Knowing When to Stop

by Ned Rorem

  —We sit around imagining the unimaginable. The faces of our mothers, being sliced slowly to ribbons while we are forced to look. During these same hours across the ocean, fifteen million gypsies, Jews, homosexuals, intellectuals, idiots, and other categories of European misfit are being sucked into a holocaust of which we are yet only dimly aware.

  —Shirley’s a fellow pupil now, we have classes together, including one with Menotti. She has a crush on Menotti, and we walk him to Thirtieth Street Station after school. We do the same with Serkin’s assistant, Mieczyslaw Horszowski, whom she also has a crush on, and who plays Beethoven definitively, even I agree.

  —Shirley’s best girlfriend is Louise Elkan, scion of the Elkan-Vogel publishing firm that prints French music in America. Shirley and Louise do interpretive improvisations to Mahler symphonies, looking like kindergarten students of self-expression.

  —In New York one weekend she and I both stay at Morris’s. At the Carnegie Cinema we see a revival of Crime without Passion with its eerie montage behind the opening credits: liquid globules drip onto the screen, grow larger, and one by one turn into fearsome banshees who then dissolve in a cloud. Morris says: “Another drop of blood and we’ll get the Rockettes.” Such Manhattan sophistication! Is Shirley impressed, or does she feel this whimsy belies Morris’s butch front?

  Later in the street we pass an unfortunate woman whose left eye is higher than her right. “She lifted her eyebrow once too often,” says Morris. Wow!

  —Am I ashamed of Philadelphia friends that I don’t juxtapose them with Chicago friends, and vice versa? It’s too complicated. The Chicago friends know nothing about music, not at least from inside out.

  Have I learned anything from a year at Curtis? Little academically, nothing from Scalero, but everything from the viewpoint (earpoint) of repertory, amity, concentration, execution.

  People always ask: “When do you do your work? You’re so prolific, yet you’re so busy extracurricularly.” Answer: I’m never not working. Every thought and action of my life pertains to my music. I’m working when I eat, when I sleep, when I cruise, when I read, when I say I love you. When I talk with you about the weather or when I type these words, sonic notions are fomenting, usually quite consciously. The time-consuming process of notating these notions is merely the tip of the iceberg.

  —To a desert island I would take nothing but my own talent. My memory of great works is stronger than the fact of those works.

  —I have failed to discuss my shyness (there’s a memo to myself to do so, here on my desk) because, although I agonized for years on chances missed because of timidity or chances ruined because of liquor that camouflaged timidity, and although I recall it as pathological, I cannot reexperience it. Once I had convinced myself that shyness is a form of vanity and that those witty others opining loudly across the room were not so much wittier than I, I gritted my teeth, began to speak my own language, while trying not to be a fool rushing in. Anyone bright is shy, and anyone bright discovers that shyness doesn’t get you far.

  That said, I still shudder from shyness, as I still shudder from stage fright. No one believes me.

  —Those Saturday-night chamber music jamborees at 2302 Delancey! Eileen Flissler, on learning that maybe the Brahms Piano Quintet would be played, rehearsed her sight-reading of that piece in the afternoon so as to impress us with her sight-reading in the evening. (“I swear I’ve never seen this music before.”) But Seymour might substitute Bartók’s First String Quartet, and leave Eileen hanging.

  “The potency of cheap music.” It’s true that the pop songs of one’s adolescence, perhaps because they were forever intertwined with situation—kissing, dancing, pining—are more evocative of time and place than classical music, which is generally imbibed in the pious restrictions of a hall. For Rae Gabis these artistic sessions were a prelude to all-night poker parties; for me they were a prelude to barhopping. To this day I cannot hear the Bartók without salivating in anticipation of beer and more beer.

  —Once I defined a concert as: That which precedes a party.

  Morris, not shy, had a way, after showering, of going around naked, with that tough ape strut of gangland types from Singapore to Saratoga, flaunting his triceps. Naked, except for always a towel over his shoulder. “Why do you always wear that towel over your shoulder,” I asked, “when you’re naked?” Long pause. “Because when I was little my mother accidentally let slip a pan of boiling oil that scarred me.” “Can I see?” Yes, there was the angry, pink, knotted wound, healed and defiant. Five years later when I told this to Nell Tangeman, who had a similar scar on her shoulder and chest, she asked: “So what did you do?” “I kissed it.” “And what did he do?” “He cried.” “I’ll bet,” said Nell.

  —At the Christmas party in the Curtis lobby, on the eve of my permanent leavetaking, Elisabeth Schumann sang a Schubert lied. Inconceivable, then as now, that she should sing a Poulenc mélodie, yet that mélodie on Judgment Day will be seen to be as important as Schubert’s. (Why, then as now, do major music schools have no staff to instruct French repertory—much less American repertory—with the same relish as German?) Nonetheless I was moved to tears.

