by Ned Rorem
Kafka’s writing and Berg’s music have an affinity. Both derive from the same … credulous skepticism about this eerie world, and frame the result, like the wounds in the hands of poor Saint Francis.
Two cats beneath the window keep my drowsiness from succumbing with their human screaming. True sex should envelop like a wind. How I want it! (I was going to write miss it—but my inhibited fancy always withholds me from excess)—want to be kissed for hours on and in the mouth, from hair roots to toenails. But this [illegible] is dismissed for a slight touch, a hasty climax.
Kafka’s K and Berg’s white virgin are life & death, neither having outward concern with the manageable details of sex. The cats can shriek thru eternity for all I care, while I walk the streets & ponder the imponderables.
Blue is my favorite color. Life Blue, as in the tale. Death Blue, too. Let me be put in a dark blue coffin to be always surrounded by the oceanful of whales and sailors—the vastest expanses and the raunchiest bars. There’s no hope really, when happinesses are interpreted as truths (& all memories of previous minutes are truth) then everything goes, and everything is gone. Probably what I’m looking for is Enthusiasm, a trait which so turned my stomach for ten years past. But perhaps that zest on which all expound may be an answer in the form of Device. Who can do anything that can help anyone? Or who can have the infernal presence of mind to declare—pleasant escape!—what could be? Maybe some worldly gain stands a bit away as my halfhearted insensitive. That had, I’ll yearn to cuddle with the hills like Émile. Of what use? For there is always the golden anticipation of the homecomer’s smile which makes me think—but just for a moment—that I can’t be sure that this is not the end. Yet the hoped-for never materializes, and God plays around with his chessboard, bored to a frazzle. One can never be positive of quite knowing when the End’s around; who can say whether doubt might not be the ultimate joy? I am aware only that, for me, the world has become as far away as in a dream—as almost to disappear.
18. Aaron
La joie est bien plus fertile que la souffrance.
—from Ravel’s letters, 1905
For a change of voice, and to offer a bird’s-eye preview of a path that will later be strewn with closer specifics, this section, the transcript of an interview for Vivian Perlis’s oral history series at Yale, recapitulates some of what was noted in chapter 13, then hurries through the decades to settle in 1988, when the interview occurred, two years before Aaron Copland died.
• • •
The first of his music I ever heard was Quiet City in 1940, and it bowled me over. Except for Chicago composers, Sowerby and Carpenter mainly, the notion of American Music hadn’t quite taken with me. Now here suddenly was Aaron Copland’s gem, at once so French like all I adored with its succinct expressivity, yet so un-French with its open-faced good will. So I tried to find as many of Copland’s records as possible, although except for El Salón México (and I had visited that nightclub during a trip south of the border with my father) there wasn’t much available.
We first met when I was nineteen and a student at Curtis. I used to go up to New York each month to seek various modes of art and fun unavailable in Philadelphia. I knocked on Lenny Bernstein’s door (I didn’t know you were supposed to phone people first), and we hit it off. He had the Copland Sonata on his piano, and played it for me, and again I was bowled over, despite—with its almost mean angular aggressivity—its difference from Quiet City. So Lenny picked up the phone and made a date for me to visit Aaron. That would have been February of 1943.
I went next day to the West Sixty-third Street studio, which I recall as a single narrow room as long as the block and compartmentalized by shelves heavy with air-checks and acetates of his various scores. Aaron was affable, immediate, attentive, with that wonderful American laugh; in the four-plus decades since that day I’ve seen him behave with the same unaffected frankness not only with other young unknowns but with countesses and Koussevitzkys. He played me a tape (only it wasn’t called a tape then) of Of Mice and Men, of which I was especially touched by the super-simple D-minor moment for solo strings illustrating the death of Candy’s dog. I played him a juvenile trio, my Opus minus-one, which I still have in a drawer somewhere. We talked about whether tunes came easy, and gossiped about Mexico and Chicago. That was that. When I moved to New York the following year Aaron was a regular fixture at New Music concerts, and always surrounded. A few times he came to dine on West Eleventh Street where I lived with Morris Golde, once with our mutual friend, the painter Alvin Ross, who did both our portraits. But it wasn’t until 1946 that I really grew to know him.
