Tag: composer memorial

Incredible Time (to live and die): Remembering Dean Drummond

Drummond and Brown

Dean Drummond and Elizabeth Brown at the premiere of Seahorse (2008)

The first time I heard Dean Drummond’s Incredible Time (to live and die) I was floored. I listened to it over and over. As a lover of glissando and reverb, the zoomoozophone (which he invented) was like a dream. I was completely smitten with Incredible Time‘s intricate flute part, played by Dean’s wife Stefani Starin. The microtuned synthesizer, triggered by both a keyboard player and percussionist, tied it all together. Like all of his music, it made you aware of your place in the world at the present moment. Dean’s musical universe is a sublime architecture of numbers, ratios, and rhythmic patterns. Throughout an insanely busy life, he steadily built a body of complex, beautiful music that reflected his acute social conscience.
On April 13, Dean died of complications from multiple myeloma. He led a multi-dimensional career as composer, instrument inventor, conductor and musician through hundreds of performances and numerous recordings with Newband. As director of the Harry Partch Instrumentarium, he honored Partch’s legacy by preserving his instruments and performing his compositions—and he kept that legacy alive by writing and commissioning new pieces, and by building and adapting new instruments. Dean also inspired a generation of students as director of the Harry Partch Ensemble at Montclair State University.

My friendship with Dean developed through my deepening involvement with the instruments that defined and propelled his music. We shared a passion for timbre and microtonality, though mine is more instinctual and based on harmonic gravity. Over the last twenty-five years, I wrote three pieces for the Partch instruments, hands-on, in three different studios. What was it like to work closely with Dean, and with the original Partch instruments? His sense of humor really helped in dealing with tedious technical and logistical issues. I saved some of our email exchanges:

DD: The boo is being repaired and is unavailable Friday evening, Nov 16. The marimba eroica is being repaired and is unavailable from Friday morning, Nov 16, until Monday morning, Nov 19. Beginning Nov 23, most instruments will be at Japan Society in NY for a couple weeks. The instruments will be set up by Dec 11, but used all day Dec 12 by students. Beginning Dec 13, the studio is very free until Jan 21. You can still reserve time after that, but classes begin Jan 22 (my birthday). We should meet briefly the first time, at 5pm on Dec 12. Then you can stay at the studio as long as you want. You need to reserve the times you will use with me 48 hours in advance in order to guarantee having exclusive use.
EB: We’d better synchronize our watches on 12/12 (which is my anniversary, as well as Virgin of Guadalupe day). I assume you mean I should reserve other times at least 48 hours in advance, not exactly 48 hours in advance of each visit.
DD: no, I meant exactly. if you want to use the studio at 3:30 on Dec 13th, you must reach me by phone (voicemail is unacceptable) at exactly 3:30 on Dec 11th. There’s a grace period of 45 seconds before and after. I’ve invested in a very sophisticated satellite timer which will prompt me to call you at precisely the right time to reserve the studio.

Dean’s sense of organization was legendary. Colleagues say his budgets had the rigor of a CPA’s. Numbers were effortless for him. The exchange below concerns tuning only one of the instruments:

EB: Dean – I tuned harmonic canon 1 yesterday, and had trouble getting to a couple of the pegs (I gave up on the 41st string on the left side)…
DD: I didn’t know that you were using HC I. fyi, there are two different tunings happening on a weekly basis. It gets tuned to the standard tuning on Thursdays and gets changed to my tuning for MS Genitron on Fridays, although some weeks, if someone comes in to practice the changes might be made at other times. So it was probably on my tuning when you came in. My tuning changes X strings 41-44 plus the Oak bridge setting.
EB: I thought I’d told you I was using canon 1! Will try to keep your schedule in mind when tuning it. Have a feeling I tuned it to the standard tuning with the oak bridge in place for MS Genitron, apologies!
DD: The high X bridges don’t move for the tuning, but the Oak bridge must or the string tension is wrong. You actually erred towards loosening the strings so no harm done…

Writing Archipelago (1990)
I first met Dean through cellist Ted Mook, who was playing with Newband in the late 1980’s. Ted asked me write a piece with cello for a Newband concert. The concert’s repertoire was limited to the instruments in Partch’s Daphne of the Dunes, plus zoomoozophone and synth. Dean gave me hands-on access to the instruments in the Partch studio, which was near the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel. I was just a fledgling composer, and this was a very big deal! Not understanding the math, I composed by ear (using a Yamaha DXVII2 Synthesizer loaded with Partch’s 31- and 43-note microtonal scales at home). I taught myself to read and write the tablature notation for each instrument. In the studio, I reveled in the funkiness and tactile nature of the Partch instruments, and the amazing reverb of the zoomoozophone. If the instruments were tuned correctly, they would play EXACTLY the pitches I wanted! The wobbly sound world in my head came to life under Dean’s direction.

After Newband obtained custody of the Partch Instruments in 1990, many presenters wanted all-Partch programs, but Dean continually advocated for other composers to be included on Newband concerts. I was lucky—Archipelago was performed many times, and included on the Music and Arts CD Dance of the Seven Veils.

Writing Delirium (1997)
When Newband commissioned Delirium through the Cary Trust, the studio had moved to SUNY Purchase, and I don’t drive. Typically, I’d get up early and travel several hours on public transportation to the studio. Once there, I’d spend a long time tuning the string instruments I was using, then have maybe an hour to work before it was time to head home. This took the entire day, which Dean thought was both pathetic and funny. I vowed to never again write for Kithara II, with its 12 sets of hard-to-access strings tuned to bizarre hexads. If it wasn’t perfectly in tune, what I wrote sounded awful. But, Newband performed Delirium deliriously well under Dean’s direction, quite a few times.

At Dean’s memorial service on April 20, each person described him as fiercely individual and principled, and passionate about music—but also nutty. Lois V Vierk said that Dean was her very first composition teacher, during her freshman year at California Institute for the Arts. She wrote a piece for flute, cello and teapot (Dean played teapot). Pianist David Witten remembered Dean saying that the only use for a (well-tempered) piano was to fill it with warm milk and take a bath in it.

The many percussionists at the service were in awe of Dean and his music. Gary Kvistad remembered helping Dean build the zoomoozophone in his barn. Gary Schall recalled that the very first live performance on zoomoozophone was at his Manhattan School of Music percussion jury. Jimmy Pugliese spoke about learning Dean’s “Columbus” on the top two registers of the zoomoozophone, while Dean was still building the lower registers—because Dean was always creating something.

If we had been out of touch for a while, I was always astonished when we reconnected by what he had accomplished during that time. In 2009, I saw a terrific, insane concert version of his comic opera Café Buffé.

DD: Thanks for coming out the other night! The last couple months have been crazy. The night before the first rehearsal of the opera I finished editing a film project….which is going to be shown every Friday I think as part of the Kandinsky exhibit at the Guggenheim. Next I’m composing MacBeth music for Martha Clarke. I think I’m finally going to learn a little theremin for that!

He’d gotten a theremin years before, and we were both obsessed with the instrument. After I married my long-time partner Lothar Osterburg in 2003, he wrote:

DD: Do you know about this?!!!! It’s a theremin band!
http://www.lotharandthehandpeople.com/
EB: Yes, all the theremin players are jealous I married somebody named Lothar. It’s an old band; Lothar was the name of their theremin.
DD: I figured your marriage had to have some sort of sleazy career-building aspect!
EB: Having a husband with a volume control antenna is extremely useful.

Writing Seahorse (2008)
Through Dean, I was commissioned to write a piece for the Montclair State University’s Harry Partch Ensemble. He wanted me to play in the piece, and help coach it, so I wrote a theremin concerto. I figured that if I could play each part, the students could too – so I made a recording for the students by playing and overdubbing all the parts.

DD: We all listened to your CD this morning. I should say attempted because your piece, or at least the CD, has the remarkable ability to put people to sleep. No matter how many times we tried to start it, everyone was out by the zoomoozophone entrance. We tried the beginning of “Drunken Waltz,” too, and it got the same effect before the theremin was to enter. We’ll just have to hope it’s different when we try to rehearse.
EB: Great! that’s exactly the response I hoped for! So many people have trouble getting to sleep nowadays that audiences will flock to hear Seahorse, possibly wearing pajamas!
DD: Well that explains why there’s line of people wearing pajamas outside of our house. On the other hand, over in Montclair, thousands of students are in front of the president’s office protesting the performance of Seahorse. Campus police confiscated all copies of your music and said only a licensed anesthesiologist could play the CD of Seahorse. Now I’ll never know what it sounds like.

But then, he also wrote:

DD: It’s fantastic….really mean it. I think it’s going to be amazing. The parts are very playable so great possibility for a great performance. It’s a piece that I’d like to also do w. Newband asap. The students loved the mock-up tape. They all feel very lucky to have this piece. I do, too.

And I was lucky to work with those students! Seahorse was premiered in December 2008. Last year, I received a New Music USA CAP award to record Seahorse with Newband for New World Records. Dean let me use his theremin so I wouldn’t have to schlep mine, and even arranged for parking reimbursement.

EB: I doubt if I’ll have time to learn to drive until after the Seahorse recording, and Lothar won’t let me use our car until I do. He seems to think that if I can play theremin I should be able to drive. So unfortunately I cannot take advantage of the free parking.
DD: Your theremin doesn’t drive? I have the model that does. It parks anywhere.

The Seahorse recording was wonderful! Newband sounded great, and Dean played Adapted Guitar 1. He looked terrific and seemed healthy. I chose to believe his multiple myeloma was in remission, because the alternative was unbearable. Afterwards, he said he was feeling pretty good because he’d scheduled his chemo around the recording. He was receiving heavy chemo for three weeks, with one week off. He said he had no idea how long he had left to live. In the meantime, he was enjoying every single day.

Seahorse Recording Session

Dean Drummond and Elizabeth Brown (center) with the members of Newband at the recording session for Seahorse

He never heard the final edit.
There would have been a Newband Concert at Heidelburg University in Ohio on April 13, the day Dean died. The program would have included pieces by Partch, Drummond, and Cage, plus Dean’s arrangement of Bach’s Es Ist Genug for 4 zoomoozophonists.

*

From Charles Bernstein’s libretto for Dean Drummond’s Café Buffé:

The world swirls around me
It’s a mystery I’m here at all
The world swirls around me
It’s a mystery I’m standing here at all
Got a telegram from eternity
Said it was time for me to call
 

*
 

There’s no time like the present
And the present’s already gone
No time like the present
And the present it’s already gone
 

***
 

Thanks for the company
Thanks for the music
 

*

What an incredible life!

Remembering Robert Ward (1917-2013)

Ward and Ching

Robert Ward with Michael Ching in 2000.

