Through Alan’s Eyes
Chapter 2
I will not take much time rehashing my first few months at Juilliard, other than to say – I immediately found living accommodations in Manhattan, leaving my parents to feud alone until their marriage finally imploded a few years later. I was diligent as I could be in my piano studies, which meant practicing two to three hours daily rather than the requisite ten to twelve. My sights were firmly set on the prize that lay ahead—the spring entrance exams in composition, an opportunity I would not let pass me by for anything.
By now, I had produced a couple of art songs, one with flute obliggato in addition to the customary piano accompaniment and decided, with some advice, they were worthy of leading off Alan Seidler’s real catalogue of works. Meanwhile, I retained the services of Mr. Stanley Wolfe, an adjunct faculty member who walked me through the basics of orchestration to the point that I was able to complete a First Overture for orchestra (a second never followed), subtitled Homage to Ives. In my still-voracious listening, now quite heavily weighted toward 20th-Century composers, I discovered the work of Charles Ives, who immediately became and remains one of my musical heroes and whom I regard as the founder of home-grown American ‘Classical’ Music. Slightly later, another seminal influence was the French expatriate Edgard Varese, whose seemingly infinite uses for percussion and unconventional use of other instruments as well as the human voice continued to fascinate me.
Two things in the previous paragraph make me grimace — namely, identifying not one but two of my spiritual, not imitative, influences as a composer, and my use of the word ‘Classical’, which I do not consider adequate or appropriate for what we have come to identify as Modern, Post-Modern, Neo-Classic, Neo-Romantic, Minimalist or Maximalist music or what-have-you. The list goes on and on, but I have yet to find a name which satisfies me for most of the music composed after the infancy of the 20th Century. And this does not take into account that Homage to Ives was in no way worthy of Ives and barely resembled his music save for a middle section in which the brass cacophonously blare a written-out ‘improvisation’ on the theme of Mary Had A Little Lamb, following its pseudo-stately entrance in the horn section.
The following April, armed with these few works and a couple of long-discarded piano pieces in which I experimented with strict twelve-tone serialism for the first and only time, I took the entrance juries in composition and succeeded with little difficulty in transferring my major field of study, a feat I was later informed, was far from ordinary.
Somehow, I’ve forgotten to mention that by now the Sixties were upon us, arriving with a whimper and before too long, reminding us of their presence with a bang. As a habit I do not give out my precise age, and I don’t intend to break that deeply-ingrained pattern now. Suffice it to say, I’m a true-blue Baby-Boomer and identify myself as such. That, I believe, says enough to place me squarely in my proper demographic for all practical purposes.
If the assassination of JFK marked the death of innocence in America, my only argument with that seemingly ubiquitous sentiment is that, in my somewhat jaundiced view, I can’t help but wonder if this country was really so innocent to begin with. It took a few more years for the tumultuousness of the decade to coalesce over the twin issues of Civil Rights and Vietnam, but when it did, all the old rules were out the window, or so it seemed at the time. By the time the “Hippie Era” officially dawned in the Summer of Love, I had physically grown to the man- size I still am to this day and, in my own opinion and that of those who surrounded me, didn’t lag far behind mentally.
My participation in the new freedom was as avid and gleeful as could be. A once-introverted young child was now transformed into a happy and outwardly confident young man. I need not dwell on my dabbling with soon-to-be or already illegal substances, other than to say that I survived relatively unscathed compared with numerous childhood friends. In a way, if my artistic vistas were not actually widened, there is sufficient evidence to support the theory (my own, of course) that they were in no way rendered more narrow. I will refrain from echoing other’s paeans to the original Woodstock, except to say that I was proud to be there, and I do not expect to partake of another such singular gathering in my lifetime, nor can I imagine one occurring.
I may be deflecting from the true importance of this story – my progress (or in the eyes of some, lack thereof) in my studies at Juilliard, now that I was a full-fledged composition major. From the cradle forward, it seems I have possessed a bit of Poe’s Imp of the Perverse. I will not digress here to recount my childhood antics which largely belong to the province of unsophisticated slapstick, or perhaps to the Theatre of The Absurd. But before long I found numerous ways to put this trait to creative use, to the consternation of some of my professors, but to the amusement and gentle encouragement of my primary teacher, the late, great composer and theorist Vincent Persichetti, lost to the world of music too early, in 1987, and sad to say, a few more steps closer to forgotten with every year that passes.
