The 60s

by The New Yorker Magazine

  “I’m so glad you could come, I’m so glad you could really make it,” Mr. Gould said, turning around, to Mr. Menuhin. “I want you to see this one. This one is a special pet.”

  “Such a nice thing to do in New York,” Mr. Menuhin said, in a light, warm voice, and gave Mr. Gould a gentle, warm smile. “Seeing a movie, at eleven o’clock in the morning! I’m so happy you suggested it.”

  “I like making these films,” Mr. Gould said. “I’ve always felt this terrible frustration in concerts—you do it and it’s gone. Why not put it on film and have it? So that it will be there.”

  “Wonderful idea. Wonderful,” Mr. Menuhin said, his smile broadening and a look of appreciation coming into his eyes.

  Mr. Gould grinned.

  “I did a television film on Bartók, covering the musical influences in his life, and playing some of his arrangements of Hungarian folk tunes and excerpts from the solo violin sonata he wrote for me, and speaking in between, and I did another one about Yoga,” Mr. Menuhin said. “I find it rather difficult when they put you in front of the camera and say ‘Do something.’ ”

  Mr. Gould bobbed his head in agreement. “We had a very good director for this one, and we even built a set, as you’ll see,” he said. “We shot the whole thing in two days. After two months of conferences, of course.”

  “Was it dreadfully expensive?” Mr. Menuhin asked. “These things do cost so much.”

  “Thirty thousand dollars, about,” Mr. Gould said. “But I wanted to do it right. There’s no point in doing it at all if you can’t get what you want.” He waved a hand at the projectionist, who was peeking out of a square hole in the back wall. “We’re ready any time you want to start,” Mr. Gould said.

  Mr. Menuhin gave a little sigh and tightened his hands around his middle. “I hope this will be made available to television in this country,” he said.

  Mr. Gould grinned again. “Well, they’ve got Leonard Bernstein,” he said. “I don’t do it the way he does it. Not that I don’t admire the way he does it. He has the ability to communicate on a great many levels at once. My way is different.” He bobbed his head vigorously. “I don’t know if my film is for the mass public. Sometimes I think they don’t know what the hell I’ve said, but they feel elevated.”

  Mr. Menuhin’s eyes twinkled.

  “Roll it,” Mr. Gould said to the projectionist behind the wall. He turned back toward the screen, and tossed his coat, muffler, and cap on the floor. The lights went out, and the movie started, showing Mr. Gould at the piano playing an improvisation based on “Do Re Mi,” from Richard Rodgers’ score for The Sound of Music. When he had finished it, he looked up, on the screen, and said to the camera, “For hundreds of years, musicians have been doing the sort of thing that I was attempting just now. They have been taking little bits of musical trivia, like that theme from The Sound of Music, and trying to find complicated equations into which, like a common denominator, these tidbits will fit. In fact, there is some part of almost every musician that longs to experiment with the mathematical quantities of music and to find forms in which these quantities can function most successfully. And perhaps the long-time favorite of such forms is that special musical mix we call the fugue. The fugue is normally conceived in a number of voices, a number of individual lines that, up to a certain point, may lead a life of their own. But they must have in common a responsibility to some special material that is examined in the course of the fugue, and consequently each of the voices is first heard announcing, in its most comfortable register, the same theme….”

  As Mr. Gould elaborated on the give-and-take between the voices in the fugue—each musical voice, he said, went off on “some pretty wacky tangents of its own”—Mr. Menuhin listened intently, and when Mr. Gould explained that the relation of the subject of a fugue to its counter-subject would be something like that of “God Save the Queen” to “The Star-Spangled Banner,” Mr. Menuhin made a soft sound of concurrence. “They ought to combine and complement their personalities in a manner that, as Johann Sebastian Bach once said, suggests three or four civilized gentlemen conducting a reasonable conversation,” Mr. Gould continued. “And the conversation that they carry on does not necessarily always deal with particularly imposing matters….In fact, in certain cases the more ordinary the subject the better.”

  “Good,” Mr. Menuhin said. “Very good.”

  The offscreen Mr. Gould got up and went right up to the pillowcase screen, shaking his head ruefully. “Can you get a slightly sharper focus?” he called back to the projectionist.

