Through Alan’s Eyes
Chapter 4
I mentioned earlier that my 1977 marriage was, to say the least, ill-considered on both sides. This viewpoint is easily borne out by the fact that beyond romance and a certain compatibility, we each, consciously or otherwise, harbored other expectations of one another, largely image or career-oriented, which we could not possibly fulfill. On my part, I realized that by the time we decided to legalize our union, my recording career was rapidly losing steam and in fact, my Blue Goose contract had little more than a year to run. It would neither be renewed nor picked up by another label, as my popularity on both vinyl and stage was rather quickly being replaced by a growing reputation, more deserved than not, for too little work, too much play, and a far-from-secret taste for excess and living the wild life. I supposed (wrongly) that a seemingly stable marriage to a pretty, fresh-faced young talent could reverse the process, but especially with a minimum of real effort on my part and without the backing of a high-powered publicity machine willing to do most of the work for me, this was not to be.
My bride-to-be, on the other hand, was starting out as a complete unknown and had an even more impossible wish-list to fulfill. She even managed to ignore everything I revealed in the preceding paragraph. Her jumping-off point was the delusion that my supposed influence in the New York music world was enough to guarantee her, in descending order of preference, a berth as a dramatic soprano with The Metropolitan Opera, The New York City Opera, or if all else failed, a career as an art-song recitalist at venues such as Carnegie Recital Hall, as it was then known. This was years before necessity reluctantly forced me into the production end of the music business, my purpose being to keep live performing art by living artists a going concern in the 21st century.
Given my long absence from the world of the concert stage and those who inhabited it, none of these plans or dreams came close to bearing fruit.
What they did accomplish, though, was to arouse me from my lethargy to begin work on a song-cycle, “Five English Poems for High Voice and Piano”, and with that one simple step, I found myself on the road back to a reborn career as a full-time composer, as if the intervening years had been a dream from which I awoke, finding myself seated familiarly at the writing-desk I had done little more than glance at for what could have been a day or a century.
It amuses me to note this simple truth, but music, like life itself, is loaded with little ironies, and as often as not, one doesn’t need to seek them out to find them. For example, the “Five English Poems” were begun the week of Jean’s and my wedding in February 1977. By the time they were completed in the spring of 1980, I had already received my Decree of Annulment from Canada without her having performed even one song, publicly or otherwise. Secondly, one would suspect from their title that the “English Poems” were set to texts of British origin. In fact, I couldn’t come up with a more colorful title at the time, and the “English” refers to nothing more significant than the poets’ language, whether British or American. Lastly, the “high voice” in the title was intended to be a soprano, but by the work’s premiere (some fifteen years after its completion), the voice singing was that of a tenor, Steven Goldstein, with whom I have worked many times since. In both my own opinion and that of the largely unaware audience, nothing was lost in the process.
Gradually testing my powers for signs of prolonged disuse, my next project was a revision of Whitman’s “The Last Invocation,” from my student days. I rearranged the piano part for an adventurously-scored small orchestra. I was pleased with the result, for I was soon to take on a much more complex project, which, while never receiving a full performance, served as an important bridge to my mature work.
Then again, the whole issue of ‘maturity’ is perhaps one with which I spent too much of my career wrestling. Fueled by many of the composers’ biographies I devoured during my pre-teen years, it stuck in my craw that I probably didn’t reach the cusp of what is generally regarded as artistic maturity until my mid- to late 30s. Considering the same may be said of Beethoven, let alone countless others who left us far less a legacy, in the larger picture, if it was O.K. for Beethoven, it will certainly do for Seidler.
Despite my intensive training as an instrumentalist planning for a virtuoso career and my wide exposure to the symphonic repertoire, I had long realized by the time of reaching ‘maturity’ that my best work frequently used a poem or other text as a jumping-off place, rather than a purely instrumental idea. Though I by no means ever abandoned ‘pure’ instrumental music as something which lay outside the boundaries of my inborn talents, I came to the realization that setting poetry to music was an art-form to which I was particularly suited. The percentage of my completed vocal pieces substantially exceeded that of my purely instrumental works. With some rare exceptions, this principle tended to hold true in direct proportion to the length and complexity of formal construction of the work in question. Even so, with a fairly concrete concept for a fully-staged opera reasonably well-formed in my creative mind for at least the past ten years, I still find myself waiting for the right librettist to appear, though both my increasing age and deteriorating health lead me to the realization that the sooner I begin to play a more active role in seeking one out, the better off and more satisfied with the completeness of my life’s work I will inevitably end up being.
