On Ned Rorem (1923-2022)

29 January 2018 p/c: Mary Marshall

From the Minors to the Majors (1981-1991)

Although Ned Rorem remains famous for having an opinion — sculpted into an aphorism — on almost everything, he never said or wrote a word that I know of about baseball. The closest I think he ever got was his setting of his frequent collaborator Paul Goodman’s poem “Boy With a Baseball Glove” in his massive Evidence of Things Not Seen, and that poem’s really about the “effortless poise of youth,” not baseball, which was distinctly outside of his aesthetic universe. Fiercely un-athletic Ned, who I recall demonstrating his physical dexterity only once, but then on the Dick Cavett Show, by walking on his hands, a display I viewed on a four-inch-wide portable television while an undergraduate at UW-Madison in summer 1980.

It isn’t that Ned didn’t have anything to say about baseball.  He didn’t write about baseball because baseball didn’t say anything about him. Just as this article about Ned Rorem will be more about me than Ned, everything Ned wrote was really about himself. But enough about me.

Giving a phone interview just before my lesson three years later, he delivered a biting zinger to the New York Times about avant-garde composers going neo-tonal. He scoffed that they were like people applauded for giving up smoking while those who never took it up were ignored. Yet, standing in the dugout as his pupil, my job was not just to learn how to pitch, but to observe as the Master's own pitch sequence evolved. The early, diatonic, Francophilic lyricism of the songs of his that I loved as a teenager had been enlivened by tone rows and chromatic saturation. Like a veteran pitcher expanding his repertoire to stay in the Show, Rorem's music had evolved as he assumed his place as an elder statesman at Curtis. By inviting me to study with him at Curtis, he had pulled me up from the minors, showing me not just how to survive in the Show, but how to command the mound.

At a place like the Curtis Institute — where every student has been provided with a full scholarship since 1928 — the pursuit of absolute perfection demands a psychological currency, not a financial one. No more sandlot busking; you were handed a locker in the ultimate clubhouse. But that membership required trading the exquisitely mediocre pleasures of the minor leagues for the crushing pressure of being groomed as a thoroughbred. You were prepared for the social and professional elite, then assigned your role in the Show. But the stakes were brutal: you graduated only when your teacher said you were ready. You could be dismissed at any time, sent down to regional orchestras, semi-professional opera companies, or worse — a teaching job.

Ned taught for two years at SUNY Buffalo and two more at the University of Utah, famously declaring that after that amount of time, “a teacher begins to believe what he says.” I was one of his first three students at Curtis, where he ultimately broke his own rule and taught for over two decades. He was quite open about his mixed feelings regarding pedagogy, outlining them in his 1993 Opera News piece, “Learning With Daron.” His brutality as a teacher was no doubt informed by how he, a product of both Curtis and Juilliard, had been treated by his own mentors: Gian Carlo Menotti, who was a massive influence, and Rosario Scalero, whom he found stifling. While he never talked about studying with Bernard Wagenaar at Juilliard, he worked as a copyist for Virgil Thomson in exchange for lessons and occasionally referred to David Diamond as “more than a friend — a mentor.”

“Do any of you write?” he asked my classmates Norman, Robert, and me one afternoon. I hazarded sharing a review of a concert I had written as a freelancer for a local Philly paper. He read it back to us, pausing after each sentence to comment upon it, dissect it, and dismiss it. That was a tough day. I didn’t share my writing with him again until spring 1984, when, having had some success with a manuscript that my friend and writing mentor Emily Wallace had shared with Joel Conarroe, then Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania, I presented a copy to Ned. I wrote about it, thirty years later, in my memoir:

Taken aback, he flipped through it and placed it carefully on a pile of papers on his red dining room table. “I’ll read it, Daron,” he promised. I thought myself rather brave. “But I haven’t much hope for it.” I deflated. “Why?” I asked, sincere. He had evidently formulated a summing up of me for my character prior to our final meeting, and now, he delivered it, suavely wrought, an opinion stated with all the simple conviction of fact: “You tell people what you think they want to hear. Since you’re bright, you’re usually right. But sometimes you’re not.” It occurred to me then that I felt psychically the way that I had felt physically the night that I sliced off a knuckle into some corned beef.  There was blood everywhere, of course; but the blade was so sharp that I never felt it. In fact, it was the single cruelest thing that Ned ever said to me —and probably the most therapeutic. A few days later I had Ned’s letter —

“I read your whole diary in almost one fell swoop and was quite impressed. Diaries are dangerous, being the most subjective of literary forms (and subjectivity is boring), but yours makes it, and is the real thing…. When we are next together we can talk more. Meanwhile, know that I was truly moved by much of it.”

Afterwards, Emily took me to lunch and shared Joel’s take. “Tell Daron that, if he’d like to kick off a great literary career and kill his music career at the same time," he had said, "I’ll be happy to pass it along to an agent in New York.” While Ned had secured his place as an “intellectual social arbiter” with the 1966 publication of The Paris Diary of Ned Rorem, times had changed. There was no way I was going to compete with Ned on his own turf. So I kept the manuscript in a drawer, working on it for another fifteen years before parts of it finally ended up in my 2019 memoir, Duet with the Past.

Home Runs (1992-2012)

After establishing myself by fulfilling a handful of commissions from big orchestras and winning some prizes, I officially stepped onto the national operatic stage in 1993 with the success of Shining Brow. I knew it was so because Ned marked the opening night with a charming telegram telling me that it was — literally a telegram, in that old Western Union teletype font, the letters uneven and herky-jerky above and below the horizon, reading: “Congratulations Daron I told you that you would arrive at 23 Love Ned.”

My career began in 1981 when the Philadelphia Orchestra premiered Prayer for Peace. It was an earnest, Transatlantic piece that any serious tonal composer could be proud of — and I was. Though pushed to keep writing that same piece, I rebelled. As my farewell to Curtis, I offered a jazzy Divertimento built on a bebop head by Les Thimmig, the teacher who had launched me as a UW-Madison undergraduate. It was a deliberate provocation. Bringing pop music into Curtis Hall was a mortal sin back then; even George Rochberg’s polystylism was shunned. Yet my piece was a deadly serious attempt to reconcile my Midwestern love for the "low" '70s L.A. Sound with the dominant, "high" academic ideology of the East Coast. In this, I followed Les, who had fought to bridge his Yale modernism with his roots as a jazz saxophonist.

Critics like Paul Griffiths at The New Yorker used Brow’s unabashed eclecticism to point out that I was failing to toe the "Transatlantic" line. I paid them little mind. Louder, more understanding voices like Leonard Bernstein's recognized my sincerity and my use of musical allusions to build a meta-narrative. This metamodernist trajectory began publicly at my final student premiere in April 1984 at Curtis Hall. Even at that early stage, I was drawn to the ebullient stylistic freedom of Lukas Foss over Ned’s curated, late-century intellectual elegance.