  The decision was made. Against Father’s better wisdom I would leave Curtis on 31 December for good.

  Now voyager …

  I have loitered in 1943, not knowing when to stop, because those four seasons mark the close of a side of youth to which I still clung, while aching to slough off. Philadelphia was a womblike hyphen between the not-yet-embalmed past and the plunge into New York’s maelstrom.

  Names sprinkled through the year, unrelated and casual, may ultimately crisscross. Yet dreams, like kaleidoscope patterns, cannot be passed intact between people. Indeed, our own childhoods will never be recaptured by our present selves without shattering and repositioning their fragments into new puzzles, like crests of bright waves which instantly melt back into shade. Everything exists while simultaneously ceasing to exist, so that “meaning,” even to itself, alters incessantly.

  Yet what else have we except art and bullets? Well, some try to communicate through what they call love, others through mutual nostalgia. These few thousand words have briefly served, for one person in one frame of mind on one autumn morning, to call back lost friends and reintroduce them here.

  15. Virgil

  Manhattan during the war and up through the early 1950s was governed by Aaron Copland and Virgil Thomson, the father and mother of American music. Young composers joined one faction or the other, there was no third. Both were from France through Nadia Boulanger, but Copland’s camp was Stravinsky-French and contained a now-vanished breed of neoclassicist like Alexei Haieff and Harold Shapero, while Thomson’s camp was Satie-French and contained a still-vital breed of neo-Catholic like Lou Harrison and John Cage. (The Teutonisms of Wolpe-via-Schoenberg were as yet quiescent.) A few lone wolves like me were still socially partial to one or the other. I saw less of Aaron than of Virgil, simply because the latter was my employer for a while.

  With the hard lens of hindsight it’s clear that, beyond an occasional letter of reference or a pat on the back, neither musician, during decades of fraternizing, ever lifted a finger toward my music, be it by performance, verbal recommendation, or through their copious prosifying. Naturally they were more important to me than I to them—they were older; to this day I recall every word that each ever said, and realize how their professional behavior stamped mine. Yet such awareness stems from tenacity: instruction is taken, not given, and they set an example just by being. Beyond those elements of themselves that were at the disposal of anyone, I owe nothing to either man. Still, with the soft lens of hindsight I cannot today recall either man without my eyes welling at the accumulation of affection that comes only from patience and the years.

  On the face of it, entry to the Empire City through Virgil Thomson’s door would seem the ideal route for a twenty-year-old, half Julien Sorel, half Alice Adams, anxious about a solid career in the shiftin
g sands of musical composition. Thomson at forty-eight was the best English-language critic in the world; by extension he was one of our most-played composers. His daily reviews and Sunday sermons in the Herald-Tribune, although of smaller readership than Olin Downes at the Times, had larger cachet, and that cachet—the power to put a musician on the map and keep him there—had much to do with his own music being commissioned and performed. Virgil was shrewd as they come—about everything but Virgil. When in 1954 he retired from the paper, the performance frequency of his music plummeted overnight to the surprise of no one but himself.

  Meanwhile, at the start of the new year 1944, he was at his peak, writing words and music nonstop, socializing, too, and with a presumably satisfactory sex life. There are three conditions of success to which we all aspire—success in work, in society, and in love—but nobody can juggle more than two simultaneously; to succeed in all three at once means that one of them is collapsing—we’re dancing on a volcano’s brink. For now he seemed blessed, at least from where I sat.

  I sat at a long table in the end of the dining room between parlor and bedroom. The European tone of the Chelsea, which smelled of camphor and lavender in the old-maidish lobby and of cinnamon and citronella in Virgil’s apartment, set me more or less at ease: it reeked of childhood. My duties as in-house copyist were to work under the master’s guiding eye from ten till noon and from one till three five days a week. For these twenty hours I received twenty dollars, of which five went to Morris for rent, five to a savings account, and ten to concert tickets, music, books, groceries, subways, and beer. During the first week I had lunch with Virgil (I didn’t yet call him that) while he taught me the ropes. After that at midday Morris would meet me at a Riker’s hash house on Eighth Avenue, or I’d eat alone somewhere or maybe nowhere.

  The copying tasks began with short pieces, graduating eventually to big ones, rendering everything in Virgil’s oeuvre that had not hitherto been printed into legible fair copy. The problem lay less in making a readable facsimile than in deciphering the original. Virgil’s penciled calligraphy, like the manuscript of Pierre Boulez—a man whose music was as fancy as Virgil’s was plain, and who was in all ways except keenness remote from Thomson (the two would nevertheless become, a decade later, staunch friends for reasons of expedience)—was slapdash, almost as though he didn’t want to be deciphered.