At the time, Juilliard had 32 composition majors, including myself. The faculty had a far-above average contingent of eminent composers – in addition to Persichetti, Luciano Berio, Roger Sessions, Otto Luening, and soon-to-be living icon Elliot Carter. Following the current fashion in Contemporary Music, 30 of the 32 composition students were slavishly devoted to strict serialism, melodically, harmonically, and even rhythmically. In the weekly Composer’s Forum they would loudly shout down the works-in-progress of the two stubborn holdouts who refused to join the gang. One was a poor fellow who stuck to the style of Robert Schumann over a century after the latter’s death. His music was well-constructed in terms of form and harmony and was melodic enough. After leaving school I lost track of him and even today, when I think of him, have a vague, sickly feeling that he could have come to no good end. The other, of course, was me. Though I have never had a quarrel with free atonality – I have employed it either in sections or, when appropriate, throughout an entire work – the strictures and rigidity of the 12-tone system leaves me cold. It is not of value for me personally, except perhaps as an academic exercise.
My first effort as a composition major was a setting of Whitman’s short poem The Last Invocation, originally for high voice and piano but later arranged for voice and small orchestra. Despite the angular vocal line, a plethora of dissonances in the piano, and prolonged harmonic tension, the fact that the piece finished on an arpeggiated C-major chord (albeit with artificial overtones in the piano’s highest register), made it unacceptable to virtually all my peers as well as some of the faculty. This hardly deterred me, especially under Persichetti’s harmonically strict but creatively liberal guidance. In addition to a few random comments on the works of others, he convinced me that he was less than enamored of the twelve-tone clique. He encouraged me to go my own way, provided I had the requisite training to support me, an attitude he held on to during my time with him at Juilliard and beyond. The opportunity to have this man as my mentor is something I will never forget, no matter how far afield I may have wandered from his example in my later works.
My next project was far more ambitious: a work for large orchestra which somewhat crudely presaged at least one of the stylistic concepts which remain constant in my work today. One of the two pillars of my compositional ethos is collage, whether expressed harmonically, metrically, rhythmically, or in terms of conflicting melodic lines – probably a remnant of my lifelong musical love affair with the work of Charles Ives. This piece found me seeking the largest-sized music paper available in order to have sufficient space to simulate, at least in my own mind, quadraphonic sound, more specifically an attempt to pit I perceived as four separate orchestras against one another. The short (eight-minute) but metrically and dynamically complex work was scored for the usual orchestral component, most notable for the placement of the instruments, prominent keyboard parts (piano and organ) playing mostly loud and off-beat tone-clusters, four solo celli and a huge percussion section, which, though growing technically both more complex and more daring with the passing years, was already becoming a staple of my larger-scale orchestral efforts, whether purely instrumental or containing vocal parts as well. I entitled the work Tracks for Orchestra. Once complete and again passing muster with Persichetti, it was duly examined, dissected, and largely excoriated by students and more of the faculty than this seriously aspiring artist would hope for, unless my sole aim was to produce a combined sense of shock and anger. Tracks has not been performed since that single reading by a volunteer student orchestra. A slowly-decaying full score still resides in my portfolio, and I would be naturally curious though more than a bit leery about countenancing a performance today, practically forty years later. Even so, a good deal of my more mature work is to one degree or another a source of controversy without my bothering to reach into my grab-bag of early efforts to add fuel to the fire.
It was not the generally negative reactions that these products of youthful exuberance seemed to engender, nor the nearsighted contempt of my peers that precipitated the larger controversies which were to end in my leaving the halls of musical academe for once and for all. Though I was in total ignorance of the fact, at just about this precise moment in time, a rebellion against the severity of the Serialists was beginning to take shape among young composers, all of them outside the halls of Juilliard, thus, practically speaking, out of reach of those of us who might have benefited from the exposure to something truly new and different.
This new movement, which was not the centered in New York, was soon dubbed Minimalism. New and unfamiliar names of young composers were soon bandied about –Terry Riley, Steve Reich, John Adams. Their aim, it seemed was to eschew the complexities which had become increasingly a part of ‘serious’ music in favor of simplistic and, to some, hypnotic creations, often consisting of little but a single line, repeated melodically and often rhythmically ad infinitum, and to the uninitiated, seemingly without end.
