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| My Red Hook door |
Five Movements
Seven Cues Without Film
The second summer term of the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts proceeded along much the same schedule as the previous term. One notable event was the visit by the eminent composer Morton Feldman, who struck me as among the most unpleasant people I have ever met. The afternoon session went OK. He played us some recordings and provided some scores for us to follow along in. But in his evening presentation to the entire school, he came across, to me, as arrogant and boorish. Who tells the school they're visiting that they're a cheap summer camp and that clearly none of us are serious. After all, how could we be? Many of us were not born in New York City, and hence were beyond the pale. By the time he was through I was pretty hot. I went up afterwards to, well, I'm not sure what my intention was, but we ended up in a verbal altercation, the upshot of which was that he called me the unholy progeny of John Cage and himself. Ben commented that he did not want to witness that act. I told the story to my kids a few months ago, and they thought the whole thing was hilarious, especially since they had no idea who either of them was.
Far more pleasant was the visit from my University of Washington counterpoint teacher Diane Thome. It is the only time I can recall her looking relaxed. This may have been an early clue to me that academic life was not the bed of roses I had imagined it to be. When the term was over Jill, Dan, Bruce, and I took a road trip to visit J. K. Randall at Princeton. My memory is hazy but we may have engaged in an outdoor improvisation session that first evening and then filled two sides of tape the next day, followed by lunch and conversation. It was on this occasion that as Professor Randall was peering at the tape machine, considering whether to use Dolby B or C, he straightened himself and asked of us with rhetorical bravado “Noise reduction? Who wants noise reduction?!” It was in one of those sessions that he waxed rhapsodically and hilariously about baseball stats and non-standard notations. This became the Inter/Play tape “Labor Day”. My recollection is that Bruce Huber was also on that session but that he isn't credited on the tape.
If I wanted my degree, I had to put together some sort of project to present and defend. My intention became to do what I could to strip away any overt rhetorical obfuscations, and to get down to basics. Over the course of a few weeks at the end of the fall of 1983 I produced five scores, collectively called “Five Movements”, each named by the date of its composition. The first, “November 11, 1983” is scored in the form of four concentric cycles, each cycle containing combinations of pitches taken from a set of eight (F, G-flat, B, middle C, F, G-flat, B, and C). In the middle is a C Clef which I intended to pertain to the whole score. The next, “November 17, 1983”, contains just three pitches in a cluster: F-sharp, G, and A-flat, arranged in groups of three simultaneities of one or two notes in all their combinations, all arranged as a stylized sine wave. The third, “November 22, 1983”, scored as a stylized eye, has combinations of pitches from a set of five: A-sharp, B, C-sharp, D, and G. “December 1, 1983” is a study in articulation. Its pitches, F-sharp, G, A, C, D-flat, and E-flat are arranged in three lobes an octave below the bass staff. “December 8, 1983” is just two low notes at opposite corners of an empty space spanned by long slur marks: the lowest E on the piano, and the A-sharp at the bottom of the bass staff.
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| The height of my fame |
I made recordings of each of the Five Movements on Ben's piano as I finished them, allowing each a 45-minute cassette tape side. I also prepared a large format ink score for each movement, which scores hung on the walls of our home in Greenwood and perhaps here for a while. They currently reside in the big pine box under my piano. I presented them at Bard Hall on March 2nd, 1984, garnering an above-the-fold headline and picture in the Dutchess North Register Star. This was the absolute pinnacle of my fame. I enlisted the help of Matthew Crain to play percussion in order to articulate the movements. I played each page for 10 minutes or so. I had arranged Bard Hall with dim lighting, the chairs set in irregular groups around the floor. My hope was that it wouldn't look like a generic concert hall. Matt and I had rolled the remains of a large steel barrel we had found in the woods (somebody's sculpture material?) to the door of Bard Hall and the presentation opened with Matt hauling off and whacking it five times with a stick. A truly glorious sound. One of my piano students left right after it was over. When I asked them about it later, they said that they had needed to take a walk to think it all over. I take that as a win.
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| Me with my diploma in Latin |
My defense later that spring was uneventful other than one exchange when I realized that my use of the word interval confused some of the visual arts folks. Apparently in that field it denotes a regular distance between marks, whereas in music it is typically used to refer to the relationship between 2 pitches regardless of the regularity of the distance. I did get my diploma, so I guess my defense was a success.
That year I went home to Bellevue for Christmas and January. My folks almost didn't recognize me when I got off the plane. My hair had grown out and I was amply bearded, not having shaved since before I left 18 months before. By the time I returned to Red Hook the weather in Seattle was almost Spring-like but of course it was still midwinter at Bard. The snow was deep and the temperature was in the 20s and teens and, alas, while I was gone Ben's cat Roger (my name for him not Ben’s) had passed away suddenly. Over the next few weeks I came to the decision to abandon any further academic ambitions, and to move back to Washington. There were several reasons for this decision, which I have never regretted. Foremost among them was the realization that the necessity of making a living at music would, for me, inevitably poison my relation to it, and that academic life in particular, though it had distinct advantages, was just not one I had any rabid eagerness to pursue. Figuring that nobody was likely to be willing to provide the kind of hands-off funding to support me in following whatever crazy thing my imagination presented and finding myself worrying about money for more than 8 hours a day, I figured I could just get myself a job that would occupy only 8 hours and be free to fund my own music. Ben thought I should hang out through graduation anyway, which seemed fine.
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| My living quarters |
And I'm glad I did, as those months were full of some wonderful experiences. It was during this time that what became known as the Barrytown Orchestra, or OMOO (Orchestral Music Of Opportunity), coalesced out of our frequent session work. I have dubs of more than twenty recorded improvisation sessions from June of 1983 through to May of 1984 and there were several weekly large group sessions at Bard Hall that I don't have dubs of. I also became friends with Penelope “Penny” Hyde, a graduating senior who ended up as part of our sessions at Bard Hall and at “The Carriage House”, off campus on the grounds of “The Oaks” in Barrytown. One large painting of hers has been hung on a wall of wherever I have lived ever since. Several of us visited Wesleyan University at some point where we improvised with some of the residents at the Holistic House, where everybody thinks alike and nobody smiles, but where they had an amazing lentil soup in a perpetual simmer on the stove. Just the thing for the miserable cold I had. My brother Glen visited at some point, prompting a train trip down to DC to visit museums and on the way back quickly spending all the cash I had in our own version of escape from New York.
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| Penelope Hyde at The Oaks |
That Spring was when I wrote the little pieces that are now called “Seven Cues Without Film”, as studies in combining two things, “two” being broadly defined. The first version of the score was penned with fine tipped colored markers. I did eventually abandon such elaborate gimmicks after it dawned on me that gimmicks were what they were. These were the last pieces I recorded on Ben’s piano. The rest of the Spring was occupied with packing and shipping all my stuff, bidding my friends farewell, and attending graduation. Much to my delight, my diploma was written in Latin, so that I can claim to have a degree in a classical language. Penny was kind enough to drive me to the airport to see me off.
Recordings:
Five Movements - March 2, 1984, live at Bard Hall
Seven Cues Without Film - recorded in 2012
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