by Ned Rorem
I’ve reexamined his lovely “Epitaph,” composed in 1946 on a Melville poem. My own “Reconciliation,” written that year, comes too close for comfort to his “Epitaph.” The influence is flagrant, not least in choice of texts—I read what David read. But though the keyboard configuration in each song is virtually the same, our vocal lines are undisguisedly our own. Innovation in itself, of course, is meaningless. (Radiguet: “A true artist is born with a unique voice and cannot copy; so he has only to copy to prove his originality.”) David and I wrote our songs on top of each other; Debussy’s “Fleurs,” too close for comfort to Poulenc’s superior “Fleurs,” predates the latter by forty years.
When I told David I’d seen Lana Turner at Café Society, it turned out he had lived with her. He tutored Artie Shaw in counterpoint when he was married to Lana. “What was that like?” I truly wondered. “Oh, Baby Snooks [he called me Baby Snooks], Baby Snooks, your endless questions. Well, it was exquisite.”
He took me to the midnight WOR broadcast of Perséphone, with Stravinsky conducting, and Madeleine Milhaud as the dynamic diseuse. Which is the first time I saw that sacred man in the act: the musicality of his physicality, moving up and down, as though he were joggled slow-motion in a tumbril, his sinewy back, his desiring arms. David brought beer for everyone.
He was responsible for my first publications, the two psalms, which were accepted on his recommendation by Associated Music Publishers and printed immediately.
We ran into him, Morris and I, on that somber night of Roosevelt’s end. David had written music for The Tempest (starring Arnold Moss, with Zorina as Ariel and Canada Lee as Calaban), an extensive score for sizable orchestra which he himself conducted every evening. “Tonight,” said David, “Moss broke down during the closing speech, ‘Our revels now are ended.’”
His songs from The Tempest revolve still in my brain; I listen to their echo. Sometimes I wonder if the frisson of hearing again a long lost piece is due less to the music’s power now, than to a remembrance of the music’s power when first discovered. Can one, in other words, enjoy the madeleine for its own sweet sake?
George Perle, still in uniform, resurfaced from foreign parts during this period and was often visible at intermissions of ISCM concerts. He had thickened and virilized since his lean Chicago days, an equivocal sensuality beneath his unflappable stance. I took to spending Saturday evenings chez lui, where he analyzed Bartók’s six quartets for my illumination. He admired my perspicacity while remaining immune to my gifts, if I had any, nor did he play me the results of his own gifts, which I came to savor only years later.
It is tempting to compare Diamond with Perle, if only for their jeweled proper nouns. I do abhor metaphor in musical discussion (music’s “meaning” is not too vague but too precise for words, thus untranslatable), but I might suggest that the oeuvres of each man are mutually exclusive except in resembling the other’s name. Perle, with all his in-built emotion, nonetheless incises his staves with a diamond stylus. Diamond, with all his academic exactitude, nonetheless sculpts tunes creamy as pearls. Their one other point in common is the birth year, 1915.
Apropos wit, George’s nonvocal music does possess it, but don’t ask why. He can also write fast music that is inherently, kinetically fast, not just slow music speeded up. I used to contend that there is no fast twelve-tone music, since fastness depends on dogged repetition (hoofbeats) which twelve-tone music cannot by its nature have. But then, though he is the world’s foremost authority on Schoenberg’s socalled twelve-tone system, George himself doesn’t compose in that system.
There is not, however, any witty twelve-tone music, because twelve-tone music is German. Earlier I emphasized that to be French is to stress proportion; to realize that humor and horror are not mutually exclusive; to be profound while retaining the levity required (at least in Paris) to get through life without collapsing; and to discover the depth on the surface of things. To be French is to show three sides of a coin. French is witty, and wit, as exemplified by that most stylish of French composers, Franz Joseph Haydn, is ellipsis—knowing what to leave out. Wit depends on tonality, and all French music true to the name is tonal.
To be German is to dig in rather than to spread out, to get to the crux of things obsessively. That which under other circumstances seems funny gets drowned by the very terms that offer it, like Schoenberg’s Von Heute auf Morgen, a suburban-type wife-swapping farce mired in Bavaria. Serial music, especially in the theater, lends itself ideally to themes of injustice and dreamlike madness because the system depends on irresolution. But where Schoenberg uses this lugubrious language for his “comic” opera, stultification ensues.