In the summer of ’46 I got a scholarship to Tanglewood and became one of Aaron’s six protégés. The protégés were billeted in one huge stable in a Great Barrington girls’ school (now a golf club), along with Martinů’s six protégés, and Martinů himself. But Martinů fell from a garden wall during the first week, was badly shattered, and had to be replaced by Lopatnikoff. The twelve student composers had two lessons a week with their respective maestros, plus two group sessions, plus access to all kinds of rehearsals, notably of Peter Grimes, which received its American premiere there. It was the happiest summer of my life. Aaron lived in Pittsfield and invited me to dine once or twice, and to see Señorita Toreador, an Esther Williams movie that used El Salón México as background music. He also offered me scotch and sodas (he was never a drinker, but I was) which quite went to my head: Aaron was my teacher, after all. “Don’t tell anyone,” said he, “because one can’t make a habit of inviting students out.” But what did he really think of me?
I was always a lone wolf and never became one of Aaron’s regular flock anymore than I became one of Virgil’s, except that I worked as a copyist for Virgil, so I knew him better. Aaron had an entourage, so did Virgil; you belonged to one or the other, like Avignon and Rome, take it or leave it. I left it. Or rather, I dipped my toe in both streams.
Virgil’s “Americanness” predates Aaron’s. Virgil’s use of Protestant hymns and, as he calls them, “darn fool ditties,” dates from the twenties. Aaron’s use came later, filtered through Thomson’s. One may prefer Aaron’s art to Virgil’s, but give Virgil full credit: Aaron knew a good thing when he saw it. Although he’s had a wider influence, he’d not be what he is without Virgil’s groundbreaking excursions. Virgil invented his own folk music (a little as Poulenc and Ravel did, with their Polish and Italian and Greek pastiches) and left it rough hewn, while Aaron took actual folk music and revamped it into sheer Copland.
I gleaned less from the one-on-one meetings at Tanglewood than from the classes. The class in orchestration was most canny. Aaron had us all score the same passage—five or six measures—from a piece of his. We did this, each in our own corner for an hour, then regathered to compare the results against the original. Very instructive. Appalachian Spring had just been published, and we all carried our own little score around like holy writ, the way the Latin-Americans carried around the Falla Harpsichord Concerto and the French students Pelléas. (This, please note, was five years before the Boulez backlash.) But Aaron, sly fox, had us orchestrating sections of Statements, which we couldn’t possibly have known beforehand. Sometimes he would invite outsiders. For example, Britten came to talk about Peter Grimes, and Harold Shapero analyzed his Classical Symphony. We had a class in movie music, and one in modern vocal music. Aaron had yet to write the Dickinson songs, and didn’t yet feel of himself as a song composer.
He was more interested in other composers than any composer I’ve known. That was the season he imported youngish geniuses from all over South America: Tosar from Uruguay, Orbon from Cuba, Orego-Salas from Chile, Ginastera from Argentina, Buenaventura from … Aaron listened patiently to every note of every one, then commented in a very general way. He was less a pedagogue than an advisor—a sort of musical protocol expert. Exhilarating on the spot, but I recall the details less accurately than with my Virgilan contact. Virgil was more naturally verbal. Also Aaron, alt
hough in theory unbiased as to your style, was in fact disposed to praise music that most sounded like his own.
The next summer I went back to recapture Paradise. You never quite can, can you? And yet I did. In 1947 the guest composer-teacher was Honegger. Like Martinů before him, Honegger was stricken during his first week and spent the rest of the time in the hospital. So Samuel Barber, who just happened to be on campus, agreed to replace him. I was still in Copland’s class, but Barber’s chief pupil was Bill Flanagan, who thereupon, until his death in 1969, became my best friend (platonic) in the music world. By then I had already published a few songs and had a firmer ego than the year before. Aaron seemed to repeat himself with the new class, even as I doubtless do today at Curtis, hoping no one will notice.
I returned to Tanglewood for a few days in 1948 when Hugh Ross introduced my Sappho madrigals. Then I stayed away until 1959 when I stopped by for lunch with Aaron and Harold Clurman. In the shade of the shed I shed a tear and haven’t been back since.
