by Ned Rorem
If the notion of musicalizing a poem in French seemed chic, so did the notion of musicalizing poems by friends. Bruce Phemister, like most of the old Chicago acquaintances, lived in New York now. Less a poet than a novelist, Bruce had nonetheless written a nostalgic stanza named “Russian Spring,” which I had used pleasurably a year before. Now I asked him to make a suite in three sections to be sung by soprano with flute, violin, and piano. This he did in a triptych of Sitwellian images called “Hell,” “Noon,” and “Spring.” (Father, learning of these titles, urged me to change “Hell” to “Hades,” imagine!) The seminonsensical word sequences were theatrical and quaint, and eminently singable. (Virgil did not concur: perusing the text he sniffed: “I think she stink,” which made me titter uncomfortably.) I found good interpreters: Ellen Greenberg, a chum from Northwestern and now with Stokowski’s Youth Orchestra, played fiddle; Leslie Oakes, a pupil of Francis Blaisedell’s, who had recently recorded the Bowles Flute Sonata, played flute; Janet Lauren, a trusted soprano from Curtis, sang; and I was the pianist. According to a pretty promotional postcard printed by Morris and pasted in a yellowing scrapbook, we premiered this piece, now called In Piazzas Palladio, during a live broadcast from WNYC on 20 February 1945, between 4:15 and 4:45. Also on the program was my Four-hand Sonata, and an Arioso for violin and piano, of which I retain no copy and don’t recall. The broadcast was part of WNYC’s “American Music Week,” which the radio director, David Stimer, was launching that year, and which continues still every February. Stimer, himself a pianist, acted pleased with my program, became a friend, and would pass through my life in various guises.
Virgil announced that I must resume piano lessons. He summoned his old friend, the French pianist E. Robert Schmitz, who had written a book on piano method, modestly called The E. Robert Schmitz Piano Method, which I perused with mixed feelings, having then as now an allergy to methods of any sort—one man’s meat, etcetera. The doctrinaire study named all the arm and hand joints and how to use them properly (never put your thumb on a black key), despite flagrant evidence of improper use by a Horowitz or a Glenn Gould, who gyrate their torsos and flatten their palms with heaven-sent results. Nevertheless, I agreed to take lessons with Schmitz’s star protégée, a Miss Betty Crawford.
I don’t remember much about the lessons, in either method or repertory, but Betty was an affable and intelligent woman with an unexciting yet useful skill at the keyboard, and I “used” her often as an exponent in my own works during the next few years. She was also, although I couldn’t know it then, a vital link to the next chapter in my life, as will appropriately be seen in the next chapter.
Drinking, so as to be able to have sex, defeats it purpose. Drunk, one’s impotent. So drinking becomes an end in itself. Let me describe a hangover. With a hangover—assuming you’re not planning to drink again soon—the mind is so riveted on the body that there is no mind. Is this self-renewal? the obstinate craving for oranges and soda water? the obsessive sex drive? With a hangover, only the body exists. In urinals, in back alleys, in barns, far from taverns, one glides from cubicle to cubicle, inspecting, rejecting, in the semidark, pausing sometimes at length, then starting all over again, like flipping channels on the TV.
Drink and recover in order to drink and recover in order …
Recurring theme, with no variations.
One morning out of the blue there sat another person at my worktable in the Chelsea. Tall and bigboned but somehow fragile, like Orson Welles on a tulip stem, effusive but shyish, obsessed with how music looked on the page, this was Lou Harrison. A California composer six years my senior, he had worked with Schoenberg and with Henry Cowell with whom he had founded New Music Edition for publishing what then was deemed experimental work. Now he was uprooted for the first time, about to begin a stint as a part-time stringer at the Tribune and meanwhile helping Virgil with extra copy work. More skilled than I (Lou’s hand-drawn musical and prose artifacts are world famous), with a practical sense of performance broader than mine (he had formed his own percussion orchestra with John Cage in San Francisco), and with a grasp of intercultural workings that surely exceeded my grasp, Lou became Virgil’s valuable colleague. Indeed, he may even have let me slide out of sight were it not for his devotion to my cause; nor was Lou interested in replacing me. As it was, we got along famously: Lou as a person was a total original, as a composer a total eclectic. His social style was Californian, easygoing, even oriental, but with more than a twinge of a daftness which led later to a turn in the loony bin, and a predilection for Negro males. His music style was anything that was asked for; Lou felt that one ought to be capable of all, and had earned a living from choreographers (twenty-five dollars a minute was his fee) of every persuasion, composing fandangos for José Limón, Coplandesque diatonicisms for Jean Erdman, Schoenbergian mood pieces for Charles Weidman. Lou taught me the whole bag of tricks of the so-called twelve-tone system in about an hour, and I applied them for about a week. Finally, however, his eclecticism was original. Lou Harrison fifty years ago was concocting raga-type ostinatos identical with those today of Philip Glass and Steve Reich, with the notable difference that while all three men prepare canvases that are nonpareil, only Harrison superimposes a drawing—a melody—upon the canvas which gives it a reason for being.