I have been lucky to have had a number of great teachers and colleagues, but Robert Ward stands out first amongst them. Even back in 1977 when I first met him, his hair was mostly a distinguished white. His fatherly manner was always warm, and even when he was vehemently arguing a point, he never seemed truly angry. Bob’s inner composer was a respected and valued member of society, and so he frequently could be seen in a good suit or sport coat and bow tie. He believed that artists weren’t always outsiders, but people who deserved a place at the table beside donors, industrialists, and scientists in order to provide a different perspective on society.
Bob Ward believed in providing his student composers with opportunities to hear their works performed under the best possible circumstances. When he realized that a couple of us at Duke had finished orchestra pieces, he arranged for the North Carolina Symphony to come over and read them. When I decided to write a one-act opera for a senior thesis, he arranged for it to be produced and sung by experienced professionals. Bob was very insistent that composers be able to play and sing every note of their operas in order to remain honest to their inner ear. He also felt that by trying to play and sing a show, composers would learn what the singers have to go through to learn the notes. Back then in 1980, for me, coaching and listening to MET roster singer Michael Best try to get through my vocal lines was a priceless lesson.

Bob was really great at encouraging you to write in whatever style you wanted to. This was particularly important back in the ’70s and ’80s when music composition was in the grip of what felt like life or death battles over atonality and twelve-tone technique. Despite those prevailing stylistic winds, Ward kept to his tonal and often tuneful style. I remember a composition teacher at a summer festival describing Ward’s music as “awful.” But it was not awful! It was simply an American sound that was prevalent in the ‘30s and ‘40s, the sound of Gershwin or Gould and Bernstein. Robert Ward believed that sound still communicated with audiences, and he was going to write in that manner with all the technique and integrity he could muster. He never really deviated from that path.

After our days as teacher/student, Bob and I got to work on a couple of other projects together, including the premiere of Minutes Till Midnight at what is now called the Florida Grand Opera. That opera has a great aria in it where the main character, a nuclear scientist, asks, “Oh cosmos, with your myriad stars, afloat in the mystery of space, will your mantle of peace descend on this tormented place?” That kind of lyric about world peace inspired Bob.

Bob was something of a socialist at heart and not a fan of organized religion. He was toying with the idea of an opera about the labor leader Eugene Debs in his later years. The church certainly was not portrayed in a favorable light in his opera Abelard and Heloise. His progressive politics were mixed with old fashioned ideas about marital roles. In a fairly recent conversation with me, he said archly that now that I was a freelancer, I was lucky that my wife had a steady job. Even in his crackly older voice, you could hear the sound of friendly chiding. But indeed, I think Bob was justifiably proud of the fact that he had earned a living through his art and had been a good provider for a wife and five children. How many of us could do the same?

Bob was generous with his stories. This was much to the chagrin of his smart and undersung spouse Mary, who sometimes had the “not-this-one-again” look of someone who had heard a story about “Lennie” [Bernstein] or “Arthur” [Miller] one too many times. I do remember a tale about a harrowing night when the Japanese broke through the American lines where he was directing a band in the Aleutians, and some witty chats over dinner with his Crucible librettist Bernard Stambler.

For most of us in opera, to get a single piece into the standard operatic repertoire would be considered a lasting and major accomplishment. There are plenty of examples of that—The Merry Widow, Pagliacci, La Giaconda—to name a few. Clearly The Crucible is going to remain a cornerstone of the American opera repertoire, alongside Susanna, The Ballad of Baby Doe, and a few others. In addition to some of the most iconic characters in American opera, The Crucible has a sense of forward motion and sweep, which causes it never to be bogged down in a swamp of recitative.

Bob was very proud of the opera and posters of the Korean and German premieres (Die Hexenjagd!) used to hang on the walls of his studio. I know so many singers who have vivid memories of singing Tituba, John Procter, Abigail or Elizabeth Proctor that we could probably have a Crucible sing-along. Maybe we’ll do that sometime. The hymn in the show, “Jesus my consolation,” has taught more opera singers to sing in 7/8 than any other piece. His other operas deserve a second hearing, including Abelard and Heloise and his treatment of Edith Wharton’s Roman Fever which is a smart little chamber opera for four women.

Ward’s instrumental music is always idiomatic and well-wrought. Check out his Appalachian Ditties and Dances or his Raleigh Divertimento for wind quintet. There is a really charming young audiences piece for narrator and orchestra called Jonathan and the Gingery Snare which I remember Bob narrating with great enthusiasm. Although he had stopped writing operas, Bob continued to write instrumental music well into his nineties.

Ward with Ching

A less formal Robert Ward with Michael Ching in 2005.

Arts in the state of North Carolina is better for Bob Ward having been there. His involvement with the School of the Arts and, to a lesser extent, Duke, will be long remembered. He regularly served on national and state boards, prize committees, and music panels. In order to keep opera alive in central North Carolina, he co-founded and chaired the board of an opera company there, now absorbed into the North Carolina Opera. In this internet era where every tweet, blog, and post is an implied act of subtle self-promotion, he did the in-the-trenches work unsung, as a quiet steady duty.

In our final chat together last month, when we were making plans for me to come see him this July, I asked Bob about his relationship with the composer Douglas Moore. He said that Moore was an unusually generous colleague. That is an apt description for Bob, too.

*

Composer and conductor Michael Ching is now the chair of the Douglas Moore Fund, which provides an annual grant to an aspiring opera/music theater creator. His opera Speed Dating Tonight premieres this summer at Brevard.

Remembering Jeffery Cotton (1957-2013)

[Ed. Note: The author would like to give special thanks to Karen Latuchie and Stacey Richter.]

Jeffery Cotton

Jeffery Cotton photo courtesy Dan Coleman

Jeffery Cotton—composer, entrepreneur, essayist, and fiction writer—succumbed to sudden cardiac death on February 4, 2013, two months before his 56th birthday.

He has left us with a trove of darkly hued, deeply lyrical works. His compositions can be heard as a film noir soundtrack that evokes the deceptively sunny Los Angeles of his childhood filtered through the haunted German expressionism he encountered as a student of Hans Werner Henze. But an artist’s life is not wholly contained in finished works. Throughout our two-decades-long friendship I admired Jeff for living a fully creative life.
BMI’s Ralph Jackson introduced me to Jeff at Chamber Music America’s annual conference in 1994. I was fifteen years younger, and just beginning graduate studies in composition.
I looked up to Jeff. By the time he earned his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1989, he was among the most decorated young composers of his generation, having earned three BMI Student Composer Awards, a Fulbright Fellowship, the New York Youth Symphony’s First Music commission, and, in 1990, a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Even with this extraordinary validation of his musical talent, it was characteristic of him to remain independent by curtailing his search for an academic post and following his heart to New York City. To get by, he took a job as personnel manager for the Orchestra of St. Luke’s and its associated Chamber Ensemble. Jeff’s compositional prowess became known within the organization, and he was promoted to composer-in-residence of St. Luke’s Chamber Ensemble.

Under the ensemble’s aegis he created and curated a new concert series called Second Helpings, based on the premise that a second performance is often more difficult to secure than a world premiere. Each concert was presented in an unconventional performance space, such as the Guggenheim Museum or Dia:Chelsea. With its reprise performances, the series helped sustain interest in many new chamber works and was praised by The New York Times.

Jeff’s achievements and trajectory were an inspiration to me. While there is a venerable tradition of composers serving simultaneously in administrative and artistic roles—from J. S. Bach as Kappellmeister for Prince Leopold, to Quincy Jones as vice president of Mercury Records, to William Schuman as president of Lincoln Center—it takes a resourceful and independent spirit to forge such a path outside of the academy.

I wanted to get to know Jeffrey Cotton, and see how he did it.

Fortunately, St. Luke’s Chamber Ensemble was scheduled to premiere Jeff’s new Trio for clarinet, cello, and harp soon after our initial meeting at the CMA conference, so I planned to attend.

On the date of the premiere performance—February 8, 1994—nine inches of snow fell on Manhattan. I made the treacherous hike from the 66th Street subway station to Merkin Concert hall in a sound-muffled city. Few people braved the elements and the concert was sparsely attended, but this gave it the feeling of being a semi-private event, which is perfect for chamber music.
Any piece of music—new or old—would be terrifyingly and unfairly paired with Schubert’s C major cello quintet, as Jeff’s Trio was that night. Nevertheless, I was deeply moved by Jeff’s piece, which went straight to the heart. I told him that this was the first time I’d heard a brand new piece of chamber music that fully deserved pride of place with the Schubert quintet.

As I got to know Jeff better, I learned how he developed such confidence as a composer. After important early studies with Daniel Kessner at Cal State Northridge, Jeff spent formative years as Hans Werner Henze’s apprentice in Berlin. Not only did Jeff receive traditional composition lessons from Henze, he also co-composed a film score and helped to orchestrate large sections of Henze’s Seventh Symphony. At first, I thought that Jeff’s own voice was a continuation of the post-Romantic line that stretched backward from Henze to Berg and Mahler. But I came to realize that Jeff was a quintessentially American composer who had made a kind of artistic “reverse commute” from America to Europe. Whereas Henze’s aesthetic forebears—such as Arnold Schoenberg and Erich Korngold—ended up in Hollywood, Jeff was raised in Los Angeles but sought the opportunity to live in Berlin, which was still shadowed by division and repression in the 1980s. At some subconscious level, and before it was fashionable, I believe that Jeff sought out the aesthetic world that great Hollywood composers like Max Steiner had left behind in Europe. Midcentury Los Angeles is always present in Jeff’s music, and even the ghosts of West Coast jazz are in evidence. For example, in his program notes for his Five Runic Songs, Jeff explicitly references “the style of trumpet playing in popular music of the 1940s and ’50s” in Hollywood, and the piece evokes the velvety, pensive approach made famous by Jack Sheldon and Chet Baker.

As he chose works for the Second Helpings series, and as he composed his own music, Jeff grappled with the problem of balancing artistic idealism and entertainment, and he was loath to pick sides. He was never at ease with what he understood to be an impatient dismantling of musical modernism in favor of simpleminded mass appeal. Jeff saw this as throwing out the baby with the bathwater, in a quintessentially American way. At the same time, he departed from modernist stereotypes by being keenly interested in communicating to his audience and to the musicians who interpreted his music.

His beautiful handwritten (and later, computer engraved) manuscripts were gratifying to instrumentalists, who immediately realized that he sympathized with them and that he wrote for their strengths. His appreciation for music’s graphic presentation even took the form of an intelligent and pointedly snarky essay on the state of notation software in the early 2000s. Jeff proudly noted that his rant attracted the respectful attention of the very company he chided, and that they rose to the occasion by improving their software in accordance with his constructive critique.

