"...about Jackie ..."

Jan. 24, 1999

Dear Jackie,

  How should I begin? Believing that you might still be living somewhere in New England, and thinking that you might still be in contact with Ira, I asked him for your address. To my delight, he provided it several months later.

  This seems to be a time when friendships, relationships, folks I knew in the 1950's,are coming to mind. Not that anyone, or anything was forgotten really, but I had never done anything about it until, "out of the blue", I received a call from Mike Scheff a few months ago. Then I called Ken Mack (you'll remember the Band Director at BUHS), who gave me Ira's phone number, and so on.

  Maybe it's the frequency of reminders of our mortality that has prompted me to think, "We aren't getting any younger, and it's the time to find out who your friends turned out to be." I mention mortality because Ira has now lost both of his parents, my mother and my brother have both died, Mike Scheff's wife died Sept. 5, I've lost many friends, former students…I could go on and on, but I'll spare you the morbid and very sad litany. Suffice it to say, if we have anything to say to each other, now is the time to say it.

  Jackie, I should very much like to know the woman you have become. Ira tells me you have children, of whom you're justly proud…..But Ira has said little about you, so I have no more than my very fond memories of when we were kids together.

  I will tell you a bit about me, hoping that it doesn't sound altogether like a resume, though the more mechanical parts might be easiest to express in those terms.

  For instance, Bachelor of Music, 1963; Master of Music, 1965; doctorate in 1990. Some would say that it's lazy to say it this way. I call it efficiency.

  Married in 1964 (big mistake; I was far too young for that), two children, now 34 and 30, two grandchildren. Divorced about 1973. Lived with a lady for about nine years. Remarried in 1986. More detail about any of this at some time later, if you wish.

  I have taught at the Los Angeles Institute of the Performing Arts until the division in which I was teaching folded due to what was considered misuse of county funds. I was teaching music theory to students of Heifetz and Piatigorsky, right after I returned from Wisconsin to California after I had finished composing music for public schools on a Ford Foundation Grant (two years). It seemed (and it was true) that Heifetz, Primrose and Piatigorsky were being paid handsomely by L.A. County, but not a single one of their students was from Los Angeles. It was kind of amusing to receive a letter saying that my contract was up for renegotiation, and three days later was given notice that the institution no longer existed.

  After that, I taught at U.S.C. for a number of years, and then I, a non-Christian, non-Catholic, non-theist, was hired by Loyola Marymount University in Westchester, Los Angeles. There I remained for fourteen years, eight of which I was Chair of the Music Department.

  I presume your remarkable ability to see the wry and droll edge of the world remains intact, so you will appreciate the following. On my first interview with Father Clark, S.J., then the Academic V.P. of L.M.U., later the Jesuit Provincial for California, I told him that I wasn't a Catholic and didn't believe in God, and asked him if this would cause problems for me or for the institution. He said that L.M.U. was an institution that tried to come to grips with the problems of modern society, so I knew "up front" what my status was. It was only gradually that I came to understand that the Jesuits are like one, big squabbling family, joining ranks against outside adversity but remarkably varied in other respects. There were a couple who themselves were not certain of the existence of a Deity, which prompts one to question why they would take vows of chastity, poverty and humility. (I never did meet a humble Jesuit, so I presume they spent about 50% of their time in Confessional.) Their residence, Xavier Hall, had the best stocked bar in southern California covering the whole of the second floor. An honest to God traffic signal was in this help-yourself establishment: Green = go for it, yellow = last drink before prayers, red = off limits for the moment. Some of them were quite susceptible to its blandishments. I was afraid to light Father G's cigarettes for fear that he might become a living flame thrower. In fact, they have a kind of dude ranch in Arizona to which some are sent periodically to be "dried out" and rehabilitated. - Well, I'm getting carried away with not-quite-nostalgia. It was really not the place for me, but I had some excellent good times there, and they paid me well enough. None of them ever tried to convert me, but such things as having a "Right To Life Week", followed by "World Hunger Week" only highlighted the contradictions that come with religion, and the general atmosphere was not really reflective of my realities. I remained on the faculty three years longer than I should have, so my kids could earn their Bachelor's degrees without tuition. (Jill majored in Business and Psychology, worked for an advertising agency for a time, and now is a full time divorced mother. Erik became a dentist, and is back at USC finishing up work for a specialty in orthodonture. We have unconflicted but somewhat removed relationships.)

  After I finished my doctorate, the economic axe fell on Southern California, ultimately leading to my move to the East Coast, in 1993, to join the faculty at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. My wife, C…grew up in these environs, which is one reason we live in New Hampshire rather than Massachusetts. The other is that there's no way we could afford our house, property and the rest of it if it could somehow be transported to the Boston area. Thank goodness the economy is stable, but not booming, here. Tourism is the major industry in the Lakes Region of N.H., and we live quite near Lake Winnepesaukee, the name of which is variously spelled. (Damned near bought an island, from the 200+ it contains, but realized how it would be inaccessible for about four weeks a year due to ice and such going in or out, meaning there would be times when it would be unapproachable by boat, but too soft to drive on the ice.) ON GOLDEN POND was filmed at Squam Lake about ten minutes from where we live. To me it's indescribably beautiful here, the kind of environment I dreamed of when I was a kid in North Dakota, later Arizona, and of course California. So green in summers that it makes your heart ache. And actual seasons, so that weather reports have a meaning. But you know all about it, having lived in New England for so many years. There are other less obvious advantages. No personal state income tax here, no sales tax-it took me a hell of a long time to get used to paying what it says on shelves. It's as rednecked as you can imagine, so C and I have no social life to speak of, but I value my solitude a great deal, so necessary to composing. Of course to move here I had to give up my position in the Beverly Hills Symphony, but funds were drying up for that enterprise anyway. For a time I continued returning to CA in the summers to play in the Easter Sierra Music Festival, but I've given that up now, mainly because I lost the vision in my right eye, which inhibits the reading music part of playing, and leaves me uncomfortable so far as tooling around southern California freeways and such in the Mazda that I left for the purpose.