At the time I was totally unaware of this development, but had independently decided that the complexities inherent in Modern Music, rather than being an exciting development, had too often become an end to themselves, with each composer vying with the next to be the cleverest, neither knowing nor caring if the poor audience was left in utter boredom. Therefore, I, together with a few young musician friends and street theatre people we knew, decided our mission was, in our own way, to reduce the complexities in contemporary music to something close to their lowest common denominator and wake up the sleepy audiences whether they liked it or not.
My premiere offering in this lean, new style was a piece which practically defied characterization, which I called Why Cover Pigeonholes With Fortuna? I scored it for a two-part mixed chorus (male and female) and three trombones. The repetitious and intentionally nonsensical two-line text was created in collaboration with a close friend, the painter Arnold Fern, now many years since lost to the ravages of AIDS. The vocal parts, written in a spare and stark manner, consisted mostly of open fourths and fifths, unisons and dissonant major sevenths. They were loudly intoned from the rear of the throat outward in a guttural manner I was told was certain to produce vocal chord damage if practiced with any regularity. They consisted of only two lines:
Why cover Pigeonholes With Fortuna?
Why go fidangling through the lane?
repeated four times in a manner as grating to the ear as possible. In the intervals when the singers fell silent (as voices and instruments took turns throughout), the three trombones engaged in a freely atonal, quasi-Ivesian battle with one another, finally resolving on a totally out-of-place slide into a quiet diminished seventh chord at the work’s end. Persichetti, good-natured as always, found the piece hysterically funny. Most of his colleagues and nearly all my peers, however, greeted it with total bafflement and near-silence when it was performed at the next Composers’ Forum.
Before long I returned to a somewhat longer and even more outrageous outing in this style, but first, I made a token bow to lyricism (not at all in vogue either) by penning a piece entitled simply Sonnet, to a poem by my friend and future pop writing partner Timothy Aurthur, scored for baritone voice, French horn and piano. Not surprisingly, this work too, though (or perhaps because) relatively easy on the ears, received similar treatment when rehearsed in Forum as most of my previous efforts. Nonetheless, with the aid of a baritone and a horn player borrowed from the somewhat more liberal-minded Manhattan School of Music across town, Sonnet was actually programmed and performed as part of a concert of music by young composers at Alice Tully Hall, marking my debut as a composer at a major musical venue. With the audience of mixed ages and tastes, it received a far more gratifying response than anything I had tried out or even had read at Forum or in Juilliard Composers’ Concerts. Yet, it would be some years before I would attempt something so close to the Classical Music mainstream again.
The coup de grace that would finally lead to the end of my conservatory career followed soon behind this mild taste of popular success. Quickly returning to my proto-Minimalism (or co-Minimalism, perhaps), my final work written at Juilliard was titled (with tongue firmly in cheek) Three Profundities, later re-christened Three Profundities for Screaming Unison Chorus. The three poems, if one were charitable enough to call them that, were penned mostly by my own hand, with the gleeful collaboration of Timothy Aurthur in the last and most outrageous of all. Each was written for either unison or two-part chorus and each had a different instrumental accompaniment (or anti-accompaniment, as the case may be). The text to the first, Hairy Ape, could be considered a slightly-modified nursery rhyme but for its subject matter. The only of the three to utilize mixed rather than unison chorus, its style superficially resembled Gregorian chant, and the instrumentation, two violins starkly playing mostly open fourths and fifths, added to the quasi-Medieval flavor. After the briefest of pauses, this was followed by an extended limerick, probably seen as totally lacking in respect for the hallowed surroundings in which it was premiered as well as appearing to condone illicit drug use in its final line. Despite the feeling of nonsensical hilarity I still get on occasion when recalling the four-line poem, the piece was called On The Final Illness and Lamentable Demise of Specataca-ta, Second-to-Last Emperor of Tierra del Fuego, and was to be performed with mock solemnity “In Apocalyptic March Style,” by the now once-again unison chorus, backed by the two violins and joined by piano and field drum (this last at the suggestion of Dr. Persichetti at his most whimsical). Last of this trio was the oddly-named Yapskwuging Tune, intended as a surrealistic (and largely unintelligible) commentary on the quick modernization and high-rise construction going on in New York City at the time. It begins with wind instruments, each repeating over and over a line totally unrelated to the next, as a narrator solemnly intones:
The correspondent dips fingers in the crepuscular soup;
The bone nods.
