On Making Records

‘For this flautando pianissimo, would the first violins please lead from the back this time,’ said the gentle Voice of Authority, who sat next to me last weekend in a tiny room in the basement of the Flynn Theater in Burlington, Vermont, wearing a set of headphones and leaning over the score of my Double Concerto, making quick little pencil notations over each measure as upstairs, on the stage, Jaime Laredo, Sharon Robinson and the Vermont Orchestra, conducted by Troy Peters, performed.

The effect was as striking as it was instantaneous: listening through headphones myself, I now heard the violins in the back of my head instead of the front, and the sound, while being more ethereal, had more middle to it. I was astonished. Later, Troy explained to me that this is a fairly common request, made to elicit a little more evenness and heft from a section of strings, but it was new to me, and a revelation. ‘Concertmasters,’ he continued sensibly, ‘lead; it’s their job. So they tend to be a little ahead of the rest of the section, especially in super-loud, intense passages. This can take away a little bit from the center of the sound.’

Adam Abeshouse was the ideal producer and engineer for the Vermont project; he generously answered my questions as time permitted, and seemed to realize that I was truly enjoying the experience not just of hearing my concerto documented so beautifully but also of learning from him.

Every producer I’ve worked with has taught me things. Years ago, serving as conductor for an ultimately unreleased recording of my opera Shining Brow, I learned a lot about how to pace a session by inadvertently allowing, by being too willing to agree not to move on, a highly accomplished, well-intentioned producer to spend most of a ninety minute recording session putting the first ninety seconds of the piece in the can. In his defense, he probably couldn't be faulted, since critics do seem to form a large part of their opinion of an entire recording based on listening to the first few minutes, and he probably felt that he was protecting the project.

Serving as a producer myself for a disc of Henry Cowell art songs one evening in New York at Town Hall (lovely, but noisy space — because of the Times newspaper delivery trucks that roar down Forty-third Street late at night), I learned to be highly selective about what I ask the engineer to play back for the artists. I’m afraid that I made the process harder than necessary for the soprano by allowing her to listen to too many takes. By the end of that long evening, she seemed gallows-bound as she marched down to the basement to don the headphones like (her words) a crown of thorns.

On another occasion, producing a disc of my wind ensemble music in Texas, I was taught to stop overusing the talk-back switch by a pair of engineers who assembled a little box connected to nothing with a switch and a light on it labeled ‘conductor interrupter’ and presented it to me after the last session, saying, ‘See, Daron, now you can talk as much as you want and never stop the session!’

Over the years, producing pickup orchestras contracted to record my private students' works at lovely old Kaufman Studios in Astoria where so many of the great silent films were shot, I figured out, with the laid back, expert help of Joe Castellon, how a producer can practically conduct the orchestra from the booth if necessary.

I learned that being a little bit sneaky is an important skill for a producer during another session with composer-pianist Tom Cipullo and tenor Paul Sperry. I asked the engineer to run tape (how I date myself, since now sessions go straight to a computer’s hard drive) during rehearsals and was rewarded for my deceit (and foresight) when I captured Paul effortlessly lofting a lovely, creamy high A that, during takes, he never surpassed.

Sneakiness notwithstanding, trust is a producer’s currency; without it, the process can be really unpleasant. Serving as conductor for the recording sessions of my opera Bandanna in Las Vegas a few years ago, I worked with an excellent young German tonmeister who performed a real-time mix to stereo of the dozens of microphones trained on the soloists, chorus, and orchestra. I trusted him, but knowing (and having to accept) that what I was hearing on the podium was serving not as the final product but rather as the raw material for someone else’s ears was anguishing.

As a collaborative pianist, I have learned to sympathize acutely with performers’ insecurity and feelings of over-exposure when compelled to listen to playbacks of myself accompanying baritone Paul Kreider on a disc we made together for Arsis. I loved Paul's performances, but, oh dear, how keenly I shall have liked to have fired that clumsy pianist! I was ultimately satisfied with the quality of my performance on the released disc, but during those sessions mine was the scalding self-loathing usually reserved for viewing oneself naked in the mirror after a season of unmitigated gluttony.

Working towards a recording session as a proofreader for a music preparation team that had just finished copying the new charts for a first-time read-through at Carroll's (that history-drenched warren of rehearsal studios on Fifty-fifth Street) by Liza Minelli and her big band during the late nineties, I learned an important lesson about musical charisma by witnessing an artist of her amazing caliber turning it on, dazzling and inspiring even the most hard-boiled of elite New York freelance players and then, just as suddenly, turning it back off.

Post production, the magical-mystical place where the temptation to achieve perfection at the loss of musicality, authenticity, and genuine feeling is literally at one's fingertips, is just as fascinating. Choreographing the mix-down from 32-tracks in real-time with the engineer and performing overdubs on my opera Vera of Las Vegas for CRI, I learned to alternately revel in and despair at recording technology’s ability to enable one both to ‘bury’ mistakes in the mix, and to suddenly lose a dozen hours of work by accidentally pushing the wrong button.

What producers and performers share, of course, is the joy of capturing lightning in a bottle. At one point in Vermont, Adam turned to me and with a happy, child-like smile, remarked, ‘You know, there are like a handful of people in the world who could have done what Jaime just did there.’ It was one of those moments that was at once musically and personally fulfilling. As the recording industry continues to metamorphose, I’ll keep my hopes pinned on the Process of 'making records,' hoping that it never moves too far away from that key on a kite string in a thunderstorm place.

Ghost Light

Standing in the Piazza San Marco very early in the morning on a December day in 1989, bathed in that insalubrious, marrow-chilling, surgically gray mist that seems to simultaneously rise from and fall into the canals, I thought about a morning a few months earlier back in Manhattan when I'd risen and descended to the Korean deli in my bathrobe carrying a coffee mug in order to buy a Times and a scone, only to be tackled by a handsome young coked-out Captain America-type arbitrageur looking behind him waving a hundred dollar bill at his aggravated cabdriver and thanked God I was here, here instead on this island where I thought I'd live forever.

I’d arrived at the Santa Lucia Station on the first train of the day from Paris, having spent the past few months in Cassis, first at the Camargo Foundation, and then on my own when the fellowship ran out, busing tables for meals and living cheaply in a room above a restaurant on the harbor. The carabinieris goose-stepped ceremonially up to the flagpole in front of the basilica and raised Il Tricolore; there were no lights on in Caffé Florian, which wouldn’t open for hours; a pale, pretty woman in a red dress only partly concealed beneath a royal blue pea coat sped with her head down against the rain past the Campanile towards the aquamarine sea.

The moon burnt like a ghost light over the silent city; the rising sun looked like a blood clot suspended in olive oil beside the Chiesa di San Giorgio. I was twenty-eight, and entirely susceptible to what Mann called Venice’s “somniferous eroticism.” It seemed to my overheated imagination then to have become over the centuries solipsistic by design, to not exist except as a manifestation of what I (and legions of tourists, though I was determined to stay) imagined it to be, an empty stage in a closed theater; dead, but fecund because of all the things that had died there.

I’ve since returned many times to the Bride of the Sea, my favorite city on the planet, the Island of No Regret, La Serenissima. I know that my memories are not unique. Like countless others, I’ve sobbed in La Fenice, filled journals with true lies about myself, returned faithfully to my favorite pensione and observed the innkeeper's children growing up, welcomed the New Year by drinking too much champagne in Harry’s, fallen asleep in churches after dancing all night during Carnival, performed there over the decades the real-life, unmasked roles of innamorato, pedrolino and vecchio, read Ruskin while tracing his steps, shrugged when I didn't get it at the Biennale, experienced Stendhal's syndrome when I thought that I did, spontaneously bought flowers for a mother with her little boy on the Fondamente Nuove one sunny summer Sunday morning, then spent the rest of the day with them in the cemetery on the Isola di San Michele, surprised myself there by discovering tears on my cheeks while standing at the foot of the grave of Stravinsky. I've walked Lorenzetti’s walks, and missed everything because I was reading about it in his book; I've spent a hundred days happily losing myself and being lost, lost and not caring; avoided the old tourist traps, fallen into new ones; been given horns.

