Alan Seidler

by Alan Seidler

It’s there—there inside me. Not just inside but all around me, enveloping me wherever I am, whenever it chooses. If it was ever absent, it was before I gained what we humans call consciousness. It’s the force that transports me from mood to mood, sometimes gently, sometimes with a violent, electric-like jolt. Sometimes, it propels me literally from room to room, or across a room with a loping run. Can I stop it? Not really. Surely more than when I was a child, but never completely, and if I could, would I? And if I could, what would define me then?

For lack of a better term, I’ll use the vernacular and call this force music, which is to say organized (or sometimes deliberately unorganized) sound. Yes, I do have a way with words when I’m of a mind to, but it’s a fleeting state of mind which comes and goes, not like the other. I have never been “a visually-oriented person.” The stick-figures I draw today are the same stick-figures I drew decades ago. So as a creative being (and I do believe most beings are in one way or another meant to create), that leaves me only music.

Chapter 1

I don’t know when I understood that my reaction to music, to sound, was different from other children around me. I do know it was quite early, before I had begun my formal education. From the time we got our first television set, a large, ersatz Oriental cabinet that was more of a piece of furniture than an appliance, I was fascinated with the rare glimpses I had of men seated at the piano, drawing forth music from it.  Those were the Nifty Fifties, in many ways the cultural nadir of the lives of so many unsuspecting souls who lived through it, and it must have been a very young Liberace, perhaps a year or so before he once and for all traded in his white tie and tails for his ubiquitous sequins and bric-a-brac. I also had occasional glimpses of an aged Toscanini, baton in hand, nearing the end of a career which seemingly reached back into infinity, or, at any rate, the early 1890s, which was close enough.

One thing I remember quite clearly – my response to these stimuli, no – this  stimulation, was to beg my parents, tired and ready for sleep as they often were, for a piano. For what felt like the longest time, they treated my wish like any other childish whim, certain that if they only ignored it, it would go away. But it never did. It grew stronger with every exposure to this other-worldly force, lifting me out of the uncertainties of childhood, as my parents, much like the oversized children they could become at a moment’s notice, battled over I knew not what.

My mother’s Aunt Jean had had some piano training earlier in life. If we were visiting the home of some reasonably genteel relative who had a “real” piano, she could be persuaded to hammer out the opening of Von Suppe’s Poet and Peasant Overture or one of the other ‘light classics’ in vogue at the turn of the 20th century.  Of course, when she was through, I would run to the instrument and treat all present to my incomprehensible interpretation of what I had just heard until one of my parents, as gently as possible, led me away. Still, when Aunt Jean was alone with my mother, she would prod her to get me at least a used Upright so I could take a few lessons and see what transpired. “Who knows?” she said, “Maybe he’ll be another Liberace.  That’s what we need – a little Liberace in the family!” Such was the highest level of musical awareness in my family, and for most, would continue to be.

Still, my parents were hesitant. In those early years, they were far from wealthy and, generally speaking, as thrifty as circumstance would allow.  They voiced aloud their fear that if they bought a used piano for me, I would soon tire of it and it would end up in our chilly, foul-smelling, unfinished basement along with the other detritus of our lives. In what seemed an interminable period of time, I wore them down gradually, and six days before my seventh birthday, a battered old brown Upright which my father acquired at Power’s Used Pianos appeared at my front door and was clumsily carried into the den, where it remained until it was replaced by a newer model roughly three years later. The instrument, circa 1900, had deeply yellowed keys and the smell of age about it. It couldn’t have cost my father more than a few hundred dollars, but at that moment in time, it was everything I wanted.

My mother began making the rounds of friends and acquaintances, seeking out an acceptable teacher for me.  The choice turned out to be Mr. William Higgs, said to be “the best in town,” or at least the best in our neighborhood. For the moment, he was adequate to my beginner’s needs.

Mr. Higgs, a heavyset man with large, pudgy fingers, taught me scales and arpeggios and the bare basics of theory and notation.  From early on, I loved to play and hated to practice, a routine I got away with for far longer than I should have, learning not much later what the life of a virtuoso truly entailed.  Within a couple of months, I was improvising on my own, “taking off,” as they say in the jazz world, on the paltry material then available to me.

Unbelievably, within a few months I began to “compose” – having acquired the aforementioned basics of notation – childish imitations of the simplified Classic and Romantic pieces I was given to practice, often as not finding a way to rhapsodize around.  I had my father drive me to the local music store which was stocked with music paper and other available supplies, and abracadabra! At least in my seven-and-a-half year old mind, I was a composer, a title I hold close to my heart to this day.

By now it may seem obvious that talking about my life is among my specialties, from past triumphs through later struggles to future glories.  Yet, a secret I kept from myself and all but a few perceptive (and trusted) friends is the perpetual difficulty to ponder – let alone translate into words – the whats, whys and wherefores that surround my chosen life’s work: what place it occupies in my life, what standards I hold myself (and, by extension, other creative artists) to what inspires me, who were my most significant influences, the extent to which I benefited from formal training as opposed to intuition, inspiration, and the elusive yet omnipresent factor of trial and error.