During the late ‘90s and early aughts, I worked as a professional hand music copyist in Manhattan. I served as Ned’s personal amanuensis alongside a fistful of other prestigious clients. As a colleague and fellow hard worker, Ned was proud that he had worked for Virgil as a copyist exactly forty years before I had worked for Virgil as an arranger. But this shared history could lead to problems. One night at Yaddo my name came up in conversation. Ned deftly recharacterized me as merely his copyist rather than his colleague. When I heard about it, I yelled at him, and he stopped that sort of thing.

Around that time, Ned’s masterwork, Evidence of Things Not Seen, premiered, launching him into a phase of legacy and summation. While he cemented his reputation with that massive, evening-length cycle, I was carving out a guildsman’s career as a practical, working musician. I focused increasingly on lyric theater, composing operas like Vera of Las Vegas, Bandanna, and Amelia, alongside over a hundred new songs. It annoyed him when I accepted commissions from groups he had just worked with. For instance, a piece I wrote for the King’s Singers made him jealous enough to snark on it in his diaries. But writers settle scores; that is simply the price of knowing one.

Ned, Gary Graffman, and David Diamond took me to dinner across the street from Curtis. We chatted about trying me out as a faculty member to occasionally teach Ned's students. Everything worked out as it had to. Any questions about whether the Curtis Institute was the right fit for me were answered by my opera Vera. Its furious, relentlessly allusive score — coupled with the stylized, filmic subversiveness of my piece Much Ado — moved Ned to acknowledge that, while I was never going to be a manageable, Establishment-affirming team player, what I was doing took real passion, skill, and guts.

In 2003, Ned retired from Curtis after twenty-three years. At that exact time, I was skidding through a divorce while winding down what had become a ten-year stint teaching composition at Bard College. My schedule was relentless; at one point, I was teaching simultaneously at Curtis, City College, the Princeton Atelier, and Bard. Yet our relationship was no longer defined by academic schedules or institutional hierarchies. Ned once told me, “No matter how long we know one another, I’ll always think of you as my student.” But after his partner James Holmes died in 1999, Ned admitted that any debt I felt I owed him for bringing me to the East Coast was paid in full by the care I gave Jim at the end. This was a characteristically unsentimental but deeply moving acknowledgment of how far our relationship had evolved.

In my 40s and Ned’s 70s, we frequently discussed the differing paths our careers had taken. While my focus was on building community — serving as president of the Lotte Lehmann Foundation and running music festivals — Ned became the ultimate establishment figure, serving as president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and speaking and writing as a revered public intellectual. Even though my metamodernist aesthetic, embracing polystylism and intermedial works was directly in opposition to the traditionalism and cultural elitism that Ned had defended throughout his life, he gave me credit for having found my own voice and going my own way. As arts funding decreased and the old, reliable gatekeepers lost their authority, Ned turned 80, and Gilda and I moved our family Upstate to raise our kids. Fatherhood became my central focus, and my journey into operafilm began taking me way out of Manhattan’s orbit.

Stealing Home (2012-2022)

Between 2013 and Ned’s death in 2022, our trajectories reflected a profound contrast in generational artistic response to aging. For Ned, it was a decade of intentional, quiet deceleration and the peaceful guarding of a monumental legacy. For me, it was a period of deep fulfillment as a father and husband, counterbalanced by relentless, restless artistic reinvention. As the traditional musical establishment declined — or simply took up new enthusiasms — I turned to new visual and technological mediums, actively pivoting from staged opera and embracing operafilm.

As Ned entered his nineties, he famously declared that he had said everything he needed to say and was content to let his enormous catalogue speak for itself. Nearly forty years younger than Ned, and with my sons moving into their teens, my reaction to advancing age and the realities of heart disease was precisely the opposite.

As writers we could not have been more different but, in the end, both perfectly reflect our sensibilities: Ned’s polished, detached elegance reached for sculpted aphorisms; my grounded prose braids memory and technical fluency into raw narratives. Bernard Jacobsen once likened Ned to a fox and me to a hedgehog. I sort of agree. But, if I am a hedgehog, then I am one who dreams a fox’s dreams. Surely then it must follow that the fox dreams a hedgehog’s dreams. Who knows? In the end, Ned and I did the work to meet up somewhere in the middle.

When I published my memoir, Duet with the Past, in 2019, facing heart disease squarely made my own mortality feel like a ticking clock. If Ned's response to the encroaching twilight was Quaker silence, mine was a fierce understanding: to document a complete summation of my theatrical vision, I could no longer wait around for establishment institutions to grant me at-bats.

I concluded that, to leave nothing on the field, I had to abandon it and build my own. I threw myself into developing a new subgenre of opera and film that I called “operafilm”. Acting as an independent auteur, I served not just as composer, but as storyboard artist, director, and editor. This race against time yielded my Bardo Trilogy — a highly concentrated exploration of the threshold between life and death.

Ned’s pleasure in pastry from Soutine’s (now closed), a little pocket patisserie down the street was common knowledge. He loved sweets. Arriving with a box of them guaranteed an impish smile through the crack in the door. That said, the renowned sensualist’s daily lunch of a peanut butter sandwich and a can of Ensure year in and out clearly served him; when he died in November 2022, he had lived but one year shy of an entire century.

Three years after his death, my open-heart surgery stands as a success, the Bardo Trilogy is complete, and “operafilm” has launched with my new manifesto, Exploring Operafilm, to anchor it. With my boys getting ready for college and my strength returning, I am contemplating another major artistic shift — perhaps, having stolen home, I am just going to keep running. But for now, a quodlibet for Ned:

He was pleased when guests arrived precisely at the appointed hour. He liked it when I played and sang my songs for him. He was a suave, quietly enchanting crooner who would play Harold Arlen from memory. He lit up when Barbara Grecki entered the room, and he treasured Mary Marshall and Shirley Perle. He knew everybody. He could be willful, petulant, and nasty. I knew how to make him laugh. He forgave me repeatedly for things I said to him. And I forgave him.

Those of us who knew him all cherish memories of Wallace the cat, Sonny the Bichon Frisé, and Jim serving juice mixtures made by combining whatever was left in the refrigerator. I remember the night Ned visited me in my apartment on St. Mark’s Place, rose from the couch, and brained himself on the low, angled ceiling of my garret — sitting back down, stunned, and then bursting out laughing. I remember how consistently he treated my son Atticus, even at the age of three, like an absolute equal. I remember painting the ceiling of his office blue one summer while he insisted on answering letters at his desk directly below. I remember finding a sliver of raw onion in the whipped cream atop a banana cream pie I had baked and carried up to New York for him and sitting with Norman Stumpf at the red table listening to Robert Convery taking his lesson in the living room. Or performing “Emily’s Aria” from his Our Town with Gilda — getting to be the first people to do that — and treasure his description of my mother’s face when they shared a table at the Barclay before attending my Curtis debut.

