 |
| Alison in Woodstock |
That summer I shared some of what I had been up to recently in various configurations of ad hoc seminars. For
Seventeen Prepuntal Contraludes I put together a talk in which I tried to explain some of its technical specs. Another time I shared a tape of my big Synclavier piece
AKU, which Ben thought would benefit from some reverb, so Bruce Huber brought a guitar amp to a stone chapel, left over from Bards' days as a seminary, and we recorded the sound of it as it was thus blasted into reverberant space. We even managed a performance of Book of Windows, with me playing the piano part on Ben's Crumar, Bruces' electric guitar standing in for the saxophone, and Jill Borner reciting the text. Elaine Barkin was there that evening and I have reported her response in a previous post.
 |
| New York City |
I found that Alison Watkins, who was there to work on her poetry with Robert Kelly, had a similar sense of humor and general level of articulateness and we hung out quite a lot. It was in her company that I visited the local sites, such as Woodstock across the Hudson River, which had a nice bookstore, and a sort of permanent outdoor craft market, presumably populated by some of the festival visitors who never went home. We also took a train down to the city for a couple of days, visiting museums, going up to the observation deck at the World Trade Center, and finding more bookstores. I discovered that my usefulness to Alison was in lugging books, but I did grab a few for myself at The Strand - a nice edition of Chaucer and a 1939 cloth-bound edition of Gertrude Stein's "Three Lives" from The Modern Library. That may also have been where I snagged my copy of "Morte d'Arthur".
I can't recall that I did much composing that summer; the experience itself was so overwhelming that it was almost all I could do to soak some of it in. I did get together with Ben at his house for a couple of improvisation session/composition lessons, and joined as best I could in sessions with others. I may have started working on what became Intermezzo I, which arose as a way for me to compose myself into an understanding of what I thought Ben was on about with his concept of 'Partitioning' in "Meta-Variations", but I also remember making some egregiously false starts on at least one huge project, trying to outdo myself in Book of Windows-type chart-heavy structures.
 |
| My home, Fall 1982 (not New York City) |
By the end of the summer I decided that I wanted to hang around Bard between the summer sessions. I was, at the time, in a hurry to get my degree so that I could continue my journey toward doctoral fame and fortune. Three years was just too long to spend on a Masters. I worked out a plan with the school wherein I would replace one summer with a residency over the rest of the academic year. Finding housing was a bit of an issue but I did finally secure a room on the ground floor of a barn in nearby Red Hook that had been converted to a living space and workshop for the owner's furniture refinishing business; and Ben rented one of his older cars to me so I had a way to get around. So I gave back my return ticket and prepared to winter over.