  Naturally I've skipped an awful lot-working for Proctor and Gamble in data processing (I was flattered that they wanted me to go into management but I found that my heart was really not in toothpaste and detergents), summer gigs like pre-need sales for Eternal Valley Memorial Park (I didn't sell so much as a single lawn crypt in Mark Twain Gardens), attending a Bartender's Training Institute and working for a catering company, making easy-play piano arrangements for Sacred Songs in Waco, Texas (It's Jesus, Coming for Me in E-flat, that sort of thing). And all of this sounds pretty objective.

  I'm sure I've bent your eye longer than you care to be reading already. So I'll wait until you write to me, if you'd care to, to go off on another autobiographical tear. Luddite that I am, I'm not hooked up to the Internet, don't have any dot-coms, and the like, so you'll have to do that the old-fashioned way.

  Have you any plans to attend what I assume will be a 40th anniversary bash for our class at BUHS? I've asked Ira to look into it, to see if Kay (formerly Ream), or one of the other sort of organizing-things people, might have something in mind. So long as it's not a sock hop in the El Rancho Barstow Hotel, and baked spaghetti in the school cafeteria! Imagine how long it's been since we went through those commencement exercises at Langworthy Field.

  I do hope you'll write, Jackie. I'd love to hear from you.

Yours,

Leroy

Dear Jackie

  It was so good to hear from you, and to hear your voice again after all these years. You may have been living in Massachusetts, Connecticut and possibly other Eastern environs for many moons, but in truth you sound a bit more Southern these days than you did in high school. (I'm ever mindful of your Southern heritage.)…

  This coming Thursday I am having something new performed at Berklee, the first premiere in more than a decade. My FIVE CONTRAPUNCTI for WW Trio will be played by "professionals", whom I have yet to meet. The medium may be small, but the music consists of real noggin knockers, complex forms involving prolation canons, palindromes, triple fugue, etc. Naturally I hope that the personality, character and emotional content has some effect, in addition to the technical gymnastics. C and I will probably just bus down to Boston for that evening, and return home again…

  My work on The Toscanini Legacy: His Symphonic Repertoire on Compact discs comes so close to being completed, and then some firm, major or minor, will suddenly begin a series of new reprocessings of previously released material, or will issue, for the first time, performances culled from broadcasts done during the '30s or '40s. During this process of reviewing and comparing, which has damned near given me a hunched back from my 'on the floor typing' (this book takes up nearly two reams of paper), I have developed a zoo of the ridiculous, statements from program notes. Remembering that you too have a sense of humor, I thought I might share just a few of my favorite examples with you, hoping that they provide you with a few chuckles.

  Peter Aisleitner, discussing Toscanini's "live" 1939 recording of Beethoven's Symphony No. 3 ("Eroica"): " The original release of M-765 was approved by a committee in the composer's absence." Remarkable as it might seem, I guess whatever might be left of Beethoven was normally summoned to approve other issues of his music on Victor's Red Seal label.

  Anonymous author( notes for MYTO 1 MCD 89009): "Sarnoff's emissary, Samuel Chotzinoff, a great admirer of Toscanini, came on purpose to Milan and convinced the famous musician to accept a contract…" From this I infer that many emissaries come to Milan by accident.

  In fact from the Italians have come some of the most peculiar program notes, probably not helped much by their inept translators. And they give their essays titles, like, "The Chastity of Music". The following is typical, from Allesandro Nava's essay entitled. "The Scream and the Frenzy", which accompanies all of the releases in "TOSCANINI EDITION 5". "The Eighth, as in the studio recording, is outstanding in its dryness and density; a sort of marvelous clockwork mechanism, which, however, in this 1939 live version is broken up into unusually harsh touches, as though the mechanism were weighted down in the outer movements by obscure, hard masses brought about by dangerous vibration of the original impulse." These types of overwrought metaphors pervade such writing, probably influenced by the dense writing of the musicologist, Adorno.

  I'll close with an example from Michele Selvini's discussion of Toscanini's recordings of music by Richard Strauss. "Virtualistically the epitome of musical humorism, Till was…one of the battle horses of Toscanini, who adored the nature of small opera without voices."

  You may wonder at the enclosure. In truth, I've been writing an autobiography for my grandchildren, who will/would probably know little of me otherwise. It has been my intention that it not be read, or even opened until some time after my death, and my intention has not been to have it published, but rather simply to leave a record of myself, my influential relatives, people, times and places that would otherwise disappear from ken forever. I have taken out the chapter devoted to you, and have reproduced it by itself, thinking that you might like to know what is said therein. This I give to you, unamended, written nearly a year ago.

