8
I’ve never let my schooling interfere with my education.
—Mark Twain
If Aspen seemed a laid back, familial type of music school, Juilliard was an entirely different universe. Pianists hung out with other pianists, violinists with their own kind, and so forth. There were only four conducting students in my first year, so we latched on to anybody we could.
The president of the school was the composer Peter Mennin. Although he was a fine administrator and visionary educator, I was sorry to have missed the opportunity to learn from his predecessor, William Schuman, the composer who had left to assume the directorship of Lincoln Center. During Schuman’s tenure at Juilliard, a solid base of both musical and academic study was implemented which survived into Mennin’s regime. The curriculum was rather broadly defined. To graduate, you had to meet the New York State Regents’ criteria. So the school offered certain “traditional” subjects, albeit with a twist. The course “Song Text and Opera Libretto,” for example, could satisfy the English component of the requirement for a college degree.
The most important of the non-performance classes was called “Literature and Materials of Music” and completion of a level of L and M was required for all students each year. It was an advanced form of that old standby, “Harmony and Theory.” Conductors and composers had an even more difficult version of this course. My freshman L and M teacher was Hall Overton, a composer who had made a name for himself in the third-stream jazz movement, and who was constantly forgetting to flick the ashes from the cigarette that forever dangled from his lips. Smoking in classrooms was an accepted part of the culture then, yet I often wondered about the man’s dry cleaning bills. He was not a bad teacher, his attitude cool and hip.
My freshman year was naturally devoted to learning the ropes. I seemed to be doing well with conducting and playing viola in one of the orchestras. By the second semester, I was forming chamber groups and presenting such works as the Stravinsky Octet for Winds and the Ibert Divertissement. There was even a performance of the Third Brandenburg Concerto with a very young Pinchas Zukerman as one of the three violinists. In retrospect, it is astonishing to think just how many of my peers at Juilliard would go on to have international careers—Itzhak Perlman, Emanuel Ax, Joseph Kalichstein, Jeffrey Siegel and countless performers, who are still active on the world’s stages. In recent years I have suggested that we have a reunion of the classes of the ’60s and assemble an orchestra for a fund raiser. But who would conduct? Levine, Conlon, Davies, Nelson, to name a few options. Maybe the gathering will materialize someday and we could invite a pupil from the preparatory division who played for me when he was eleven years old: Yo-Yo Ma.
In my second and third years, I lived in an apartment on 115th Street and Broadway, a half-dozen blocks south of Juilliard’s pre–Lincoln Center home. Initially I shared it with a violist, Peter Sokole, who has since served in the Concertgebouw Orchestra for more than three decades. Peter was a bit active socially and he had a lot of visitors, so I frequently stayed in my room. During the next year in the apartment, my old pal and bass player from LA High, Ken Friedman, was my roommate. Ken was more like me, quiet and shy. He went on to become principal bassist of the Vancouver Symphony. My closest friend was Jeff Siegel, who has remained a constant confidant to this day. We went to movies, concerts and restaurants almost daily. In no time, we learned the trick of getting acquainted with the ushers at the various concert venues, and we rarely had to pay to get in.
In 1966, Vladimir Horowitz came out of retirement. When the concert was announced, organizers had already determined when the tickets would go on sale, and limited them to four per customer. The only hope of getting one was to stand in line overnight outside Carnegie Hall. I know that if everybody who claimed to be there actually was, about fifty thousand people would have surrounded the hall. I did get in that line, and when Mrs. Horowitz came around with coffee and doughnuts about two in the morning, I said, “I don’t drink coffee, but could I have an extra doughnut instead?” She laughed and said, “Of course.” I would never again see this woman smile.
The afternoon recital was easily the most anticipated event of my concert-going life to that point. Horowitz walked onto the stage almost a half hour late, but no one cared. He was present, and something remarkable was about to happen. There was a great, collective intake of breath when he missed some notes in the first phrase of the Toccata, Adagio and Fugue by Bach. After that, everything was pure musical magic. All those recordings I had listened to, the praise other musicians bestowed, nothing could come close to the live performance. Attending that concert was a reminder of how live performance remains more satisfying than the recorded equivalent.
Many years later, one of my record producers, Joanna Nickrenz, asked me if I had been at the once-in-a-lifetime recital. I said yes, and that I could relive the whole experience by listening to the commercial recording of the concert. She asked, “Did you really think the recording was of the actual concert?”
I said, “Of course. You can tell just because he missed those notes in the Bach.”
She then produced a tape and asked me to listen to it. I was shocked! It was certainly not the same as my cherished recording. All manner of musical errors were in evidence. I asked what had happened.
Joanna explained how most of the material was recorded multiple times and that they had to leave in the opening because the entire audience heard the wrong notes. But while we all sat there in Carnegie, we were too enthralled to notice the others. That is why recordings can be so misleading. Even if they are unedited versions of the most sublime performances, nothing can replace the relationship of the artist with the audience. I have heard recordings of some of my own concerts that I thought were wonderful at the time; then, on rehearing, I notice poorly judged tempi, overindulgent ritardandos and a slew of wrong notes.
As important as Juilliard was, perhaps it was more revealing to observe the active concert life in New York. Jean Morel used to advise us to learn from the things that go wrong, because if you try to imitate what is good, you are merely a copy. There was a lot of good going on, though. We could routinely hear Bernstein, Szell, Ormandy, the underrated Martinon with the Chicago Symphony, and practically every artist that passed through the city. I still hadn’t developed a taste for opera and it remained the weakest link in my musical chain.