I have never been able to squeeze a compliment out of Aaron. He was always willing to write recommendations, always willing to socialize, but my music was nothing he would include on programs. Perhaps I lacked a musical identity (except in the few dozen songs from the mid-forties which are inimitable) until I went to Morocco and started thinking bigger and writing symphonies. Yet even then, although he flatteringly scoured everything I showed him, he never enthused. What I learned from him was not what he taught me per se. Rather it was through observing how he did what. Aaron stressed simplicity: remove, remove, remove what isn’t needed. That stuck. The leanness!—particularly in his instrumentation, which he himself termed “transparent,” and taught me the French word dépouillé: stripped bare. The dépouillement was certainly something he got from Paris, from Boulanger—but he was not seduced, as I was, by so-called Impressionism. Our respective Frenchnesses were at opposite ends of the scale, and that, I think, put him off.
Aaron brought leanness to America, which set the tone for our musical language throughout the war. Thanks largely to Aaron (via Virgil, of course) American music came into its own. But by 1949 there started to be a give and take between the United States and Europe. Europe woke up where she left off in 1932, like Sleeping Beauty—or Sleeping Ugly—and revived all that Schoenbergian madness, now perpetrated ironically not through the Germans but through Pierre Boulez, who was a most persuasive number. The sense of diatonic economy inseminated in us by Copland was swept away in a trice, and everyone started writing fat, Teutonic music again. It was as though our country, while smug in its sense of military superiority, was still too green to imagine itself as culturally autonomous; the danger over, we reverted to Mother Europe. Aaron never really survived the blow.
In 1949 when I was living in Paris, Shirley Gabis (now Perle) and I invited a half dozen people over to hear Boulez play his Second Sonata, and Aaron came. At least one of us left the room in the middle, so discombobulating was the performance, but Aaron stuck it out with a grin. On the one hand, he was aroused by the nostalgia of his own Parisian past, when everyone tried to épater les bourgeois; on the other hand, Boulez was appealing and sharp as a razor, and Aaron would like to be taken seriously by the younger man and his mafia. Artists, even the greatest, once they achieve maximum fame, are no longer interested in their peers’ reaction so much as in that of the new generation. Who knows what Boulez thought of Copland’s music? The French have always condescended to other cultures. Except for Gershwin’s, names like Copland and Harris and Sessions were merely names when I first dwelt in France, and are still (pace Carter and Cage) merely names there. Anyway, that same day, Aaron sat down and played his Variations, no doubt to prove he was just as hairy as Boulez, but the effect was one of terrific force and form, and, yes, inspiration, thrown at the hostile chaos of the enfant terrible.
I came back briefly to New York in 1952 and visited Aaron in one of his hundred sublets (this one deep in the south Village). Patricia Neway was there, rehearsing the Dickinson songs which she was to premiere with the New Friends of Music. I was terribly interested (and, as a songster myself, maybe a bit jealous) that Aaron kept the verses intact without repeating words not repeated in context, and impressed at how sumptuously, even bluesily, melodic the songs were despite the jaggedly disjointed vocal line. He had already—hadn’t he?—written the Piano Quartet, his first leap onto the tone-row bandwagon. But here now again was the pure old master, clear as mountain dew.
During the fifties we saw each other less, since I lived in Europe for that decade. But whenever he was in Paris I invited him chez Marie-Laure de Noailles, where I lived, or chez Marie-Blanche de Polignac, who “received’ on Sunday evenings. I can still see him in these two extraordinarily beautiful houses, amid the fragile Proustian society. Renoirs all over the walls, breast of guinea hen all over the table, the dizzy scent of Lanvin perfume pervading the salons, and Aaron so down-to-earth with his famous contagious giggle, so plain, so—dare I say it?—Jewish, and at the same time cowboyish. For it’s notable, maybe even something to be proud of, that the first truly important American composer is a Jew, yet a Jew who never, as Lenny did, wrote Jewish music. Except for Vitebsk. Always at these functions he was duly impressed, but anxious to get to the sonic core of the situation, meet whatever musicians might be there, or listen (especially at Marie-Blanche’s) to Poulenc, or Jacques Février, or maybe Georges Auric playing four-hands with the hostess. Mostly, though, he was probably unexcited by the tone, anxious for something more current, more vital.