Weekends we would gather at Lou’s pad on Bleecker Street, where he lived with his black boyfriend, a clergyman, and while swilling quart after quart of Schaefer beer, talk of his idols, Ives, Ruggles, and Varèse, artists he pitted against Copland, whom he disdained. Lou adopted me, was helpful in many ways, for he had his foot in every door. It was he (I think it was he) who gave me entrée to certain organizations that performed me, like the International Society for Contemporary Music.
Impromptu Thanksgiving at Virgil’s. We all go down to the store to buy raw things which Virgil will then cook in his little kitchen. Maurice Grosser, Lou, a couple of others, but not Morris. I recline on the sofa, an odalisque with a flask of yellow wine, nursing an incredible vagueness which had lately been remarked by Virgil, who declared that my work was deteriorating and that I was too young for that. Maurice shoves a couple of goblets into my hands and says, in his tense quick way:
“Fill these with water and make yourself useful.”
“No,” pipes Virgil. “Ned doesn’t have to work, Ned’s a beauty.”
Lou adored the retort and quoted it always. But whether or not I played the lily of the field, I was waxing remote, unfocused, confessing to Virgil that Morris and I were having differences, that the apartment was growing smaller by the day.
Morris and I gave big parties in the small apartment, so big sometimes that if a guest passed out, he would remain standing, bolstered involuntarily by the others.
Sometimes smaller parties, suppers where I’d bake sweet potatoes because, since I’d loved them since childhood, I assumed you did too. I would play the record of In Piazzas Palladio repeatedly for one and all. Aaron Copland told Alvin Ross, who told Morris, who told me, that he always heard the title words as “With Zaza’s Fellatio.”
• • •
The International Society for Contemporary Music, known to all as the ISCM, was the rival of League of Composers, though in 1954 the two groups merged. In the forties the ISCM represented the Germanic side of a spectrum on which the League was French. A junior offshoot, called the Forum, had charter members and gave concerts. Lou thought I should join. One evening at Miriam Gideon’s on Central Park West I was presented along with Jacques de Menasce. Miriam, Elliott Carter, Dika Newlin, Mark Brunswick, Vivian Fine, and Kurt List were the hosts. Jacques and I offered our wares, then were asked to withdraw while members voted. Jacques was accepted unanimously, while I had one dissension, which to this day still leaves me guessing.
The first Forum concert on which I was featured took place in the upper auditorium of the old City Center on Fifty-sixth Street, 17 December 1944. Lou was featured, too, and so were the two veterans, William Ames and Johan Franco.
I accompanied “Doll’s Boy,” “The Knight of the Grail,” and “De Don Juan” as sung by Lys Bert (now Lys Symonette of the Kurt Weill Foundation), a German friend of Morris’s with a light and smart soprano sound. Because I knew there would be a postconcert seminar in which each composer must justify his existence in words, I got sick a week beforehand, went to bed, and for five nights vomited black bile. What did I know of the clever repartee and biased dogma that governed factions and inspired edgy wit! In those days there were far fewer composers around than now, but those few were an accepted, if rarefied, fragment of general society; art, like education, was not anathema, and thus artists could afford to bicker about which language was holy writ and which was negligible junk. To the ISCM the writ was twelve-tonish and the junk was Coplandiana. My music was diatonic, even nonmodulatory in the extreme, and thus would fall under the Coplandiana label—a music conceived without any system beyond that of economy, and which must sink or swim solely by the persuasiveness of its expressive content. Since the ISCM weighed in the direction of the highly methodic twelve-toners, and since they, being less in vogue than the tonalists and hence more adept at verbal self-defense, I felt like a fish out of water. Today, of course, art is not even a peripheral concern. Composers of classical music are not despised pariahs, for to be a pariah one must exist. Being invisible, living classical composers are safe if powerless and poor, so they band together and write each other recommendations. The aleatorics, the dodecaphonics, the minimalists, the neoromantics, all are mutually tolerant bedfellows.