A case could be made, though I shan’t make it, that Schoenberg’s science, like Freud’s, while being irreversibly branded on the globe, can now be viewed as a blind alley. Freud entered a cave which expanded toward ever deeper shadows rather than narrowing toward a ray of light. Schoenberg, in “emancipating” dissonance, ultimately justified flaccidity. Dissonance by definition resolves, otherwise it is not dissonant (dissonant to what?); but where all is dissonance nothing is dissonance—no relief, and at the same time no tension.
Shirley and George knew each other too, both being friends of Ben Weber’s, as was Shirley’s new husband, Seymour Barab. They all moved in the same then-isolated twelve-tone circle of fifths. George, now a widower, would marry another sculptor, even as Shirley would marry twice again, before Shirley and George, forty years later, would marry each other. Quite like Madame Verdurin and the prince de Guermantes. Well, maybe not quite.
Back to Martha.
Early in 1946 we moved out of the studio and into the theater when she opened for the first time under the splashy sponsorship of Sol Hurok. This meant she now was on Broadway with a thirteen-piece orchestra and a three-week run. It meant too that certain students who had been drafted into the troupe would make their debuts, and that I would finally see the new Chávez score, whose sounds (fairly nondescript) had been filtering from one rehearsal room while I played classes in another. I’d already seen the costumes, such as they were—loincloths for the boys, red scarves for the girls—when they arrived two days earlier to the childlike glee of all. I’d already heard, too, Copland’s Appalachian Spring in its full orchestra version, which had just won the Pulitzer Prize, and which Martha had premiered the previous year, along with Hindemith’s Hérodiade, in Washington. These dance works, with the new Dark Meadow, were now before us in New York. The excitement resembled what a Diaghilev opening must have generated forty years earlier. I’ve never felt anything like it.
When the curtain rose on Dark Meadow, those daily faces—the lighthearted kids from dance class—were suddenly unfamiliar. Four boys squatting on their haunches clutched from behind, between their knees, four girls, also crouched, and like amoebas in slow motion they glided awkwardly about the stage in contradiction to Chávez’s disappointingly precise but useful-enough score. Amid this octet Martha, as She Who Seeks, lay on the floor and rolled herself up in a rug, then unrolled herself, then rerolled herself, then reunrolled herself, while we, deep into Freud, were chilled to the core. (The next season Iva Kitchell, the comic mime, performed a hysterical parody of this behavior.) Though I must have seen it a dozen times, I recall no more of Dark Meadow than the close: a Noguchi tree suddenly sprouts tin leaves as the chorus moves obliquely to the front of the stage while Martha, back to audience, slants off to the wings, staggering slowly, arms raised and clutching a bright red menstrual rag.
Appalachian Spring, a ballet extolling family values with music by a man who never slept with a woman (Martha told me beforehand that the score was crystalline—her word—and apt to a tee, while Aaron explained to me afterward that it was composed “in the abstract,” according to cues and lengths, and that he never knew the plot, much less the title, until the final rehearsal), is called a masterpiece, the right meeting of talents at the right time. Martha was perhaps a bit old for the role of Bride, and less enth
ralling than as another bride in Hérodiade where, with only Mae O’Donnell as lady-in-waiting, she prepares to marry Death while only a bassoon—Hindemith’s bassoon—prods her magically.
At the peak of her fame (like Lenny Bernstein, she had always been famous, even before she was famous), Martha was nonetheless past her prime. What one now recalls is not her technical prowess—the swirled kicks or the hard heel resonantly crashing into the floor repeatedly like a flamenco—but the sheer presence, the morbid visage, the stillness. Immobile as a pillar, a liquid pillar, a pillar of brandy, she moved mountains.