Jeffery Cotton Balcony

Jeffery Cotton. Photo by Honey Bunny, courtesy Dan Coleman.

Had Jeff been merely a composer who was frustrated with new technology, his essay might not have held sway with notation software programmers. But Jeff had special qualifications in the field of software development, which dated to his days as personnel manager for the Orchestra of St. Luke’s.

When he arrived at St. Luke’s, their roster of musicians and concert assignments was kept in a bulging three-ring binder. He taught himself an early database system known as Hypercard and singlehandedly created St. Luke’s first electronic database of musicians. As he approached the age of 40, Jeff sought opportunities for professional growth, and he parlayed his Hypercard skills into a new job as a programmer for a nascent electronic medical records company.

By this time, Jeff and I were close friends, and I grew concerned that his fulltime work as a programmer could cause him to lose touch with the classical music scene. I nominated him for the post of composer-in-residence for the Boston-based Metamorphosen Chamber Orchestra, a post he would hold from 1999 to 2003. He composed six new works for Metamorphosen, many of which have been widely performed elsewhere. One of these commissions, the Suite from Pyramus and Thisbe from 2002 (which had begun as a series of sketches made in Berlin while on his Guggenheim Fellowship in 1990), was recognized with the Walter Hinrichsen Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Jeff impressively maintained two parallel careers in composing and computer programming. His compositions of the early 2000s were championed by the Arizona Friends of Chamber Music, Seattle Chamber Music Society, Cypress String Quartet, and Tucson Symphony Orchestra. During the same years, he founded a web design and hosting company called Wired Musician, worked in the IT department of Deutsche Bank, and even participated in the “dot com” bubble as an IT employee of the ill-fated company Kozmo.com. It was all creative activity for Jeff, who was an independent dreamer, ceaselessly engaged in designing new worlds and solving problems.

When any artist acts with such astuteness and confidence, I have to wonder what motivates him. Ambition, in the positive sense of the word, seems to me one of life’s essential mysteries, but there were others in Jeff’s life as well.

When Jeff was in his thirties he discovered that he was half brother to the folk singer Tom Rush, and that his family’s history was more complicated than he had known. The maternal musical DNA shared by Jeff and Tom (their grandfather had been a successful big band leader) might warrant the further attention of genomic researchers, but it certainly solves the mystery for me: Jeff followed a deeply rooted path.

With music and computer programming under his belt, Jeff had turned his attention in recent years to writing fiction. The latter effort was cut short by his death. But in his nonfictional essays, many of which are published on his website, Jeff’s astuteness, integrity, and candor are always accompanied by his sardonic, infectious sense of humor.

Our conversations were always filled with laughter. When we last spoke, a week before he died, Jeff told me how much he loved the movie version of To Kill a Mockingbird. He admired the adaptation of the novel, the acting of Gregory Peck, and most of all, Elmer Bernstein’s musical score.

“Except for all that xylophone,” Jeff said. And he followed up in an email:
“The xylophone should be illegal.”

My Only Mentor, Butch Morris (1947-2013)

Marclay, Morris, Horvitz 1987

Butch Morris (center) performing with Christian Marclay (left) and Wayne Horvitz (right) at the Times Square-area bar Tin Pan Alley in 1987. Photo by Keri Pickett, courtesy Wayne Horvitz

I met Butch Morris shortly after moving to New York City in 1979. I am not sure how or when, but he was extremely gracious to me, became a lifelong friend, and I can honestly say he is the only single human being who I think of as a mentor. It wasn’t about music in any technical sense, but really more in a social sense: How music fit into his life, how he created community, what he cared about, what he didn’t care about, and so on. The fact that Butch was fun, charming, a great person to travel with, to dine and drink with, and to hang with is something everyone who knew Butch can speak to. I could go on for many pages, even chapters, but I will not. Instead I would like to speak to two singular aspects of Butch’s contribution to music since he came on the scene in the ‘70s: community and conduction.

When I arrived in New York, the city and the Lower East Side, in particular, was a diverse community. Punk rock and out jazz, improvised music and new classical music crossed paths constantly, as did people of divergent backgrounds. It was a racially integrated community as well, but only so far. Sort of like the high school where kids basically get along, but still the white kids tend to sit together in the lunchroom and so do the black kids. Butch was keenly aware of what being a black man in America meant. He had no delusions of living in a “post-racial” world, and he was vocal and articulate about racism. I myself had come to New York because of Cecil Taylor, The Art Ensemble, et al., but it wasn’t surprising that I quickly fell in with my more immediate peers: Elliott Sharp, Bobby Previte, John Zorn, Eugene Chadbourne, and many, many more. We were white kids from the ‘60s. It’s important to remember that, like a lot of us, I came to improvised music more from The Grateful Dead and The Jefferson Airplane only to find Albert Ayler and Sun Ra later. Butch reached out to me, and to many others, without ever leaving behind his history and inspirations. He didn’t care if the jazz community approved of him, and he sure as hell didn’t care if the academy or the uptown music world approved of him, and he took chances, musically and socially. And he did it with such grace that as far as I can tell he rarely alienated anyone, which was not often the case in a scene where a lot of egos were involved and folks had powerful opinions with strong emotional attachments. In many ways this seems to me to be a crucial aspect of what led him to what he became best known for, which was the system known as conduction.

As a musician I got to play a lot with Butch, in small groups as well as some of his larger ensembles. I made three of my first five records with Butch, toured in his trio with J. A. Deane a lot, as well as the Horvitz/Morris/Previte Trio. Later I produced a record for Butch and was involved in the early conduction ensembles. The Horvitz/Morris/Previte Trio was a seminal moment in my own artistic evolution. To put it in its absolute simplest form, after a few years of wanting to be Cecil Taylor I remembered how much I loved Richard Manual, and something began to click that felt like my own. Many other influences helped along the way, especially the Chicago and St. Louis musicians, and the Art Ensemble of Chicago in particular. I made a record for Black Saint from a live recording at Studio Henry with Butch and William Parker, and I began to find ways to bring my own harmonic language into the palette of “free improvisation” (whatever that means), and also to use electronics with acoustic instruments and at acoustic volumes. Butch was particularly supportive and encouraging, often without really saying much. The trio I formed with Butch and Bobby allowed me to develop those ideas. We made two records that I still consider some of my best work, and Butch played beautifully. It is worth noting that they were also two of the easiest recordings I have ever made. Just set up, play, listen a bit, and keep playing. We toured Europe a few times and did concerts around the States a bit, and we had a lot of fun.
I remember years ago going to his apartment to listen to the mixes of a record we were working on. He had the left speaker on top of the right speaker, and I was furious. How could we listen to a stereo mix that way? He wouldn’t move the speakers, that was how he liked it. He didn’t give a damn. I wouldn’t be honest if I didn’t say I miss those times, often deeply.

For a variety of reasons, including my move to Seattle, I did not perform in Butch’s conduction ensembles much after the early ‘90s. For the most part I stopped being involved in what really became his life’s work. Nonetheless, as a composer, I have given “conduction” a lot of thought, and I find it a singular and momentous achievement. It has been interesting, and honestly a bit disheartening, to see just how much attention Butch and conduction have been given by the media and social media since his death, considering how much it was essentially ignored in his lifetime. There are many stories of its success and positive reception but nothing close to what, in my opinion, many artists have received for much lesser contributions to the very essence of how music evolves. I believe that this is for the most part a result of how Butch liked to live, and what his priorities were.

I was on a music panel in the late ‘90s selecting the first round of musicians and composers who would be in residence at Civitella Ranieri. Unlike a lot of panels, we arrived a day or two early and were given copies of all the work samples from the artists. On the second evening, after food and wine, I went back to my cell and braced myself for hours more of listening through work samples. The residency very much encouraged improvised music, jazz, and international artists, as well as more traditional contemporary composers. I listened to the work of a lot of experimental composers and jazz composers, many of whom I was already familiar with, as well as a lot of new music composers, some of whom I did not know. I knew Butch had applied, and I assumed I would support his application, but it occurred to me that if I was going to articulate my position I should listen to the work sample he submitted. In fact I had yet to hear any of the ten-CD box set he had made for New World Records, but whatever I was then listening to seemed to answer all the questions and even feelings of discontent I had been having all evening. First off, the music didn’t sound anything like jazz or “improvised music,” it sounded like vital contemporary music, possibly composed but also unlike so much of the “new music” I had been listening to. How should I say this? Like it didn’t have a stick up its ass? It sounded comfortable in its own skin—soaring, living, glorious. Granted it was three in the morning, I was tired, maybe even a little drunk, but I still remember it to this day. George Lewis and Jonathan Harvey were also on the panel, and as I walked in the next morning I heard Jonathan Harvey talking to Gordon Knox, the artistic director, saying, “It was quite interesting listening to many of the work samples, but there is only one CD I would like permission to keep, and that is the music of this Butch Morris fellow. I must find out how he creates this incredible music.”

I was in Nashville shortly thereafter, producing a fairly traditional record with some Nashville session guys, and I started thinking about comfort zones. I don’t mean an aesthetic comfort zone, I mean physical comfort. Music sounds good when the physical relationship between performer and instrument is good. Technique and expression come from this. Which is why I think that when you take a classical violinist with great chops, conversant in modern music and with experience playing in great ensembles, and he or she spends two weeks with Butch, their improvised language often sounds brilliant, with flow and grace.

A problem in contemporary music, especially of the through-composed variety, is that often the composer creates situations that aren’t comfortable for the performer. I suppose that in itself has its place, but it can get old fast. A composer creates a new work with extended techniques and writing that “pushes the envelope” and all too often it sounds like work, not play, and after all we try to play music, not work it. Musicians improvising, even if they aren’t “improvisers,” will usually make choices that are within their physical comfort zone and within their technique. This creates music that has the same level of physical logic that these same performers possess when they are playing Mozart or Hank Williams. Meanwhile Butch found a language that created structural integrity, something sorely missing in so much so-called “improvised music.” Cecil Taylor and many others have spoken eloquently about the logic inherent in the body, that the logic of our physical relationship to our instruments has an innate intelligence. Butch never wanted to lose sight of that, but he also insisted on never assuming anything about structure, and he developed a methodology that allowed the music to turn on a dime. Of course one can argue that his music was also, like Ellington’s, personality dependent. With Butch, his conductions were, of course, an expression of his entire being. There will never be another conduction by Butch, with all that he brought to the music. That being said, and I think Butch would be pleased, I truly believe that his system is significant enough that it will live on in many forms, will transform and evolve, and have great influence on the music of our times.

No matter how far out the music got, Butch always wanted it to feel like a song, like a singular piece of music, and his system and his presence allowed him to create that. It didn’t always work. No music always works. But the potential was phenomenal, and it created a music that simply couldn’t exist any other way.