He was as kind to me as I deserved, and I was to him. I understood him when he would say, once in a while, that in the end, it was more important to be understood than it was to have been loved.

On Performing

Beginnings

A prepubescent boy of 12 bathed in dazzling stage lights in 1973 sings Norman Dello Joio’s 1948 setting There is a Lady Sweet and Kind accompanied at the piano by his fearsome teacher, a man named Wallace Tomchek, at some rural high school in Wisconsin for three non-descript oldsters checking off boxes without looking up until the end when it is revealed that one is weeping.

In the beginning, performance is what you make of it. In the end, when you finally become what a lifetime of performing has made of you, you’ve become a means of transmission, an instrument. In between comes the performing. And the bear. More about the bear later.

Public Performing: the ritual for which one dresses up (or not) in concert blacks, hits the deck, and participates as performer or auditor in a transformative exercise facilitated by music-making, is undeniably an opportunity to enjoy and explore peak human and aesthetic experiences that, in their rightness, touch peoples’ souls and enrich their lives.

Christmas 1978, as a tenor in the choir during a recording session of, among other seasonal pieces, Holst’s Lullay My Liking I am moved to secret tears of gratitude and joy by the sudden, staggering understanding of how very much I love all the people with whom I am singing, that we are good and that, no matter where everyone’s paths will take them after graduation, we can take gentle, youthful pride in our performances; that our conductor Kay is excellent, and that she and Tomchek have taught us well; that this is a memory, a peak moment, if I can hold on to it, an instant that, if correctly remembered and left unadorned, might help carry me into the future.

Listening to the recording just now, I can still identify individual voices in that long ago chorus, and I am transported in time to who I was then, able to examine the skein of memories that ties the man I am and the boy I was in a way that consoles and admonishes, celebrates and memorializes.  Memory is what makes us human; it is the Madeleine. But it is performance that activates memory and compels us to act.

Private Performing: composer (and former chef) Carlos Jaquez Gonzalez observed to me during filming of the operafilm 9/10: Love Before the Fall (in which he sang the role of Tony) how alike Family Meal in the restaurant world, chamber music with friends, and ensemble building in the theater are. I have leaned into that with my New Mercury Collective.

I am with stolid deliberation working my way through a new French language edition of Marcel Proust’s À la recherché du temps perdu — a gift from the Camargo Foundation’s resident director, Michael Pretina — side by side with my mother’s nicotine-stained 1934 English language edition. It is November 1989. The Mistral is marching stiffly down the Alps and sweeping across the Côte d’Azur on its way to North Africa, so I am wrapped in jeans and a shocking pink woolen Benetton sweater purchased a few weeks earlier in Venice with money I don’t really have and in which I have sweated. It still looks good, but it smells a little funky. A few days earlier I had set Paul Muldoon’s poem Holy Thursday to music, and have volunteered to perform it, along with a few other songs—some Barber, Rorem, Bernstein, and a couple of my own—at a soiree Michael is throwing for some donors. I can hear the rhythmic crashing of the waves on the limestone cliffs below the villa and, on a lark,  synchronize to them the thrumming chords of the piano part of my setting of Paul’s poem. As I play for an instant I realize the moment for what it is.

The riskiest performing of all, the ultimate gift that performers can offer one another, is the sharing of unfinished drafts or unpolished performances. Complete trust and inclusion of others in one’s creative space. As a composer who performs, mine is the music room at Yaddo, the artist retreat in Saratoga Springs, New York.

Sitting next to David Del Tredici, giddily charging through Mozart Symphonies four handed arms like spaghetti on a summer afternoon in the early 90s; David accompanying me as I roughhouse my way through Now You Know — a song with words by Antler and dedicated to me about, among other things, how male babies in the womb get erections, and how many, and how often — to a roaring audience of guests in summer 1998; David’s exquisite accompaniment as I sing my setting of Gardner McFall’s Amelia’s Song in September 2005 for the rest of the guests after dinner while composing the opera; accompanying Gilda Lyons myself in my arrangement of the hymn Angel Band before dinner during an annual board meeting sometime during the aughts; weeping, a few days after Ray Charles’ death in 2004, while singing and playing my setting of Stephen Dunn’s Elegy for Ray Charles (were Stephen or David aware yet that they had Parkinson’s?) for him in the middle of the night.

I may have thought that I was a pianist, singer, or conductor before I landed in conservatory, but that nonsense was knocked out of me the first time I walked down the second-floor hallway at Curtis lined with the sepia-colored group graduation photos (of Gary Graffman, Jorge Bolet, Leonard Rose, Jaime Laredo and…) to the sound of kids younger than me crushing repertoire that I’d never have the technique to perform. From that moment on, I thought of myself as “a composer who plays the piano,” despite all the piano lessons and some really terrific teachers, with whom I am grateful to have studied — beginning at 7 with a stern Polish Holocaust survivor named Adam Klescewski; then Duane Dishaw at the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music; and then Jeannette Ross at the University of Wisconsin; ending with Marion Zarzeczna, a pupil of Horszowski’s, at Curtis, who taught me finally how to not play “like a composer.”

Just as composing requires a safe, secure space from whence to create, performing requires that you feel safe onstage. Every one of my teachers observed with wonder how comfortable and at ease I was at the keyboard. It was because, when I was fifteen my mother made my father promise that, if I were at the piano, then he could not summon me to perform any of the numerous random tasks that he demanded of all three of his sons when he was home in what we decided was a conscious desire to keep us from relaxing. For me, the result was that the moment I took to the bench I felt safe. In performance, charged with lifting up and protecting a singer, I was always and have remained, entirely in command of myself as a performer because I’m not there for me: I am a man on a mission.

I made the most of the technique that I had. I performed on hundreds of concerts as a collaborative pianist, made records, coached, and put over from the piano a dozen operas to collaborators, producers, and colleagues. I’ve always acknowledged my place. After hearing me premiere some songs with Douglas Hines, Vladimir Sokoloff told me, “You’re a fine collaborative pianist. Soloist not so much.” I am grateful for that.

Middles

Putting over Frank Lloyd Wright’s “Balsam fir” aria from Shining Brow for Lenny on his beautiful Baldwin at the Dakota in 1990, knowing it was good stuff; the absolute I-can’t-believe-this-is-happening thrill of hearing him channel my compositional voice and manipulate it without corrupting it, singing and playing through the same material in his gravelly-schmoozy voice, and by doing so, teaching.

A colleague once turned to me just before I was about to perform on a benefit concert at Alice Tully Hall and groaned, “Please just don’t play like a composer, okay?” I have encouraged dozens of proteges over the years to perform their own music so that they will learn this tough lesson firsthand. Accustomed to filling in the blanks, focused on the larger musical argument, composers typically forgive themselves for their technical inadequacies. When we compose at our instrument, we hear the music we are making as it ought to sound instead of the way we are playing it.