  The things that are calling out to me to do, I must now do. It's time to once again prepare lessons for my (students) in Boston…..

  I hope I'll have the chance to see you in person before too long. You've no idea of how much I look forward to that.

Yours,

Leroy

CHAPTER XI. JACKIE

….Jackie entered my life like a thunderclap, leaving me breathless, all too aware of my own shortcomings and provincial qualities, and very much in love.

Jackie had existed just outside my field of vision. We had only a few classes together, but I knew her to be a super-intelligent person. She knew Ira Gwin, and Ira liked her very much. I had learned a bit about Jackie from Ira before I really had any close contact with Jackie.

  It was during a return bus trip from a field trip to I don't know where that Jackie and I began talking across the aisle. She told me of a story she had written about a man in isolated circumstances who had heard nothing for years, and when he finally heard a sound it killed him. God only knows what self-inflated nonsense I spouted, but I was in that state of becoming, and of wanting her more than anything else I could imagine.

Ira and I talked about this, and gentleman that he was, he would not give up his own plans but would not interfere with mine, a perfect sport whose attitude allowed us all to remain friends no matter what course events took. And that is exactly how we all remained, though in the event I was the luckier man.

  (Jackie) was born of a somewhat taciturn father of Scottish descent, and a loveable but quite conservative southern mother. Jackie's parents were in the process of splitting up during the beginning of our relationship, which added layers of tension, significance and confusion to our initial being together times. I was too unwise, too untutored in the effects of divorce upon children to really empathize and understand all the meanings this had for her, though I must say that Jackie had it all sorted out as well as anyone could at that age. I hesitate to use the word "typical" with respect to anything about Jackie's well stocked, steel trap mind, but having an intellectual model of the reasons and a sense that this outcome of her parents' attempt at union was inevitable was consistent with both her keen analytical abilities and her flair and feeling for the dramatic.

  What I brought to our "us" were my sincere enthusiasm for the 20th Century concert music I was in the process of discovering, occasional bursts of verbal cleverness, a kinky and sometimes morbid sense of humor and the simple fact that I loved her. I also brought along altogether too much needy baggage with which I have often assassinated myself, expressed as an exaggerated fear of making a fool of myself and of being hurt. It was only much later in life that I could just accept that sometimes I am foolish, and that taking the pain could be worth the risk, that pain is survivable.

  What Jackie brought to the chemistry of the two of us were her human sensitivities, her greater sophistication in most areas, her romanticist's view of life and, when her feelings were near the surface, the tenderness which was part of her. Much better read than I, the figure of Bronte's Heathcliffe haunted her fantasies, while nostalgia for the South of her heritage was expressed in a love of Faulkner's dark thoughts and the plays of Tennessee Williams.

  Times with Jackie were adventures for me, adventures of the mind, of the body and sexuality, sometimes of the external world. When we read of the imminent destruction of the Watts Towers, those tall, spindly and airy constructions of Rodia, we drove to the Watts area of Los Angeles, blissfully unaware that this was not the safest area in the city for folks like us. We viewed them through a locked fence, walking all around the perimeter, together with many others who wanted a final look at those monuments to America before they were destroyed for being unsafe. Only a few months later was it learned how unsafe they weren't, when several tons of pressure were insufficient to pull them down.

  On a picnic outing with Robert Holson and the peripatetic Konda, we drove down what we did not know was a private road, disturbing a sprinkler system, and set up a blanket on which to sit when enjoying the view of one of the greener areas near Barstow where irrigation and a relatively high water table had done their work. Our horseplay and such were interrupted by gunshots and a red faced man, who was furious to the point of madness, and shouting that our blood was going to be all over the grass. At gunpoint we rehooked his sprinkler system, and were marched back to the car, a trek enlivened by another redneck in a pickup truck who assured our host that he had firearms in his vehicle with which he could aid in dispatching us. Only later did we learn that teenagers had poisoned the fish with which he stocked his pond, and had destroyed parts of his property. Doubtless he associated us with those of our peers with whom we had little or nothing to do.

  We had contact at school, and what might be termed a continuity of feeling. But we were only able to see each other in a semi-private context once or twice a week. The in between times could be excruciatingly fearful. ("Will something happen to bring this to an end?"). And I always had to do more than I really knew how to make them seem less empty. Of course those lacunae made our times together that much more special, to me at least. And those discontinuities also caused some aspects of our relationship to proceed like a series of vignettes, yielding experiences that might read like a series of anecdotes, and actually were individual events rather than life-bytes chopped out of an otherwise continuous fabric. The time we drove onto an isolated desert road at night to find a little privacy, only to get stuck in the sand and have to sacrifice a bolster-type seat cushion to provide traction for the rear wheels. The time I was petting her cat on my lap and the animal vomited on me, requiring the borrowing of a pair of Jackie's short pants. These looked distinctly odd hanging over my hopelessly thin frame, (at the time I resembled a domesticated praying mantis), and even Jackie's mother was amused by how such female clothing is just not designed to accommodate a male's private parts. The outings, sometimes in the company of others, sometimes just by ourselves, to Disneyland, to the no longer extant Marineland, to Big Bear, are lovely to remember, were unique experiences, and would make for the most boring kind of reading. The times I treasure most cannot be properly committed to paper at all-warm, sunny afternoons and cooler desert evenings spent talking , being close, listening to music, making plans for being married after graduation from college.