Well, I survived the postconcert seminar, even acquitted myself without embarrassment by stating that music must defend itself—or something equally obvious.
• • •
I produced more and more music, mostly songs on words of Donne and Blake (“A Burnt Ship,” “The Sick Rose”), and settings of Old Testament prose. These were sung at the frequent “new music” concerts, usually with myself accompanying Muriel Smith.
Muriel had quit Curtis a year ago to become the overnight star of Carmen Jones. This all-Negro updated English-language version of Bizet’s opera, unlike The Swing Mikado, left the original score intact. When Muriel Smith bolted on stage, a smoldering Vesuvius, to sing the “Habañera,”
Love’s a baby that grows up wild
and he don’t do what you want him to,
Love ain’t nobody’s angel child,
and he won’t pay any mind to you,
she threw back her head with its blue-metal hair, strutted about on her mocha legs, cajoling cast and audience alike in a contralto as insidious as hot golden rum, the house went wild. Nothing like her had ever been seen on a New York stage, her picture was on Ebony’s cover with interviews in Look and Life, desserts were named for her at Sardi’s, and she was mobbed in the streets. At school in Philadelphia, as a student of Elisabeth Schumann’s, she had proved bigger than life, uncontainable, a born actress of the histrionic mold. Yet, like so many professional vamps through the ages—not just stage people but femmes du monde and business women—Muriel was innocent in matters sexual. She lived with her mother in a railway flat on Saint Nicholas Avenue. Whenever I went there to rehearse, our work would be succeeded by lunch (mashed potatoes stick in the memory), during which her divorced father would show up and quarrel loudly. If Muriel had a crush on me—a crush that would endure for years, with a smile through her tears—it was assuaged in those days only by proxy. After a performance of a Saturday evening she would come downtown and talk until dawn, whereupon she would expire in the little bedroom and I’d sleep with Morris in the parlor. Sunday, using the multicolored canes which Father had bought in Mexico, we would investigate the Empire City, strolling through the Lower East Side, and try to speak French. We never kissed. Like most of us, Muriel was nourished by the necessary obstacles of love.
The sound of Muriel’s mezzo was the closest thing to dying or, rather, to a suspension of living, when time stops except for the hallucinogenic concentration on the immediate: it was like listening to red, to cake, to the ecstatic smell of tuberoses frozen in amber. This is not an informative way to describe music, I know, but Muriel resisted sensible criticism. (All singers do, unlike instrumentalists, for a convincing voice is irrelevant to intelligence, even to practice.) Indeed, I could never speak to her about “meaning,” about the sense of this or that poet, for she would only agree with her beautiful eyes, unaware of intellect, then open her lips and prove a point merely by song. This could have been fatal—performance by instinct alone. It eventually was. For the present she drifted on.
We made home recordings together, thought about opera possibilities, even straight acting. We collaborated until the end of the decade, when she moved to London to become an even bigger cult figure, and certainly—as a black glamour girl—a weirder novelty than at home. In England she had regular jobs on the stage in The King and I, South Pacific, and in movies, notably Moulin Rouge, where she rips open the screen in a fight with Colette Marchand, then gains a sort of “unsung” immortality by dubbing Zsa Zsa Gabor’s singing of Auric’s famous “Valse.” Elsewhere she made pop discs by singing fast songs slow, like “Come Rain or Come Shine,” as Streisand would do years later with “Happy Days.” She also gave sober recitals in Wigmore Hall in programs of a surprising complication considering how unskilled she was at just reading notes. Muriel had the exasperating habit of learning by rote, not untypical of singers then but rare today.
Her decline began with Moral Re-Armament—how vilely that rings to my pacifist ears—a fundamentalist sect that salved Muriel’s sincere but sometimes misguided notion of civil rights. (In 1956 she turned down an offer from Samuel Goldwyn to star in the film of Porgy and Bess because “it doesn’t do the right thing for my people.”) Her entire energy was now spent propagandizing for that sect through films and concertizing worldwide. Returning to the States finally, she visited me, proselytized, brought sentimental poems of her own making, hid little tracts between the sofa cushions. She became a dietician in Mount Kisco, then in Virginia, where she continued gullibly to champion Moral Re-Armament, where she lived still with her mother, and where both women died within a year of each other, the mother at ninety-one, Muriel at sixty-two of an excruciating postmastectomy ordeal. She vanished in limbo, forgotten.