Later that spring, at the old MacMillan Theater on the Columbia campus, she premiered yet another grand contraption to Samuel Barber’s maybe best score, The Serpent Heart. Again Mae O’Donnell, in her cool blond beauty, provided the perfect foil as the chorus who graciously raises the curtain, again Martha with a snake in her mouth has a hair-raising solo on a boogie-woogie bass, and again Noguchi provides the ideal prop when Medea, as the curtains close, rides toward the audience madly in her shining chariot. (Parenthetically, the three most unforgettable décors of my experience are Noguchi’s for Diversion of Angels, Balthus’s for Ugo Betti’s L’île des chèvres, and Félix Labisse’s for Claudel’s Portage de Midi.) I retain another memory of that May night at The Serpent Heart. During intermission a woman, perhaps forty, very blond, all alone, overly made-up but saved by her singular theatrical beauty, dressed all in beige, including a beige pillbox hat, except for a flame-colored chiffon scarf (“cheapness that only money can buy,” as JH once put it), was pacing the aisle angrily. This was Stella Adler, whom I would see from afar for many years, and who would come to recognize me only after a dozen meetings (“All goyim look alike to me,” was her excuse), and whose daughter, Ellen, became a friend in Paris. Stella, age ninety-one, died yesterday as I write these words.
I shall round out this chapter called “Martha,” which would have little raison d’être were it not for this:
After the stint of working at her studio I did not meet Martha Graham for eight more years. Ah, the fact of her was forever around Manhattan—and much of musical life centered on that fact; composers were rated by some according to whether they had collaborated with her. By others, notably John Myers & Company, who felt Balanchine rightly ruled the roost, Graham was rated zero. But her myth advanced, aided by Hurok. I kept up, as young composers always do, if only to see what the competition consists of. But after moving to France in 1949, the fact of her dissipated.
In May of 1954 I wrote in my diary: “Martha Graham’s company is here for the first time. The French who, if only on their deathbeds, do take their freewheeling birthright Catholicism for granted, do not therefore know how to take the implacable no-nonsense of Martha’s pagan Jocastas or protestant Emily’s. We had that with Kurth Jooss, they wrongly clarify (they, who ask with brave discovery if you know Brahms’s quintets!). The French are still for toes and fairy tales, so they have put her down.
“Yesterday afternoon, emerging from the Eglise Saint-German into green sunlight, I spotted her at the Deux Magots terrace seated gauntly before a cold demitasse and a pile of dry brioches. For a moment we spoke—if indeed speaking is how one communicates with her, if one communicates—and I wandered off, caught again.
“Caught by the past when I was as young in New York as now I am in Paris, as enamoured there then of miraculous Frijshian ladies as I am here now of my Marie-Laure. And Martha again today, so out of context! How far, on this warm warm evening, were those nervous mornings during the war’s end, of banging to a count of eight loudly, while in silence I worried that she choreographed Dark Meadow to Chávez’s tunes, not mine. How far, those Grahamesque explications we all understood without understanding, that vague speech on mental landscapes of primeval ritual, which did somehow compel the dancers! For we were moved, it worked.…
“Tonight I took in again her Night Journey, dying. Afterward, alive in the wings, I asked Martha (hugely tiny among her winged Noguchis) how long she’d be in town, if we could have iced tea together, or could I show her Versailles. ‘Yesterday would have been the time for that,’ said she, ‘when you passed by the Deux Magots. From now on I haven’t a minute to myself.’”
Twelve years later. In the fall of 1966 her conductor, Eugene Lester, having read my recently published Paris Diary, felt he should bring me and Martha together again to discuss a collaboration.
I see her moving toward me across the immensely echoing floor of the rehearsal room, now up on East Sixty-third Street. Each step disintegrated the clock until her scarlet mouth was close, uttering the identical phrases of years ago, but which inevitably took new meanings according to occasion. We chatted only briefly. (She spoke disparagingly of Nureyev, whom she had just met, and who had flung his whisky glass across the room into the fireplace. “The arrogance!” said Martha, though it was a gesture she would have been capable of.) Then to business.
Stock still for twenty-seven minutes she listened to the tape of my Eleven Studies for Eleven Instruments. When it was over, she’d all but choreographed it in her head. We shook hands, kissed, it was a deal. Already she had a title, from Saint-Jean Perse, The Terrible Frivolity of Hell, and I recalled that, of course, Martha always spoke, ever so softly, in iambic pentameter.