Butch’s humanity was phenomenal. Every one of us who feels like Butch was one of our dearest friends knows we share him with hundreds of other people, if not more.

People work so hard to be present, to live in the moment. I know Butch loved to be alone, and I know he loved to be with people. To me he seemed to live less in the past or future then anyone I have ever known. On the street, in the park, in an airport, even waiting for a cab, he was always there for you, and now he isn’t.

My Mentor, My Collaborator, My Father: Dave Brubeck

Dave and Chris leaving the stage together a couple of years ago at the Detroit Jazz Festival. Photo by Marty Rickard. Courtesy Tish Brubeck.

Some fathers and sons are lucky enough to have great relationships from childhood to the very end. I’m in that fortunate group. My dad and I did many fantastic things together, from playing jazz gigs all over the world in the very best concert halls, to playing on the edge of our seats during recording sessions that still sound vibrant, to sharing the joy of sitting on the stage surrounded by orchestra and chorus performing not only jazz charts but also my father’s significant body of sacred music. I witnessed his evolution from a jazz musician who could improvise or write a beautiful tune at the drop of a hat to a composer who learned how to orchestrate and slave over score paper for endless hours. As I got older we shared a special composers’ bond when Dave came brimming with enthusiasm to the premieres of orchestral pieces I had been commissioned to write. At this age many in my generation are experiencing the loss of their parents. My situation is a bit different than most because not only did I lose a father, but I lost a dear friend and musical partner. We have been recording, performing, and writing together for over 40 years.

Dave, Dan & Chris

Dave Brubeck with his sons Dan and Chris. Photo courtesy Tish Brubeck.

The last recording my dad made was Triple Play – Live at Zankel Music Center with my eclectic Blues/Jazz/Folk/Funk group. Believe it or not, Dave would still get nervous, even at 90! He was our musical guest and we wanted him to play loose and relaxed. Therefore we didn’t tell him we were secretly recording the concert. Sometimes, you gotta roll the dice. He played his ass off! Weeks later he told me he wished we had recorded that gig. What a joy it was to play the tapes for him of the concert he thought was lost to the ethos. He agreed it was damn good and exciting enough to share with others. The terrific reviews prove it is not just a proud son singing his dad’s praises.

One of the last concerts my father played was with me and my brothers on Father’s Day, June 19, 2011, at Ravinia outside of Chicago. I think it was fitting that our father, the family man, played his last American gig with his sons. My youngest brother Matthew plays jazz cello, Dan is on drums, Darius is also on piano, and I’m on electric fretless bass and trombone. It was a joy to perform Dave’s inspiring compositions. We made some beautiful music together, got a great review from the Chicago Tribune and then our old man went to Montreal for his last gig before “hanging up his spurs.”

Young Brubeck Brothers

An early outing of Dave Brubeck and his sons, the Brubeck Brothers: (from left to right) Dan, Chris, their friend Jim Montgomery, Darius, and Dave. Photo courtesy Tish Brubeck.

The last major piece my father and I composed together premiered in 2009. I had received a commission to write an orchestral tone poem inspired by 101 Ansel Adams photographs that were to be projected over the orchestra. I brought my dad into the piece because I wanted to experience the joy of working with him on one more project before it was too late. Some sons go camping or on a fishing trip with their fathers when they know that time is winding down. I wanted to create a new musical work with my dad. He insisted he was too old to get involved, but my wife and I got my mother to read Ansel Adams’s autobiography to Dave. He started to see the similarities between Ansel and himself: The fact that Ansel was a budding concert pianist before he became a photographer was enticing. So was the fact that both Dave and Ansel grew up in Northern California. Both had learning disabilities that were greatly alleviated through the process of learning to play the piano. Their creativity germinated in relative isolation (my dad grew up as a cowboy on a 45,000-acre ranch and Ansel fell in love with the stunning landscapes of Yosemite) and their talents helped to transform their genres and built bridges that delivered a new perception of jazz and photography as “legitimate” art forms. Dad resonated with Ansel Adams’s story and finally we won him over. I am proud of the piece we composed together which has been played dozens of times and just had its very successful European premiere. Dad was too frail to make the West Coast premiere, but was finally able see a performance for the first time when the Temple University Orchestra played Ansel Adams: America at Lincoln Center. An excellent recording was made by the gifted young players at Temple and it was released a few months ago. But the story doesn’t end there.

When my father had a heart attack on the morning of December 5, he was just one day shy of his 92nd birthday. After a Christmas concert with Triple Play in Nebraska the night before, I was driving on a highway to the Omaha airport when I got a call from my wife, Tish, telling me that my dad had been rushed to the hospital by ambulance. About a half hour later a second call delivered the numbing news that he didn’t make it. The highway just kept coming at me in hypnotic rhythm as I tried to wrap my head around this new reality. I always thought Dave would go on tour sometime and just never come back. He belonged to the road and to the world, it seemed, as much as he belonged to our family. It was surreal, he wasn’t on the road this time but I was–literally. After five hours in the car and two flights, I finally got home to my parents’ house pretty late at night. There was a tearful reunion with my family comforting each other with loving hugs. About midnight Tish and I got back to our own house nearby. I opened up my computer for the first time that day and was overwhelmed by the emails that cascaded in from all over the world. One caught my eye because it said “Congratulations.” This seemed a bit out of place, so I opened it. This is how I learned that just hours after my dad left the planet Ansel Adams: America had received a Grammy nomination for Best Instrumental Composition. This felt like my dad was winking at me, grinning and giving me a congratulatory hug from the other side. It was a beautiful lift when my spirits were sagging and it helps me believe in magic and miracles and to keep looking at life in a positive light. My dad always did. He overcame a lot of things and had tremendous inner strength. He loved the old standard “Sunny Side of The Street” and just for kicks he would often romp through it with unbridled joy.

For those of you who didn’t know him, here are some things I learned from my “old man” that might interest you and maybe even help you as you try to lead a musical life path.

Find a great partner to share your life with. In my dad’s case it was my mother, Iola Whitlock. Because his mother, my Grandma Bessie, insisted he endure one of college’s rituals, he reluctantly went to the senior dance. My dad was already doing lots of little jazz gigs. He was happy playing but very uncomfortable at the thought of dancing. Therefore, he asked around the campus to see who was the smartest and most intelligent conversationalist. Turns out that there was a drama major named Iola Whitlock who was smart as a whip and beautiful too. Iola and Dave went to the dance, talked all night, never danced, and when the sun came up had decided then and there to get married. Over the decades she supported my father’s dreams, wrote a lot of great lyrics and librettos, and never doubted his creative vision. She even managed him at first, and was the first person to come up with the idea of presenting jazz concerts on college campuses. She somehow found the time to raise us six kids, too! My parents were married an astounding 70 years, and what a spectacular adventure they had!

Family Business

The family business–Dave Brubeck on piano with four of his children: Dan on drums, Mike on sax, Darius on trumpet, and Chris on the piano bench behind Dave. Photo courtesy Tish Brubeck.

Value what is original about your approach to music. After World War II, my dad studied at Mills College on the GI Bill with the French composer Darius Milhaud. Milhaud had fled the Nazis when they took Paris and ended up in California teaching at Mills. My father had dreams of learning how to write in the sophisticated European tradition. Milhaud scolded him, saying that the only original thing about American music was jazz and he should try to incorporate that wonderful language into the symphonic realm. My dad followed his advice, eventually teaming up with Leonard Bernstein in some of the earliest collaborations that featured the integration of the classical and jazz genres. Dave went on to write many beautiful cantatas for orchestra, chorus, and jazz group.

Stick to your guns. Dave had exactly two lessons with Arnold Schoenberg in L.A. At the end of the first lesson he was told to write something and bring it back for the second lesson. Dave was proud of what he wrote and when he played it for Schoenberg the next week, A.S. stopped him in the first bar demanding to know why Dave chose the 2nd note he had written. My dad replied “because it sounded good.” Schoenberg went on a tirade saying that that was not a good enough reason to choose a note. Dad dared to ask what made him the sole arbiter of what was a right or wrong note. Schoenberg pointed to the tall book cases filled with scores that lined his studio and said he knew more about Western music than anyone else alive and that is why he had the authority to enforce his musical opinions. For better or worse that was Dave’s last lesson with the great Schoenberg. The rest of dad’s life he kept creating his melodies because of their emotional meaning to him. His intuitive melodic and harmonic instincts served him well and as a member of his band I have witnessed him improvise gorgeous and moving music countless times. When I heard this passionate music come out of him (and Milhaud was also impressed by this innate ability) it would occur to me that my dad was a genius. Thinking back though, in my father’s first major oratorio, The Light in the Wilderness, which is a very tonal piece based on the teachings of Jesus, he created a passage where the twelve disciples were introduced by each singing their own note in a twelve-tone row. It was quite dramatic especially when Judas starting singing “Repent” on a high and straining dissonant note. So something rubbed off from his Schoenberg encounter.

Being a composer is time consuming and is hard work. My dad fell way short in the carousing department. He left that to his friend and musical partner, Paul Desmond. They lived vicariously through each other, Paul being the swinging jazz bachelor with a penchant for Dewars Scotch and serial, intelligent, cutting-edge women. I think a part of Paul always thought of us kids and my mother as his surrogate family. Dave would not hang out and drink or whatever with the other musicians. He would go home to his wife and kids and work. He toured so much that he learned out of necessity to start writing on airplanes. When he was home, people were amazed to see that he had an upright piano elevated on woodblocks so that it would be at the best height for him to ride his stationary bike and pump his legs quickly while he simultaneously practiced piano and composed. That man could compress time one way or another.

Perseverance. In the early days my dad was leading a group of musicians who were all former students of Milhaud. It was known as The Octet. They played very interesting music, but only got three gigs in a year. So Dave started doing trio gigs in the Bay Area. One early joint was the Burma Lounge in Oakland. Clint Eastwood told me he used to sneak in as a kid to see my old man. When Dad tried to add Desmond to the group the club owner said it was ruining the band. But they stuck together and it was obvious they had a special sound and it needed to be recorded. Dad went to every record company trying to get signed. They all turned him down. We were really poor in those early days. When we went on the road, we would stay in old hotels that had cavernous closets—most times the closets were the best thing going for them. My older brothers Darius and Mike traveled with sleeping bags for those closets, that was their part of the “suite.” My parents got the bed and when I was a baby apparently I fit nicely in the dresser drawer with some blankets piled underneath me. We thought it was fun—indoor camping! We saved money up as a family because dad had to start his own record company to get his music out there. Perhaps you have heard of it—Fantasy Records! His partners were sons of a man who owned a record pressing plant. Dave supplied the talent, and they manufactured the recordings. Critics noticed, and the vinyl started moving. Then his partners screwed him out of the company. He was thrown off his own label due to some legal shenanigans. But once he was forced out of Fantasy, Columbia Records signed him and with their mammoth distribution the rest is history. By the way, his groundbreaking LP Time Out was held back by Columbia for a couple of years because it broke all the rules. The music was in odd time signatures, it was all original compositions instead of “show tunes” (songs for which Columbia owned a piece of the publishing), and did not have a foxy girl on the cover but had modern art instead. Columbia’s marketing department didn’t know what to do with it. Goddard Lieberson intervened. That was back in the days when musicians, not lawyers and accountants, ran record companies. Goddard went against the rest of Columbia and told them to put it out. Ironically, for a long time people resented Time Out’s enormous commercial success and held it against dad. But he was just pursuing his vision and created something so original that it succeeded against all odds. It all happened because he got screwed out of Fantasy Records. You never know: In the long run, a setback can be a blessing in disguise. Keep the faith!