  One of our trips was portentious in a way we did not realize, in that it heralded the separate paths our lives would take, a condition which would become permanent. Jackie planned to attend Wellesley College just outside of Boston proper, and so that she might receive a kind of orientation/preparation for that experience we drove to a coastal town where one of that institution's older students lived. I was slated to attend the School of Music as a composition major at the University of Southern California, a continent's width away from Jackie.

  We did not attend the chaperoned events that followed commencement exercises, preferring our own company, and staying out all night. We both recognized that going our separate ways represented a major change, as did the entering of higher studies in general, but we hoped to continue our romantic involvement through the mails, regular phone calls, and being with each other two or three times a year.

  And we did manage to do this for nearly two years. But distance, the different experiences we had, changing expectations, and the natural desire to explore other possible relationships did their negative work. I more or less broke things off. Shortly before I had completed my undergraduate degree work I received an announcement from Jackie that she would be marrying…..I wrote her a brief letter congratulating her and wishing her the very best, while feeling regrets, the pangs of loss, and the sadness of the end of another era.

  "Our song" was Howard Hanson's Second Symphony, the kind of choice only a couple of romantic teenagers would make, but apt to the way we felt and the who that we were. Almost thirty years later I heard the "Romantic" theme from that symphony, during the end titles for the motion picture "Alien", as Sigourney Weaver and the cat are drifting away in space in suspended animation. I wrote to Hanson, a letter to which he did reply, and said that this was like encountering an old friend in an alien territory.

Jackie, wherever you are and whatever you may have become, you were the best friend, and the best girlfriend I could possibly have had. I hope that your memories are as fond as my own.

Dear Jackie,

  Thanks so much for your letter. I've just completed all the copying, and will shortly take the material to be reproduced, so now I can address, for a moment, matters in your letter.

  I see that you live in a beautiful environment, just as I had imagined, with plants, trees, dogs and a house with some history. I'm glad to have been given the chance to gain a more direct impression of your "digs" than my mind's eye alone would have allowed.
By the way, your handwriting is superb and easily read, as it always has been. No need for concern about inoperative computers with respect to letter writing. I use an old fashioned typewriter because that is my bent, and because it spares my good friends the optic spasms and potential retinal hernias that trying to read my handwriting might cause, not because I expect others to follow my lead….

  I remember that the Mojave was formerly a kind of inland sea, with an underground river. Do you recall that when we had a longer than usual wet period, in 1958 or so, antique shrimp eggs that had been dormant for God knows how long were revivified in the puddles and pools near Newberry? It caused quite a stir at the time, with some among the more fancifully imaginative believing that they were related to trilobites(sp.?), which perhaps in a very distant way they were. There is a kind of stark beauty in the desert, and no doubt it arouses the geologist's heart. I just wouldn't want to live there again.

  And I remember with clarity our expedition to see the Indian symbols on the rocks near the obsidian fields also out Newberry way. In some trunk filled with family mementos I'm sure the photographs I took can still be found. We went with the Fausts and Sid Brown. It's my fervent hope that those paleoliths (paleographs?)(petroglyphs) have been spared the spray painting and other forms of vandalism so often visited upon such treasures.

Please keep writing to me, Jackie. You've no idea how much I've missed you over the years. Wish I could visit with you in person, in Boston. Most Tuesdays would be ideal for that purpose, since my teaching day ends at 4:00PM on Tuesday.

Love,

Dear Jackie,

Thanks so much for the postcard. I imagine you and your daughter had a glorious time. Though I've never been in Italy, I know that you're right about the multiplicity of cathedrals from having read about them. Religion does seem to have been a big item in Italy.

Thinking that you might be interested in finding out a bit about what your old boyfriend has been doing in the way of composing, I took the entirely presumptuous step of making a sampler tape of some of my music. A kind of bird's eye snapshot, whatever the audio equivalent might be, this will give you an idea of the range of approaches cum aesthetic stances that I've adapted to my purposes over the decades since 1959. I've never been a trend follower, trend bucker or trend setter, for that matter, preferring to go my own way. I've tried never to write the same piece twice, so you won't find the kind of stylistic consistency in my music that you'll find in composers who are more doctrinaire. The kind of consistency that I hope you do find is that which grows out of a respect for craftsmanship and solid musical values. I have no patience for the musical sandbox, a la Minimalism, or the no-brainer aspects of popular music, but neither am I enamored of music which is really a demonstration of mathematical theory and in which the actual sounds are the incidental result of numeric manipulation. (That doesn't mean that I reject 12-tone music or serial music of other kinds just out of hand. A good composer can write good music of that sort, witness Schoenberg, Weber, one of my own composition teachers, Ingolf Dahl. But there are composers out there who couldn't write a convincing C Major scale who hide behind the mathematics, to which they can point as justification for that which sounds as inchoate as the aleatory music of some of the '60's kooks. I've only saved one of my serial compositions; the others I would classify as experiments, and they went directly into the trash can, which, like the eraser, I consider to be the composer's best friend.) As nice a man as he is in person, and a brilliant fellow with whom to have a chat (I've only been able to do this once), Pierre Boulez so often seems to pick the most rancidly butt ugly sounds he can find, which he then proceeds to manipulate brilliantly. You know, Jackie, it's not a question of whether something is dissonant or consonant. There are times when one wants music that really bites and grinds, filled with incipient or real violence. But the image presented to the ear should still have a certain sonorous quality. Carl Ruggle's music, for instance, SUN TREADER, is almost uniformly dissonant to a degree, but those minor ninths, and the voicings of his sometimes dense chords, have that rightness which only comes of being concerned with the acoustic image. - Well, anyway, my own music ranges from friendly to distinctly pugnacious, and love it or hate it, live-performance slip-ups set aside, however it sounds is because I wanted it to sound that way, and not the result of happenstance, mathematical or otherwise. - Sorry to bend your eye so long about these matters. I've probably given you macular degeneration as a result of sitting here thinking about such things, and then proceeding to spout off about them.