  Nothing changed in the focus. Mr. Gould sat down again. Onscreen, he was saying, “When we hear a fugue like the one in E Flat from Volume II of Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier, we hear a composition that not only disciplines four profoundly beautiful lines but makes them more compelling by having them work within a superbly disciplined harmonic regime.” He then played the fugue on the piano.

  “Lovely,” Mr. Menuhin said when he had finished. “Lovely.”

  The offscreen Mr. Gould gave Mr. Menuhin a pleased look. Then he got up and went back to see the projectionist. When he returned, a moment later, the image on the screen was sharper. “Better?” he asked Mr. Menuhin.

  “Much better, yes,” Mr. Menuhin said.

  Both men settled back more easily in their chairs. Mr. Gould crossed his legs. He hunched forward as he heard himself say, on the screen, that he was now going to play a much more intense fugue from Volume II of The Well-Tempered Clavier—the B Flat Minor, one of the finest of Bach’s fugues.

  “Wonderful,” Mr. Menuhin said at the end of the fugue.

  “It’s a great piece,” Mr. Gould said.

  Mr. Menuhin commented on the lightness of the piano sound, and Mr. Gould said that this particular piano had almost no aftertouch.

  At one point, when the camera zeroed in on Mr. Gould as he was playing, the watching Mr. Gould shuddered. “God, that’s a nasty shot,” he said. “It’s like Cornel Wilde in A Song to Remember, with Merle Oberon leaning over the piano.”

  “Oh, no, it comes over beautifully!” Mr. Menuhin said.

  Every time Mr. Gould finished playing something on the screen, Mr. Menuhin would lean forward slightly, Mr. Gould would turn around to him, and Mr. Menuhin would say, “Wonderful performance, wonderful performance.” Near the end of the movie, Mr. Gould said, onscreen, “Paul Hindemith is one of the few composers of our own time who can undeniably be called a fuguist to the manner born. Hindemith has developed a very special language of his own, a language that is contemporary in the best sense of the word but in its attempt to provide harmonic logic uses what you might call a substitute tonality.” Then he played the fugue from Hindemith’s Third Piano Sonata, which Mr. Menuhin immediately said was a wonderful piece.

  “And now!” the offscreen Mr. Gould said, standing up. “We come to what we’ve all been waiting for!” He adjusted a knob near the screen that turned the sound up. “We have to have this louder, that’s for sure,” Mr. Gould said, laughing and shaking with his laughter.

  Mr. Menuhin smiled.

  On the screen, a quartet—a baritone, a tenor, a soprano, and a contralto—started singing a composition in fugue style by Mr. Gould:

  “So, you want to write a fugue,

  You’ve got the urge to write a fugue,

  You’ve got the nerve to write a fugue.

  The only way to write one is to plunge right in and write one.

  So go ahead.”

  “Lovely, lovely,” Mr. Menuhin commented.

  The movie ended. The lights came on.

  “Wonderful program!” Mr. Menuhin said. “Beautifully done!”

  Mr. Gould suddenly looked shy. “Thank you,” he said. “It was really quite fun to do. But it took a hell of a lot of work.”

  “I love your approach to the music and the completely unmechanical way you play,” Mr. Menuhin said, beaming at Mr. Gould with admiration. “And you spoke throughout so smoothly. Was it impromptu?”<
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  “I had it on the TelePrompTer,” Mr. Gould said. “I looked at it often enough to pick up all the cues, but I forced myself to invent phrases as I went along, to keep it sounding natural and not too formal.”

  “Yes, wonderful,” Mr. Menuhin said. “Especially if the words are your own.”

  Mr. Gould laughed shyly.

  “For the one I did on Bartók, I had quite good dialogue, but not quite as good as yours,” Mr. Menuhin said. He gave a little sigh. “Most enjoyable!” he said.

  “Next year, if you’re going to have some time, we might do one together,” Mr. Gould said. “You ever done the Schoenberg Fantasia?”

  “Oh!” Mr. Menuhin gave a little gasp. “What a splendid idea! I must look at the music.”

  “It’s a dry work—one of his last things,” Mr. Gould said.

  “I have the music,” Mr. Menuhin said. “You’re not coming to England next summer? We might do it there.”