Since writing the above I’ve gone through her file of old letters. So much more intensity and confusion than what I recalled, it’s heartbreaking. Muriel felt strongly about what she felt strongly (race relations, the power of song, salvation through prayer) but saw as through a glass darkly and was used. Did I too use her? We all use each other continually, animals and humans, it’s the design of existence, a chain reaction.
• • •
John Cage was very much around, and we met often, mainly at Lou Harrison’s dark loft on Bleecker Street. Like Lou and Virgil, Cage spoke in a high-pitched démodé whine which belied his craggy features framed by a manly “German” haircut. Already tireless in the promotion of his selflessness, he seemed a dime-store Descartes pushing “Je pense, done je suis” as though he’d coined the phrase. If everything’s art, as Cage would claim, then anything’s art; and if nothing is truly ugly (a heap of corpses at Belsen?), as he also would claim, then is anything truly beautiful? His undefined terms make for easy chuckles and a soft-centered coterie, while his nonegoist stance makes for lasting publicity of that stance. All contradiction is brooked with a permanent smile, like that of so-patient Mormons who, because they’re going to heaven and you’re not, can afford magnanimity. Cage today has grown dogmatic, oversimplified, a bit pinched, awfully boring. When a Laurie Anderson claims that she can’t mistrust anyone so funny, I’d counter that continual laughter is idiocy. Half a century ago his style had not yet congealed into cliché, nor indeed had he begun to work with Merce Cunningham in their mutually independent collaborations. (“We’re doing different things simultaneously,” say they, validifying this as art because “that’s what happens all around us in actual life.” Then why n
ot three, or seventeen, or five million things on stage simultaneously?) His reaction to my work, specifically to Prelude and Adagio, which Lou called Bogey Man Music, was of hearing what was not in it, while what I heard in his prepared pianos was a seductive tinkle, if it didn’t last too long.
But how does anyone hear anything? My dearest friends don’t hear Bach, or see blue, or taste lemons as I do (at least their adjectival emotional reactions never synchronize with mine). John Cage, who’s favorite piece was my favorite too, Socrate, gleaned from it what I never heard. Where for me Satie’s quips were plaintive, to John they were campy, and to take at face value Satie’s designation at the end of his three-minute piano piece, Vexations, “to be repeated 486 times,” and then to rent a hall plus a relay of pianists and to do precisely that for twenty-five hours, is to take Satie literally where he was being merely whimsical. Elsewhere Cage links Satie and Webern because, he contended, there has been only one new idea since Beethoven in the field of structure, and that idea is couched in their brief pieces: brevity as definition. Why, then, perform Vexations 486 times? As for Socrate, it lasts over half an hour, and indulges in heartwarming harmony—a trait John would eschew. Webern and Satie were in fact opposites: Satie’s page was minimal, but that minimum was perfect, and he stopped when he was through (unlike Beethoven). Webern’s music, equally short by the clock, was more densely packed than a hydrogen bomb.
Ankey Larabee had a fling with Cage. She told me that he liked to make love to the accompaniment of a metronome. Once when a spring got loose, the metronome began ticking faster and faster. The lovers stopped, breathless, when it reached the maximum 208 beats to the minute.
I was bowled over when one evening John brought forth Either/Or by my piquant landsman Kierkegaard, of whom I’d never heard, and began to read aloud: “What is a poet? A poet is an unhappy being whose heart is torn by secret sufferings, but whose lips are so strangely formed that when the sighs and the cries escape them, they sound like beautiful music.” Could this be shortened to “An artist when he cries makes music”? Less overwhelming was the premiere a few years later of Cage’s most notorious piece, “4’33”,” scored for a performer who remains silent by his instrument for four minutes and thirty-three seconds. Hadn’t Harold Acton, in one of his novels from the twenties, proposed the identical philosophy? (The music dwells in the audience’s fidgety thoughts and in the random outside din during the prescribed minutes.) John has been dining out for two generations on Acton’s uncredited notion.