In the early 1970s, my friend and collaborator Timothy Aurthur and I became fascinated with the life story of Sobhuza II, who acceded to the throne as King of Swaziland at five months of age in December 1899 and continued to occupy it until his death in 1982. Even if in name only, Sobhuza ruled as hereditary Ngwenyama (“Lion”) of Swaziland at the time the British established a protectorate over the landlocked country in 1902. Though the Swazi royal house dates back nearly 500 years, Sobhuza was the first of his line to be educated abroad (at Cambridge). Upon his return to his homeland in 1921, his great popularity with his subjects was instrumental in avoiding Swaziland’s total annexation as an outright British Crown Colony like so many of its neighbors, keeping the country at least nominally independent, with representatives of the native population included both in Parliament and in some government ministries. Sobhuza is generally given credit with negotiating the orderly and peaceful withdrawal of his British “protectors”, which was completed with the return of full independence to the Swazi people in 1968. Helped by these accomplishments, during both his lifetime and afterwards he was regarded as a combination God-King in a way that many of his ancestors were not. He was the subject of a number of tribal legends such as having married over one hundred times, doubtless spurred on by his unusually long reign, regardless of what degree of veracity may be rightfully attached to them.
It quickly occurred to Tim and me that this obscure slice of history would provide an excellent breeding-ground for some sort of musical/theatrical work. However, the expenses and other difficulties connected with staging such a production, not to mention the requisite lavish costuming, dissuaded us from calling it an “opera” from the start. We contented ourselves with “ dramatic cantata,” which absolved us of responsibility of providing any more than vocal soloists (bass and mezzo-soprano), a chorus placed on risers, and a somewhat unconventional orchestra about which I will say a bit more momentarily.
This was our truest (and, as it would turn out, last) collaboration. We wrote one scene at a time, with Tim presenting me with a section of text, for which I would then compose the music and orchestrate before we moved on. There is nothing particularly remarkable about the vocal solos, but this work marked a much greater freedom in my choral writing. It called for much larger and more complex parts than my student vocal works, giving me a multitude of opportunities to expand my use of unconventional vocal techniques, including semi-aleatory shouting, rhythmic chanting, and a use of native Swazi incantations, seemingly for their own sake, regardless of the meaning of the words, backing up soloists, orchestra or both, and at times becoming a vocal orchestra unto itself.
It also marked my first experience with using African folk-rhythms and drumming techniques, which I returned to much later in the choral symphony “The Mystic Trumpeter” with the experience that only years can bring. (It is perhaps interesting to note that the work’s overture consisted completely of a fugue for pitched percussion instruments, undertaken in response to a challenge by my librettist. The use of such instruments was beginning to take a consistently larger place in my work. I was and still am glad for the experience.)
Timothy Aurthur and I stopped communicating, for reasons that are still puzzling to me, shortly before the work’s last scene was finalized in 1987. He had been my collaborator since the late 1960s in both serious work and, perhaps, more importantly on the lyrics for many of the songs I recorded for Blue Goose in the ‘70s, especially those on the album “The Duke of Ook,” and on projects ranging in their diversity from “Sobhuza II” to a film script, “Bandana Babies,” completed in 1972 but production of which was halted early on due to the astronomical costs of renting professional-grade video cameras and other necessary equipment even in the early 1970s. I cannot account for the rift between us, except to wonder whether his wife, whom he married in the early ‘80s, gradually became fed up with the amount of time she regarded as me taking away from their marriage and gave him some sort of ultimatum. (He did however attend my November 1995 concert at the Merkin Concert Hall). Whatever the case, though I miss his partnership and friendship, all attempts on my part to renew the relationship by phone have met with less than enthusiasm on his part. We live and we learn, or at any rate, we live.