  Every week my script improved. Reexamining the script today, it appears overly ornate, with scrolls and curlicues formed by the special music fountain pens that could write thick and thin in India ink, but it was a marked contrast to the original. Virgil, of course, showed me examples by his previous secretaries to use as models, and once sent me uptown to the atelier of Arnold Arnstein, dean of copyists, where five young people were bent over the scribblings of the Current Great (Schuman, Moore, Menotti, Barber) and transferring, by means of slide rules and compasses, rough drafts onto transparent paper—onionskin, as it was called—for photoreproduction. After a month or so of clarifying early works of Virgil—whimsical settings of Georges Hugnet or Jean Racine or King Solomon, for example, or the dumb sonata for solo flute, or the truly touching 1928 Stabat Mater on a text of Max Jacob (the only beautiful piece he ever penned), or sonic one-page portraits of friends that had never been inked—I graduated to bigger things. I did the score and parts of the First Symphony (Symphony on a Hymn Tune), scheduled for performance by the Philharmonic the next season. The responsibility was intimidating: Rodzinski would be conducting from my score, eighty men would be playing from my parts, and if someone sounded a false note, the error would not only be traceable to humble me, but expensive rehearsal time would be spent in correcting it.

  More than the responsibility, though, was the instructive value. Yes, I was skeptical about, even contemptuous of, and mostly bemused by, what I felt to be Virgil’s sappy stuff (and jealous that big-time performers should be hoodwinked), for I hadn’t yet perceived sophistication in the simplemindedness. But the experience, for a young composer, of being answerable for every one of the myriad notes in this or that score was more vital than theory. The best way to learn how a piece of music is confected—be it Monteverdi or Charles Mingus—is to copy it. Not impersonate but reproduce literally, like Borges’s mad (sane) antihero, Pierre Menard, who “translated”—from Spanish into Spanish, so to speak—all of Don Quixote word for word, then called it his own.

  Among my chores as apprentice was to accompany the boss to rehearsals. Virgil-as-performer was insecure, hence feisty. In private his lucidity was exemplary since as a critic he could do the impossible—put into words that which can’t be put into words, by describing one art in terms of another. When playing a Mozart sonata, for example, for friends in his living room, he would raise both hands high then let them fall with great authority onto all the wrong keys; yet he would accompany this action with such explicatory elegance about how all of Mozart’s instrumental slow movements are really subliminal love-duets that he gave an illusion of virtuosity. But in public he could offend. Once when he was engaged to guest-conduct one of his affairs—I think it was The Mayor La Guardia Waltzes—with Stokowski’s Youth Orchestra, his insecurity grew apparent not through reticence but through bullying. During the rehearsal he shrieked at the kids to play softer. He was hissed. Stokowski meanwhile, as was his wont, strolled coolly among the instrumentalists while Virgil ranted on the podium. “Leopold,” cried Virgil, “how do I make them play softer?” Stokowski, all aplomb, turned toward his adoring orchestra, put a finger to his lips, and simply whispered: “Softer.”

  Another time, before the live Wednesday-night performance on WOR of the master’s recently orchestrated Five Portraits, I became embarrassed more for me than for him. During the previous weeks, while copying the score and parts of this new piece and weary of Virgil’s endless series of moronic tonic-dominant progressions, I spiced up a couple of chords with added sevenths. Hearing this at the rehearsal, Virgil had a fit. I realized my miscalculation (the “improvements” diminished the music, if possible) and it was my lot to go into the orchestra and correct each part while the conductor, Alfred Wallenstein, and players expensively waited.

  I recall this evening for another reason. After the performance Virgil took me to Bleeck’s Tavern, better known as the Artists and Writers Restaurant, a hangout of Herald-Tribune employees on West Fortieth. With us were Edward James and Yvonne de Casa Fuerte, both of Virgil’s generation. Yvonne, a marquise, French and poor despite her rich Spanish title, was sweating out the war as a violinist in American pickup orchestras. Plain, even gross-featured, she exuded nevertheless a whiff of strong glamour with her copper hair and ostrich plumes, her gruff gallic authority which does not exist in American females, and her inability, despite long residence here, to speak English. (André Breton, asked why he never learned our language while living in New York, replied: “Pour ne pas ternir mon français.” And Gertrude Stein, whose French was said to be rocky and accented despite the bulk of her seventy-two years on foreign soil, could have said as much, in reverse. Indeed, might not her clarity in English—in American—have been dimmed had she stayed home?) In the 1920s Yvonne had founded the Sérénade Concerts in Paris, which promoted Darius Milhaud, the young Igor Markevich, Henri Sauguet, Vittorio Rieti (whose mistress she was), Francis Poulenc and Nicholas Nabokov. Now in New York she was active in the League of Composers, a cousin of the French organization. In fact, besides Yvonne, there were four powerful women who, in this prefeminist era, ran the bureaucratic side of New Music: Claire Reis, who had invented the League in 1923; Minna Lederman, who started the dazzling Modern Music magazine, verbal artery of “the cause” until its demise in 1946, and who as I write remains vital in her late nineties; Louise Varèse, wife and biographer of Edgard the innovator, excellent translator of Rimbaud, and parental figure to all; and Alma Morgenthau, sister of Henry Jr. and mother of Barbara Tuchman, who gave money. What these women said went. Claire, Minna, and Alma were each touchingly, because hopelessly, in love with A
aron Copland. Yvonne and Louise were not (they were also not Jewish). Yvonne, my first brush with the dynamic of a continental lady, remained an ally, especially during my Paris years when she became cultural attaché at the American embassy. As for Edward James, natural son of Edward VII, he was shortish and thin and married to Tilly Losch, but queer, very, and a patron of the arts beginning with the late Diaghilev ballets. He had written the text and paid for Poulenc’s first big choral piece with orchestra, Sécheresses, and otherwise sought the company of the highborn and of rough trade. I never saw him again after this Wednesday, but Gavin Lambert eventually wrote a novel about him called Norman’s Letter.