“Playing like a composer” is one thing. Among serious composers and pianists both there is a stigma attached to the ability to “put a song over” at the keyboard — what composer Tevi Eber reminds me is dismissed as playing like a “theater pianist.” It happens that I am very good at it, though I stopped doing it when arthritis made performing more painful than it was worth. When he first landed in New York City in the early 40s, Leonard Bernstein did some work arranging, transcribing, and notating jazz improvisations for Harms under the pseudonym Lenny Amber. (I did the same thing, for another publisher, during the late 80s.) Distancing oneself from “hack work” is one thing, but LB was (besides being a terrific soloist) a super-practical musician, and proud of the fact that he could “put over” his shows “the way that Marc [Blitzstein] did” and function as a first-rank professional performer. 

Afternoons every couple of months with Paul Sperry over the years in his studio at the Majestic on Central Park West in New York City reading through the stacks of song cycles that composers sent him, enjoying the adventure, the challenge, the overview of what was happening in the art song world, the bits of wisdom imparted, the thumbnail critiques of the vocal writing, the laughter, the wine, quite simply … the playing.

Concert music composers often bring unexpected, fascinating, and enchanting aspects of the music they perform in public — particularly their own. One legitimately wonders whether or not their performance is somehow more authentic. (“I meant those wrong notes.”) Setting aside commercial issues like when musicians are compelled to “cover” their own songs the same way every time to "preserve the brand,” the conventions of pop music allow us to enjoy composer Paul McCartney’s teenage demo performance of When I’m Sixty-Four and a performance he gives of the song at the age of … sixty-four equally.

Procedural memory is a crucial aspect of being an effective performer. That’s why one practices scales, which, aside from keeping one physically limber (more about that later), create a wealth of repetitive motions that can be executed without conscious management, increasing suppleness of execution, improving one’s technical precision, and even storing history itself in the retained motor skills.

Teachers transfer their muscle memory to their students by passing along to them their personal fingerings. This practical aspect of the oral tradition has a lot of history and poetry to it. Consider that Tchaikovsky was assisted by his composition student Iosef Kotek (a violinist) who provided practical advice that helped his teacher make the solo part more idiomatic. Tchaikovsky offered the piece to Leopold Auer, who rejected it (a ding the piece had to overcome in order to get legs), so the premiere went to Adolph Brodsky; but then Auer picked it up later and passed along his fingerings and interpretation to his students — Elman, Heifetz, Milstein, Shumsky, and Zimbalist, among others.

Concert musicians are typically unforgiving of “wrong notes” mainly because playing all the “right” ones is at least empirically provable (“He can play all the notes in Brahms, but he doesn’t understand him,” I once heard a cruel violist quip) and someone’s got to play them. Because immaculate technicians who play consistently need to exist in order to feed the musical ecosystem in which orchestras function more than inspired ones who play “wrong” notes, the best string players at conservatory often sit at the back desks. (And why every concerto competition has an etude round to eliminate competitors.) This was pointed out to me in April 1983 when, as students in Philadelphia, my girlfriend and I heard Vladimir Horowitz in recital at the Academy of Music. Age and wisdom rendered moot the issue of “wrong notes.” The colors, the artistry, the vision of his performing were mind-blowing. Notes be damned.

Hmmmm, that’s nice. No wonder the celli sound so plump there, I muse, hearing a bass clarinet doubling hitherto buried in the orchestration. Looking and sounding good during a rehearsal of Gershwin’s I Got Rhythm Variations with JoAnn Falletta and the Denver Chamber Orchestra in 1987, I’ve relaxed just enough during some passagework to let my mind wander. Up I go, my fingers rattling on by muscle memory, hearing things I’m not supposed to be hearing because I am not listening to myself. Even in the moment I am thinking “this is so cool” until I notice JoAnn glancing at me and I plunge back down into my own brain.

In the operafilm I Hear America Singing I have the composer wonder, “Where do people go when they go ‘up?’ Is it heaven?” If the moment of silence between the final sound and the first clap is where the bear lives (more about him later), then I think that the spirit of whomever composed the piece might live “up there,” with angels like Wenders’ Damien and Cassiel, observing and remembering. That’s why I’ve never “gone up” while performing my own music. If I ever do go up playing my own music, who will I meet there?

Just as there is a strict protocol governing the relationship between choreographer and dancers, there is an etiquette associated with composer-virtuoso soloist interactions that respects the roles to protect the people. Nearly every one of the soloists for whom I’ve written came to the first orchestra rehearsal with their part memorized. My job was to stay out of the way. Respecting the process, whatever their reservations, is their honor as a musician, just as it is the composer’s honor to give the work created for the soloist everything they’ve got.

Ideally, the soloist knows the piece so well that they take “ownership” of it, perform it as though they had themselves written it, in front of the composer, who actually knows when they are not hitting their mark. You can’t bullshit the composer, if the composer is the real deal. The soloist must lift up and protect from the bear not just the music but the composer by serving as an avatar, advocate, and champion. Accordingly, protocol dictates that the composer does not have the right to tell the soloist that they are not cutting it. Everyone knows that it is offensive to the paying audience, one’s colleagues, and to music for either the soloist or composer to think of, worse use, an engagement with one orchestra to workshop one’s performance before an appearance with another orchestra. What’s more, the soloist — whose fee to play the piece probably exceeds the composer’s fee to have written it —  must responsibly and respectfully navigate a Green Room and dinner after with the donor, orchestra manager, and conductor.

In no other genre of concert music composing and performing do so-called “high art” conventions and expectations of the past so brutally collide (thereby exposing poseurs) with contemporary performance expectations. A concerto presented as an amicable exchange between equals sounds lovely, but the audience came for a bullfight. (Oscar Levant, in Humoresque: “A concerto is a contest between a solo instrument and an orchestra, in which the solo instrument always wins.") It is one thing to “put a score over” to give an idea of what the piece will sound like in the hands of a performer; it is quite another to accept a soloist’s fee and then to poorly perform one’s own or another composer’s work in a professional setting. The former is woodshedding; the latter is an unforgivable betrayal of not just the audience’s and the composer’s trust, but the conventions and history of the composer-soloist relationship.

After the premiere, much depends on how the premiere goes, and how people came to be hired. If the soloist initiated the commission, or is famous enough and likes the piece, they will then presumably tour with it. Management isn’t necessarily thrilled with this, because it is the point when the soloist is putting their reputation on the line for the concerto. That’s truly when one finds out of the piece has legs.

Orson Welles captures perfectly the effect that performing the same piece in different venues and for different audiences either on tour or over the span of decades feels like to me in the funhouse mirror sequence of The Lady from Shanghai. “Of course, killing you is killing myself,” says Everett Sloane, aiming his pistol at Rita Hayworth, who he sees in reflection with her gun aimed at him, along with his own face. “It’s the same thing. But, you know, I’m pretty tired of both of us.” Every shot that rings out causes another reflected version of Sloane, Welles, and Hayworth to shatter into a million pieces.

