Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Part 3 - Summer 1983 - Spring 1984

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts - July-August 1982 Part 2

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.

John Rahn to the Rescue 1981

I was 22 and had been living at home while at school, commuting by bus across Lake Washington to the UW, following a more or less self-prescribed path to fulfill my firm ambition and expectation to finish my undergraduate work, get a masters and a doctorate, and finally to become a famous and renowned professor of composition somewhere. It was that somewhere that I had never thought through, and the slowly dawning realization that I would soon need to apply, and to go, to elsewhere for graduate studies was, I admit now, terrifying. I sent out a few feelers, but had no clear idea where out there would be a good fit and that might be willing to consider taking me on.

John, knowing how fascinated I had become by the various works of Benjamin Boretz that he had shared with me - both in our lessons (the score of ("...my chart shines high where the blue milks upset...") was open on the piano in his office) and in theory seminars, notably Language ,as a music and Meta-Variations: Studies in the foundations of musical thought - suggested that I write to Ben for advice. Had Ben been teaching at a school that had a graduate program that would have been an obvious choice, but that was not the case as far as we knew. So I sent off a "Hi there, I feel like an increasingly square pig in a narrowing round hole, and am at a loss as to my next step" letter. I didn't know this until later, but John also wrote him a short note of introduction, for which, and for his timely encouragement, support, and tireless opening of intellectual doors, I am ever grateful. I also found out even many more years later that I was one of only two students who had ever written Ben a letter. Try it kids!

One evening that Spring, much to my surprise and amazement, I got a call from Ben. This in and of itself was a total flabbergast to me, who hadn't a clue that a venerable figure such as Ben would condescend to pick up a phone to call a nobody, and to my great excitement it turned out that Bard College was starting an interdisciplinary MFA program to take place during Summer terms and he asked if would I like to apply and come out East in June. Neither I nor my family were in a financial position to accomplish that so suddenly but I thanked him profusely and applied for the next year. The application, as I recall, was little more than a single sheet to provide a name and address.

And so a year later, in June of 1982, a day or so after an end-of-school-year party held at the house Neal was sharing in Wallingford, wherein I was introduced to his kid sister Karen, who would become my spouse 5 years later, I was launched across the continent to who knew what out in the sticks 100 miles north of New York City, in a mysteriously foreign sounding Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, never having gotten a clear idea about how to fend for myself in any significant way, and never having been so far from anyone I knew. But all that will be story for a later chapter.