Knowing When to Stop

by Ned Rorem

  Who was I? Can a person be denned by who rather than what he is? By behavior rather than production? A composer cannot.

  Was I composing on the sly? Absolutely.

  Menotti taught a course called Dramatic Forms and I was enrolled, as was Wainright Churchill, plus a dozen singers. The purpose was to illustrate the theatrical devices of librettists and composers in every sort of vocal music, and the instrumental filigrees that embellished it. If art is the communicable concentration of some aspect of life that shows one or more persons what they did not know they knew, then surely the lyric theater embodied the theory more strikingly than other forms. I’ve also retained the term chalumeau as defined by Menotti: “This lowest register of the clarinet resembles a gurgling dark liquid, and that is just what Paul Bowles had in mind, in his wonderful background score to My Heart’s in the Highlands, when a character guzzles liquor from a jug.” And the class was beguiled by the teacher, singing both parts in his sweet little “composer’s voice,” when he performed a love-duet from his just-finished opera, The Island God.

  Menotti got special dispensation from Scalero to allow Wainright and myself to compose similar scenes for presentation in class. My choice of text was gaudy. In Huysmans’s Against the Grain the world-weary hero engages a ventriloquist and two mimes to divert him. As he lolls on silver cushions in a dark nook of his parlor, the carefully lit hirelings enact a melancholy scene from Flaubert. Toward the end of The Temptations of Saint Anthony Flaubert invents a savage conversation between the earthbound male Sphinx and the skyborne female Chimera:

  “Hither, Chimera, rest awhile.”

  “No, never.”

  So it begins, winding a lurid path through such opulent pronouncements as, “I seek new perfumes, ampler blossoms, pleasures never tried before,” and ends fifteen minutes later with the Sphinx’s resignation to the impossible: “Thou dost escape me.”

  As sung by Remo Allotta and Ellen Faull, the well-rehearsed timbres and curving airs remain in the memory, and our teacher, whose rising fame was based largely on outrageous plots, professed titillation at the drama. Lately I’ve reperused the score: chunk after chunk of Ravelian harmony buttressing De Mille-type tunes make an effective display to the unknowing, but as a structure the piece is zero. I mention this little cantata, The Sphinx and the Chimera, because it is my first decently performed piece, and thus my Opus minus-one.

  Opus minus-two was a Four-hand Piano Sonata contrived at the behest of, and recorded in a regular studio by, Eugene and Shirley. What wouldn’t I give to retrieve that cire perdue, not for the beauty of the music but for the unduplicatable passion of the young performers! The music itself combined Hindemith’s Four-hand Sonata with John Alden Carpenter’s Concertino and pleased with a not entirely empty sparkle. I revived it on concerts off and on for the next five years, then consigned it to a forgotten trunk, where it shall forever remain.

  My actual Opus 1, also dating from 1943, is a short psalm for men’s choir and a few winds, about which I’ll tell you in a few pages.

  Shirley and Rae heard about my “Jewish generality” to Lenny, and were shocked. “What made you say such a thing?” I was not proud, but neither was I clear about “such a thing.” Today’s politically correct postures were differently focused yesterday. As a Quaker, wasn’t I, by definition, without prejudice? (I note this here not to define but to describe.) If there were good and bad Jews, couldn’t the same be said of Gentiles, of Negroes, of homosexuals? Lenny twitted me ever after for being anti-Semitic, and constantly repeated (if others were listening) his mot about my being a mixture of sophistication and naïveté. Alvin Ross, too, was bemused by my sweeping pronouncements which, when challenged, I would cover with a “Don’t hit me, I’m a pacifist.” Marie-Laure would soon declare that I—or at least my spoken French—was a cross between the princesse de Clèves and Jean Genet. Even JH today claims to be sometimes stunned at my various unreasoned propos.

  Well, it is not given to us all “to see oursels as ithers see us.” My parents, who had converted to the Society of Friends when their world seemed elsewhere so intolerant, were nonetheless capable of “remarks” about the Other. My rationale for Rae and Shirley would have been that, yes, for me Jews are the Other. But so are the Rich, the Chinese, all women, straight men, redheads, horses, and certain breeds of dog. Indeed, so is anything not myself. Generalities are risky, true, but they’re sexy too. Opposites attract as well as repel, and similarities make a dull planet. Why else were we all so anxious to go live in France when the war was over?