I’ve had this experience in my own small way with songs like Holy Thursday, which I’ve played, sung and accompanied hundreds of times in different situations. I am fascinated by (because I can’t imagine how) Anne-Sophie Mutter or Joshua Bell feel performing the Beethoven Violin Concerto in the hundredth city, or Paul McCartney performing Hey Jude, but I’d make an operafilm about it in a hot New York minute.

Ends

Because I came to music first as a singer — that prepubescent boy of 12 bathed in dazzling stage lights in 1973 — I’ve always been entirely at ease as a choral conductor. Hartzell, Tomchek, and Robert Fountain were excellent role models, and I’d been doing it without effort for years by the time Louis Karchin engaged me as his assistant with the Washington Square Chorus at New York University (an interesting bunch comprised of NYU students and community members) during the late 80s and early 90s. When I took over as music director, we had a run of several years during which I joyously deepened my appreciation and love of exploring the rapturously singable part writing of  Monteverdi and Gesualdo by teaching them, week after week; picking up the stick to conduct Mozart — all the great repertoire I had been gifted to sing growing up.

Like most composers, I’ve been called upon to serve as conductor for various reasons, with ensembles large and small, fairly often over the years. I had excellent teachers: Catherine Comet was both terrifying and inspiring; and the help that I got from Lukas made me a respectable technician. Because I’ve only conducted when I needed to, I cannot in good conscience consider myself a conductor.

Stepping off the podium in Milwaukee and shaking the concertmaster’s hand after conducting Suite for a Lonely City— music that, via Bernstein, landed me on the east coast — in 1978 and intuiting that it was the beginning of something; bowing to Norman’s grieving parents in the little balcony in Curtis Hall after conducting the one and only performance of the memorial symphony I wrote for Norman in 1983, crushingly aware of the callow impertinence of my gesture; the feeling of disenchanted vindication I had when stepping off the podium in Las Vegas after having gotten my opera Bandanna in the can in 2000; thirty-eight years after looking down into the faces of my teenage contemporaries and feeling atop Mount Pisgah at the beginning of my story in Milwaukee, leading my fifty-something contemporaries and Gilda Lyons — in music that Bernstein once wrote as a young man for Tourel  — on my birthday in 2016 in Philadelphia, relieved that it would probably be my last time on the podium.

Once Tin Pan Alley gave way to broadcast pop, songs usually ended by repeating the chorus or the hook while the music faded out, facilitating crossfades on the radio and enabling the band to improvise solos on the “ride out.” Odd how songs just end again in the Internet era. Most importantly, fade outs avoided the dreaded “full stop.” Full stops are downers. Full. Stop. See what I mean?

Transitions are where development and drama happen. Anybody who spins a narrative on some sort of timeline fusses with the transitions between set pieces, the reasoning being that, if you allow an audience to applaud, they’ve been released from the moment and must be pulled back in and their disbelief resuspended. “Exit, pursued by a bear” — the all-time greatest stage direction.

Concert music generally comes to a full stop (either it ends “up” or “down”) when the piece is finished. As a performer one hopes to have been so much in the moment that one’s behavior at the double bar is too crass a thing to consider, just as composers suppose — correctly or not — that the audience will be moved to reflect on what has just transpired and that their anticipation of the opportunity to express their appreciation will mount during whatever silence follows the last note. In that space lives the bear.

Seated at the piano in Curtis Hall in Philadelphia in April 1984, finishing the world premiere of a big song cycle called Three Silent Things, the performance of which would mark my last appearance as a student on that stage, looking up from my finger on the A key as the pitch decayed first at Rob’s face, hearing the B of his cello, then at Lisa’s face, hearing the D of her viola, and then Michaela’s as she held the F# on her violin, and finally at Karen as she sang, “this shallow spectacle, this sense,” on the tonic, I understood for the first time that Wallace Stevens’ poem A Clear Day and No Memories, which I had read as an elegiac, innig meditation on mortality, was in fact a clinical description of existential emptiness, the loss of love, and the end of memory. After I nodded the final cutoff of that simple Gmaj9#7 chord, it felt as though the silence that followed stretched on and on. I hadn’t until that moment had the conscious self-awareness to accept that we were all basically quits, and that, although our narratives would of course continue, they would diasporate.

At that moment, I was eaten by the bear. I was genuinely unprepared for the emptiness, the sense of loss, of, well, what Karen had just been singing about, to feel so viscerally awful. In this place a performer hears not one beat of applause, one word of congratulations; feels not one hug, smells not a single flower in the bouquet that has appeared in one’s hands. Stage Managers are the caretakers of this liminal space, guiding otherwise capable people past the bear and into and out of the wings, gently but firmly telling them to walk slowly or to rush. The bear has a huge repertoire: the imposter syndrome, performance anxiety, the fear of being deemed unworthy, judged, all the feels; for some performers, the hardest part is never having come to terms with the fact that there will never be enough applause, and that the Real World is still out there past the bear, waiting.

Making myself as small as I can at the piano in Philadelphia, sometime in fall 1982, I am aware that I am not here to perform, but to witness. Periodically, I am called upon to play a few measures of accompaniment, but otherwise I am superfluous. I try to commit to memory everything that Szymon Goldberg is saying to my violinist friend during her lesson. He isn’t just passing along fingerings, bowing, style, bow speed and pressure, and tradition, he is summoning the aesthetic world in which Debussy lived for her and gently referencing for her the way that a half dozen other great violinists have played the piece — some for Debussy himself — so that, as she commits the great Sonata in G minor to memory she will inscribe it in her own poetic memory. As she puts her violin to her neck, the spirits of Gaston Poulet, who premiered it, David Oistrakh, who recorded it, and more join her.

“The Germans were advancing on Paris,” I recall Goldberg observing, “and you can feel the end of the world in it.” Like Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du Temps, the Debussy Sonata captures in music some essential quorum of understanding of the actuality of the end of time. Even in my early 20s I appreciated the coolness of her hand in mine as we walked home together that fall evening, and how superficial my grasp of Debussy’s last piece was. Understanding it would require a lifetime of study and experience. “To think he died only a few months after writing it,” she mused. “But he left us some breadcrumbs at least,” I replied.

Ned and I have finished a couple of games of backgammon at the red dining room table in January 1999 the day after Jim died and I say, “I’ll throw together something to eat” and he pushes the board away, saying, “I’m going to play something.” His retreating back. I move to the kitchen. When I hear him playing and singing a Hoagy Carmichael song in the living room, I stop what I’m doing, bow my head, weep stupidly, and listen.