  “I’d love to come and visit you,” Mr. Gould said. “But I’m finished with concerts. You know my feeling about concerts. I’m bored with them.”

  Mr. Menuhin smiled wistfully. “On the screen, it does gain dimensions,” he said.

  “Some people say that every performance is an experience, but it’s not that for me in concerts,” Mr. Gould said. “It’s animal. It’s all a circus. It’s immoral.”

  “Yes, I do know what you mean,” Mr. Menuhin said mildly.

  “When I’m onstage, I can shut them out, but I don’t like it,” Mr. Gould said. “I won’t do more than six concerts a year. My view of the future is the end of the concert experience and the revitalization of the home experience. I haven’t gone to a concert in months. When I’m in the audience, I’m completely distracted, I’m acutely uncomfortable. I don’t feel the therapy of private listening.”

  “You are recording, though?” Mr. Menuhin said, beginning to look alarmed.

  Mr. Gould said of course, and laughed. “I want to send you the Six Bach Partitas that just came out,” he said. “I’m rather proud of that record.”

  Mr. Menuhin appeared relieved. “Would you come to England in July?” he asked. “To make the film?”

  Mr. Gould bobbed his head and grinned. “The Schoenberg,” he said. “In July.”

  Mr. Menuhin got up to go, smiling and looking utterly at peace. He gave Mr. Gould his hand. “It will be lovely,” he said. “We will do it, and then it will be there.”

  D. Lowe and Thomas Whiteside

  DECEMBER 28, 1963 (“BEATLE MAN”)

  INTIMATIONS HAVE LATELY been reaching us of a rapidly developing craze among young people in England for the music of, and public appearances by, a group of pop singers called the Beatles. The Beatles—the origin of the name is obscure—are four young men from Liverpool, all of whom were born during the blitz. Their appearance, to judge by the photographs of them in the English press, is distinctive, their getup including identical haircuts in dishmop—or, as one London newspaper put it, Ancient British—style, and lapelless suits patterned after a Pierre Cardin design. Their music is marked by a strong rhythm that has come to be known, variously, as the Liverpool Sound and the Mersey Beat, and, altogether, the effect on English teen-agers seems to be overwhelming. The Beatles put on a Royal Command performance at the Prince of Wales Theatre, in London, which was attended by the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret, and even the Queen Mother seemed to be impressed; she is reported to have conversed with the Beatles backstage after the performance longer than she normally does with the most distinguished artists. The English press has recently devoted almost as much effort and space to attempting to analyze the attraction of the Beatles as it has to discussing the political position of the new Prime Minister. In an article entitled “The Anatomy of Beatlemania,” the London Sunday Times printed the opinions of a number of psychiatrists on the subject. One of them wrote, “In a sense, the open hero worship of the group is an indication of how fully emancipated adolescents have become, a sign that adolescence is now a proud experience rather than a shameful phase.”

  Whatever the nature of Beatlemania, this country is about to be exposed to its carriers. The other day, the Beatles’ manager, a twenty-nine-year-old Englishman named Brian Epstein, flew in to New York to arrange for three appearances of the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show in February, and before he flew back to England, contract in pocket, we had a chat with him, in his suite at the Regency Hotel. He proved to be a polite, round-faced man, elegantly but conservatively dressed, and with a quite conventional haircut. “Most of my time here has been taken up with discussions with Ed Sullivan about the Beatles’ appearances, so I haven’t seen too much of New York, I’m afraid,” Mr. Epstein told us. “I found Mr. Sullivan to be a charming man. He got his first glimpse of the impression the Beatles have been making in England one day a few weeks ago when he found himself at London Airport. At that time, it happened, the Prime Minister was supposed to fly out to Scotland, and the Queen Mother was supposed to land from a trip to Ireland. But everything was out of whack, because, you see, the Beatles were flying in from a tour of Sweden, and the whole airport was in an uproar because of the crowds that turned up to welcome them. Mr. Sullivan knew a good thing when he saw it. The Beatles have broken every conceivable entertainment record in England. They are the most worshipped, the most idolized boys in the country. They have tremendous style, and a great effervescence, which communicates itself in an extraordinary way. Their beat is something like rock ’n’ roll but different from it. They are quite different from the big English rock ’n’ rollers in that they are not phony. They have none of that mean hardness about them. They are genuine. They have life, humor, and strange, handsome looks. Their accents are Liverpudlian—of the Liverpool area—and they have been called a working-class phenomenon, but I disagree with the sometimes expressed notion that their appeal is merely to the working classes. The Beatles are classless. We get fan letters from public schools as well as from working-class people. Mummies like the Beatles, too—that’s the extraordinary thing. They think they are rather sweet. They approve.”