Stay Humble. Though my dad ended up playing for presidents, the Pope, kings, and queens, he never lost his respect for the average Joe. One of his favorite people to hang out with was a gardener who helped take care of things at home when dad was on the road. This old Italian knew the earth and it wasn’t because he had a degree in botany—he just loved the land, and so did my dad. Dad grew up as a cowboy and would vividly describe to us when he used to work for a dollar a day from sunrise to sunset. He lived through the Great Depression. He made it through World War II. He could never understand how Christian civilizations that purported to follow the teachings of Christ could do such horrible things to each other. During the war, he vowed that if he lived, he would write music that would help illuminate the true teachings of Christ. He reached tens of thousands of people with his “classical music” and reminded people of the teachings of Jesus the philosopher, not Jesus the icon of “Churchianity.” He very, very rarely had an unkind word for anyone. It was a bit infuriating sometimes; he was so noncommittal in his analysis of some of the people we had to deal with. I have a more mercurial tongue and if I ever ventured a negative opinion about someone he would say, “Yes, and that is his mother sitting right behind you.” He set a very high bar in that department.

Dave & Chris

Dave Brubeck at the piano and Chris Brubeck on trombone in a performance with the Bachiana Filarmonica conducted by Joao Carlos Martins at Avery Fisher Hall on October 2, 2009. Photo by Fernando Mucci. Courtesy Tish Brubeck.

You have no idea what your music means to someone else. We did a tour of Russia in 1987. I remember leaving at five in the morning on a bus that was in front of our hotel which would take us to the airport. It was bitter cold, and an older woman had been standing outside our bus hoping to possibly see Dave when he came out to the bus to leave. She had a medal on a chain that she gave to dad because her deceased husband had loved his music so much, and she had promised her husband that she would somehow find a way to give his medal to my father. It was very moving and I felt for this woman. Compassion about fans was bred into our family at a very early age. This is a true story:

One Christmas Eve as our family sat around in our California home in the late ‘50s my father got a phone call. He came back with a remarkable expression on his face. He told us kids to quiet down and told us a longer version of this story. Someone in New York City had just called to say that a man had crawled out on a ledge to end his life by jumping many floors to the cold asphalt below. Police officers and a police psychiatrist tried to talk the man down off the ledge but he was just so despondent they didn’t succeed. Friends were called in and asked if they would come to the apartment and try to talk to him and get him to come back inside. Nothing had worked and the situation seemed grim. Dad was called because a friend of a friend knew the person who said the words that finally got the jumper to come back inside. He apparently was told: “If you jump, you won’t hear Dave Brubeck’s next album.” That motivated the man to come back inside. Years later, this story sounds like a New Yorker cartoon, but at the time my dad was in such a state of wonderment that it made me see, from my six-year-old perspective, that we are all connected in hard to fathom ways.

You have no idea what your words may mean to some else. A few years ago, when my dad was already older, he agreed to sit with Ken Burns and his crew to talk about his memories and the meaning of jazz in America. I wasn’t there (madly writing on deadline across town) but later in the day I called dad and asked him how the interview went. My father told me that he blew it. I asked him what he meant by that. He said that he talked about racism in America and recalled the story of how his father, Grandpa Pete (the Cowboy), took my dad as a kid to see a man Pete knew. Pete also knew that this person had been branded when he had been a slave. Pete told my dad that that was no way to ever treat fellow human beings. Then this fellow took off his shirt and showed little Dave the brand burned into him. When my dad relayed that story on camera, he got deeply emotional and cried. That’s why my dad said he blew it. But when the Ken Burns series about jazz came out, Ken himself told me that the story Dave told and his anguish which was caught on camera became the emotional centerpiece of the entire documentary. My father’s humanity came through loud and clear in that segment. Another crazy thing came out of it, too. Many of the jazz critics who saw that film and kind of enjoyed beating up my dad or dismissing him in print for his vast popularity over the last 50 years were also moved. There was a very public reassessment of Dave’s talents, originality, durability, and humanity. The family man who was too good to be true maybe really was a great guy who was too good to be true. It is not his fault that he created music that lots of people loved.

I could go on and on describing some of the great things my father did and said to many over his 90+ years. What I have written here is the tip of the iceberg. My mother has been working on a book for the last several years and she had pretty much finished it in the last few months. She chose to end the book at the Kennedy Center Honors, which may have been the pinnacle of Dad’s remarkable life. In addition to Bill Charlap, Jon Faddis, Christian McBride, Miguel Xenon, Bill Stewart, and Herbie Hancock, the producers wanted to surprise Dave by having my brothers and I play during the concert. Dave had originally requested that we play but was “turned down” by the director, to Dave’s great disappointment. However, there was a deep conspiracy between the producers and me and my three brothers. Even our own sister and my son who lives in Washington didn’t know, and certainly mom and dad had no clue that we were going to play. You can see the moment the camera caught dad in disbelief as he sat in the box next to Obama. Watch and you will see the old Cowboy mouth the words, “Son of a bitch!!!”

 

Excerpts from the Kennedy Center Honors program honoring Dave Brubeck
What a night that was. It was full cycle and poignant. Dave fought hard for civil rights in the ‘40s and ‘50s and here he was hanging out with our first African-American president. In his first book Dreams from My Father, Obama describes his father (whom he saw only a few days in his life) taking him to see his first jazz concert in Honolulu, which happened to be my dad, my brothers, and I playing together those many years ago.

I’ll leave you with one of my dad’s favorite lines, which was what Eubie Blake said on the occasion of his 100th birthday tribute: “If I’d known I was going to live this long, I would have taken better care of myself!”

No one lives forever, my dad did his best and led an astounding life. It was great to be on that incredible ride with him.

Kennedy Center Boys

Honoring Dave Brubeck at the Kennedy Center Awards (L-R): Bill Charlap, Miguel Xenon, Darius Brubeck, Chris Brubeck, Matthew Brubeck, Dan Brubeck, and Herbie Hancock. Photo by Dave Barrett, courtesy Tish Brubeck.

Remembering Elliott Carter (1908-2012)

Helen & Elliott Carter 1977

Helen and Elliott Carter in 1977. Photo courtesy of Joel Chadabe.

I think it was in the summer of 1958 that I attended the Aspen School of Music in Aspen, Colorado, high up in the Rocky Mountains. Darius Milhaud was the major composer-in-residence. Lukas Foss and Elliott Carter were composers-in-residence for a week or two during the festival. I may be leaving some things out and forgetting some of the people and some of the details, but I do remember two things with great clarity. One of them is my explorations of the mountains around Aspen on horseback, going off in a different direction several times a week with a fellow student–her name was Meg–on adventurous, exhilarating long rides, sometimes all day, feeling an extraordinary sense of freedom as we moved through a landscape alone on top of the world.

The other one is a workshop in percussion offered to the composers at the school by George Gaber, an exceptional percussionist then active in the New York music scene. At 8:00 in the morning, Gaber was there in the music performance tent, surrounded by an enormous number and variety of instruments from timpani to finger cymbals. A few composition students were there. So was Elliott Carter. To my pleasure and surprise, Carter dominated the conversation as Gaber went through the instruments, playing each one and demonstrating different techniques for playing them. Carter had brought a notebook with him. He asked a lot of questions and took copious notes. It occurred to me later that he had begun to think about the Double Concerto, finished in 1961, but at that time we—“we” being the students who were there–knew of Carter through his String Quartet No. 1. That a composer we respected as a leader in the avant-garde would come to a workshop with young students, ask questions that told us what he didn’t know, and take notes, was very impressive. But thinking back, my guess is that at that time in his career, he had achieved a level of self-confidence and comfort with what he was doing musically that allowed him to display without embarrassment what he didn’t know. Early on, he had actively sought public recognition for his Americana style, for example his early orchestral piece Pocahontas, but as he told me and, in fact, said in many interviews, he had reached a point where he realized that he hadn’t gotten anywhere and he decided to go off to the desert and work out his own ideas. His first realization of the new ideas was his String Quartet No. 1 which was widely recognized as a masterpiece, albeit a little-understood masterpiece. As a student, I followed him around a little bit at Aspen, and I vaguely recall that I asked him if I could study with him.

Well, I got my chance. In September 1959, I began the three-year master’s degree program at the Yale School of Music. Carter was there to teach in 1961 and 1962. His class was a seminar that met for a couple of hours every week. The four or five of us taking the seminar presented what we were working on. I remember writing a piano piece that had an unusual little figuration in it. I remember it because Carter said something to the effect of: “Hmmm, well, that seems to work very well, but I don’t see why it does.” His teaching was largely by critique and discussion of our work. His ongoing messages to us were to do things in the most interesting way and (I paraphrase this advice, given to young composers starting their careers) to follow our own ideas and not be swayed by the lure of an artificial public success. I do not recall that he ever discussed his own work with us, but he did play examples of works by other composers, especially works that he thought we didn’t but should know. He played and we discussed parts of Boulez’s Le Marteau sans Maître, for example, as well as “Improvisation sur Mallarmé” from Pli Selon Pli, and a piece by Gilbert Amy, a student of Boulez. He discussed the orchestration of these pieces. He presented many discussions of orchestration and orchestral sound in general, for which Carter pointed to examples in Mahler’s music where colors shift as instruments mix, and come and go, in the course of a single thread of melody. He was also interested in Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring and spent time trying to analyze it, but Stravinsky, who was a friend of Carter’s, apparently assured him that there was no underlying schemata. It’s interesting that Carter searched for an underlying schemata in The Rite of Spring, not something that would have occurred to me to do, for example, but the mainstream of music in the early 1960s was based on underlying structural procedures, as in Boulez’s and Babbitt’s serialism and Cage’s chance operations, and Carter was interested. His own compositions were organized by an underlying procedure based on chords and intervals. In fact, for a theory class at Yale, I did an analysis of Carter’s String Quartet No. 2, a piece that I have grown to know better as years go by and that I consider the first definitive expression of his musical ideas.