Performing is praying, lullay-ing, baying, and kyrie-ing. Sometimes it even involves playing. In the beginning there is the swaddling band and the infant’s reflexive whimper; then, the Whitmanesque song of oneself; at the end there is the winding sheet and the survivor’s keen. Or is it the other way around? William Blake’s “piping, loud” arrival; Dylan Thomas’ raging “against the dying of the light;” T.S. Eliot’s ending “with a whimper.” In the end, when you’ve finally become what a lifetime of performing has made of you, you’ve become a means of transmission, an instrument.

Thanksgiving 2017, I tease out the first few notes of Copland’s dignified, soulful setting of the great hymn Shall We Gather at the River, look up at my partner Gilda Lyons and wait, contentedly, for her to begin. She raises her hand slightly as she often does when she begins a song. I think of the countless times I’ve held that hand; I think about the anticipation of restoration, and how her love and acceptance has transformed my sorrows into joys. Together we perform.

On Teachers

This essay appeared first in the Huffington Post on 11 August 2016. Click to read it there here.

Wallace Tomchek at the Chicago Hilton, summer 1997. (Photo: Earl Hagen)

Wallace Tomchek at the Chicago Hilton, summer 1997. (Photo: Earl Hagen)

THEME

I was drawn to the piano at the age of seven because my older brother Kevin, whom I idolized, was a gifted pianist. At the beginning of my first lesson, our piano teacher Adam Klescewski sat me down on the piano bench backwards and commanded me to sing an A, which I did. I possessed absolute pitch. I grasped immediately the concept of sharps and flats, and demanded to know what was between the notes. I now retain excellent relative pitch—where did the “perfection” go? I wonder. He taught me the names of the lines and spaces in the treble and bass clefs: “Every Good Boy Does Fine; FACE; Good Boys Do Fine Always; All Cows Eat Grass.”

I didn’t like practicing. (I still don’t.) I began paying my other brother Britt—who ratted me out anyway—a dollar to tell our mother that I had practiced. He’d tell her anyway. Then, he’d say, “No-no-no, this time I promise I won’t tell her you didn’t practice!” So, what began as a bribe turned quickly into extortion. Even early on, Britt had skills. After a few months, the little spinet with the feather-light action lost its appeal. During my final lesson, I noticed digits tattooed on my teacher’s forearm. The same afternoon, I discovered on a very high shelf, along with a lot of other books about the Holocaust, an oversized book of tenebrous, horrifying concentration camp photographs called Despotism. I returned to the book obsessively. That a man who had experience such horror could make such beautiful music, create such beauty, despite all, seemed unimaginable—just impossible to me.

VARIATIONS

Shortly after that, I quit the piano for trumpet. Well, I longed not so much to play the trumpet as to be Herb Alpert. I thought there was no cooler man. Anyway, I at least wanted to be the sort of boy that played the trumpet.

Between gigs, dashing, floridly over-qualified Harry Shoplas taught band at Linfield Elementary School. He played a shiny Selmer trumpet, which he often carried tucked under his arm as he walked the school’s halls, leaving behind him the smell of Aqua Velva and valve oil. The female teachers must have regarded him ravenously. Between classes, he smoked cigarettes in a basement lair that he shared with Norman Cummings, the second-coolest teacher at the school.

Harry sized me up and handed me a euphonium I think because I was overweight and looked like I could lug it back and forth to school. He quickly switched me to alto saxophone—Britt played the baritone saxophone in Harry’s dance band and I aspired to playing with him. I loved the smell of wet reeds, and the taste of the cane, but I could never get the thing to play softly. Our fifth grade band concert closed with a Bert Kämpfert tune called Spanish Eyes, which I recall vividly because it was the last thing I played on the saxophone.

One afternoon, Shoplas took our band to a Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra concert that included the Largo of Antonin Dvořák's Ninth Symphony. Nixon had just won the ’68 election and my favorite toy was a plastic Apollo 7 model. But it wasn’t snowing; it was warm, and raining pitchforks. Small and awestruck in a plush red velvet seat in Uiehlein Concert Hall, I was mesmerized by the conductor, Kenneth Schermerhorn. He cut a strikingly handsome, athletic, charismatic figure, and when he raised his arms it was easy to imagine that he was celebrating the Eucharist. In fact, he radiated the authority of a minister, but his back was to us, and there was a sensuality to his movements when he initiated the glittering array of brass instruments, sumptuous strings, and bird-like woodwinds that stirred me. The concert hall was like a cathedral, the audience like a congregation, and the communion—despite the profane context—spiritual. As Stephen Colburn played the ravishing English horn solo in the Largo of the Dvořák, I felt a lump in my throat, a profound sense of longing, the feeling of being tugged out of myself and suspended in midair. That was the moment, at age seven, that I knew that, no matter what, I would be a composer.

On a September afternoon 35 years later, Kenneth and I lunched before a concert on which he conducted my Much Ado overture with his Nashville Symphony. Did he remember the fan letter from the dazzled child who couldn’t find a word grand enough to describe how moved he had been by the experience? He laughed and said no. I told him what I had written: “Dear Maestro, your performance last week was just superfluous!” He exploded in grainy, rueful laughter, and mused, “How like coming home it feels to finally work together.” “And how ironic, under the circumstances,” I replied, “that the Largo was adapted into a song by Harry Burleigh called Going Home.” “Indeed,” he agreed, smiling. We swapped stories for another hour, laughing until we cried. “I am neither a young nor a healthy man,” he sighed, wiping his eyes, “but I am glad that we are finally sitting together now at this table.”

In retrospect, I’m not surprised that—sitting in Uiehlein Hall trying to decide which of the many instruments on stage I would most like to play—I decided to become a composer first and a performer second. It was because Father had unintentionally taught me that although Power can compel, it does not last; Mother had by example taught me that Authority could inspire, and therefore last forever. Like Love, Authority must be earned. Every time a new piece of music is read for the first time the composer starts with all of the Power and no Authority. If the music inspires and moves the performers, then the composer’s Authority grows. If it does not, well, as Virgil Thomson once told me, “Don’t worry about withdrawing pieces, baby; they have a way of withdrawing themselves.”

I received a lot of encouragement from my grade school teachers. When Jesus Christ Superstar dropped in the States, Kevin bought the LP’s. Mr. Germanson allowed me to play it for the class. When I followed that up by playing the “God Said” trope from Bernstein’s MASS, though, letters from angry parents prompted a telephone call from the principal, Mr. Buege (pronounced “biggy”) to Mother, whom family lore holds told him that it was 1968 and that he had better get hip.

At ten, when the other adolescent Lutheran boys were getting their first frisson from contact with the King James Bible, Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s Principals of Orchestration called out to me at the Brookfield Square Mall Walden Books. I carried it around everywhere the way a gunslinger packs his pistols.