The next two L and M teachers I had were Roger Sessions and Luciano Berio. Sessions was notoriously strict and students were forever trying to catch him in mistakes, especially when he would assign us to harmonize chorales.
“Mr. Sessions, the fourth note in the second bar of the alto clef should be a C-sharp.”
He would erase the offending note.
“No, the alto clef.”
He would erase the offending note.
“That’s the fourth note, not bar.”
He would erase the offending note.
“C-sharp.”
And on it went.
Berio reminded me a little of actor Peter Sellers in his Inspector Clouseau role. The great Italian composer was the only person I had ever seen trip over a piano.
Not that this mattered. I was doing a lot of work conducting, playing piano for ballet rehearsals, as well as leading contemporary music concerts at school. My attendance in classes was spotty. The sessions with Morel seemed to be the one thing that I really cared about.
In 1966, I was invited to be assistant conductor of the New York Youth Symphony. I made my Carnegie Hall debut leading William Schuman’s New England Triptych. Because I went to innumerable concerts at the Hall in my freshman year, the place did not seem so huge, at least from the audience. However, with that first step through the doors and onto the stage, I felt overwhelmed by the sense that the auditorium had at least quadrupled in size.
Schuman was there, and we began a friendship that lasted until his death. That made me regret even more that he had not headed up Juilliard during my student days. Perhaps his presence would have encouraged me to show up for more classes.
In my final year, my L and M teacher was Vincent Persichetti, another well-known composer who changed my attitude about classwork. This man made me curious about everything. He was rigorous but enthusiastic, and had a way of making the most boring contrapuntal exercises come to life. Persichetti also led us on great journeys of discovery. At the end of some classes, he would glance at his watch and nonchalantly make a remark along the lines of, “Well, we’re out of time. By the way, do any of you know five piano concertos that start with the piano alone? See you Wednesday.” We would rush to the library en masse. Of course, his lesson was not about getting five correct answers. It was about how composers handled the opening of works in piano concerto form. Persichetti succeeded in teaching without your realizing you learned something. I hated missing any of his classes.
In 1967, I was promoted to music director of the Youth Symphony and gradually Carnegie Hall started to seem its normal size. This is when my brother moved to New York to study, and I thought it would be a nice idea to perform the Beethoven Triple Concerto with him, Jeff Siegel and violinist Theodore Arm. Our mother arrived about two weeks prior to the performance to coach us in the work. She was demanding, as usual, but obviously we were achieving good results. Then about three days before the concert she said, “Let me see how you are going to bow.”
We assumed she was kidding. We were professionals, adults, but it was no joke. So the four of us exited to a hallway, then returned to make a truly appalling entrance. She had us work on this over and over until she deemed us presentable. When we asked her why we needed to perfect this, she had an astutely perceptive answer.
“Because the audience judges you before you play one note.”
A line I have never forgotten. Even though I still find my own entrances a bit awkward, I have come to realize that appearance does indeed count. But some artists go to extremes, and may be remembered for how they look rather than how they perform.
In my senior year, the specter of the great Juilliard challenge loomed. This was the dreaded L and M final exam. After four years of comprehensive study, final evaluation was based not only on how well you played, but on how much you learned in those classes. That test was legendary around the building on Claremont Avenue. Fail the exam and you did not graduate.
Tales were told of how we would be placed in a room alone and given a score to analyze. We would then be shepherded to another room in which more scores would be open on the piano, some quite obscure, which had to be identified. The example most often cited was the Second Symphony of Khachaturian. I was sure that if I didn’t recognize the score in question, that would be my answer, even if it were an early Haydn symphony. On the blackboard would be words and phrases that we had to identify and translate. And these words may or may not have had any relevance to music. One tale claimed that a student defined al dente as a musical phrase played by a flutist who positions the instrument directly on the teeth.
I was scared to death. I had been a poor student at best and there was no way you could cram for this exam or fake it. I arrived and was handed the last four pages of the first movement of the Berg Violin Concerto to analyze. I felt sure to be assigned to the fifth ring of the musical inferno. I jotted down things that looked analytical and hoped I could explain a little something about the piece.
Upon walking into the room, I saw sitting around a table Persichetti, Sessions and Jacob Druckman. The sixth ring of hell now looked good.
There were the scores on the piano, the words on the board and the sweat on my palms. As I started in with my dissertation on the Berg, Mr. Persichetti stopped me and said, “Look, we all know you are a fine musician and we only have one question for you. Why weren’t you in class more often?”
I explained that the school had assigned me so much conducting and piano playing activity that it was impossible to get to very many classes. The committee thanked me and sent me home.
Stories about that era at Juilliard could fill ten books. For me it was a period of musical intensity. However, during that time, I experienced so much isolation from the world outside the conservatory doors that I never even noticed the chaos that rocked my neighborhood as I walked to school up Broadway. Columbia University was just one block from my apartment, and although the area seemed more crowded with people than usual, I had no idea that hundreds of students had occupied several of the university’s largest buildings to protest racial discrimination and Columbia’s support of the Vietnam War.
These historic events lasted a week and ended in violent confrontations with riot police. But I remained oblivious because this external upheaval coincided with a period of intense personal struggle. Portions of my long-term memory had faded; I could recall even less about my childhood. I suspected I was having heart problems and my physician stated the trouble did not appear to be physical. I paid twice-a-week visits to a therapist, but still I grew further and further away from my past.