In the spring of 1954 I saw him often in Rome. The Tender Land had just failed in New York, and he seemed anxious for a change of air. Also, Nicholas Nabokov had organized a huge international festival of modern music there, as he had in Paris two years earlier (funded by the CIA), and Aaron’s Piano Quartet was to be played. Now, although this piece predated Carter’s First Quartet by at least a year, and Stravinsky’s Septet by at least two years, its seriality came off as bland compared to the other two works, which were also homages of defection to the enemy camp by their respective creators. Aaron’s succumbing to the new mode was not so much dishonest as desperate—a falling into the trap of the young whom he still hoped to lead. But how could he remain a leader when he was in fact being led? In Rome that spring, although he was continually surrounded by interviewers and hangers-on, it was clear that Elliott Carter, involuntarily, was usurping the throne, at least in the ken of the brash young Turks.
As Aaron’s fame swelled during the sixties and seventies, his influence waned. In January of 1966 when he came to Salt Lake City, where I was teaching, to conduct the Utah Symphony, I told the university that, sure, I’d invite him to give a talk if they would cancel all classes and guarantee a full house. There was a full house, all right, but strictly of faculty and townspeople.
What else? It all now seems so long ago. In the past twenty years we’ve met fairly often, but as you know, Aaron is receding into his own world. And any “world feels dusty when you stop to die,/We want the dew then, honors seem dry”—as he depicted in his most beautiful song. But the honors that accrue to him ever more vastly appear so often to be simply praiseworthy, a touch standoffish, treating the man like a saint. Now, to be a saint, you must once have been a sinner, and I feel that it diminishes Aaron to avoid discussion of his various temptations. We all recall his friendly reticence, his hunger for gossip, although he himself was not given, as Virgil was, to gossip. Aaron never said nasty things to others, but I’ve seen him cool to people who wanted something out of him or who were too clinging. And I’ve seen him lose his cool, as when he nearly expired while listening to Auric’s awful Piano Sonata, and actually swearing when it was over. Or when I referred disobligingly to Boulanger in The Paris Diary, he wrote me that he would simply not endorse a book that was so vindictive about someone he had always loved and needed. (That slap did me good and reversed many an exhibitionistic stance.) I’ve seen him elated, especially when a new piece was being played (
you never get blasé about that first performance). I’ve seen him struck dumb by the beauty of a passing human being. I’ve seen him depressed, dark, near tears, about the plight of an arrogant friend we both loved. But he never actually talked about his carnal life, except elusively. His rapport with Victor Kraft was ambiguous, and in any case, pretty much deromanticized by the time I knew them both. It’s not my place here to speculate on later loves—his generation even including Auden, was circumspect. Indeed, Aaron was the most circumspect person I’ve ever known, considering how he encouraged others to let down their hair.
I am thrilled and I wish Aaron could be thrilled too, to discover how cyclic our world becomes if you live long enough. In just the past two or three years, I’ve heard any number of scores by young men and women in their twenties, scores which do more than emulate the wide-open spaces of Aaron’s most beloved works—they actually sound (in timbre, tune, and hue) like steals from the master. Always admired by the masses, he’s becoming readmired by fickle youth.
Nevertheless, I asked three members of this youth recently: “Is there any composer whose next work you just can’t wait to hear?” They had to stop and think. They were not agog as we once were about how the Clarinet Concerto was going to sound, how the new Nonet was going to sound, or how Inscapes would be received. These were events. Aaron Copland wasn’t the only one, but he was the chief one whose new works we were all avid to hear. I don’t think it was because we were specifically younger. It’s that the whole world was younger, there were fewer composers around, the repertory of American works was slimmer, so any new addition was a thrill. Aaron was the king and in a sense still is. There hasn’t been another man since then from whom all young composers await each new endeavor with bated breath, and whose endeavor usually doesn’t disappoint.