Venice has given me one memory that is unique and entirely my own, though: laughing in a stiff wind and the crisp Adriatic rain on the Zattere al Gesuiti, I experienced on an autumn afternoon in 2004 Venice's magical 'think-by-feeling-what-is-there-to-know' ability to transmute Life into Art in the arms of my wife, the love of my life.

That's Alright, Baby

‘That’s alright, baby,’ she purred with that famous ‘just put your lips together and blow’ voice as I tripped on the stairs and fell to my knees at her feet. ‘Oh my, I’m sorry!’ I said, looking up at her. Chuckling, she asked, ‘Are you on your way to Lenny’s?’ My vocal chords no longer worked. ‘Rglksh,’ I croaked. She smiled and patted me on the arm as she passed. ‘Have fun,’ she said, rounding the corner.

It was a hot autumn day in 1987. As if being on my way to my first private lesson with Leonard Bernstein weren’t nerve-wracking enough, I had literally run into one of my all-time favorite screen goddesses on the stairs. I hadn’t bargained on that when I had drummed up the nerve to make the call, schedule the time with his assistant, thereby taking the maestro up on the invitation to study composition and conducting privately with him that he had extended a few weeks earlier at Tanglewood.

Nine years previously my mother, not knowing what to do with her son, who was composing up a storm, playing the piano all hours, singing, and conducting with a single-mindedness that was just plain unnerving (not to mention disappointing to my trigonometry and physics teachers, among others), wrote a mother’s plea for advice to Leonard Bernstein’s personal secretary, with a score and cassette tape of one of my orchestra pieces enclosed.

Mother never showed me the letter that she wrote in 1979. It must have been persuasive though, because Ms. Coates passed the materials on to her boss, who (in an example of his extraordinary generosity of spirit) replied enthusiastically. I was allowed to read his reply after my mother, who looked slightly stunned, had finished. ‘Yes,’ I read, astonished and trembling in our rural Wisconsin kitchen, ‘your son is the Real Thing, a born composer. I think he should come to New York and study at Juilliard with my friend David Diamond.’

A letter was sent to Diamond, of whom we had never heard; he wrote back that it was too late in the season for me to come to Juilliard. Instead, I went to Madison, where for the next year I wrote poetry, composed, practiced, and enjoyed being a Midwestern undergraduate at a Big Ten school. When it came time to audition at Juilliard, I sent in my scores, flew to New York, and presented myself for an interview with the school's distinguished composition faculty. 'Mr. Hagen,' Diamond delivered the committee's funereal verdict through gray pursed lips, 'I think you should go back to Wisconsin and develop your technique.'

Sweating, clad in a green leisure suit with a round-trip Milwaukee-New York-Milwaukee train ticket in the pocket, I thanked the gentlemen who had just passed judgment on me, excused myself, went to the nearest bathroom, and violently threw up. After I had collected myself, I headed home and spent another year in Madison. When it came time to audition for Juilliard again I applied instead to Curtis, and was accepted. After three years in Philadelphia, I returned to Juilliard as a scholarship recipient, and concluded at last my formal education as a student of David's.

My years in Madison, at Curtis and at Juilliard behind me, and now my brush with Bacall behind me, I reached the second floor of the Dakota and knocked on Bernstein’s door.

Interlude: Knuckles and Digits

This morning I awoke with the first few bars of Beethoven’s Opus 49, Number 1 in my head. Morning coffee made and carried into the music room, I pulled out the well-thumbed second volume of complete sonatas and placed it on the rack, turning, for the first time in twenty-eight years, to page 355.

It is said that this humble (some say even insignificant) sonata, probably the easiest of them all to play, was written to be learned by students, and that its publication was an accident — that Beethoven’s accountant took it upon himself to publish it during one of Beethoven’s periods of financial distress. No matter, there before me sat the first page of my old friend; for like so many fledgling pianists before me learn it I did. The music was covered with fingerings and lesson notes, even an oily discoloration in the lower right hand corner of the page from having been so often turned.

When I placed my hands on the keys, I felt first the flush of familiar pleasure as my thumb played the upbeat to the first bar. Then a rush of motor memories, life memories, and admonitions from my beloved teacher, Ms. Ross came to me as my pinky began the second bar. The row of descending thirds in the left hand that enters next provoked rueful gratitude for the weeks spent practicing fingered thirds I was assigned when it emerged that I had never practiced them before.

And then, in the third bar, the crossed out fingerings (this was the Schenker edition) and the Schnabel fingerings that my teacher preferred I learn. ‘Why Schnabel’s?’ I asked. ‘Because he studied with Leschetitzky, who studied with Czerny, who studied with Beethoven,’ she answered.

The familiar outward rotation of the right hand in the second movement once carefully rehearsed as a teenager to serve as a moment of relaxation prior to a difficult passage triggered not just the thought ‘relax here’ but also a warm, clear memory of being stopped at that point during a lesson and being asked how much sleep I had had. I confessed that I had been for the past thirty-six hours copying the parts to a new orchestra piece. ‘Then, my dear,’ my teacher sighed, ‘go home, get some sleep, and come back tomorrow, because you can’t possibly expect your hands to do what your head and heart tell them to in this state. Not just the lack of sleep but the gripping of the pen for all that time has clearly short-circuited your coordination.’

Double bar reached, I closed the volume and placed if back on the shelf, thinking that there is still romance for me in the knowledge that my fingers had just traced pretty much the same patterns Beethoven’s did two centuries ago. Musicians all know that muscles remember, that motor memory is fashioned over time through the repetition of a given collection of motor skills and the ability of the brain to internalize it such that they become automatic; that once muscle memory is created and retained, there is no longer need to actively think about the movement and capacity is freed up for interpretation and expressivity.

This is the place I love the best — where the mystery of talent unfolds, knuckles and digits are forgotten, the poetic memory runs free, and the exhilarating music ‘sans commencement, sans fin,’ which this morning sounded to me like the Opus 49, Number 1, fills the the air.

Yes, I've Read That

‘Good luck, boys,’ the Registrar said as he handed us each a small envelope with thirty dollars in it. Stamped on each in a heavily-seriffed typeface that seemed to evoke the Ages were the words THE CURTIS INSTITUTE OF MUSIC. Below that was scrawled in loopy letters our name and the date – something-something-1982. Our train-fare and lunch money: we were going to New York for our lessons with Ned Rorem.

We were punctilious about ringing the buzzer at precisely the appointed hour. To be early or late was to begin our lessons with explanations. Not good. I remember that I nearly always wore a suit and tie, because I understood that respect was due, and because I also understood that a lesson with Ned wasn’t just a lesson, it was a performance.

Lessons began with lunch laid out on the red dining room table. There was always a quiche from Soutine’s, Godiva chocolates, and sometimes berries. Always, there was a pitcher filled with liquid of indeterminate color that we dubbed Mystery Juice. Years later Jim revealed that it consisted of a melange of whatever unfinished juices there were to be found in the refrigerator on the morning of our lessons.

There were books everywhere; paintings of Ned on the living room walls. Jim might pass through on his way to an engagement. On the piano would be placed copies of whichever of Ned’s pieces Boosey had just put into print. Wallace the cat, fat, foul-tempered, and plagued by seizures set off by rhythmic sounds, would flit in from the bedroom, rub on our legs, and then hiss at us imperiously before stalking out.