  In Yaddo in 1965, when he was more malleable than now, and was supposed to know about such things, Norman Podhoretz answered my “What is a Jew?” by saying he’d have to think about it. Next morning he said: “It’s a frame of mind.” This could be the case too for a homosexual (who could aver, and be believed, “I used to be gay, though I’m not anymore”) but not for a black. To be black is, first and foremost, a physical state. The complication with Jewish is that it’s sometimes a religious condition, sometimes a Semitic condition, sometimes both. But an anti-Jewish Arab is not anti-Semitic, and a Jewish convert—Elizabeth Taylor, say—can change her mind.

  If someone told me that so and so had all the bad traits of a homosexual and none of the good traits, would I be offended? Probably. Less so, if that someone were gay.

  In early adolescence I put away childish things and learned to understand T. S. Eliot. We all understood Eliot. He was the complex adult antidote to Amy Lowell. Today, three generations later, I cannot understand him, pondering Prufrock without a clue. But if the sense has vanished, so has an awe of his language-dropping. In Part V of East Coker, for instance, Eliot speaks of “Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l’entre deux guerres—” which of course should be d’entre deux guerres. (Gore Vidal in 1985: “Tennessee loved to sprinkle foreign phrases throughout his work, and they are always wrong.” Gore does the same, and they are mostly wrong—as in his many repetitions of cri de coeur, intending cri du coeur.)

  Nevertheless, while still at Curtis, I sketched out a choral setting of The Hollow Men, opening with a male chorus in parallel fifths. I was pleased with this trouvaille until Shirley (unaware of my sketch) said that were she to set The Hollow Men to music she would open with the basses and tenors in parallel fifths. (In the contests I judged in the late fifties, many an entry was a choral version of The Hollow Men, each beginning with a men’s choir in parallel fifths.) As late as 1947 I made a setting of Part IV of The Dry Salvages, which I called Prayer: “Lady, whose light shines on the promontory.…” Janet Lauren learned it, and the hue of her coppery monotone on the concluding words—“or wherever cannot reach them the sounds of the sea bell’s/ Perpetual angelus”—lurks still in the back of brain, though the song itself, unprinted, lies dusty in the same trunk as the Four-hand Sonata. None of us knew that Eliot did not grant permission to composers. Only with Cats, posthumously, did his widow with an eye on the market concede the rights.

  Not only Eliot, but all poetry today makes less and less sense. Did I ever know what it was about? Yes, in song settings. But no longer. It’s not that I’d sleep till noon—I wouldn’t go to bed till noon. The pith of a poem emerged during exhaustion in the seconds before sleep. But never during sleep: dreams have their own logic, which poetry ignores.

  The logic of music was a stabler process, emerging during performance, despite our not being able to see in medias res, as with a picture, the outcome. With a painting that displeases we can look away, but we can’t “listen away” from a piece of music. (However, it might be argued that a piece of music, on second hearing, is a hologram: we experience both the process and the outcome simultaneously.)

  When Lenny phoned Aaron Copland on my behalf, he made a date for us to meet. Was that meeting the next day? The next month? Trips to New York had become so frequent that chronology derails, but the meeting itself, though natural, remains cleanly framed.

  Copland lived at the Empire Hotel but had a lof
t across the way on Sixty-third, now Lincoln Center. There he received me, at the top of a narrow stairway on each step of which lay a carton of books. The studio itself had few amenities, no carpets, no pictures, no silken divans. Like Copland’s music, it was lean. The long room contained nothing but shelf after shelf of music and records (the latter mostly air-checks), sensible chairs, and a grand piano on which lay opened a manuscript of the host’s Short Symphony, which Stokowski was to conduct next week.