Because I had to leave for several months in Utah, that was that. I knew she was working on “our” ballet for the winter season because she phoned occasionally—those inspired midnight calls with ice cubes tinkling through the wires across the land. (Her drinking, which was known, now seemed a crass contradiction of that earlier Spartan self-denial.) The ballet was evolving, but possibly because the music wasn’t written for her, my feeling of high honor was coupled with disinterest. Also, the music had been used by others before her, though Martha didn’t know it and I certainly didn’t tell her. Valerie Bettis, Norman Walker, others … In her two hundred-plus creations, a mere handful were choreographed to already existing music. Just as American Song wouldn’t be quite as it is without Janet Fairbank, so Martha Graham caused to exist a great bin of first-rate music. Would I have written something especially for her?
But in a sense, it was written for her, as I realized on returning to New York and, like Maldoror, seeing for myself. In the past, it’s been shocking how dancers seem unaware of what composer they’re dancing to. With Bettis and Walker and the others I’d been pleased but not dazzled: mostly they Mickey-Moused the music, doing what it so obviously told them to do. Not Martha’s troupe: they demonstrated how I’d made Eleven Studies in Search of an Author. How unright that music was without this sight. How Helen McGehee’s hops were inevitably correct against the amorphous trumpet! the group’s immobility when my little orchestra goes wild! Robert Powell’s rhythmic trance behind the screeching clarinet! Virgil’s epithet was wrong, at least for now: for now, though they never stop talking but still with little conversation—meaning they hover over facts while avoiding ideas, except when approaching ideas as though they were sacred or (what’s worse) new—they are so eloquent with their autoeroticism that speech grows superfluous.
Because she was unliteral, and knew how to design counter to the yet indispensable music, Martha is my only collaborator (though she never once asked my advice) to have been right, all right, turning my disinterest to satisfaction.
I seldom read dance criticism, mostly because critics nearly never mention the music, much less how the music is used. Yet without the music the dance would be without its spine. A good choreographer goes against the sound in a manner that only the sound could provoke, finding in the music’s potential more than even the composer is aware of. No critic has yet written an essay on the interaction—on how music, because it has no specific meaning, can make or break a given “meaningful” scene. Music’s power lies in an absence of human significance and this power dominates all mediums it contacts. When Georges Auric composed the score for Blood of a Poet he produced what is commonly known as love music for love scenes, game music for gam
e scenes, funeral music for funeral scenes. Cocteau had the bright idea of replacing the love music with the funeral, game music with the love, funeral with game, which gives the film its surreal correctness.
The sea reminds me of Debussy’s La mer; La mer never reminds me of the sea. But if a picture recalls the sea, the sea conjures up no picture of anything beyond itself. In this sense, water is as abstract as music, but a picture of water represents an abstraction. Whatever title Debussy may have chosen, his work is finally enjoyed as sheer music. If a novice were told that the three movements of this piece illustrated three times of day, not on the sea but in a city, he wouldn’t know the difference. Paintings also present different impressions to different people: as many interpretations exist as spectators. Etcetera.
Maybe I’m wrong. Reexaming La mer tonight it occurs to me for the first time that all three movements are essentially fast, yet one’s memory of this sensuous experience is—as with all sensuousness—slowness. And the harmonies, which constantly revolve but never resolve, do imply the hopelessness of the sea, at least for a human lost in it. The hopeless chords.
Arthur Miller ends his autobiography with a beautiful three-word verbless sentence: “Even the trees.” He tells us that all living entities on earth are interrelated, are continually looking at each other, are looking at us, even the trees. Couldn’t the reverse be as true? I cannot know you. No Arab of yore can know us, nor Noah, nor Lana Turner. Even our mothers. We are each alone in the hopeless chords of the sea.
Betty Crawford and NR, 1945.
17. Ned’s Diary (II)
Was liquor the canvas upon which all else was limned, or was the “all else”—sex, music, death—the canvas upon which liquor was limned? The postadolescent creature who once I nourished, but who is disappearing round the edge of the universe, can perhaps depict himself more succinctly, if not more accurately, than I can. Here are some scattered entries from his early diary.