  Virgil invited me for a weekend to the New Jersey house of his Harvard chum, art historian Briggs Buchanan (whose musical “portrait” I’d copied). Of this outing I recall the half dozen taffy apples we bought at the bus station for the Buchanan children, a shimmering garden with dahlias, the quarters shared with Mr. Thomson, and, most crucially, Erik Satie’s Socrate. Virgil sang me this little cantata in his composer’s voice (i.e., his nonvoice of definitive expressivity), and during that half hour I felt my notion of the world’s musical repertory change shape, swell, shrink, and ensconce itself in my ken where it would permanently lodge, along with The Rite of Spring, as one of those three or four artistic experiences against which I would judge all others in the coming years.

  What can be said of Socrate? On that special morning I was most struck by the second movement, wherein teacher strolls with pupil by the river; the intonations are continual nondevelopmental iterations of adjacent couplets, as in the line “Est-il rien de plus suave et de plus délicieux?” Such contagious monotone chutzpah, honest and respectful. But when I later bought the score and rehashed it on my own piano, the three scenes bloomed differently beneath my fingers. Socrate is, in a sense, without style—without immediate location in time. Oddly, when you talk to confirmed Satie freaks who think of the composer as “minimal,” they’ve usually heard his every work except the masterpiece, Socrate. (Although “master” is the one thing Satie was not; it’s what Germans are.) I’ve sung it to myself every week of my life without getting bored, the joy of expectation remaining always fresh. Satie’s philosophy, in relating the conventionally unrelated—equating wit with sorrow as a qualitative expression, for instance—was not far from yesterday’s pop culture, which made the ordinary extraordinary by removing it from context. Elsewhere, conversely, like the surrealists, he treated his eccentric subject matter straightforwardly. In the margins of his compositions he inserted little verbal jokes, whimsical advice to the performer or “impossible” directions not unlike those Ives was employing at the same time in America. Socrate itself is fairly long as pieces go; as a program in itself, fairly short. Nothing “goes” with it, least of all other works by Satie since, in a way, they are all contained within Socrate. The texts from Plato’s Dialogues, highly truncated in the French translation, are set to music without romantic gyration, even without vocal embellishment, almost as they would be spoken. They are set literally, so to speak, with respect. Respect—that is, humility—is not a quality one quite associates with greatness. Yet humility is precisely the genius of Socrate: Plato is not illustrated, not interpreted, by the music: he is encased by the music, and the case is not a period piece; rather, it is from all periods. Which is what makes the music so difficult to identify. Is it from modern France? ancient Greece? or from Pope Gregory’s sixth century? Why the music seems never static I do not know, for in the academic sense Socrate has no development beyond the normal evolution imposed by the words. Hence the music moving forward seldom relates to itself thematically, though its texture remains almost constantly undifferentiated. The dynamic level hardly rises above mezzo-forte, with little contrast and no climax until the final page, when we hear forty-four inexorable knellings of an open fifth which denote the agony of the philosopher, who, in the last two bars, expires with a sigh. The harmony, mostly triadic, is rarely dissonant, and never dissonant in an out-of-key sense except in a single “pictorial” section, again from the end movement, when the jailer presses Socrates’ legs, which have grown cold from the hemlock: here the words are colored with repetitions of a numbingly foreign C-sharp. So where lies the remarkability, the ever-renewed thrill of anticipation? It lies in the composer’s absolutely original way with the tried and true. The music, written in 1919, is not “ahead” of its time, but rather (and of what other work can this be said?) outside of time, allowing the old, old dialogues of Plato to sound so always new.