  The enclosed notes will tell just a little about each of the compositions. I only wanted to comment additionally on the most recent piece represented here, the FIVE CONTRAPUNCTI for Woodwind Trio performed just a few weeks ago. The notes could easily give the impression that the music is "about" the techniques/procedures involved. Well, I'll confess that writing this sort of music nearly gave me a mental hernia. Having to think forward and backward simultaneously in some instances, and generally writing in a context in which the changing of one note in one part produces a chain reaction of changes elsewhere, can make the brain take on aspects of a pretzel. But the point was still to touch both head and heart, not just to demonstrate technical skill or something like that.

I'd still like to have dinner and a good visit with you. Our present semester is nearly history, meaning I won't be in the Boston area again until early June. Perhaps we could arrange to do that on a Monday evening in June. We could meet at Berklee and go to a nearby restaurant. I'll wait to hear from you with respect to whether this seems like a good idea to you and whether or not it would fit into any of your own plans.

My temporal/academic necessities are calling to me now, insisting that I satisfy them, so I have to cut short this "I, me, mine, I think, etc." letter. It seems that I work in order to be able to work. We do whatever we do to keep body and soul together financially, and instead of being more traditionally recreatory after that's done, we become hermitic, doing that for which we live in a solitudinous way. No wonder we composers are often problematic as partners!

Hoping to hear from you, I remain,
Yours,

Quick P.S. I forgot to mention that the sound quality will range from quite decent to pretty awful on this tape. Not much I can do about that. Play without Dolby N.R. The only machine I have at the moment doesn't admit of its use.

I suppose what's on this tape may represent something less than a third of what I've composed. A couple of my things were released commercially during the 'lp' era, and are long since o.p. Of the few things of mine that have been published I've only made money on a set of choral arrangements of folk songs. God, I remember how excited I was to get my first royalty check for a whole $650 the first year they were out. At something around 3 - 10 cents royalty per copy that means they sold pretty well. It's still a negative comment on our culture that a few hours of fun spent one afternoon in 1967 would earn money, whereas something that cost me great pains over more than a year's time might not earn so much as a ruble, a shilling- - -

Note: on returning from Italy, I became seriously ill, and did not begin to recover until early 2001. Leroy called several times-once when I had just returned from having a spinal tap. I didn't want to discuss being sick, and could not write, so the next letter is from Christmas 2000, which was enclosed in a Christmas card. J.

Late for seasonal greetings, I know, but why break a long standing tradition in my family at this point?

I truly hope that medical problems are being resolved for you, Jackie. I think that Ira felt a bit hurt that you didn't want him to visit you, so I told him that you were having some medical difficulties and that was most likely why you didn't want to be visited at this point. Am I right about that? Please post me on both counts.

Received a photo type card from Mike Scheff. The Mike in the picture did bear a vague resemblance to the Mike I used to know when we were all kids, but I doubt I would have recognized him in a chance encounter. No doubt he could say the same of me. We should not have had to continue growing older after a certain age, perhaps thirty or thirty five. That was supposed to happen only to others, not to us. Where's Ponce de Leon when we really need him?

….(Ira) still sings folk songs, plays the guitar and is an accomplished country-type fiddler. Judging from what he said, and from photos he sent, being an apartment-type landlord requires him to be a workaholic construction person, fix-it-all handyman and collection service.

The photos he brought, and those he sent later, also reveal that the deserts around Barstow remain desperately austere. The rose colored lenses we seem to grow, like organic revisionist contacts, inform memory with the thought that it wasn't so bad. I cherish those good parts of that chapter in my life. But seeing the vast expanses of sparse scrub, articulated by such things as railroad tracks and trashy looking, corrugated metal structures reminds me why I wouldn't care to live there again. I much prefer the more verdant areas where we live, and can live with snow and cold more comfortably than I could return to sand and heat. Of course one could have houses on both coasts, I suppose, like the fellow who had two homes, one in Tijuana and the other in Newark. But the last tie to southern California has been severed now, with the sale of my parents' Chula Vista house, and I've experienced very little in the way of seller's remorse.

2000 had its positive sides for me, despite such medical negativities as acute anemia, dental extractions and the spraining of my lower back so that now I (temporarily) have to use a cane to walk. We faculty at the Berklee College of Music did not go on strike after all, thankfully. On Nov. 7 a group calling themselves "Brave New Works" played my 'Five Contrapuncti' at the University of Michigan. Now another 'new music' oriented ensemble, called "Prime Directive", wants to program my 'Homage to Ingolf Dahl' for a concert to be given in February or March. I guess that modern art music organizations, like rock bands, have to have catchy names now. Of course I don't give a damn if they call themselves "Dr. Strange and the Epidemics", or some such, so long as they play my music.