Over lunch, Norman Stumpf, Robert Convery and I would be quizzed on the concerts we had attended, the music we had listened to, the books we had read, and whatever gossip had manifested itself at Curtis since our previous lessons. Ned didn't talk about himself. Although we were never explicitly instructed to do so, it was clear that we were expected to express ourselves as concisely and as articulately as possible. I was good at this part, so I relished it.

Talking Part finished, Ned would move into the living room and seat himself at the piano, followed by whoever had volunteered to go first. The rest of us would sit in the dining room at the table and talk quietly, or peruse Ned’s library. (It was considered an honor to be entrusted with a book for the week.) One squirmed (or not) on a little, uncomfortable cane-seated chair next to Ned as he played through whatever one had brought. Bringing sketches to a lesson could be disastrous — we had learned through bitter experience that an entire lesson could be devoted to cleaning up our notation if we didn’t bring our work in as immaculately notated as possible.

Listening to somebody else’s lesson was as illuminating as one’s own; eavesdropping when Ned periodically took a phone call to talk business was equally enlightening. It took me a couple of weeks to realize that I was fortunate to have read all of his books before joining his studio, because he occasionally vamped — or was he testing us? we never could tell — by making points that he had already made in his published writings. We called this ‘playing tapes’ and it seemed to please Ned when we caught him at it.

'Instruction is not offered, it is seized,’ Ned would explain, pulling a pencil from the juice glass on the piano.

I had a habit back then which probably annoyed Ned enormously. If he asked me whether I had read something I hadn’t, I would say that I had, and then read the book the following week. Needless to say, I ended up reading a lot of books. I was eager to impress, and too eager for him to get to the point, to (I thought at the time) risk having my lesson derailed by my lack of erudition. It took me a few too many rather nasty, embarrassing moments to be cured of this character failing. Twenty-seven years later, it irritates me when my students do it to me with an intensity only possible in one once guilty of the same thing.

I also liked to try to impress Ned by bringing in what I thought were finished pieces. ‘Ah, another fait accompli,’ he would sigh. ‘Of course, it’s finished, so nothing I say matters.’ Beat. ‘On the other hand, there’s always something to criticize; that’s why I'm here,’ he would say, drawing a pencil from the juice glass like a stiletto.

He was at his best with me when he was the most brutal, and the better my music was, the more merciless his critique would be. He never pretended to be an academic; he was a mid-career professional. Consequently, his reactions were like dispatches from the creative and intellectual front lines, uninflected, and deadly serious. I often disagreed with Ned, but I never for a moment doubted that he was speaking from vast experience and from the gut.

Afterwards, Norman and I usually walked down Broadway to Times Square together, talking about our lessons. I remember that we did enjoy being Young and we talked about it, as well as the romance of Manhattan and our excitement at feeling as though we were on a meaningful journey. As ubiquitous as Starbucks is now, Brew and Burger was then; we would step into one and spend our lunch allowance on a pitcher of beer and burgers, wrangle like pups over the Big Issues, Music, Tonality, Modernism, Minimalism, and —isms in general. We laughed a lot, and the Big City on those evenings opened for us like Pandora’s Box. We were Young though, and Resilience and Hope always sustained us.

The First Fifteen Measures of Billy Budd

When I was fourteen, my older brother played for me his LP’s of Benjamin Britten’s Billy Budd. I remember being paralyzed like a mongoose by a cobra by the first ten seconds of music. For the next two hours, and for many, many hours afterwards as the piece worked its way into my heart, I stared at those slightly warped vinyl discs as they undulated on the turntable like surf at precisely 33 1/3 revolutions per minute.

In the first fifteen measures of the Prologue to Billy Budd, Britten evokes an entire universe — certainly he evokes Melville's 'infinite sea.' Mist, exquisite tonal ambiguity, the sense of being lost or torn between two worlds, two keys, Good and Evil, Right and Wrong, the Secular and the Divine, B flat major and B minor diads slipping against one another like waves against a 'fragment of earth.' Strings begin, ethereal, flautando, evaporate to reveal — momentarily — winds and brass in a held bi-tonal chord that shines bleakly like a harbor light (or is it a connective passage between the Now and the Hereafter?) telling us straight out that the argument’s afoot. The trumpet and horns enter on an A flat. Is that an A flat in (dark) B flat major, or is that a G sharp in (radiant) E major? Our ears don’t know yet. There is a martial stutter, a dotted rhythm, in the trumpet and horn: we’re told that this A flat / G sharp is going to be a battleground. The mists return, there is another clearing, and the brass settles onto the unexpectedly plush dominant (dry land?) of B flat major. Captain Vere’s home key has been established, the mists are revealed also to be those of memory as he begins to tell us his story. The motives begin piling on (Billy’s ‘flaw’ in the winds, the sequence of chords that accompanies Billy and Vere's offstage communion, the trill of prevarication) and, by the time Scene One begins forty-seven measures later, the fact that it begins in B major seems as inevitable as the outcome of the story.

Of course everything I've 'revealed' in the previous graph is common knowledge to most literate musicians. But that in no way diminishes the intense pleasure I've taken in working through this remarkable score (along with its partner, Peter Grimes) countless times over the past thirty years with family, friends, colleagues, students, singers, each time discovered something new. Each felicity emerges not like a gem in the mud, but like an overlooked cell in an organism.

Britten adheres scrupulously to this dialectic. There’s not a bar that seems somehow askew; there can’t be, since the entire musical argument of the opera is about the accommodation of opposing concepts. Ambiguity is made powerful because even the lay person can intuit that there are powerful tonal forces in competition with one another and that ambiguity itself, while possibly our lot, is not the most desirable destination.

The creation of opera of this caliber requires an array of skills and experiences that exceed in breadth and depth those of a composer who survives on gee-whiz enthusiasm, or pleasant tunes, or trendy exoticism, or savvy subcontracting, or a neophytic winning willingness to be told what to do by collaborators who know more about drama and opera than he does. The intellectual genius (too often taken for granted as facility or craft, because of his gift for concealing his craft) of Britten, like any truly great opera composer, is made manifest by his having created and sustained, and with such seeming ease (both in his head during the creation of the score and in the opera house, when it is brought to life by his colleagues), that necessary constellation of motives, gestures, key relationships, and philosophical concepts coupled with their musical manifestations for the entirety of the story in a way that paralyzes the complete newcomer and connoisseur alike.

Don't Let Gravity Win

'Fugue subjects,' said David Diamond, expertly sketching one on the sheet of music paper on the piano rack in front of us, 'are like snakes.' Over his shoulder I could see snowflakes whirling outside through a tall sliver of window. 'Every one of them has a head, a body, and a tail.' Chop, he slashed a line between the head and the body; chop, he slashed another between the body and the tail.

'Or like people,' I replied, 'with a head, a body, and a tale.' He laughed pleasantly. January of 1986 — the Regency Theater just around the corner was in the middle of its three week Truffaut retrospective; Marc Blitzstein’s Piano Concerto had just received its first performance in fifty years; I was one of David’s students, having a lesson at Juilliard.

'Or a Life,' he frowned, 'with a memorable Beginning, a Middle ripe for development, and an End….' He stopped writing. 'Now sketch a counter-subject.' I took the pencil from him and began adding my squiggles to the line above his. He pursed his lips. A sharp intake of breath: 'Something memorable,' he said, 'not ... mechanical.' I tried again, but all I could think was that Life, like 'a Pretty Girl, is like a Melody.' I giggled nervously.

'What’s so funny?' he asked.