I graduated with an M.M. degree in 1962, the same year that President Kennedy was awarded an honorary doctorate, at which occasion he said, “Now I have the best of both worlds, a Harvard education and a Yale degree.” In the fall of 1962, Carter went to Rome as the composer-in-residence at the American Academy. After a few adventures, as George Mully’s stage assistant in the chamber opera workshop at the Yale Summer School of Music and Art and as an employee for Poseidon Steamship Company (principal Mediterranean agent for the Turkish Maritime Lines) in Haifa, I ended up in Rome to study with Carter.

It was an absolutely wonderful experience from the beginning. I had made an appointment to meet him in Rome that October, and prior to my arrival he had found a place for me to stay, in a pensione in which harpsichordist Mariolina De Robertis lived. Partly through Mariolina, I met many composers in Rome, among them Franco Evangelisti, Aldo Clementi, Walter Branchi, many others. I also met John Eaton, who had strong ongoing ties with the American Academy, and Larry Austin, who was there for the year.

Carter was staying in a lovely small building used by guest composers at the American Academy, located outside of the Academy building and far from downtown Rome on the Gianicolo Hill. The living room was large with a grand piano on one side and a view of a lovely garden on the other. For my part, I was living a freelance musician’s life, copying and editing music, playing piano, managing somehow, and I was writing music. That winter of 1962 was the coldest ever. Not to be taken literally, the oldest man in town didn’t remember the last time that the water in the Fontana Barbarini had frozen. I was for the most part sitting at my desk, fingers frozen, wearing sweater and overcoat, composing. When I finished something, or when I felt I needed it, I called Carter, went to see him, and we spent an afternoon together, several hours, talking. We talked about my music, which I recall as helpful, insightful, and encouraging. But as I was becoming surer of what I wanted to do and as I was becoming clearer about how to do it technically, our conversations evolved into discussions of music in general. I thought it was wonderful. I loved the process of our conversations, the depth and breadth of Carter’s interests in literature and languages, and, in short, as I think back on those days, those conversations were so exceptional and I gained so much from them that I am left somewhat speechless in trying to characterize them. It was not like information that I could write down and walk away with. It was like growth. Carter must have enjoyed it as well or he wouldn’t have been so relaxed and talkative for so many hours at so many meetings. I was a young guy. He was thirty years older and he was sharing his thoughts. I also had some thoughts to share about music, opera, and literature. And now, especially as I reflect on those days, I think we were forming a friendship. I think it was sometime during that period that I began to call him Elliott.

Carters Home in Waccabuc 1977

The Carters at their home in Waccabuc, NY. Photo courtesy Joel Chadabe.

In 1964, the Ford Foundation started its residence program in Berlin and Elliott told me that he was going. I said, “How can I apply?” He said, “You’ve already applied. You’re going.” In fact, I made an early round trip. It was probably in October or November 1963 that Elliott asked and I drove his car to Berlin from Rome, then returned to Rome, then went to Berlin in January. Alvin Curran and Frederic Rzewski were also there, and Elliott and his wife, Helen, were very much a part of our lives in Berlin. I remember a performance of the Double Concerto for Harpsichord and Piano, with Mariolina De Robertis playing harpsichord, Frederic Rzewski playing piano, and Bruno Maderna conducting. It was a bit of a nerve-racking experience for Elliott because Maderna missed the first rehearsal, showed up late to the second one, and when he did arrive he looked at the scores on the podium, turned to Frederic who was seated at the piano and asked, “Frederico, che facciamo?” Then, looking at the score, he said, more or less to himself, “Oh, I see, O.K., percussion up there (and he changed the percussion’s position onstage), let’s go,” and he started to conduct through the piece, learning it as he went, to the coda. “Hmmm,” he said, “one group is in 2, the other is in 3, I’ll have to conduct one group with my left hand and the other group with my right hand. But then, how will I turn pages? Ah, I’ll memorize the score.” At about that time, there was a problem with the harpsichord, so a technician from the harpsichord company was called in and he fixed it. Between Maderna’s irritating calm-and-in-control attitude and the harpsichord problem, Elliott seemed to be a little unnerved. I sat next to him during the performance, and when it was finished, as we were getting up to go back to greet the musicians, he asked, “How was it?” I told him that it was great. It was.

Elliott with Benjamin Chadabe 1977

Elliott Carter with Benjamin Chadabe, 1977. Photo courtesy Joel Chadabe.

Back in the United States a year or so later, I joined the faculty at the State University of New York at Albany. I was traveling quite a bit, but of course I was in touch with Elliott and saw him fairly often. As those years passed, and as I become more involved in electronics, we talked more often about his music than mine. During those years, Elliott and Helen had a house on Lake Waccabuc in Westchester County, just north of New York City, and my wife and I, and eventually with my son, visited during the summers while they were there. We often went swimming in the lake. Elliott had a cabin on the grounds, which of course I visited to see his current work, which we talked about. I remember that on one of those occasions he was working on Concerto for Orchestra. He had thumbtacked all of the pages of the score around the room so that he could work on the beginning, then the end, then in the middle, and so on, always seeing the whole as he made the parts.

A structure is the relationship of the parts to the whole, and we usually think of structure as the backbone of a piece. The role of structure in many of Elliott’s works, however, is more in the presentation of the piece than its driving ideas. What drives the Concerto for Orchestra, for example, is the evolving interaction in the relationship between “personalities,” different characters or forces that are musically identified through orchestration as much as through the notes the instruments play. In composing the Concerto, and also in other works, Elliott thought of the forces in poetic as well as musical terms, as narratives, and narratives are by no means the sole domain of music. The forces in the Concerto for Orchestra, for example, are based on Vents, a poem by Saint-John Perse. It’s the forces of Perse’s winds that give us the spirit of the Concerto and the narrative of interaction between elements that becomes the long line of the composition. Elliott played through that interaction in his thoughts, then, when he found the best realization of the idea, he froze the thought in notation and presented it in a coherent structure.

Elliott’s music in general is a superb amalgam of the contemporary concept of music based on underlying process and the classical concept of structure and balance. It’s a superb generalization of narrative in literature and sound. Elliott has been a wonderful example of the composer as a knowledgeable, educated person with a broad-based understanding of things in addition to music.

I’ve seen Elliott many times in the past few years. He was composing and, fascinated with the language as well as the content, reading Proust. About a year ago, he declared “Enough Proust, no more Proust,” to my wife and I. When we saw him at a later visit, he said, “I’m back on Proust.” And during this time, although clearly growing weaker physically and tiring easily, he was composing many of the lighthearted and lovely short pieces that were perfectly performed at his 103rd birthday concert at the 92nd Street Y.

We attended the ceremony, on September 21, 2012, at the French Embassy Cultural Services building in New York, at which Elliott was appointed Commander in the Legion of Honor. It was a touching moment. And what a happy way to say goodbye.

Carters & Chadabes 1995

The Carters and the Chadabes in 1995, photo courtesy Joel Chadabe.

[Ed. Note: In March 2000, NewMusicBox published an extensive conversation between Elliott Carter and Frank J. Oteri and in 2008, Phil Lesh of The Grateful Dead (a longtime Carter fan) talked with Carter for Counterstream Radio.]

David S. Ware (1949-2012): Beyond Time

[Ed. Note: On October 18, 2012, saxophonist and composer David S. Ware died at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Brunswick, New Jersey, following complications from his 2009 kidney transplant. We asked pianist and composer Matthew Shipp, a long-term member of the David S. Ware Quartet, to share his thoughts about Ware’s life, music, and legacy.—FJO]

WareQt1995

David S. Ware Quartet circa 1995 (left to right: William Parker, Matthew Shipp, Whit Dickey, and David S. Ware)
Photo by Michael Galinsky, courtesy Steven Joerg, AUM Fidelity

Jazz maverick David S. Ware was a jazz conceptualist of unusual vision, determination, and scope. Was David of his time, ahead of his time, or born at the wrong time? Knowing him like I did and seeing how his whole thing unfolded, that’s a question I ask myself often and am not sure if there is a correct answer.

First, of his time…Well, yes, as a third generation jazz new thing cat, he brings to bear on the situation just what you think anyone who was around in the jazz loft scene of the ‘70s would. He had the influences and the worldview you would expect from someone of that era. But he had that something extra that you can’t quite put your hand on, which is why he had the impact he did with the quartet and why his group and sound could never be easily put just in the free jazz box. Yes it’s free jazz of sorts, but it is a very specific universe which adheres to very specific logics. I knew David well but never put my hand on what exactly gave him his independence and what exactly gave him the courage to trust his own instincts to such an extreme degree. Usually it’s something that happens in childhood that triggers this, often a mother that understands you and pushes you in the right way.

Ahead of his time…Well, yes, sort of. His music is so singular and focused in its aesthetic that it attracted a very strong underground following of devoted listeners. I would say that the Ware quartet in the 1990s generated an actual culture around it in a way. But David’s refusal to play anyone’s game—his refusal to let himself be used as a jazz waste product, his utter disdain for jazz culture per se, along with the striking strength of his music—made it impossible for the jazz establishment to see the value of his art. It was way too strong, singular, and illuminated for the jazz world of the ‘90s that was just starting to get over the headache of the young lions paradigm of the 1980s, as jazz was still under the oppressive weight of Wynton-like pomposity in the 1990s when the Ware quartet was in full stride.

Too late for his time…Well, no. He was when he was. But I often felt that if someone of his authenticity had hit the scene ten years before he did, life would have been a lot easier. Of course that is conjecture. Authenticity is a key word with Ware—he was his own man, with his own vision—but when he found a mentor that inspired him, he imbibed that person’s knowledge and spirit and put it through the Ware filter. A lot has been written about his relationship with the master Sonny Rollins. They were very close. Being that in with Sonny, who is possibly the greatest tenor sax player ever, obviously put Ware in a position to truly understand what it means to play tenor in this music. And make no mistake about it, David had internalized the whole “tenor sax stance” and way of being. But David also saw the great drummer Beaver Harris as a mentor. Ware was a lifelong student of rhythm: what it means in the context of a jazz solo, what it means in the context of composing, and what it means in the context of a group sound. David knew a lot about drums and always had some idea of how he wanted his groups to sound.

David composed constantly. He had loads of musical cells and musical structures in progress. He had notebooks of material and was always thinking his material through and always in a process of creating his universe. He meticulously worked his language through with the intent of generating a coherent universe, but one that allowed for formal and content surprises. David loved and respected the free jazz tradition, but was always conscious of making his music something else, whatever that something else was. He had thought through his role as a virtuoso and how that related to a group sound and how a compositional concept was the through line through all that. His genius allowed him to find conspirators who had their own language, but who could relate to his language through their language, such as William Parker and myself.