  For all Epstein’s single-mindedness about the Beatles, his account of their allure was delivered with an air that we associated more with an English drawing room than with Tin Pan Alley, and we asked him how he had happened to become manager of the group. “That came about two years ago, when I was working as a director of my family business, in Liverpool,” he said. “We own five shops in the area, three of them specializing in radios, TV, and records. I had been working at that for several years, except for eighteen months that I spent as a student at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, in London, hoping to become an actor. I gave up that idea when I found I had become acclimatized as a businessman and couldn’t really settle down to being a student. I went back into the family business and specialized in records; we became the biggest retailers of records in the North of England. Well, one afternoon in October of 1961 someone came into the shop and asked for a record made by a group called the Beatles—a new name to me—and, to please the customer, I tried to track the record down. I had no idea where it had been made, and I began writing all over for it. I finally tracked down the Beatles right in Liverpool, in a cellar place called The Cavern, about a hundred yards from my office. They were four singularly untidy young men who were beating out a very loud sound—vocal numbers accompanied by three electric guitars and a drum. They introduced their numbers with humorous patter; they have a certain Beatle way of talking. I was excited to find that they had an extraordinary quality and presence that wafted itself across the cellar. Not to bore you, I subsequently got together with the group and we entered into a management contract, and in no time I was divorced from my family business and was managing not only the Beatles but a number of other first-rate groups, too. I find the business enormously stimulating. So far, the Beatles have sold over five million records. They’ve put in some TV appearances in England, but we don’t overdo that. The crowds at their personal-appearance dat
es have taxed the strength of the British police; wherever they make an appearance, police leaves are cancelled. Only the other day, in Birmingham, the police, to get the Beatles through the crowd to the theatre where they were appearing, had to smuggle them in dressed in blue police raincoats and helmets. Teen-age girls fall weeping on the streets when they find they cannot get tickets to hear the Beatles. Riotous scenes have occurred all over the country. Well, that’s about it, really. I think that America is ready for the Beatles. When they come, they will hit this country for six.”

  Andy Logan

  MARCH 27, 1965 (FROM “MOMENT OF HISTORY”)

  NOT MANY HOURS after the President’s address to Congress on voting rights, which Roy Wilkins, the executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, described the next day as “a moment at the summit in the life of our nation,” we stopped by to see Mr. Wilkins at the headquarters of the N.A.A.C.P., on West Fortieth Street. Everyone was going about his business there as if nothing had happened. It seemed to be quiet business. Young men in gray suits, many of them carrying briefcases, moved in and out of small offices opening off the waiting room. One of them stopped for a moment to take a closer look at a framed drawing, from an old newspaper, whose caption read, “Exciting Scene in the House of Representatives, January 31st, 1865, on the Passing of the Amendment to the Constitution Abolishing Slavery For Ever,” and then moved on. A pretty girl in a turquoise wool dress, sitting under a cardboard sign that read “Keep Smiling,” was efficiently doubling as receptionist and switchboard operator, repeating over and over into her mouthpiece, “National Association. I’ll see if he’s available,” and plugging in wires with graceful hands. On a table just outside the switchboard enclosure was a gilded plaster statue about two feet high, labelled The Fugitive’s Story. It showed a turbaned Negro woman, a baby on her shoulder and a bandana containing her belongings at her feet, standing in a beseeching pose before three men, identified at the base of the statue as John Greenleaf Whittier, Henry Ward Beecher, and William Lloyd Garrison. “Harriet Tubman,” the receptionist told us politely, running her hands through her hair, and then she turned back to her mouthpiece to explain that Mr. Moon was in conference and that Mr. Morsell was in the same conference. Through the open office doors sentences drifted out to us: “The foundation is definitely interested.”…“The N.L.R.B. gets it next week.”…“What’s the chance for certiorari?”