'If Life is a Melody, then Energy must be the human compulsion to organize sound into Song,' I rallied, half-serious.

'And Force is the application of creative energy,' he smiled.

'And composition is Birth?' I asked.

'And pulse is Gravity,' he answered. 'Which makes entropy, or the lack of pulse, Death,' he said, taking the pencil. 'Look,' he circled the head of my counter-subject, 'this is memorable, but why not just take the tail of the subject, invert it, and use that as the head of the counter-subject?'

Chop, I thought: the snake devouring its tail. Chop. 'In my beginning is my end. Eliot,' I risked.

He chuckled. 'Right. The Ouroborus. My end is my beginning. Mary, Queen of the Scots. Earlier. Better,' he replied with finality as through the door the three light knocks of his next student indicated that my lesson was nearly up.

I carefully placed the enormous pages of my manuscript into the elephant portfolio in which I had brought it.

'Mr. Hagen,' he said, gravely, as I reached for the doorknob. I froze. 'Don’t let gravity win.'

Pushing Notes Around

Theme: Learning With My Students
In September of 1988 I took on for the first time the role of teacher when I accepted a job teaching music composition, ear-training and theory for two days each week at a liberal arts school several hours north of New York City called Bard College. To my surprise, I ended up serving on the faculty there for nine years — at least four years longer than I expected to. In retrospect, it is altogether possible — since during that time I never considered myself an Academic and had no interest in a career as one — that I may have learned during those years more about myself by teaching music than my students learned about music by studying with me.

Semester-long guest stints at other institutions over the ensuing years were a real blessing: they helped pay the bills and enabled me to decline situations and commissions that weren't right. These occasional positions also helped me to track the evolution of my feelings about teaching composition; they led me to conclude that, for many of my students, acquiring the practical skills of creating and notating music was a MacGuffin. What they really wanted to do was to Work Out Their Stuff. Talk. A composition teacher is not a therapist. I stopped accepting this sort of student.

Since then, I have continued to teach privately, maintained a small atelier of three or four adults. I've come to understand that a composition teacher who through self-absorption — however sincere and unwitting the self-love that fuels it — inspires his students to behave even in jest as acolytes is misapprehending his role. In other words, over time I have grown less interested in giving Life Lessons and more interested in the joys of simply teaching Craft.

Out in the Real World and dealing with the Remorseless Truths and Ceaseless Challenges of Life After Graduation, the fiercely dedicated young composers I have come to love working with most arrive at their lessons prepared to work like dogs, prepared if necessary to wrest from me the practical skills they need to survive. These determined ones, bursting with questions, demanding to be heard in the ear-splitting musical din of contemporary Manhattan, are as disinterested in projecting their father/big-brother/competitor-figure issues on to me as I am in working out my own issues on them. These students are an inspiration.

Variation One: Is Counterpoint Taught in Heaven?
Of all the subjects I've taught, my favorite is Counterpoint. The Process of studying and teaching Counterpoint is a perfect, pure metaphor for the Process that is living the Examined Life. It all begins with the cantus firmus — the Song of the Earth, the Life Song, the New Song, first taught us by example, then created on our own by grafting inspiration to memory, training and common sense.

The study of Counterpoint develops the skills required to pursue the painfully exquisite, life-long process of linking the ear and the heart and the intellect together to compose melodic lines to join that Deep Song. One's striving for the effortless-sounding Perfect Solution; the Inevitability of one's failure to find it; the requisite picking of oneself up and trying again; the sudden, unexpected discovery of a Way Forward; the coming to terms with Compromise; the search for Climax; the elegance of the interplay between melody's horizontal demands and harmony's vertical demands; the acceptance that melody generates harmony and not the other way around; the unavoidable conventional mundanity of the Final Cadence.

A composer knowingly, willfully chooses dissonance over consonance. If consonance is perceived as a state of Grace, then dissonance must be something else, and fourth species must be something which originates somewhere to the east of Eden. The Creation Story is hashed over again and again as counterpoint grows increasingly florid, dissonance is prolonged, tonality itself grows tenuous; the entire history of western music is reenacted by drawing notes on a staff.

Variation Two: Cast Thy Notes Upon the Waters
Although composers are just doing their job when they decide that a scrap of music needs to exist, it does require courage (or temerity, lack of self-awareness, or a benign form of narcissism) to write something down and then pass it to one's brothers and sisters with the expectation of a performance. A composer who creates pieces he wants carefully listened to has asked for the privilege of spending other peoples' time; if he spends that time with a certain degree of sensitivity not just to his own but also to his listener's needs, then he accumulates authority and sometimes even a reputation for authenticity.

Oh, so you are a composer my daughter plays the flute. I haven't heard of you or your music. I thought all composers were dead. You compose music that's sweet what do you do for a living? How much money do you make? So you write symphonies like Paul McCartney? That's nice honey but when are you going to get a job? Oh, so you write ... tonal music, how quaint ... do serious people still do that?

Meanwhile, we all look at the little clutch of notes on the piece of paper or computer screen in front of us and reach for everything we've learned, everything we've read, everything we've heard, everything we know we don't know and / or understand yet to quietly (or not), respectfully (or not) — write, erase, erase some more, and write something different — 'push the notes around' until we feel the subtle electric thrill that comes with the realization that the notes are finally just so and ready to sound and fade on their own merits.

Coda: Because Sometimes You Lead, Sometimes You Follow
My favorite cantus firmuses include a really tricky one by Fux, a feisty one by Mozart, a puzzling one by Bach, and one by Ockeghem to which I doubt I'll ever manage a decent solution. Twenty years ago in Venice I bought a small sketch book that I still carry with me; on airplanes, in taxis, on buses, in hotel rooms, I've given these and countless other exercises a go. Every time I try, Music and I begin our dance anew: there are familiar strains, useful shortcuts, unpleasant surprises, trends, old habits, new moves, strategies, failures. These solutions are to their cantus firmuses what music is to my life.

Every note I've ever written derives somehow from something I've heard before; every one of my counterpoint solutions has probably flowed at some time from the pen of a musician in Vienna or Beijing, Los Angeles or Tokyo, London or Johannesburg, Moscow or Managua. Over the years, a handful of notes or a gesture from one of Ned's pieces may have ended up in one of mine; a slew of my notes have ended up in my students' works — some intentionally suggested by me for the sake of argument. I am aware that every opinion I've just written has been tendered by someone sometime somewhere else. So why go on?

Because I have never reached this particular solution before. I have never said these things in this way. Nobody else has said them exactly as I have. Many people can sing my songs. They can be sung in many ways. Everyone hears them differently. Because only I can compose my songs.

Moving On

We’re in the process of being uprooted and transplanted. There is dust everywhere. The grand piano will be moved Uptown today; the rest — still half-packed — surrounds us in dozens of heavy boxes that will be moved tomorrow.

Hundreds of books: The unexpected discovery behind and under books of precious artifacts long thought lost: a lucky composing pencil magically rematerializes after five years from behind the collected poems of Seamus Heaney; an unlucky Vegas poker chip turns up after a decade beneath a stack of Patrick O’brien novels; a small medallion of Saint Mark from the Basilica di San Marco in Venice twenty years ago falls out of a book documenting the work of Eva Hesse.

And scores: dozens of enormous, heavy, over-sized and floppy ozalid prints — still reeking of ammonia — of orchestra pieces composed and meticulously copied in india ink on vellum during the eighties that I can’t bring myself to throw out; hundreds of pocket scores, the paper falling to bits, covered in cues and marginalia; autographed scores; several scores borrowed twenty years ago from the library and accidentally unreturned; dozens of scores composed by former students under my tutelage; forgotten complimentary copies sent by my own publishers of works when they went into print; all those marvelous, inexpensive Dover reprints of the standard repertoire; a prized signed copy of Berio’s Sinfonia that I thought stolen a decade ago.