Cross-hatched upon the hypotenuse,
Straw melts; wrack withers.
As soon as the word the word “withers” is uttered, there is a sudden and complete silence, followed by the unison chorus, pointing their fingers at the bewildered captive audience all the while and assisted by the instruments, now in unison too, as we hear these syllables, sung in the same grating and guttural manner as in Pigeonholes:
Yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap Skwuge!
Yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap Skwuge!
Yap, yap, yap, yap Skwuge-
Yap, yap, yap, yap Skwuge-
Yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap Skwuge!
This was just too much for the Juilliard Composers’ Forum. A mini-riot broke out in the large rehearsal studio where we convened; catcalls filled the room as used paper cups and other garbage flew through the air. During the final selection, elderly and usually composed Otto Luening got down on all fours and crawled the length of the aisle barking like a dog, adding to the growing mayhem. When quiet finally returned, Elliot Carter, his face red with anger, loudly declared, “That must be the worst piece of music ever written in the State of New York!” Another professor asked my colleagues, who by now had begun to resemble a lynch mob more than an orderly class of composers-in-training, “How would you rate that one a scale of ten?” to which one smart-aleck called out, “Do you mean one to ten or zero to ten?” As soon as the laughter died down, the Forum was dismissed early by unanimous consent, and both faculty and students marched out single-file in a state of silent shock I have rarely observed before or since.
As I neared the end of my junior year, an idea began to evolve in my mind which much later became the second pillar of my mature compositional ethos: the goal of integrating all styles and musical influences that had touched my life within the boundaries of a single work, thus creating a seamless synthesis of musical materials which would in itself morph into a new, all-embracing style, whose limits were, at least in theory, boundless. This rather lofty goal had a long time to wait, though, due to the relative lack of life experience which, even in those of us with the most evolved capacity for learning and absorbing the world around us, goes hand in hand with youth. I still lacked the technique to successfully integrate all the elements that even at that point in life were already at my disposal or would soon become available to me. Also, my life in music as well as in the real world were both about to undergo major changes, some of which were already beginning to fall into place.
Within a couple of weeks of adjournment for summer vacation, I opened my mailbox to find a letter from Juilliard’s dean advising me not to re-enroll for my final year at the school due to receiving a grade of C- minus in my composition juries, in which the entire department faculty reviewed my work for the year past. As I did not actually fail any of my courses, I considered writing back to the dean, thanking him for his “advice,” but declining to accept it. That, however, would have proven futile. Besides, new musical worlds were opening up for me. My primary regret about parting company with Juilliard was the loss of Persichetti’s guidance, on which I had in my own way come to rely. Of everything the man taught me, the most valuable concept was also the most simple. When I asked him early on how he began to compose a new work, he answered patiently, “I take a piece of music paper and a pencil. I sit down and write a single note on the page. This already gives me infinitely more than I had a moment before. Next, I put down a second note and maybe a third. If the progression of those two or three notes pleases me, I have already begun to work.” This seemingly obvious idea was one I absorbed into my own work, and when lacking in inspiration, have used frequently throughout my career.
If you are still with me, you may wonder why a man fast nearing “the youth of my old age (as I sometimes amuse myself by saying) and in far from perfect health, even given that somewhat mitigating circumstance, would take the time and effort to chronicle his youth and student years in such detail, but as is usually the case, there is (at least I believe) a method to my madness. As with any creative artist, my early influences, training, and the aesthetic and personal decisions made during that time cannot help but be a part of the creative methods I employ today. But do not fear –as promised to my colleagues involved in this project, I will do my best to compress my “cult idol” years of the 1970s into a few paragraphs and keep my personal life-dramas down to a bare minimum, so I can return to what is most important—the slow but steady growth of my career as a serious composer. At any rate, my life, like many, has become more sedate and regular with the passing years, so in a certain sense there is less that must be told.