I may never know why I so quickly recognized this rather obscure pathway as the one I would follow, rather than trying my hand at high finance, private enterprise, politics or even continuing along the path I was being trained to follow (albeit sometimes like a horse rearing its hind legs in the barn) – the life of a virtuoso pianist, a role perceived as perhaps receiving the highest level of public acclaim, with the possible exceptions of the operatic diva or the venerated symphonic conductor.

In the long term, the answer to this question is of no real importance. I love the piano and always will, though I have strangely neglected it in my mature work, an omission I am now belatedly attempting to correct.  By the time I reached the edge of puberty, however, I had acquired a few more musical friends, strange creatures like myself to most of the “normal” kids, and they let me in on the secret that a real concert pianist must practice ten to twelve hours a day. I had no intention of doing this when my heart’s desire was to fill paper with my own notes, rests and rhythms. This verdict was confirmed by my third teacher, Mr. Bogin, to whom I confided my secret. He told me, gently but in no uncertain terms, that my prowess as a pianist far outweighed the childish and derivative attempts at musical creation I had thus far penned.

Here I must pause for a moment to give both thought and voice to my youthful susceptibility to outside influences – how effortlessly I absorbed them as a child and how rigidly, with a few well-placed exceptions, I have avoided them like a plague over the last twenty-five years or so, for better or worse.

In an attempt to clarify the previous statement, in my earliest compositions I tended to the grandiose, at least in title if not in substance. To quote from the liner notes of one of my 1970s “party” albums, “by the time Seidler had reached the ripe old age of ten, he had proudly produced three operas, twenty-one symphonies and a wide variety of other works. The fact that most of these were a page long, if that, mattered little in the precocious mind of the composer.” This is essentially the truth. By this time, my parents had acquired a collection of classical albums recorded cheaply (and anonymously) in Europe in the aftermath of World War II. I listened to them voraciously, subsequently composing new works in the style of Haydn, Beethoven, Rossini, Dvorak or John Philip Sousa, still childlike, but close enough to be acceptable to the uninitiated. Sad as it makes me to say, this included the majority of my family and, for the most part, always would.

I don’t want my readers to think my family consisted of tone-deaf dolts—they were simply musically undereducated and naïve. From the time we acquired our first piano, my parents encouraged me to play pop music alongside the classics. I obliged, hesitantly at first, as I already had assumed an exaggerated sense of keeping the ‘nobility’ of my art, a bit of childish snobbery I’m happy I shed before long. My two grandmothers introduced me to the Tin Pan Alley tunes of the 1910s and ‘20s, and on my own I began to pick up more music in this style. In the ‘50s and early ‘60s, there were still a few radio stations broadcasting music of that period from original 78RPM records. I developed a more-than mild obsession with this music, including old blues and ragtime. This would serve me well not many years later, so in retrospect, I owe the family a musical debt of sorts.

I began to compile my “catalogue of works,” changing it at whim to resemble that of the composer with whom I was most currently enamored. As this became a frequent hobby and I grew older, I sensed the danger in my slavishly imitative efforts. By my mid-teens, I had dropped this useless activity and vowed never to take it up again, for I was Alan Seidler and no one else, living or dead.

Before I began in earnest to seek my original voice, I must mention Chopin – Frederic Chopin, the composer whose works I most often practiced and whose exaggerated rubatos I felt I could neither diminish nor live without.  My last and most copious composition books before I took the leap into the 20th Century were filled with piano pieces imitating Chopin’s style, some mediocre, others rather good, as far as that goes.

My long-winded point is, that by halfway through my adolescence, I was well aware of the dangers of living only with the music of others and giving no thought to where I intended to end up in this quest to become a composer of note to myself, and, I hoped, to others.

Still, in order to gain entrance to one of the prestigious conservatories, I had little choice but to follow Mr. Bogin’s advice, and apply as a piano major. He consoled me by saying that if I worked hard on my composition, I would probably be able to change majors within a year, if that was what I really wanted.

By now, my father, fueled by sheer force of will and iron-clad determination, had climbed to a somewhat higher rung on the ladder of Post-War upward mobility, and was able to purchase a brand-new Steinway Grand for me. Despite futile attempts to discourage me from a musical career on financial grounds, my parents finally resigned themselves to my determination to make a life in music. In the end, the only admonition they were left with was, “at least learn to type!”

As it turned out, dutifully and apparently without missing a beat (well, maybe a couple), I took my entrance examinations in piano at the old Juilliard School building at Claremont and 122nd. My jury included no less than the venerable Mme. Rosinna Lhevinne, even then close to 90 years of age. To my surprise if not astonishment, a letter of acceptance complete with partial scholarship arrived a few days later.  My musical career had begun in earnest.

next: chapter 2