Music was my religion, but I had still to find a proper celebrant. Wallace Tomchek was the first person I met with the requisite charisma. Wally taught chorus and drama at Pilgrim Park Junior High School. A short Jewish homosexual who closely resembled Norman Mailer with curly auburn hair and a slight potbelly, the ferocity of Wally’s passion for—and absolute commitment to—musical excellence was terrifying and irresistible. I loved him for it. When I was 15, He taught me, and accompanied me in performing, the first art song I learned and sang—Norman Dello Joio’s 1948 There is a Lady Sweet and Kind. Wally introduced me to the world in which poetry and music inextricably intertwine.

One afternoon, he called me into his office and commanded me to recite my (then) favorite poem. I launched into James Weldon Johnson’s great narrative poem The Creation. After I had declaimed about ten lines, he cut me off. “Really?” he asked, incredulous. “That’s your favorite poem?” I shrugged. “Well. Okay,” he said. “Now set it to music.” Over the next few months, I made of it an ambitious piece of juvenilia—a 25-minute-long cantata for four soloists, mixed choir, five violins, piano, and large symphonic band.

I began setting poetry to music, grafting my tunes with the poetry I have most loved. My first settings were of poetry by Poe, Whitman, Rossetti, Frost, and Joyce from a Harcourt anthology of British and American poets edited by Louis Untermeyer that I turn to for poems to this day. I have since set over 250 poems short and long, written dozens of works for chorus and multiple voices, and set libretti by Edward Albee, Barbara Grecki, Rob Handel, J.D. McClatchy, Gardner McFall, Paul Muldoon, and myself.

The challenging, college-level choral repertoire Wally taught us was both sophisticated and eclectic—Gesualdo madrigals, slick “swing choir” arrangements of tunes like Johnny Mercer’s Dream in nine part close harmony, and a yearly fully staged musical with orchestra which he designed, directed, rehearsed, and conducted. He also encouraged me to direct: I recall with particular fondness directing, among other things, a production of Thornton Wilder’s The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden for him.

I was fifteen when Wally took our class on a field trip to a screening of the movie version of the musical 1776. William Daniels’ portrayal of John Adams—part Orson Welles, part William Shatner—enthralled me. I adopted as my credo an actual Adams quotation: “There are only two creatures of value on the face of the earth: those with the commitment, and those who require the commitment of others.” I solemnly swore to myself that for the rest of my life whatever I lacked in musical talent I would make up for in hard work and commitment.

It being the bicentennial year, Wally mounted a patriotic pageant called Spirit of ’76, “a rock celebration for young Americans,” with music by gospel songwriter Paul Johnson. Our troupe toured around the southern half of Wisconsin, performing it in American Legion halls, high schools, and nursing homes—even the Milwaukee County Mental Health complex. I recall a performance there, gazing out over the audience of six hundred psychiatric patients, gripping my microphone in as close an approximation of Mick Jagger as I was able, and squealing “let freedom ring” in my white polyester pants and bicentennial logo tee shirt. Halfway through my number, careening up the center aisle, arms flapping like the wings of a pelican, a lone patient joined me—delirious, rapturous—in song. He was exquisite, florid, a soaring thing in his own universe. I couldn’t take my eyes off him. As I launched into the chorus, I glanced at Wally, whose arms flapped also like a pelican’s wings in front of the little pit orchestra. At that instant, two orderlies converged on the patient. Every eye onstage and in the audience followed him as he was frog-marched out of the auditorium, ecstatic.

Afterward, Wally drew me aside . “Did you see that?” he exulted, eyes glittering. “Did you?” “How could I miss it?” I answered. Wally continued, ignoring me, “Remember that moment! Look at what he achieved! Think about what you just witnessed, what you—what we all—just went through … together we made that moment! Sure, the stakes change, but the hands don’t! Now that’s live performance!” Whether seated in a Greenwich Village piano bar covering show tunes while coping with “handsy” patrons, putting my own operas over from the piano for wealthy commissioners, being admonished to keep better time by ballet teachers, playing at villas in France and Italy for diplomats and scholars, performing onstage at Curtis or countless other concert halls, accepting the condescension of famous singers with big egos while coaching them, accompanying Gilda in Nicaraguan folk songs on a frail German spinet for a tombola in Nicaragua, or guiding my sons’ small fingers through “Twinkle, Twinkle” at the family piano, Wally’s exhortation has never been far from my mind.

That year Wally raised the money to bring the Florentine Opera’s young artists out to Pilgrim Park Junior High School to perform Gian Carlo Menotti’s The Medium. It was the first opera I saw live. The performance, the entire student body, was riveting. To this day I remember the haunting refrain, and the music to which it is pinned: “Toby, Toby, are you there?”

The next year, I began putting together a music curriculum myself to run in tandem with my high school classes, enrolling in advanced music theory instruction at the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music. I was the youngest “adult student” division pupil of Judy Kramer, a no-nonsense, practical musician of great gifts and determination. She assigned Roman Numerals to chords in order to chart harmonic progressions. I bought Arnold Schoenberg ’s Fundamentals of Musical Composition at Schwartz’s second-hand bookshop on Wisconsin Avenue. “Why,” I asked her, “are the numerals Schoenberg assigned sometimes different from Vincent Persichetti’s, or Bruce Benward’s, even though the music is the same?” “Good question,” she replied. “It cuts to the problem with musical analysis.” I sprang the answer I’d formulated the night before: “So you’re saying that music theory is sort of a confidence game. If you can intimidate people into thinking your analysis is correct, then you are correct.” Judy looked out the window and thought a moment before answering. “No theoretical analysis can be empirically proven to be correct except by the terms of the system in which it is defined,” she said slowly. “And, even then, argument is possible.” “So,” I pronounced, gimlet-eyed, with all the grim cynicism I could muster at fifteen, “music theory is people talking about music instead of making it.”

I began composing during classes. (I still dream that I haven’t graduated high school for lack of attendance.) How peculiar I must have seemed, corralling friends after school and asking them to show me how their instruments worked, telling my best-intentioned math teacher (a fascinating man, really, who had taught in Nigeria, Indonesia, and Brazil) Max Hilmer, that “a composer doesn’t need to be able to do trigonometry” when he wondered how someone who could teach himself FORTRAN and COBOL over the weekend in order to ace a computer science exam could exhibit no interest in (or talent for) higher mathematics.

My good friend (Kay's successor) Phil Olsen sent me this scan of a 1979 arrangement of Carole King's 1971 song "You've Got a Friend" that I did for Kay and the chorus. I had just turned 16. I think I based it on a tremendous arrangement that Kay had a recording of -- was it the Air Force Men's Chorus? Anyway, there are a couple of things about having the music that make me smile now. One is my scrawled admonition at the bottom of the page (I was the pianist) "Watch Hartz!" (see, I WAS watching!) and another is my notation "Piano does anything to D-flat over E-flat" four bars before the end.