And files, discs, art: probably forty feet of personal and professional correspondence; another twenty of files containing contracts and work notes for every piece written since the seventies; thousands of archival compact discs and cassettes of performances; G’s numerous artworks; my mother’s sculptures; thirty years’ worth of art acquired from colleagues at colonies.

I'll most miss running around my adored reservoir, the pleasing exactitude and physical satisfaction of accomplishing 3.2 miles each day, the periodic small-talk with Albert Arroyo, the Mayor of Central Park, while stretching, the ritual of saying a little prayer while rounding the northeast corner followed by the perennial exhilaration of greeting Gotham by looking south over my left shoulder towards Midtown over the glittering water and chuffing loudly, season in and out, as above the trees sough and whisper.

I’ve been rooted in this neighborhood for nearly two decades. I scratched my initials into wet concrete twelve years ago just up the block; this morning I was surprised to find that they will still be there after I have moved on. The tender sapling that was planted across the street the year I first settled here has grown, like me, into a respectful, stubborn survivor.

Eight Good Seconds

When a line of music and text is sung well by a gifted singer, the intricate interplay of training and technique, and the physical and emotional risk of live performance combine to shine a light on why all music must somehow arise from the composer's compulsion to sing.

The other evening I worked with some excellent young Chicago Conservatory musicians who were rehearsing "The Picture Graved Into My Heart," a song from my 1990 cycle Dear Youth, which is based on letters and diary entries written during the American civil war. I coached the final line ("Oh, the wondrous manly beauty") of it as follows:

The line should start low and soft as the singer sings the word "oh" in a normal voice. She shouldn't try to project the low C# — it's a pillow-talk intimacy. She should only add volume as she pushes the voice into the chest while sliding upwards through the minor ninth in a moaning portamento to the fermata-lengthened D.

A full-voiced throb should enter the voice then, when the singer can feel the diaphragm beginning to tug because her air is running out. We should feel some risk there: the audience intuits that she's running out of air as she shifts the voice into her head with the last of her breath; her body and the audience's bodies share not just the reflexive response to the human moan, but the terror of running out of air.

The flute should enter just at that moment, matching the timbre of the singer's voice. The wail should pass without fuss, normal voice and diction taking over as a breath is taken and the words "the wondrous manly" are clearly enunciated ("wondrous" is a word that speaks for itself; it doesn't need any help from the composer or the singer); there should be a slight stress, a little vibrato on the word "beauty," like the woody, thick vibrato you get high on the violin's G string, even a sob, before the last of the singer's air is gone and the line ends, not tapered off, but snuffed out.

Just as much and more is happening in eight good seconds of any well-wrought, well-performed piece of music.

Ferry Me Across the Water

'Ferry me across the water, Do, boatman, do,' sings the voice in my mind as I watch Seattle recede on the Bainbridge-bound ferry. I’ve just submitted the vocal score of Amelia — an opera about death and rebirth — to the opera company; the exciting journey into the future towards opening night has begun!

'If you’ve a penny in your purse I’ll ferry you,' a male voice continues, and I think happily of arriving in Bellagio on the morning ferry in 2004, contemplating an autumn’s work on Sappho Songs; then, shuddering, I remember the presence that absence made the first time I looked back at Manhattan from aboard the Staten Island ferry after the Towers came down.

'I have a penny in my purse. And my eyes are blue…' she flirts, lontanamente, over a tympanum of water, and I recall looking out through the pre-dawn mist at the Cimitero di San Michele on a December morning in 1989, a lone heartsick insomniac waiting on the Fondamenta Nove for the first vaporetto of the day, the city asleep, the Aqua Alta a clawing pair of icy anklets.

'So ferry me across the water, Do, boatman, do!' she purrs. It is clearly the voice of the woman for whom I composed a setting of the poem as a student in Philadelphia in 1983. I remember riding the ferry from Evian to Lausanne across Lac Leman the next summer in order to steal time in the church there to revise it.

'Step into my ferry boat, be they black or blue,' the male voice replies, and I think of the dozens of singers I’ve accompanied over the years in Ned Rorem’s setting of the Christina Rosetti poem, and also of my setting — how many of those performances, those singers, can I honestly say that I remember? And certainly the poem is about Charon, but it must be the Acheron, not the Styx, yes? And is the other character Euridice?

Charon as conductor, checking Euridice Eva Marie Saint’s ticket in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, Cary Grant reluctantly beginning his adventure up the Hudson concealed in the compartment above her. — Or Charon as the solitary commuter I recognized but never spoke to every week for a decade as I sped north to teach at Bard on the same train as Hitchcock's lovers. — Or Charon as bartender, serving a drink to The Hero with a Thousand Faces as he begins his Campbellian journey in the cantina scene of Star Wars. — Or as the stewardesses (charming Charons-all) on the planes hurtling towards the Towers in my planned-but-never-to-be-written sequel to Vera of Las Vegas.

'And for the penny in your purse, I’ll ferry you,' Charon concludes, and my thoughts finally settle upon beginning the day at Rio Mar, in the liminal zone where the moon greets the sun’s rise, the river's fresh water meets the salty Pacific, the horse next door rolls over in the sand a few yards in front of me, and I mull the recurring memory-within-a-memory of myself serving as Charon for my mother, and of my father reaching into my uncle's casket to cover his eyes with coins.

Running Northwards

Running northwards along the shore of Lake Michigan in Grant Park, the sun just beginning to rise, the city of Chicago on my left, I flash on running alongside the Pacific Ocean in Nicaragua towards Casares eight months ago, and then on the deep rush of pleasure I have always felt, year in and out, upon rounding the northeast corner of the track encircling the Central Park reservoir.

My father walked these streets when I was a child; he would leave Milwaukee on Monday mornings and return home on Friday nights, each week slightly more unraveled from the fabric of our family’s life than the last. Sometime during the late sixties, my parents — while I, for whom they couldn’t find a sitter, waited in the car — went from one Loop hotel to the next for hours one awful night, looking for a beloved relative, a suicide.

Flying into O'Hare a few days ago, I read the section of Gore Vidal’s novel Hollywood — in which he so brilliantly braided together the narratives of his fictional characters with the historical narratives of Presidents Wilson and Taft — set in the Congress Hotel, where, over a century later, I am currently lodged. Usually I stay at the Hilton, in whose sitting room looking out on Michigan Avenue I always enjoy a cup of tea when I check in and think of Wallace Tomchek and my father; I laid eyes on both for the last time over tea in the same spot exactly a decade ago. Both are now gone.

I stop running and stand, panting, by the Belvedere Fountain, and remember the night in 1977 when I sat, dazzled, having just heard the Chicago Symphony perform Mahler live in Symphony Hall for the first time. And I remember the night in August of 1997, when Shining Brow was being revived at the Blackstone Theater a few blocks away: that night I stood in this same spot and looked up into the windows of the Cliff Dwellers Club and wept with relief that the previous decade of my life was over.

I've come here to serve for a semester as visiting composer at the Music Conservatory of the Chicago College of Performing Arts at Roosevelt University, which is housed in what was in the 1890’s the Auditorium Hotel. Yesterday, I worked with my students in a little studio in the Tower section (it can be seen on the far left in the picture), a floor or two below where Louis Sullivan’s office once perched, like an aerie above the lakefront, and where once he mentored a young apprentice named Frank Lloyd Wright.

Turning to look out over the lake, I suddenly recall standing in Denoon Lake in Wisconsin as a very, very young child. I looked back to the beach and watched my mother doing the Saturday Review acrostic, having spent a perfect summer day collecting interesting stones from the lake bottom and piling them on the dock for her to admire.