  Copland was already the Great Man with his settled social style and candid laughter. Thanks to whatever Lenny may have told him in the interim, he appeared more interested in getting a look at me than at my music. Nonetheless I played him a bright unfinished trio, long since faded, and he asked if the tunes came easily. (Yes, I supposed so, wasn’t that a composer’s signature?) By implying that tunes came hard to him, he made me a peer with whom he discussed “problems.” Eventually I learned that this was his tack with everyone—at least everyone male (he once told me he had trouble telling one woman from another). Such extreme amiability was in fact a wall—an American wall. At my request he played Quiet City. And showed me the score to Of Mice and Men so that I could check on the notation of the affecting moment when Candy’s dog dies. (It’s “Vissi d’arte” still in D minor but recast in stile francese, that is, in dotted rhythm with the dot on the weak beat, which transforms Puccini into Copland.)

  We talked of Mexico, and of El Salón México—the place, not the piece. That’s all I recall.

  Did I go from there to Fifty-second Street? It never occurred to me during those Manhattan forays that if I couldn’t crash at Lenny’s pad, other doors wouldn’t be open. I had only to visit one of the Eighth Street bars, or the 123 Club—a “piss elegant” hangout in the east sixties—to get picked up and offered a bed. The legal drinking age during the war years in New York was eighteen, as distinct from twenty-one in Chicago; even so, with my baby face, I was forever obliged to show my draft card to bartenders.

  I do remember that on the second visit to Lenny (had I phoned ahead?), even before I reached his apartment, the landing resounded with the razzmatazz of a jazz chorus. It was “The Revuers”—Betty Comden, Judy Holliday, Adolph Green, Alvin Hammer—screeching a number by Lenny, with Lenny himself slamming and caressing the ivories in the same wildly accurate style he used for classical music. The number was to be tried out that evening at Café Society Downtown and I was allowed to attend. We would meet the others there at ten.

  En route to Sheridan Square, Lenny stressed that Judy Holliday was considered the most beautiful woman in New York. (She was presentable, but “most beautiful”? “Christ, you’re such a literal-minded schmuck,” he said.) The nightclub act went shimmeringly, The Revuers doing some scenes (notably three simultaneous imitations of Lionel Barrymore) which I would see and see again over the years. Judy between shows downed gin from a shot glass, to my admiration, and claimed she had stage fright.

  Again I went to Fifty-second, again vomited, and again went to bed on the front-room floor, just as Edys was coming home. It was dark. She and Lenny chatted about the success he’d had downtown, then she pleasantly asked: “Who have you got under the blanket? Adolph?” “No, it’s Ned.” She froze, then melted into the back room. Edys, a decent-enough-looking dark-haired tight-lipped long-suffering leftwingish type, was never less than hostile toward me. Nor did I ever inquire as to the circumstances under which the two shared the apartment. (I continue these sentences without the embellishment or poetry of hindsight, relying strictly on the summoning of dry fact, for the sake of history, of how one thing leads to another, of eternal return, how nothing advances, though things do grow.)

  Next afternoon Lenny played me a transcript of the Clarinet Sonata, which he and David Oppenheim had performed on WNYC. Anew I was entranced by the “Taxco tune,” renotating it in my head to bring back to Shirley and Eugene. (The process is familiar to many composers: we hear visually. If at a concert a new piece is played that I wish to retain, or if in the subway I’m grabbed by a melody I don’t want to forget, I shut my eyes, sketch an imaginary staff on the brain, inscribe thereon the notes in question, photograph them with a fantasy camera and, upon reaching home, develop the negative in my notebook.) Then we went to see In Which We Serve, Noël Coward’s patriotic movie, at the Ziegfeld on Sixth Avenue.

  So domineering was Lenny that it’s hard to picture him as shorter than myself, barrel chested, too, traits that would turn gnomelike with the years. He was in fact stunningly handsome, not least because he capitalized on his drawbacks, making them into alluring eccentricities as handsome persons always do. (Aaron on the other hand was stunningly ugly, but no one ever mentions this.) Lenny emitted a faint acrid odor, like sweaty almonds, not unpleasant, which went away, as it had with Don Dalton, when the cyst on his knee was lanced a year later.

