AARON COPLAND
Shostakovitch was having a piece played in Carnegie Hall and he was herein the United States for it. I remember neither what piece nor when. Onopening the program book he was shocked to see the standard (in Americaamong other places) torso of a woman advertising a brassiere.
Some time during World War II Elliott and Helen Carter invited Estherand me to visit them for a few days at their rented summer place on the Pamet River in Truro on Cape Cod. Esther and I decided to spend one afternoon window shopping in Provincetown about ten miles away and wetook the bus to get there, since gasoline was severely rationed so even ifpeople had cars they used them sparingly. We thought we could solve the problem of a house gift if we brought back some lobsters since we knewthere was doubt what we would do for dinner. Naturally we brought them live, and it was with some difficulty that we kept them from creeping outof the cardboard boxes on the crowded bus. When we arrived at the house Helen said we had to leave immediately for a cocktail party. We knew wecould keep the lobsters alive on ice. There was an ice chest that opened ontop that was perfect for this, except that out of force of habit Helen closedthe lid. When we returned the lobsters were no longer alive but we werenot ready to dispose of them before calling the marine laboratory in Woods Hole. We were told they would be poisonous and to discard them at once, which was something we could not get ourselves to do since lobsters werean even greater luxury then than they are now. We then called some natives who pooh-poohed the experts and said the lobsters had been dead tooshort a time for it to matter. Of course that was the advice we took and here I am over half a century later to tell the tale.
It must have been some time in the mid-thirties when the writer and musician Paul Bowles, the expatriate member of the Young Composers Group that Copland had created, was on one of his trips to New York from Morocco or Paris. We were walking back from a meeting of the group and when we arrived at the apartment house on West Fourteenth Street wherehe was staying he invited me up for tea. When I entered his apartment Iwas struck by the objects that adorned his walls: knives and whips. I dismissed the notion that these were the paraphernalia for unnatural sex actsand I summoned up the courage to ask what made him opt for such gruesome decor. He told me he had more than the ordinary fear of violence and having these objects around him helped him face it. When he served tea hebrought out some cookies but he warned me they were laced with hashish. If I was not used to it I should know “they make you feel like flying,” and while there was no harm in that in Tangiers where living quarters were atground level, here we were in a penthouse fourteen stories up. Since I decided not to take the chance he offered me some cheese in a glass jar. Whenhe opened the jar it was swarming with creeping objects but he was quite
One would have taken the pipe-smoking Walter Piston to be a businessmanor perhaps a lawyer. He was someone who seemed to be completely self-possessed, without any of the flightiness or unpredictability that we expectfrom an artist. He spent almost four decades on the Harvard music faculty(never held a regular position anywhere else), and during most of that timehe almost never missed a concert of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and could be seen Thursday nights year after year in the same seat, a preferredarea for acoustics in the first balcony right and quite near the front of the hall. (It is a convenient place for composers to get on to the platformquickly to take a bow.) As a teacher he was soft-spoken and placid, and inthe sessions one on one with him I had to pry the words out to get him totalk. It was well worth it since he always spoke good sense.
Alvin Lucier was one of my earliest graduate students in composition at Brandeis. He came from Yale where he had written a Broadway show and his style for serious music was dyed-in-the-wool neoclassic. I helped himmake his music sound more contemporary within that idiom, but when hewent to Italy on a Fulbright and studied with Boris Porena in Rome, histeacher criticized the first work he brought as “troppo tradizionale!” Lucierinserted a few extra dissonances in his next work and increased the fragmentation. Porena said, “poco meglio ma ancora troppo conventionale” (alittle better but still too conventional). This process continued for severalweeks until Porena was satisfied with the modernity of Lucier's composing. The experience makes one suspect that perhaps Lucier continued the process on his own until he finally arrived at the nonmusic genre that is sometimes called “Sound Art.”
David Diamond dedicated a song to me, but after I wrote an unfavorable review of his music he came to the door unexpectedly and practically in tearsdemanded I return the manuscript. He rescinded the dedication. It wastoo bad since we were very close friends and I admired his music in general. Our friendship was ultimately patched up but not his annoyance atmy review.
In 1939, while I was teaching at Mills College, Henry Cowell was not veryfar away in San Quentin, where he was in about the third year of a fifteen-year sentence on a morals charge as the outcome of an appalling miscarriage of justice. (He was released in 1940 and granted full pardon in 1942.) Cowell was very active and successful in educating the large prison population musically, and he established an orchestra and chorus, at the sametime composing fluently. Among the pieces he wrote were some for the Mills College dancers in the form of modules that could be put together invarious ways by Cage and Harrison (anticipating Stockhausen's Klavier-stucke XI by quite a number of years) tailored to the dancers' needs. (These two young composers, as I said, provided the music for the college dancers.) One day it occurred to me that it might be a good idea, if a bold one, to takemy graduate composition seminar to see Cowell. It was a great success. Cowell was in a good mood and talkative, and the students were exposed toa creative personality with some extraordinary ideas.