I knew of David before moving to New York from his work on Cecil Taylor’s album Dark to Themselves. Upon moving to New York, I had heard him perform a couple of times but did not know him personally. When he wanted to add a pianist to the band, I was recommended to him by both William Parker and Reggie Workman. He contacted me and we did a duo session together. I remember he looked at me afterwards and said, “Wow, I think we have known each other through many lifetimes.” The chemistry was instant, both musically and personally.

It’s kind of a blur now trying to remember; it all happened so fast. Our worldview is very similar so there arose a deep, deep understanding between the two of us. He had nicknames for everyone. William Parker he called the professor. He called me the doctor. He said I could take any piece of music and doctor it, do an operation on it.

The one thing we did not have in common was a love for speed in cars. I remember the first time I rode with him on the highway, he and his wife were in the front. I was in the back seat. He looked in the rear view mirror and saw the look of horror on my face as he had his foot all the way down on the pedal of his Mustang. He asked me, with a big smile on his face, “What’s wrong, you don’t like speed?”

David’s legacy is a body of work that almost defies analysis, that is strikingly original and that has complete and utter integrity. No doubt about it. The lifelong pursuit of an original vision and the stubborn doggedness of David’s stance yielded one of the most provocative musics, pregnant with various meanings and cryptic codes. He created a spiritual landscape that will give the modern music listening public a lot of food for thought for many, many years.

Remembering William Duckworth (1943-2012)

William Duckworth

William Duckworth
Photo by Paula Court

Over the last few days, the music world has learned of the death of one of our most significant composers, writers, and educators, William Duckworth. He succumbed to pancreatic cancer that had been diagnosed about 18 months ago. Of course everyone who knew and loved Bill expected and dreaded this news.

Bill and Nora Farrell, his wife and close collaborator, covered some of the same musical territory as I did, especially in the early 1990s, and we met at a small house concert performed by pianist Joseph Kubera at the home of Robert Ashley and Mimi Johnson. But we were real opposites in many ways: Bill had a broad knowledge of musical style, a patient understanding of the human condition, and a clutter-free apartment. (I had none of those things.) In fact, I don’t exactly know how to describe my friendship with Bill, other than much of our time together was spent in dining rooms and automobiles. We discovered our mutual affinity for culinary splurges. I could pick wine and Bill could pick restaurants–a dangerous combination–living beyond our means for at least a couple of hours at a time.

Bill with Tom

Bill and Tom after lunch. Bill’s Australian collaborator, music technologist Paul Draper, was with us and took the photo, July 5, 2011.

In about 1991, to add to my patchwork freelance life, Bill invited me to work at Bucknell University in a loosely defined job running their computer music studio, teaching some private lessons, and occasionally guest lecturing in various music classes. (He said, “You can call it anything you want.”) I would usually visit the campus for a week each semester, and we would ride back and forth to Lewisburg, catching up on music news and planning our “fine-dining” adventures for the week from the temporary comfort of a depressing Interstate diner.

From this vantage point I was able to watch Bill interact with students in a variety of class situations. Whether it was presenting a new piece, a point of music theory, or guiding a student composition, he enjoyed it all; it was as if all musical sensation gave him a particular take that could be passed along to the next person. Very often, my visit would coincide with a visit from another artist, sometimes in his Gallery series, and for a little while there would be this coalescence of new and old friends of new music. My ambiguous presence at Bucknell lasted for about 11 years. As much as I had enjoyed the community that he had included me in, I knew it was time to go. Bill was very gracious about it, and of course we managed to keep our feeding schedule pretty well intact, if a little less frequent.

Bill had active relationships with many friends, preferring to find ways to visit in small, concentrated encounters. He was obviously much more interested in a way to get beyond the chitchat and into the details. He was a composer who lived in a world of composers, and just as his own music and writing had taken him in several directions over the years, so had his interests in his friends’ work. He loved to hear the details, whether they were related to concept, production, or performance. Every conversation about music was a mini-interview, with its unstated goal being to extract clear and candid expression. Though my own workaday life has given me a few different hats, Bill always related to me specifically as a fellow composer and looked for those opportunities to support me in my own career, especially when I was starting out in New York.

A consummate networker before the term gained fashion; he was always looking to spark fruitful connections between friends and acquaintances. In the 90s, quite often Bill would call me on the spur of the moment to have lunch at a now-defunct Thai restaurant on 8th Ave. I thought he was being considerate of me, since I lived right across the street. But it also turns out that he had made it his unofficial Manhattan “office” and had many of his mealtime appointments there, both social and business. I can still remember him right there, sitting in the corner next to a giant tropical fish tank.

There are many places to go for evidence of Bill’s far-reaching musical activities, and his own website offers a wonderful glimpse of his musical activities. There are sound clips of pieces for traditional instruments and videos of the large-scale projects that he and Nora collaborated on in Australia and elsewhere. In the former, you can hear nuanced patterns that sound familiar but just out of reach; in the latter, the fascination with humanizing technological context by organizing experiences that, in his words, “blur the distinction between the amateur and the professional.”

Duckworth - Time Curve Preludes Book 1 #6

An excerpt from the sixth prelude in Book One of William Duckworth’s Time Curve Preludes (1978)
© 1979 by Henmar Press, Inc. Sole Selling Agent: C. F. Peters Corporation.
Reprinted with the permission of the publisher.

Bill’s close friend, Kyle Gann, posted a beautifully written tribute on his PostClassic blog. Written several hours after his passing, the comments section quickly developed into a remarkable collection of testimonials from all over the world—Bill’s world—of friends, colleagues, and students. My favorite is this one, from a former high school and college friend: “…so glad to have heard his wonderful music and the great contributions he and his wife made together in kicking intentional music into the next dimension.”

These last 18 months, Bill was part of an experimental treatment program, and the early results were indeed promising. He looked good and his appetite was up a lot of the time. We had two extravagant lunches within the first 6 months, carefully scheduled in weeks where his medications and chemo didn’t severely affect his ability to get out in the city. He was very candid about his condition yet enthusiastic about his progress. After that, I received some update emails sent out to his friends. But with his generous spirit, I knew that his buoyant tone was really for us – to help defer what we all knew to be the worst news imaginable.

I’m listening again to my Bill Duckworth CDs, and I imagine many other friends must be doing the same these last few days. As I sit here listening to Lois Svard play one of the Imaginary Dances, I just found an entry on Bill’s blog, dated March 24, 2012:

“It’s been a good year for writing music.”

Duckworth - Southern Harmony (Cheerful) p11

An excerpt of the a capella hymn “Cheerful” from William Duckworth’s Southern Harmony (1981)
© 1993 by Henmar Press, Inc. Sole Selling Agent: C. F. Peters Corporation.
Reprinted with the permission of the publisher.

Cage = 100: Walking Along Paths the Outcome of Which I Didn’t Know…

John Cage

John Cage in August 1992, the last month of his life. Photo by John Maggiotto, courtesy S.E.M. Ensemble.

Five days after the death of colleague and friend John Cage, I produced and hosted a two-hour tribute broadcast on the New York City radio station WBAI-FM. Only a few of the many, many friends who were also close to him could be invited. As you’ll hear, the emotions of the moment are still raw. Everyone is working to come to terms with this sudden absence at the center of our community. Cage was such a friendly, welcoming, and challenging presence in our lives and in the music scene—for everyone—that even now, all this time later, it’s hard to believe he’s no longer with us.

In the WBAI studio with me were artist William Anastasi (at the time co-artistic advisor to the Merce Cunningham Dance Company), composer Earle Brown, Don Gillespie (who worked with Cage for decades at C.F. Peters, Cage’s publisher), R.I.P. Hayman (composer and a founder of EAR Magazine), Mark Swed (a music critic who is probably more knowledgeable about Cage than almost anyone else alive), and Margaret Leng Tan (a pianist who worked with Cage intensively, especially on annotating his works for prepared piano). Speaking by telephone sequentially (WBAI only had a single line) were: Christian Wolff, Pauline Oliveros, and David Tudor. The engineer and in-line producer for WBAI was Peter Schmideg, who was the regular host of the station’s weekly program “Soundscapes: Explorations in Radio Sound & Music.” He graciously offered his timeslot for this special tribute broadcast which can be heard in the following audio file.

This program was the initial broadcast of a year-long radio series I produced for Source Music, Inc., called 0’00” – after the piece Cage described as his 4’33” No. 2: “In a situation provided with maximum amplification (no feedback), perform a disciplined action, with any interruptions, fulfilling in whole, or in part, an obligation to others…” The series went on to include, with permission, the first complete rebroadcast of Cage’s complete Harvard Norton Lectures and Seminars of 1988-1989, plus all of Morton Feldman’s WBAI “Radio Happenings” with John Cage, not heard since the 1960s. Each program of the series also had an interview with a different Cage-related guest. Half of the programs in my 0’00” series were broadcast on WBAI, and the other half on WKCR.

With this 0’00” series, I was working to fulfill not only the obligation we all felt to Cage himself, for having been the center of the entire music community for musicians of all stripes—and doing so with inspiration and an infectious joie de vivre—but also for the extremely thoughtful professional encouragement of having written me an encomium about my own music. In addition, it was one small way to show my appreciation for having been awarded two grants from the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts—a philanthropic organization Jasper Johns co-founded with Cage and others which helped support so much new and creative work in our community. (To the surprise and delight of all grantees, the awards arrived in the mail in the form of Foundation checks personally co-signed by Cage and Johns.)

Adding an element of chance to the proceedings, as this broadcast took place, that year’s Republican Convention was just getting underway, and we were supposed to be prepared to cut away at a moment’s notice to former President Ronald Reagan, who was scheduled to speak after the keynote speaker. Fortunately the speech went on so long that Reagan came on late, and our tribute wound up lasting only slightly less than the intended full two hours. Towards the end of the recording, you’ll hear increasingly frequent references to the convention going on as we are speaking, and there are a couple of fake-out cut-aways to the convention feed before we finally go out, allowing the last words of this historic recording to be spoken by Reagan. Odd as this juxtaposition is, the contrast between the visions represented by this politician and by this composer makes perfect poetic (and Cageian) sense.