Clapping my hands together, stamping, loving life, and letting out a gentle whoop of joy, I continue running northwards.

Felice Euridice

‘Ahi, caso acerbo! Ahi, fat’empio crudele!’ he implored, face livid with passion: ‘You’ve got to feel the music! Do you have any idea what these words mean? You’ve got to make them real!’ The six of us were crammed into a tiny practice room with our junior high school choir director, Wallace Tomchek. He was terrifying and inspiring, possibly mad. We sang some more, and disappointed him again. ‘Monteverdi lives. He is right here with us. This isn’t just music. This is something more. If you can’t understand that, I don’t want to hear you!’ Frustrated, he flew out of the room, swept to his office, slammed the door, and left us in silence.

Thirty years later, sequestered in rural Virginia, and working on my new opera, Amelia, the invitation to attend a concert performance at the Wintergreen Summer Music Festival of Monteverdi’s Orfeo in the version orchestrated by Respighi for La Scala in the early thirties was simply too good to pass up. As the Nymphs and Shepherds sang ‘Ahi, stele ingiuriose! Ahi, cielo avaro!’ I thought of that extraordinary teacher, his rages, and his silences.

As the soloists sang ‘Non si fidi uom mortale dib en caduco e frale…’ and the orchestra and audience listened, we sang the same words as children in my memory: ‘Let not mortal man trust in fleeting and frail happiness, for soon it flies away…’ It occured to me as I listened that it is in the hundreds of pages of manuscript paper sitting on the piano back in my studio that I put my trust.

As the second act ended, I couldn't help admiring the enormous love Respighi showed Monteverdi by limning Monteverdi’s original intentions with his own in the way composers traditionally have for learning and demonstrating their regard for each other’s work.

‘Art,’ Wally would rail to a roomful of adolescents craving acceptance, ‘is not a popularity contest!’ ‘…che tosto fugge, e spesso a gran salita il precipizio è presso.’ ‘… and often the precipice is close to the highest summit.’

My father brought Wally (who I had not seen for two decades) to Chicago to attend a revival there of my Shining Brow during the nineties and we visited beforehand — I snapped his portrait (left) as we had tea at the Hilton. I’ll forever treasure hugging him afterwards at the stage door, both of us weeping, and his words, ‘I am so proud of you.’ He swept away into eternal silence shortly thereafter, but I think about him every time I compose a few measures of music that remind me of Norman Dello Joio’s lovely 1948 art song There is a Lady Sweet and Kind, which he taught me in 1974, introducing me for the first time to a world in which poetry and music are inextricably intertwined.

And I thought of him with profound gratitude this afternoon, as the seed of understanding and love of opera that he planted in me thirty years ago blossomed on a Blue Ridge mountaintop, a decade after his death, and exactly four hundred years after Monteverdi composed it.

The Heightened Awareness of Possibility

Festival of San Sebastián, Diriamba, Nicaragua, 2005. We were privileged to be able to view the Mass from the choir loft above the front door of the basilica. Over three thousand singing people stood hip to hip inside, another three thousand shoulder to shoulder in the plaza outside. The statues of the saints covered in ribbons and silver Milagros were carried down the central aisle, preceded by elaborately costumed dancers cutting intricate steps, huge colorful flags waved by proud, immaculately dressed young men, deafening drummers, and pipers. The air trembled, despite the amazing heat and humidity. The hair on my neck and arms rose and stayed that way as, sixty feet above us, the bells began to peal. Below, the procession passed through the doors. I was permitted to help ring the bells. Ecstatically clutching the rope, flying a dozen feet up and down, I looked first one way to see waves of people reaching up to touch the saints as they passed in the plaza, then another to see the huge clappers inside the bells, and then another to see the old bullet holes pocking the belfry’s inner walls.

December night, Philadelphia, 1981. Complete Quaker silence within the little empty diner at the corner of Eleventh and Spruce and in the weather-stilled city without. I sat at a table alone by the plate glass window, looking out at the enormous snowflakes falling straight down, holding open in my left hand a copy of Le Père Goriot and cupping a mug of hot coffee in my right. At midnight, a pre-war electric trolley skimmed soundlessly by on its tracks, windows steamed up by the passengers, giving them the color and texture of Hopper Nighthawks. A spray of sparks erupted from the point at which the wires above met the contact arm. In this silence I heard my own voice. If mother’s cancer had been diagnosed, I didn’t yet know it; the whole world was opening before me, and I did know that.

Fled is That Music

During the summer of 1994 in Idaho I had a conversation at the Sandpoint Festival with the composer Gunther Schuller about the so-called "third stream" chamber pieces of Alec Wilder. Schuller said that he, by way of his publishing company, was trying to make available to the public Wilder's music as manuscripts trickled in to him from Wilder's friends around the US to whom the composer had presented the only copies.

I thought about that conversation this morning when, after twenty-six years, an old friend contacted me to let me know that he possessed the original handwritten score of a duet for two contrabasses that I had composed for him in 1981. I had no recollection whatsoever of the piece, but I remembered him as he was then clearly; I couldn’t remember the premiere, but I recalled with gratitude an hour spent together, during which with his bass he demonstrated for me what sorts of musical ideas were most idiomatic for the instrument.

The first thing I did was reach for the little book that I have maintained since the summer of 1976 and in which is recorded information about every piece I have composed — the date and place it was finished, the dedicatee, the commissioner (if there was one), the instrumentation, duration, the date and place it was premiered (if it was) and by whom, the poet or librettist (if there was one), whether any musical ideas in it originated in earlier pieces in my catalogue, and when it was recorded and published.

Turning the pages, I noted described precisely and in detail at least a dozen pieces from the early eighties of which I had no memory, the manuscripts — each one carefully labored over; lessons learned, ideas worked out and fair score copied — lost. There was the duet about which my old friend had contacted me — nestled between Chimera for speaker and eight players and Collaboration Two for taped sounds and piano — Two Larks Five, for two contrabasses, completed 9 February 1981 and premiered on 12 April 1981 by [...] at Morphy Recital Hall in Madison, Wisconsin. I didn’t remember it. Nor did I recall the piece for tape and piano, although I did flash on a windowless room in which over the course of a few months I cut and spliced hundreds of pieces of magnetic recording tape together. Who played the piano when the tape piece was premiered — did I?

A mild panic passed over me as I thought about all the pieces I had written that I could no longer recall. The ideas and feelings that motivated me to create the musical ideas I couldn't remember tingled just behind my eyes, made my brain feel the way one’s fingers do when they are asleep. I felt the same sense of dislocation and the sickening tug in my stomach that I did when, soloing in Denver in 1987, I went 'up' for a few measures and heard the music tearing onward in the orchestra without me, only to look down to see my fingers still flying over the keys.

'Where are the songs of spring? Ay, where are they?' wrote Keats. Where music goes when it is forgotten is one thing; whether the music itself merited oblivion doesn't matter. Poets may wonder where music went, but most of the composers I know would want to know only what happened to the manuscript. Was it saved by a long-lost friend? Was it discarded by a thoughtless lover or was it used years ago by a disdainful colleague to line the bottom of a bird cage? Was it left in a box in a basement in a brownstone on a Philadelphia side street with the words "Please Don’t Throw Out I Will Return Someday" written on it sometime in the summer of 1984 by a heartsick young man in an enormous hurry?