  I was not physically attracted to him. I should have been, he was my carnal opposite, dashing, dusky, undaunted. But he was too smart, too much the center, too much the brash straight-A kid from grade school. Our egos didn’t jibe. My social and sexual role I’ve already noted (Le bourreau au salon, la victime au lit). To get away with such a stance precluded being loved—more, to being in loved. Anyone can love, I figured, it’s a form of blackmail; but to be loved requires the manipulation of ingrained appeal. To sleep with the Famous seemed, by the nature of things, to sleep with self-lovers, that is, to sleep with myself—incest pushed to the nth degree. ’Tis idle to object that Lenny was not yet famous—he was famous before he was famous, he acted famous. So much so that when, overnight in November, he became famous for real and remained so forever, everyone said: Why, success hasn’t changed him one bit!

  Could Lenny love? Such a surmise is high-schoolish, no one knows answers except as they obtain to oneself. Yes of course he loved—that was the purpose of his life. He also slaved at being loved, and by succeeding changed the world. As to whether he was ever in love, who can guess the anxieties, so hidden in another, that inevitably accompany that deeply silly condition? I often saw him anxious, yes, but never suffering, except toward the horrific end.

  There are no coincidences. What we need we find, especially when we’re unaware of seeking. This morning, thumbing a biography of Copland, I fell upon an illustration labeled: “Manuscript, sketch of the ‘Dog Scene’ from Of Mice and Men.” This magic page, last seen by me in 1943, is not in D minor but E minor, is not notated in dotted rhythm but in even eighth notes, and does not exactly outline the descending four-note motive of Puccini’s aria. So much for my notorious total recall.

  Ah well! Since originality is merely the imitation of something wrongly overheard, shall I use my blurred retrovision of Copland’s motive and call it my own?

  Meanwhile the little “Taxco tune” was recent enough for accuracy.

  Back in Philadelphia I played la petite phrase for Shirley and Eugene, then on the spot concocted a paraphrase—a pastiche of a pastiche, so to speak. The paraphrase made us giggle, yet went on to serve as a kind of code, a liaison between the high gravity of Curtis and the dangerous giddiness that lay beyond. The pastiche, a mere four bars of syncopation, was something Eugene, with one eyebrow raised, might interpolate into a Chopin scherzo as he rehearsed it for us. It was a way of mocking Lenny for being … what? New Yorkish? Superficial? He represented another mode, especially for Eugene. French versus German. (In 1957 I would incorporate the motive into my Third Symphony, which Bernstein, knowing nothing of our secret, premiered with the Philharmonic the next year.)

  Such contemporary music as was approved in “our circle” was definitely Austrian or German. Shirley was “going with” a young Chicago cellist now stationed with the navy in Philadelphia. Tall, blond, affable, straight, Seymour Barab was an extremely versatile musician. Via recordings and sheet music as well as during the live string quartet sessions that occurred biweekly at the Gabises’, he had already indoctrinated Shirley into the works of Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg, and of his Chicago friend
s, George Perle and Ben Weber. Nontonal or serial composition was scarcely in fashion, though when the war ended, and for decades beyond, it would seep over and damage the globe like a liquid tumor. For the moment, no one but Ben was writing twelve-tone music.

  I’m not today, nor was I then, very taken with the subject of tonality, my own or anyone else’s. I’ve always assumed that the whole of music—indeed, the whole of the universe—was tonal and that assertions to the contrary protesteth too much. All music, including Boulez and Babbitt, is tonal to my ear, and I’m convinced (but can’t prove) that everyone, including Babbitt and Boulez, hears music tonally. Should a score appear wildly complicated, I listen simply by imposing a subliminal pedal-point beneath the wildness, and the complicated filigree falls into place. By tonal I mean, of course, derived from the overtone series, a cosmological given. To deny the inescapability of this series’s power is merely to admit the power through denial.

  As to the term “the new tonality,” I am writing in the tenth decade of the twentieth century. I confess in good faith that I don’t know about it. It seems to be a current trend but feels suspiciously like a reversion, and quite un-new. I am old enough to retrace the trends of my own generation and to realize that they recapitulate ontologically music’s history for the past fifteen hundred years. The history is not one of progress—art doesn’t progress, at least not in the sense of improving—but of continual back and forth: the Eternal Return. We evolve perpetually from harmonic periods into contrapuntal periods, then back into harmonic, into contrapuntal, into harmonic, forever. A contrapuntal period is always complex and is always superseded by the antidote of a harmonic period like the one we’re presently enjoying. I would suppose this was common knowledge, and that “the new tonality” is but another incarnation.