Near the end of the program, in my protest against the formulaic last sentence of The New York Times’ obituary, “There are no immediate survivors,” we seconded John Schaefer’s heartfelt exclamation on his radio program that, on the contrary, all of the thousands in our new music community are Cage’s children. I meant no slight to Allan Kozinn’s excellent writing of the obit. He wrote it under extremely difficult circumstances, which I am happy to take this opportunity to underline and especially to note the grievous mistake inserted into it by his editors without Kozinn’s knowledge or consent: that the headline and its lead incorrectly labeled Cage a “minimalist.” The newspaper got it right though, in putting the obit on its front page. (Kozinn told me Cage benefited from the outrage that had erupted when the horse Secretariat died on the same day that Virgil Thomson had—and the editors had chosen Secretariat’s obit for the front page, rather than Thomson’s!) While he was alive, John Cage often had to deal with much disrespect and consternation. When I wrote for The New York Times myself, the editors would not allow me to describe him as one of the most influential composers of our time, suggesting I substitute “musical philosopher.” With much difficulty, I held my ground, but had to compromise with an added equivocation, referring to him as “this most influential and elusive composer.” Since his death, however, the proper estimation of his work has now grown apparent even to the most hidebound naysayers. The range, reach, and depth of his work is enormous.

A word for those who did not have the good fortune or opportunity to interact one-on-one with Cage as a person: he gave generously of himself to everyone, always with diligence and patience. In New York City, one could often run into him, whether shopping at the Union Square Farmers’ Market or attending concerts at Phill Niblock’s loft. Despite his unbelievably busy schedule, he always had time for everyone. And it was rare for anyone to speak with him and not come away enriched. His famous “Eleventh Commandment” was “Thou shalt not have an answering machine”—which meant, if anyone called him (his number was listed in the phone book), they would likely find him at the other end of the line. (Even John Ashbery once told me Cage had transformed his life by advising him, rather than getting upset, to include the telephone interruptions in his poetry.)

Cage was protean, and without question the most influential composer since Wagner—and for entirely opposite reasons. No one since has come anywhere near to taking his place.

*

Thanks are especially due to Peter Schmideg; to WBAI/Radio Pacifica; and to Laurie Spiegel for archiving and transferring the broadcast to digital form.

Radio image via Bigstock

***

Raphael Mostel 1985 Photo

Composer Raphael Mostel with Tibetan singing bowls, 1985. Photo by Michael Sullivan.

Raphael Mostel is a composer, writer and lecturer based in New York City. His work has been performed by musicians of the Royal Concertgebouw and Chicago Symphony orchestras and New York City Opera. To realize his very different compositions revivifying ancient ideas of sound, Mostel created the Tibetan Singing Bowl Ensemble: New Music for Old Instruments℠.

Remembering Marvin Hamlisch (1944-2012)

Hamlisch,Carnelia,Lithgow

Composer Marvin Hamlisch (left), lyricist Craig Carnelia (center), and actor John Lithgow during the recording sessions for the original cast album of the Broadway musical The Sweet Smell of Success. Photo by Chris Ottaunick, courtesy Craig Carnelia.

[Ed. Note: The unexpected death of Marvin Hamlisch earlier this month sent shock waves through the music community. One of only two people ever to receive an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, Tony, and Pulitzer Prize (the other was Richard Rodgers), the New York City-born, Los Angeles-based composer, conductor, and pianist created scores for dozens of Hollywood motion pictures, as well as for five Broadway musicals (including the revolutionary A Chorus Line), and was also a mainstay on the podiums of symphony orchestras across the country. Lyricist and Former ASCAP President Marilyn Bergman, who together with her husband Alan Bergman first collaborated with Hamlisch on the theme song for the film The Way We Were, remembers Hamlisch as someone who “always had a smile on his face and in his heart […] He’d sit at the piano and his musical ideas would tumble out of him—one after another—a shower of notes.” We asked fellow theatre composer Craig Carnelia—who served as Hamlisch’s lyricist for two musicals, including Hamlisch’s last production on Broadway, The Sweet Smell of Success—to tell us more about what it was like to work with this important American music creator.—FJO]

*
So much has been written and will be written about my friend and collaborator, Marvin Hamlisch, that I have decided to write a piece that focuses on those recollections that are private, moments when we were alone, or if with others, situations where we were a team of songwriters or a pair of friends.

The Way We Worked

I met Marvin in the summer of 1997. We were introduced by producer Marty Bell, who was assembling talent to create a musical version of Sweet Smell of Success, a team that already included playwriting John Guare, and would later include director Nicholas Hytner.

At our first meeting, Marvin told me he wanted to write another “serious score” and that he preferred working “music-first.” I was delighted to hear both, and since I tend to work music-first when I write my own music, this method was most familiar to me. Marvin felt he was a better composer when not limited by the structure and cadence of a whole lyric before starting to compose. He preferred to free-associate and invent musically, using a few phrases of lyric, which then leaves the lyricist the job of matching all the rises and falls of pitch, intensity and nuance in the music that the composer has put there. I’ve always loved this part of lyric writing, and working with Marvin’s music, after so many years on my own, I was endlessly surprised by the game.

What “music-first” actually means is, we would have an idea of where a character should sing and why. Then I would explore how the character might express him or herself in words, usually a verse, or a few lines, at least a title. Often, I would come to a meeting with two or three different ways of approaching the same moment. Then we would sit together at the piano with a tape running, usually for an hour or so. But don’t let me mislead you. Marvin was the only one with his hands on the keys. I would sit on a stool to his right, most often with a cup of tea, made by Shirley, Marvin’s longtime housekeeper.

Marvin had the single most limited attention span of any adult I had ever met. But these hours were unique. When he was inventing music, his focus and concentration were extraordinary. He would look at the words I had brought in for 30 or 40 seconds and hear something in his head. His hands would then take over. After that initial “idea” phase in the composing, there seemed to be no time-lag between his continued musical impulses and his ability to simply play them. I would call it “confidence,” but even the presence of confidence would seem to acknowledge the existence of insecurity. It was something more primal than confidence that I saw in Marvin in these sessions, more like raw instinct. There didn’t seem to be any brain involved in this work, and along with that omission, a lovely lack of self-doubt and second-guessing. The first attempt wasn’t always his best, but it very often was. When it wasn’t, he or I would say, “Let’s go again,” or “I/you can do better,” and the second try would invariably be the one.

I would then go home, catalogue the tape, find the best variations and begin writing to them. We would then come back together to deal with structure, lyrics, refinements, questions, additional music, whatever was needed. I would go away again, finish the lyric, and we would have a song.

But in those first hours, when Marvin was inventing, I saw him at his finest. Focused, serious, happy, doing what he was undoubtedly put here to do.

On The Road

By the time I met Marvin, he was as famous for his concert work (solo concerts and “Pops” conducting with major symphonies) as for his composing. So I would often travel to wherever he was and stay with him for a day or two to work. About a month into our collaboration, he was conducting with the Pittsburgh Symphony and I spent two days with him there to work on a song. In the afternoon, we worked at the concert hall, but as evening approached, we walked back to the hotel for an early dinner and for Marvin to prepare for the concert. He was getting into his tux in the bedroom while I was writing on the couch in the living room.

Without warning, out leapt Marvin in his underwear, doing West Side Story-style ballet, shouting “Jerome Robbins!” After ten seconds, he switched styles: “Bob Fosse!” Then, the big finish: “Michael Bennett!” Then, he disappeared. Nothing in my life up to this point had prepared me for this floor show.

The Boys at the Beck

When you do a big show, it’s seldom the big moments that end up bringing you the greatest pleasure or sticking in your memory as the peak experiences. Sweet Smell of Success had peaks in abundance, but the finest of them was an afternoon when Marvin and I went to scout out the pit at the Martin Beck Theater to see if it was going to be large enough for the orchestral numbers and combinations he and orchestrator Bill Brohn had in mind.

We were let into the theater by the stage doorman. There was no one else there. No one. There were some general lights on in the house and, of course, a work-light on the stage. We first went down to the pit where we measured some dimensions. We talked about the optional extra musician (a guitarist) that Marvin and Bill were considering. We ended up not using a guitar for the show, but added one when Marvin and I produced the cast album for SONY. Then Marvin was imagining where each player would sit and how much space each instrument and all the doubles and triples would require. I became superfluous, so I took my superfluous self up to the stage.

We didn’t speak for the rest of our time there, probably ten minutes. I was looking out at the house and Marvin was “all business” in the pit. But we were happy, both of us, with the professions we had chosen, the show we were working on, and the partnership we had found. We tried to acknowledge as much as we walked together afterwards. The acknowledgement may have lacked the full understanding I’ve expressed here, but it had an immediacy and an impact that was unusual.

The New York Yankees

Many of you know that Marvin was a huge Yankees fan. Well, as it happens, so am I, and we were in the thick of our collaboration from 1997-2002, which were glory years for the team. Marvin had gotten Joe Torre and his wife some ringside seats for the heralded Streisand concert he had musical directed and this had cemented their friendship.

So when we would go to a game together, it usually included some dazzling perks, like sitting in the dugout for batting practice, or having the best seats for play-off and World Series games, or having dinner with Joe Torre.

But the best was Game 5 of the 2001 World Series against the Diamondbacks. 9/11 had just happened, you could still smell the burning in the air. There were warnings that the World Series was a likely “next target.” “Did I want to go?” “Hell, yes! I’m going.”

Ninth inning, Yankees down by 2, one man on, Scott Brosius hits a game-tying home run. The stadium went wild, as did Marvin and I. The Yanks went on to win the game in extra innings.

Marvin loved the Yankees, but what isn’t as widely known is, they loved him back.

The Ride

At our first meeting with director Nicholas Hytner, Nick made it clear that he was going to join us on Sweet Smell of Success. Also at the meeting were producer Marty Bell and bookwriter John Guare. After they all left Marvin’s apartment that day, he called me into the kitchen and opened a bottle of his favorite wine (the only time I ever saw Marvin drink). He poured a bit into 2 glasses, gave me one and proposed a toast: “Let’s enjoy the ride.” I can honestly say that on Sweet Smell of Success, we did just that.

And yet, I choose to close these remembrances with a lyric from our second show, Imaginary Friends. The song was never used in the play, but was to have been sung by Lillian Hellman and Mary McCarthy near the end of their lives.

I had a unique experience when writing this lyric. I was enjoying my time with Marvin’s music so intensely that I made the process of completing the lyric take two days longer than it needed to. I didn’t want it to end.

There is nothing clever
I have left to say
You and I
My oh my
Words fail me

Every past endeavor
Every livelong day
So much fuss
So much us
Words fail me

See the legends disappear
With a whisper
“I was here”
“I was here”

No more ties to sever
No more debts to pay
No more chat
‘Magine that
Words fail me

Will I be remembered well?
Did I matter?
Time will tell
Time will tell

Time to face whatever
Time to make our way
Catch the light
Say goodnight
I’m through here
I’m new here
Words fail me.

“Words Fail Me” lyric used by permission Copyright © 2002 A. Schroeder Int’l