Am currently reading THE MAESTRO MYTH - Great Conductors in Pursuit of Power, by Norman Lebrecht, an axe grinder who tries to occupy all sides and parts of the street simultaneously. He both recognizes and denies the necessity of the conductor, and can understand while decrying the autocrat to which such a position naturally gives rise. Like Horowitz, author of UNDERSTANDING TOSCANINI - How He Became an American Culture-God and Helped Create a New Audience for Old Music, Lebrecht is basically destructive, with a not-too-skillfully-hidden agenda of his own. Those damnable critic-types are often compared with eunuchs in the harem, and now feel free to carp at such as Toscanini, Heifetz, and others who represented the cream of a particular artistic viewpoint. In my opinion, in order to have a legitimate cachet, a critic should be compelled to put his soul and sensibilities on the line at least once a year, perform a piano concerto, a violin concerto, a whatever, or write and have played a symphony, to be critiqued by all those he/she reviewed during the past few years, as well as by the fraternity of critics proper. I've known only one who actually did/does that, and that's Daniel Carriaga of the L.A. TIMES. He, at least, gave piano recitals, and could prove himself a competent musician, with first-hand knowledge of how difficult it is to do anything.

Well, I don't mean to burden you with such negative thoughts that are hardly apt to the season. Instead we should be celebrating what we have, what went right (and some things do), and looking forward to 2001.

With that, I'll bid you farewell, and hope you've had a memorable Christmas with your husband and family.

Do let me know what's happening.

Your mellow old friend,

Dear Jackie,

After speaking with you, a very welcome conversation I might add, I find that I have automatically gravitated to the typewriter. I'm supposed to be extracting parts from my reconstructed HOMAGE TO INGOLF DAHL, since the whole package has to be in Michigan by March 1, but there evidently are too many thoughts still to be bandied about, only a few of which I'll be able to share with you at this time.

From letters, and a phone conversation prior to his New Hampshire visit, I had the more than just distinct impression that Ira was making his East Coast trip as much to see you as to visit with me. I am amazed that he didn't communicate his intentions. I'm happy that you shared with me the reasons why you didn't welcome such a visit. Hearing it from Ira aroused many dreadful fantasies in me…perhaps you had taken a turn for the worse. No need to go into that now. As promised, I'll say nothing about these matters to Ira, while I'm still puzzled with respect to why he didn't sound things out with you before leaving Barstow….

The first paragraph may leave you a little puzzled. I think that in one of our moves a carton of my music may have been…hopelessly mislaid. To my horror, I was only able to locate my sketches of HOMAGE, after telling the director of "Prime Directive" that I would be only too happy to send him the score and parts for performance. Therefore the "reconstruction", and the urgency of the mechanical chore. Ingolf Dahl was one of my principal compostition teachers, and one of the most gifted and intelligent musicians I've ever known. He and Halsey Stevens, whose SINFRONIA BREVE prompted me to attend USC, were at opposite poles in some respects, which in the end left me no more schizoid than I already was. Stevens believed one should make his/her mistakes, learn from them, and then get on with the business of writing the next piece. Dahl was a perpetual reviser, rewriting, polishing, etc., even in works already published. I think that both men believed that aside from the mechanics, composition could not be taught directly. In any event, what I learned from them was self-criticism without attendant paralysis. There's a time to let the thoughts flow, and a time to introduce the carping doubting critic. This may not have been what every student learned or took away, because I believe that Dahl, particularly, tended to view or to tailor his kind of instruction to the needs of the student at hand. Our lessons were often about my music, but games were introduced as well. For example, one evening we tried to think of every orchestral work that began in a Unison or Octave, going through each pitch in turn to that end. On another occasion we repaired to different rooms to write a waltz in the manner of Richard Strauss (a la Rosenkavalier, the waltz in Intermezzo, The Love of Danae, etc.), in the space of half an hour, a contest which he allowed I had won, by the way. This kind of thing was a pleasure to both of us, and I think formed a part of our special musical relationship. Anyway, my tribute to this brilliant man is not a dirge, but rather a piece that I think might have amused him. Oh it begins with some dark thoughts all right, in the cellar so to speak, but ends in the stratosphere with similar material to entirely different effect. In between it might be thought reminiscent of theatre and pantomime music associated with 1920's Parisian chic, a black and white construction which finally flies to pieces in the face of a melancholy tolling or intoning of the minor 3rds with which the piece opened. There is only one brief snippet of a quotation from Dahl's SINFONIETTA which occurs twice. One would have to be thoroughly steeped in that piece to recognize it in this context, but it would have brought a twinkle to Dahl's eyes. It's a piece in its own genre, with points of contact with Stravinsky cum Bernstein, and I'll never write another piece remotely like it. Anyway, I'm more than just pleased that it will be given a second performance, a good one I hope.