The Biggest Electric Train Set a Boy Ever Had

On the first page of my copy of Nicolai Rimsky Korsakov's Principles of Orchestration manual is carefully inscribed, in my ten-year-old's handwriting, my name and the date I bought the book. I found it at the Brookfield Square mall Walden Books around the same time that adolescence found me. A few days after buying it, I first encountered another important companion of my youth — one from whom I remained inseparable from the day I scooped him up like a little ball of orange sherbet in my palm at a yard sale in 1971 until the day I moved to Philadelphia in 1981, compelled to leave him with my mother on account of his declining health. I named him Rimsky, because I imagined at the time that the man who had written the book I had taken to keeping with me at all times like a key to a secret world would have looked — had he himself been a cat — like my new pet. Rimsky grew to become an enormously fat, foul-tempered, fiercely possessive carrot-colored tabby who hated everyone except me. (In 1982, the wonderful Philadelphia composer Kile Smith presented me with a kitten so tiny that she was barely there; I named her Clara (Schumann), and she lived with me for an amazing twenty-two years.)

Leaning against the elm tree at the northeast corner of the intersection of Meadow Lane and Elm Grove Road during the winter of 1971, waiting for the school bus alone, poring over the Korsakov, I could feel the pull of the secret world of Musicians. In retrospect, its allure was a combination of things: its contents seemed to offer a path toward beginning to understand the unfathomable language of music; it served, as an object in itself, as a talisman or icon from the world of music, helping to make real to me a world that was still out of my reach, but might one day welcome me; finally, simply handling the book made me feel special. Had the scriptures affected me as viscerally at that age, I'd have become a minister like my namesake Dorn instead of a composer.

That Halloween my sixth grade teacher Mr. Cummings allowed me to recreate live over the school's public address system Orson Welles' 1938 Mercury Theater production of War of the Worlds. I admired Welles' chutzpah and drive, his fearlessness, his hyper-kinetic creativity. (Had I known at the time that he had grown up only a few miles away in Kenosha I'd have been even more smitten.) If the passion for music came first, drama followed quickly and came with greater ease. Combining the two — becoming an opera composer — seems now to have been something of an inevitability. Several years later, conducting Suite for a Lonely City — my first publicly performed orchestra piece, in 1978 — with a local youth orchestra, I identified entirely with a comment made by Welles during production of his Heart of Darkness at RKO: 'This is the biggest electric train set a boy ever had!'

I still consult Korsakov's book. I have carefully annotated it for over thirty years; every time I've learned a new scoring trick, an interesting bit of hardware or repertoire trivia, a lovely doubling, I've made a note of it, along with the date and the title of the piece on which I was working. The book has become more than an icon or a key; it has become a document of my ongoing education as an instrumental composer, one I still use when composing, and when passing along information to the next generation of young composers. Some marginalia —

• 'Flügelhorn and solo cello in unison — the slice of the cello high on the A string and the warmth of the flügelhorn — sounds like soprano sax & perfect for when an oboe will not do'
• 'Tuba piano! doubled by low bassoon staccato sounds like pizzicato'
• 'Bass clarinet and violas, plus muted horn, when in crescendo, change color like a baritone executing voix mix; done high enough, it can sound like falsetto'
• 'Low marimba with yarn mallets, pianissimo, doubled with staccato alto flute, fortissimo — the air of the flute attacks, plus the slice of the mallet, sounds like pizzicato'
• 'Violins playing harmonics pianissimo, muted, flautando, doubled two octaves lower by solo flute, mezzo forte — astonishing overtones'

A magnificent electric train set, indeed.

Another Reason I Love to Write Operas

While boxing some papers this morning, I came upon a sheaf of work notes from 1991. Reading them reminded me of why I love to write operas:

16 February 91
Princeton, New Jersey

Long work day with Paul on the libretto for the second act of Shining Brow. The characters in this story are all well-read, well-traveled, pre-television Midwesterners locked in a mesh of personal, historical and artistic events. Paul’s language is appropriately elaborate; my music is being held together by a web of interlocking tonal centers and musically-allusive melodic motives. So far, it seems to be working.

We’ve made remarkably few changes to the shape of it since co-writing the treatment a few months ago, though I’ve asked him to add a barbershop quartet of journalists commenting on current events — a nod to the recurring choral episodes which ‘cause time to go by’ in Merrily We Roll Along — between scenes one and two. The final musical transition, in which I’ll superimpose a waltz from Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier (the world premiere of which Frank Lloyd Wright and his mistress Mamah Cheney attended) on my drunken reporters will result in a ‘hand of author’ moment, no question; but the audience will enjoy (need?) it and the newspapermen’s quips will give critically needed historical context to the ensuing scene.

I’ll make the scene that follows, which spotlights a sequence of gossiping couples, a set of variations — everything said at the party is about Wright and how he affects others — on the waltz from Der Rosenkavalier introduced over the barbershop quartet by an onstage piano trio hired to entertain at the party. This will manifest several of the core themes of our opera (including the ‘borrowing’ versus ‘purloining’ argument & the union of the so-called ‘high’ culture of opera and the ‘low’ culture of barbershop) by musically ‘stealing’ from Strauss and doing variations on his theme, just as our Wright is building upon the achievements and ideas of his mentor, Sullivan; furthermore, Wright will be observed in the act of seducing someone else’s wife in front of his own mistress to the strains of this ‘stolen’ music.

The staging I envision will manifest the almost mechanical drive of Wright’s personality by having him pursue a new mistress in a counter-clockwise direction, while the entire party dances to my variations on Strauss’ waltz in a clockwise direction; Mamah will remain paralyzed at the center, unable to do anything except to perform the role of gracious hostess while watching her lover almost ritualistically betray her....

Smiling, I carefully placed the work notes from that afternoon almost exactly sixteen years ago in a box with a pile of manuscript sketches for the scene, taped it shut, and wrote BROW — ACT TWO SKETCHES in big letters on the top. 'How like a little coffin this box is,' I mused.

Coming Home

I was seven at the time, but I recall with utmost clarity a performance in 1968 by the Milwaukee Symphony. The orchestra was led by dashing young Music Director Kenneth Schermerhorn; they were performing the Largo of Antonin Dvořák’s Ninth Symphony. Although I didn’t yet know I would become a composer (it took my brother’s gift to me of the score of Benjamin Britten’s Billy Budd a few years later to seal my fate), I did decide that day to become a musician. Twenty years later, in 1988, JoAnn Falletta was kind enough to introduce my Lyric Variations with the MSO in the same hall.

Thirty-five years after that Largo — in September of 2003 — as Kenneth and I enjoyed a lovely lunch together in Nashville prior to his conducting my Much Ado with his orchestra there, I related to him how I had been taken on a school trip to hear him conduct the Milwaukee Symphony and how I had determined then and there to become a musician. He smiled as I thanked him, and then shared with me the moment he had first decided to become a musician. We reminisced about Phi Beta Studio at the MacDowell Colony, in which we had both toiled as composers, and about Leonard Bernstein, with whom we had both worked — both experiences exactly thirty years apart — at Tanglewood.

"How like coming home it feels to finally work together," he mused.

“And how ironic, under the circumstances,” I replied, “that the Largo was adapted into a song by Harry Burleigh called Going Home.”

“Indeed,” he smiled.

Did he remember the fan letter from the dazzled child who couldn't find a word big enough to describe how moved he 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, slightly rueful laughter. What a wonderful man he was to me that day. I worked hard to keep him laughing; and we both did, until there were tears in our eyes.

“I am neither a young nor a healthy man,” he sighed, “but I am glad that we are finally sitting together now at this table.”

On Having Been a Music Copyist

'I still keep in mind a certain wonderful sunset which I witnessed when steamboating was new to me.’ — Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi.