I’d become so immersed in composing that even the superb musical standard set by my high school chorus teacher Kay Hartzell seemed too low: I was an obnoxious sixteen-year-old, tending bar at night (I was underage, yes), composing during my classes, still fiercely attached to Wally, watching Kay for the slightest musical infraction. I pushed Kay hard to let me write for the chorus, and was furious when she seemed unmoved by the penciled scores that I tossed at her like a young Berlioz before the academy.

When Judy found out that I was having no success in interesting Kay in trying out my music, she wrote a letter to my high school guidance counselor. It read, in part, “I feel that Daron is receiving negative input, as far as his talents go, at school which is a shame. … It is to the advantage of most musicians to read through different styles of music, in addition to material being prepared for performance, and what could be better than the music of one of their peers?” A few months later, Kay relented, and graciously permitted me to conduct in concert the chorus in one of my early compositions.

The instruction I had been receiving from Judy, coupled with the obsessiveness with which I was composing—typically five or six hours a day—vaulted my composing skills way beyond my keyboard skills. To mend that, I began piano lessons with Duane Dishaw, a sweet-natured young man at the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music. Father ferried me to them, forty minutes in each direction. During my lesson, Father waited for me in a tavern and drank. Duane, like my piano teachers, was impressed by how comfortable I was at the keyboard. What he didn’t know was that this was because, the previous winter, Mother had caused Father to agree that, if I were seated at the little spinet in the front room, I could not be disturbed. I began not just composing and practicing at the piano, but eating and doing my homework there.

Because of my love of voices, words, and drama I was drawn to opera. Then, as now, I sang my vocal music, accompanying myself at the piano. Then, I did it because I sensed that the singer and the song must be one. Now, I do it because I know that melody (and by extension all music, arising as it does from the act of singing) must be created acknowledging the physical effort required to produce it. How a singer feels physically when performing a phrase is a crucial manifestation of how he feels. I considered and failed to adapt Cheever’s short story O City of Broken Dreams as a one-act opera, then began sketching a dramatization of Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology. I abandoned that in favor of Through the Glass, into which I poured everything I was absorbing by listening obsessively to Kevin’s LP’s of Benjamin Britten’s Billy Budd, and Peter Grimes, Giacamo Puccini’s Turandot, and Kurt Weill’s Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny.

I was also composing for orchestra, but I’d never played in one. It was time to change that. Harry Sturm, assistant principal cellist of the Chicago Symphony under Fritz Reiner, was hired by the City of Milwaukee to run something called the Park Promenade Youth Orchestra. I played piano in it that year. He must have liked the rake of my sails, for he took me under his bow, devised for me an introduction to the ways of the orchestra. First, I was to play piano in the ensemble for a concert. Second, I was to station myself in various parts of the ensemble and listen to how they interacted as he conducted rehearsals for another concert. Third, I was to take lessons in the rudiments of conducting from his assistant, Michael Kamenski. Fourth, I was to compose, rehearse, and conduct the premiere of a new composition. The result was Suite for a Lonely City—the piece that Mother sent to Leonard Bernstein that inspired a letter from him that changed my life. In his review of the concert, Jay Joslyn, the Milwaukee Journal critic then, wrote that I must have felt like Moses atop Mount Pisgah, looking down from the podium into an orchestral Promised Land as I led my fellow teenagers in the premiere. I really did.

A few months after graduating from high school, I proudly accepted my first professional fee as an orchestrator from John-David Anello, the founding conductor of the Milwaukee Pops and the Florentine Opera Company. Anello was one of Father’s clients. I recall vividly his conspicuously large, majestically chiseled head. He had deeply-set eye sockets, thrusting cheek bones, a noble nose, and a very high, broad forehead atop which flowed backwards a leonine mane of hair. His hands were enormous—bony, gnarled joints bulged like rings from his very long fingers. He was so ugly that he was beautiful. Father took me to his gracious home on Milwaukee’s lakefront one evening after one of our rare joint-appearances at a Mensa meeting. He was a true basso profundo, whose velvety voice rolled out like thunder. Really, he was quite grand. He led Father and me into his study and then turned and asked Father to wait in the next room, which I liked. “My boy, I conduct the Milwaukee Symphony in some outdoor concerts each summer for the county—something I call ‘Music Under the Stars’—and I need somebody to arrange a Burt Bacharach tune for one of them. Your dad says that you can do it.” His heavily-lidded eyes met mine: “Can you?” I was thrilled. I still have the municipal pay stub. The same summer Anello also gave me my first professional conducting lessons, and my firstmusic-copying gig—extracting the solo piano part for the Yellow River Concerto. Several decades later, his daughter contacted me, explained that she now conducted the orchestra at my old high school, and commissioned a piece!

CODA

In 1997, the Chicago Opera Theater revived my opera Shining Brow at the 1400 seat Merle Reskin Theater. The Reskin had risen, by way of the Blackstone, from the ashes of the Iroquois Theater, in which 571 lives were lost in a tragic fire in 1903. It was a perfect venue for director Ken Cazan’s revival.

As the opera’s composer, it was indisputably my Green Room, I thought, happy, secure, with my librettist Paul Muldoon at my side. I wore my first tuxedo, picked up from the tailor at Brooks Brothers only hours earlier, and purchased with some of the cash left over from my retirement annuity. I was about to excuse myself in order to attend an alumni event organized by Curtis across the street at the Hilton when my father and Tomchek entered.

My father had driven Wally, the charismatic chorus teacher who first introduced me to music as a religion when I was fifteen years old in 1976, and who I had not seen in two decades, from Milwaukee to Chicago to attend a performance.

“You look like a young Napoleon in that tuxedo,” observed Wally as he hugged me. His snowy white hair and beard, closely cropped, smelled of lavender soap. He wore a baggy blue sweater with coffee cups of various colors embroidered on it. I laughed, asked, “Did Napoleon wear tuxedos?” “It does look good,” admitted Father. “Where did you rent it?”

“Dad,” I said, placing my fingertips to my temples. Wally motioned for me to sit down. I declined, motioning for him to sit down in my place. “Your father Earl dragged me down here,” said Wally, half-serious. “He told me I couldn’t miss a revival of Shining Brow.”

“You know,” I told him, tearing up, “I think of you, Wally, every time the curtain goes up on one of my shows. I think of how you told me that my responsibility was to ‘make beauty, despite all.’ I’ve tried. I’m trying. Thank you for everything that you taught me.” He removed his round, wire-rimmed glasses in order to wipe tears from them. “Well,” he looked away, “you have no idea how proud your Father is of you. You have no idea.”

Wally died a few months later.

Adam, Wally, Kay, Harry Shoplas, Harry Sturm, Judy, Michael, Duane, Maestro Anello, all firmly and with great compassion, laid the foundations for my life as a musician. Looking back now at the age of fifty-four at what they gave me, it takes my breath away: every one of them taught me to create beauty, despite all.