One good thing about having to reconstruct the piece is that it has given me an opportunity to do a bit of weeding and pruning. Even four measures too many can make a piece seem prolix, and I like to think, whether it's true or not, that every note in one of my pieces is essential. You might easily ask, then, how I could love so much of the monumental, even hypertrophic music by Bruckner. I think that is because that kind of spaciousness and spirituality is exactly right for that music. In fact such long-breathed, but consistent and logical, utterances allow one to recapture a sense of the eternal, much as does looking at the stars, even if "eternal" proves an illusion. But that kind of rhetoric would be anathema in my music. Our time sense is so different now, probably much as writing, using a Mozart-type vocabulary, would be like taking a coach and six horses out on the Hollywood Freeway, writing with a luxuriant time scale like Bruckner's would be like trying to reenter the world of empires, stuffed armchairs, and 19th Century world views. Parenthetically, it is so frustrating that it is the 18th and 19th Century music that the general public wants to hear, that is to say the ever-dwindling public for music that isn't infantile. Escapism? Trying to use music as a kind of drug, just to feel good? Wanting to repeat familiar experiences, without remaining alive to the present? Of course I love the music of Brahms, of Beethoven, and so on, but it is indeed frustrating to know that we are now in the 21st Century while some who should know better have yet to enter the 20th Century in musical terms.

This whole line of egocentric discussion may be boring the Hell out of you, and in any case I must return to my dutiful chores vis a vis part copying…

I look forward to receiving your letter.

Yours,

P.S. You are right about it being a rather special group of friends we had at BUHS. Serendipity must have reared her benign head to bring us all together at that important point in our lives. When I think of Bob Holson, Mike Scheff, well, I want to go on but won't. And of course you, who are inescapably in the very fabric of my life. It would make your ears blush if I told you how much you meant to me.
I was distressed to learn from Ken Mack that Bill Phillips passed away, but I don't know the circumstances. David Livingston, who you probably didn't know well but was a fellow bandsman, is also gone. I haven't been able to find out anything about Joey Stensby, who has just disappeared from the ken of any of whom I've made inquiries…

Dear Jackie,

Did I make a tape like this one before? Since you didn't mention one, I'll presume that I didn't, while recognizing the danger of becoming wearingly repetitive, and inundating you with too many letters and other materials. I keep forgetting little things like December, and whether I'm at home or in my car.

At any rate, you saw me through many trying, early performance experiences, like auditioning for an Idyllwild scholarship with the spurious "Mozart" E-flat Major Oboe concerto, and the nervous piano recitals in Mrs. McKinney's living room. Thus, I thought you might be interested in hearing a few examples of what I did as an oboist in some of the periods following. It's probably an egocentric gesture. Stokowski said, "I'm an egotist. It's a disease." I don't believe that I'm diseased yet, but I might test positive for a minor infection of that kind.

These old performances bring back many memories, of friends represented therein who have died, and of the occasions themselves. For instance, the evening on which we played the Schoenberg Quintet the Schoenberg Institute was so hot that perspiration was dripping down my nose and onto the reed. (I've only included the last movement here, because unless one is genuinely enthusiastic about the 12-tone vocabulary it might seem oppressive.) the night we played the Mozart quintet the hornist, Jeff von der Schmidt was ill, vomiting about twenty minutes before we entered the performance area. The pianist in that Mozart (Al Dominguez) died miserably, in hospital, like my brother a victim of AIDS. The examples I've included from the California Chamber Ensemble years involve John Fessenden, bassoonist and conductor, who died in a tragic accident, Don Ransom, clarinetist who died from an allergic reaction to a bee sting, and Clyve Acker, tubist, who committed suicide. It could all be quite depressing, except that recordings preserve good memories too, and keep something of them alive for me.

As I listen to these, from a removed point of view, I think that I was decent enough, while I would never have been a great performer, even if I had devoted myself full time to that end. But I really only wanted to bring a little bit of beauty into the world, and to participate first-hand, in the making of music. And I did do a little bit of the former, and quite a bit of the latter, which is not too bad for a guy with a compromised nervous-motoric system. It was even more of a challenge than learning to walk again had been, and I did get somewhere with it.

Tape quality is extremely variable, some made illegally from hidden mikes right in the audience, some made under slightly more favorable circumstances, but none having commercial quality sound. All are "live', and none are namby pamby performances. They all have personality, not the oh-so-careful performances one often hears. And it's all good music, even if I hadn't been a participant, so you'll probably find some things to enjoy here. At least I hope so.-Sometimes I miss playing in orchestras - the excitement before the event, the feeling good when things are going well, the participation in a shared artistic end, the after-concert activities with like-hearted and interested friends. But like you, who have adopted a more contemplative lifestyle than formerly, my future productions will be from the desk rather than the stage. I think that composing music is what I do best anyway. That, and being the most attentive listener any composer or performer could ever hope for. Yes, I do turn my hand to short stories and such from time to time, and strictly for recreation let my puppet turtle write fake ads, his scams and such from time to time. But for me, only music involves both the right and left brains so completely - shaping those lines, feeling the right density of the textures, developing a rational harmonic scheme and, especially dealing with the overall architecture, the event orders that evoke or elicit the internal dramatic-emotional part of ourselves. Still, I more or less enjoyed the production part of music in the more immediate sense of performing, and I'd be denying a good part of my life if I didn't admit that I regret, to an extent, being a playing musician no longer.

Gee, I just heard myself make the high 'F' in the solo in the Minuet in Ravel's Tombeau, and the high 'G's' at the end. That part that sounds like a piccolo at the end of the movement is really the oboe, And that quasi-exotic solo in the middle of the Rigodaun. Not bad at all, I'd have to say, with about the right amount of singing qualities. - I included only the last movement of the L.A. premiere of Kurt Weill's Symphony No. 2 because he was really more of a wonderful tunesmith than a symphonist. The second movement gets downright tedious, but the Finale is rather effective.