I was reminded of Twain's words recently when the Buffalo Philharmonic, conducted by its Music Director, JoAnn Falletta, gave a pair of semi-staged concert performances of my opera Shining Brow at Kleinhans Auditorium. As most composers do, I perched myself on the edge of a seat in the middle of the empty hall and followed along during the rehearsals to which I was invited, poised to answer any questions that came my way from the podium.

Of course, the music sounded different in rehearsal from the way that it did in performance, partly because the hall was empty, but also because it was designed to be heard coming from an orchestra pit: the music was being shared only by the conductor, my brothers and sisters in the orchestra, cast, and chorus. But it was also different because every performance reveals new details — on the one hand, a clarinet countermelody that had never really ‘sounded’ before may, in the hands of a new player, suddenly come to life, inspiring a little thrill of rediscovery and satisfaction; on the other hand, an error in a player’s part that has stubbornly resisted the efforts at correction of a half dozen orchestra librarians and proofreaders over the years can finally be heard and pounced upon, or a new way of dividing the violins so that a passage is more felicitous may emerge at the hands of an interested conductor or concertmaster.

Following the score that morning, I remembered where I was, who I was, and when I first wrote the notes on the pages before me. I took comfort in the splashes of color on them: cues in red and blue from when I conducted it myself a few years ago, notations in green from when I re-orchestrated it for smaller forces for a revival in Chicago, alterations in orange from the original production sixteen years ago, and new ones, in black, added for Buffalo.

Twain: ‘Now when I had mastered the language of this water and had come to know every trifling feature that bordered the great river as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition. But I had lost something, too. I had lost something which could never be restored to me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry had gone out of the majestic river!'

I remembered my first 'copying job' — extracting a piano solo part for the Yellow River Concerto in blue ballpoint pen for John David Anello and the Milwaukee Symphony during the seventies while I was still in high school. And then, my astonishment upon winning a job as a music copyist a few years later at the Fleisher Collection of Orchestral Music in Philadelphia when Sam Dennison, the curator, pulled from the shelves the same Yellow River part I had copied in Milwaukee. And then, working at Fleisher while a student at Curtis, spending hours in the stacks, combing through the collection of scores by South American composers copied by hard-working WPA chaps during the Depression — all exquisitely done, many in three or four colors, most never looked at again, let alone performed.

I remembered helping one afternoon in the early eighties to unpack some boxes sent to the Curtis Institute by Leopold Stokowski’s estate. My fingers practically tingled as I drew out of one of the boxes Stokowski’s full score of The Rite of Spring, which contained not just the maestro’s orchestrational changes in one color, but Stravinsky’s own modifications for performance specifically in the Academy of Music in another.

I remembered working for Arnold Arnstein when I first arrived in New York; learning my teachers’ music ‘from the inside out’ while studying with them by serving also as their copyist; I remembered sitting at Virgil Thomson’s dining room table and looking out of the window of his apartment at the old Chelsea Hotel as I orchestrated piano pieces for him; still later, serving as a proofreader at Chelsea Music and watching a song for a new Andrew Lloyd Webber musical coming in on the fax machine, just melody, lyrics, chord symbols, and a bass line; I remembered my last copying job, many years ago; and I thought about the many copyists I have since employed to copy my own music.

Computer software programs like Score, Finale, and Sibelius have made those of us in our forties and older the last generation of American concert music and opera composers who shall have had the opportunity to serve our musical apprenticeships in this ancient, traditional, and I think honorable manner. We were like young monks back then, usually in need of a shower and a shave, armed with our quills, vellum, and ink, running into one another at Associated Music when we stuck our heads out to pick up supplies, meet with our employers, share with our colleagues ‘secret saves’ and anecdotes from the trenches of our drawing boards.

Twain, again: ‘Since those days, I have pitied doctors from my heart. What does the lovely flush in a beauty's cheek mean to a doctor but a 'break' that ripples above some deadly disease? Are not all her visible charms sown thick with what are to him the signs and symbols of hidden decay? Does he ever see her beauty at all, or doesn't he simply view her professionally, and comment upon her unwholesome condition all to himself? And doesn't he sometimes wonder whether he has gained most or lost most by learning his trade?’

Overture: To Write One Poem

In a dream sometime before dawn, Kurtz’s last words from Heart of Darkness came out of my dead brother Britt’s mouth. Entering my dream, I responded, Some Rosebud, pal and realized that we were driving somewhere, looking for my dead mother. Of course, that never happened, but my father driving himself and me to the hospital twenty years ago and my holding up from the back seat my brilliant mother’s head as it lolled from side to side, dumb blank eyes leering first at my father, then at me, did.

Running just as the sun set, the coastline between Huehuete and Casares several miles north was a long narrow ribbon of aa suspended between the towering, mustard-yellow sheer cliffs over which it once poured, and the ocean, which, when met, froze it in place. The drama of time and tide played out on my left as the sun sank into the Pacific and each seventh wave climbed higher, slamming millions of metric tons of seawater into the strand of lava and filling my running shoes, since being trapped here at high tide between the water and the land will get you squashed, then drowned. I felt more alive than I have felt in years, exhilarated by the space and the exercise, the feel of my muscles working together as I negotiated the positas — sweat mingling with spindrift on my lips.

After having used precious potable water from the tank to shave and to clean the scrapes on my legs picked up through inattention at the run’s antipode near the base of the sixty-foot-high cross placed in memory of the drowned at the end of the sandy beach in Casares, I slept, and dreamt of the white horse I call Rosebud, whom G. described rolling over on the riverbank yesterday, scratching her back in the sand, and of the afternoon in New York a few years ago when, unaware that I was in the middle of an attack of appendicitis, I set to music Philip Larkin’s To Write One Poem with its beautiful image of wave crests as galloping horses.

Prologue: Knuckles and Digits

Once, when I was a child, during a piano lesson, I noticed that the digits tattooed on my teacher’s forearm were the same color as the inspection brand on a side of raw ham; they flitted in and out of the cuff of his immaculately white starched shirt when he crossed hands at the keyboard like crabs scuttling sideways on the beach here, just before dawn this morning, at our small house nestled in the crotch of sonsoquite created by the meeting of the Pacific Ocean and a river on the Nicaraguan coast.

I am watching the sun as it slides from the east to the west, admiring our chickens and guinea hens, enumerating the bird calls before sunrise and not trying to notate them, following with interest the progress of the sweet-faced old chancho as she twirls her tail and processes towards me up the beach after her wallow in the river, stopping to nibble on a scrap of leftover cabbage.

The greater herons look on, aristocratic and methodical in their movements even in the moment they throw their heads into the water to snatch a fish. Harold casts his gleaming ivory circular net into the water like a lariat, pulls it out, repeats, his left leg rising gracefully with each throw. Harold’s wedding dress net snares a Lisa, which he’ll use to catch a bigger fish that he’ll try to sell down the road for enough cordobas to afford the bus to Managua to attend a day’s worth of classes at the University.

A few minutes ago, G. thought she heard the ecstatic hosannas of the elderly African American man back in Manhattan who walks up and down Broadway in every sort of weather with his Bible clutched in his left hand and his right arm waving wildly between 84th and 98th Streets chanting Gloria! Gloria! but it was only a bird singing on the same pitch. I first misidentified the sound as a bumblebee, which I swatted — same pitch, wrong class.

I’m told that I had perfect pitch back when I studied with my Polish piano teacher and wonder periodically where it went. I remember seeing the tattoo when I made a mistake because he would raise his arm to swat the offending digits with his pencil when I erred. Did I err because I noticed the numbers or did I notice them because I had erred?

Just now, my tio dipped his knuckle into my belly button, drew it out, and announced: gordo. I will follow the progress of the holy man as he walks towards Harlem and hope that Harold catches his fish.