come with me and help out at the benefit. I knew Allen had an interest in the subject and had had a famous teacher, Chögyam Trungpa, who had died two years before. When Allen met Gelek Rimpoche soon after, they immediately became close friends. From then on, he was at all the teaching sessions that would happen in New York and traveled frequently to Ann Arbor. During those years, Gelek Rimpoche’s Jewel Heart organized two retreats a year—one in the winter and one in the summer—and Allen and I went to both every year. There were usually three of us sharing a room, the third person being either Stokes Howell, another writer friend of mine, or Kathy Laritz, Gelek Rimpoche’s assistant at that time. During the retreats I often saw Allen wake up at night, turn on a flashlight, and begin writing poetry.

One summer Allen and his lifelong friend Peter Orlovsky came to visit me in Cape Breton. I remember many evenings after dinner when Allen would recite poetry. There was no TV near us and the radio offered very little of interest, but Allen knew volumes of poetry by heart. He could recite hours of poetry by Shakespeare, Blake, and Tennyson, to list just a few. He told me that his father, Louis Ginsberg, himself a poet of some recognition, had gotten him and his brother Eugene as children to memorize poetry. At times there were readings when both Allen and his brother read poems, a performance I found both moving and beautiful.

Allen was outspoken and honest to a fault up to the very end of his life. From time to time I witnessed his encounters with people who knew him only by name, but had no idea what a warm and spontaneous person he truly was. I remember a dinner in the 1990s at the house of Hank Luce, the publisher of
Time
and
Fortune
magazines. Hank was a big loud guy and part of the Luces—a powerhouse family in New York and throughout the country. Hank didn’t really know Allen, but at dinner began poking around conversationally, clearly looking for trouble. But Allen, at that moment, was not interested in getting riled up. He answered Hank amiably enough. Finally Hank said, “I hear you write pornographic poetry?”

“I do.”

“Let me hear some.”

At that point Allen let loose with some real hair-curling, pornographic poetry. Not only was it pornographic, it was really vulgar, too. I could see that Hank was deeply impressed. Finally, when it looked as if Allen might be slowing down, he said, “Well, well, well . . . that certainly is pornographic.”

After that they fell into a lively and very friendly conversation. In fact, Hank and Allen had a very good time together.

During the last ten years of his life, Allen didn’t take care of himself very well. He was diagnosed with diabetes and heart disease. He saw a specialist in Boston for his heart and another in New York for the diabetes, but I didn’t notice him paying any special attention to his diet. Toward the end he spent more time in hospitals, but his general good spirits were not dampened. A year before he died, he sold his archives to Columbia University, where he had gone to college. He paid his taxes, gave his archivist some bonus money, and bought a beautiful loft that ran through the whole block from Thirteenth to Fourteenth Street between First Avenue and Avenue A. He was dying, and several times he talked to me about it. These were difficult conversations for me. I had lost Candy only six years before and I wasn’t ready to lose him. He did tell me during that year that he had always been afraid of dying, but now for the first time, the fear had left him.

Early in April 1997, Allen was at Beth Israel Hospital for some sort of checkup. I was supposed to have lunch with him on the coming Wednesday, but I stopped by the hospital on Monday to visit him. While I was there, and just before I was to leave, he said to me, “Do you want to read my last poem?”

“No.”

“C’mon I want you to read it.”

“No, Allen. I don’t want to read your last poem.”

“Here, read it.”

It wasn’t long. Not even a whole page long. I don’t remember it or even reading it at all. I think I just stared at the page.

“Allen, you’re supposed to be home tomorrow evening, so I’ll see you on Wednesday for lunch as planned.”

He got out of bed and walked me to the door of his room. I didn’t know what he was up to, but I didn’t like it. As I was about to leave he turned me around and kissed me on the cheek.

“I am so happy I knew you,” he said.

At that point I was actually getting angry.

“Stop it, Allen. I’ll see you on Wednesday.” And I ran down the hall to the elevator.

He did in fact go home the next day and he spent that evening calling up friends and saying good-bye. I heard about a number of those calls later in the week, when we were all together at his house. That same Tuesday night he had a stroke and went immediately into a coma. Gelek Rimpoche sent six or seven monks to stay at my house and he came, too.

Allen’s loft was filling up with friends. His bed was placed almost in the center of the room near his Buddhist altar. He was still alive, but in a coma. On Wednesday night, the monks slept in a row on my parlor room floor. By Thursday they were all sitting near Allen’s bed, reciting Buddhist texts. Gelek Rimpoche told me that he had been working with Allen for some time, preparing him for his last hours. I knew some of the texts, but only in English. I followed along in English anyway. It was the best I could do. More and more people were coming but mostly people who knew him well. Patti Smith was there. Bob Thurman, the head of Tibet House, too. And, of course, Peter Orlovsky. I had to leave on Friday for a solo concert nearby. When I got back on Saturday, Allen had already stopped breathing, though he was still there in his body. Gelek and the monks began the final recitations, and a few hours later, he was gone.

To say that Allen “passed on” or “died,” which of course he definitely had, does not capture for me the emptiness that his leaving has left behind. Still, as I’m writing about him now, years after he is gone, I think of him with great pleasure. And to be truthful, even now I do not feel he is very far away.

OPENINGS AND CLOSINGS, BEGINNINGS AND ENDINGS
. Everything in between passes as quickly as the blink of an eye. An eternity precedes the opening and another, if not the same, follows the closing. Somehow everything that lies in between seems for a moment more vivid. What is real to us becomes forgotten, and what we don’t understand will be forgotten, too.

In my first year at the University of Chicago, the question I asked myself was “Where does music come from?” The attempt to answer that question led to the composition of my first piece of music.

More than a dozen years later, still pondering the same question, I asked Ravi Shankar where music comes from. His reply was to bow toward a photo of his guru and say, “Through his grace, the power of his music has come through him into me.”

Over time, for me, the question has evolved into another question: “What
is
music?”

For a while, the answer I found was that music is a place. By that, I mean a place as real as Chicago, or any other place you want to think of, that has all the attributes of reality—depth, smell, memory. I’m using the word “place” poetically in a certain sense, and yet what I want to convey is the solidity of the idea. A place is a way of outlining a particular view of reality. You can mark a particular view and call it a place, and you can go back to it. When I say music is a place as real as Chicago, what I mean to say is that in our minds it exists in very much the same way. I can take the plane to Chicago, and I can also imagine Chicago, but either way, I know Chicago is a place for me. In the same way, that same place can exist in a painting, in a dance, in a poem, or in a piece of music.

Place is both abstract and organic. It’s completely organic when it is something we can see as connected to ourselves—as an extension of an organic being in an inorganic world. But at the same time, place also has the quality of being abstract, in that it has the fluidity of scale and movement. One of the things that we learn to do is how to return to that place, which is at least as real as anything else you can imagine, including yourself.

Recently I’ve been thinking about music in yet another way, less allegorical and more in terms of what really happens. Now when I’m writing music, I’m not thinking of structure; I’m not thinking of harmony; I’m not thinking of counterpoint. I’m not thinking of any of the things I have learned.

I’m not thinking
about
music, I’m
thinking music
. My brain thinks music. It doesn’t think words. If I were thinking words, then I would try to find music to fit the words. But I’m not doing that, either. In working with mixed media, I have to find music to go with the dance; I have to find music to go with the play; I have to find music to go with the image or music to go with the words. And I have to find the music from
music itself
.