I have a younger musician friend, Jeff Hunter, who lives in Riverside CA. He is an atheist. His mother is a Jehovah's Witness. As a kind of response to the dictum, "know your enemy", which is to state his position too strongly, he became a biblical scholar, able to cite chapter and verse as well as the historicity and mistranslations in certain passages better than most Christians. He and his mother have a gentleperson's agreement, and neither treads on the other's convictions….Though there are far less compelling reasons for doing so, I imagine you and I should also have such an agreement. As mentioned during a phone call, I just can't get behind the party of Dan Quayle, Jesse Helms, "Gramm" and the inarticulate George W. Not that I consider, or considered, Bill Clinton to be an heroic figure, in fact this last supreme blunder with the pardons is worse than just obnoxious. But he was at least three times as entertaining and five times as clever as George will ever be. There is no one to vote for these days, just politicians to vote against. - But in a contrary crossing of party lines, the previously mentioned Jeff Hunter and I would have loved to have brought back tricky Dick Nixon, quite possibly the most intelligent President in the 20th Century (with Harding probably falling at the other end of the scale). Quite coincidentally, right now I'm reading Joan Hoff's NIXON RECONSIDERED, which is a survey of his accomplishments sans Watergate and other products of his paranoia. I'll let you know when I've finished it if it is mainly an apology, with "spin", or is really an objective assessment.

One of my cousins on my Dad's side lives in an area of New Jersey where it snows, but the snow does not stick, producing a morose, muddy winter season. Snowboarders, snowmobilers, and skiers, whether cross-country or downhill, would despair. Here it snows with intensity on occasion, and the snow stays, and stays. Oh it melts a little by day, just enough to insure a treacherous surface when it refreezes at night, requiring either ice-walkers or footwear with treads that could compete with Michelin "X" series tires. Only sometimes during the twilight of a beautiful Autumn do I find myself echoing the sentiments in Erika's beautiful aria in Barber's VANESSA. "Must the Winter Come So Soon?". But I can sometimes feel like an unwritten aria at the other end. "Must the Winter Drag On So Long?". It will be good to see the maples, birches, oaks and such looking verdant again. The downside is the increased property maintenance it compels, which in your case involves getting that electric fence up and running again, I imagine. We're occasionally visited by white-tailed deer also, but not often enough to cause any problems. If I'd been twice infected by Lyme disease I guess I'd want to keep them off the property also. - Near us, in Lake Winnepesaukee, is Long Island, joined to the mainland by a bridge. On that island have been deer so friendly that you can feed them by hand from the edge of the road. But as has been true in your environs, the deer eat up all the shrubs and such, and no one can keep a garden. With no natural predators on the island, they had to hire a sharpshooter to dispatch them at night using a sniperscope. It appears that some folks can kill an animal with trusting eyes, but I could never do it.

I'd best be onto dealing with damnable school work again. I like some of the kids so much, but I'm so tired of relating the wonders of the Augmented 6th chords and such, and trying to keep "up" for the classroom, when I'd so much rather be creating something new. Economics and insufficient fund are the roots of most evils.

Remember that letters and phone calls are always welcome.

Love,

Dear Jackie,

Our letters are crossing in the mail, so if I seem unresponsive at times it's only because the many interesting issues you inevitably raise just haven't reached me yet.

Societal-cultural paradigms - yes, I more than just suspect that we have lost ours in the sphere of intelligent general culture. So many things contribute to this, everything from bottom line only businessman type thinking to egalitarian ideology in the educational sphere. "Mainstreaming" instead of providing for students according to their abilities and needs, commercial airways flooded with material cum entertainment aimed at the perpetual low-range adolescent, assimilation of the worst that minority cultures have to offer…instead of the best - - I could go on and on like this, but it would be like preaching to the choir. I think things were a bit better when we were young, because we still had college preparatory tracks in school, and there was still concern for cultural education in the larger, better sense. But the direction things were headed was already at hand…the economic power of teenagers on the way to dictating what is/was created and being made available, and such visionaries in the communications industry as David Sarnoff and William Paley on their way out. One thing that strikes me as rather odd is how folks wring their hands over such issues as the fact that test scores in reading and math have fallen since the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, when there was almost nothing in the way of electronic technology. The same folks then want to throw more technology at the problem, when it could very well be a contributing source to the decline in general abilities in these areas. I'm afraid that your George W .is going to do his best to ensure that things get worse in this area by adding to the "teaching to multiple choice tests" mind-set. He already just about ruined the educational situation in Texas - talk to teachers from there about how analytical thinking, writing of essays, music, drama, hands-on science have all gone down the tubes in the interest of preparing students for one examination. In the end I suppose the cream will rise; it almost always does. But it's a damnable shame that it's made so much more difficult by enforced homogenizing, without the nurturing that potential and talent need to be brought to fruition. Meanwhile those bucks just keep on being spent on Nintendo games, robot toys and boy bands. One has to hope that at least some of the right people are watching the History channel, the Learning channel and Bravo instead of MTV.

About Bruckner, I can understand why you do not care for his music. Brahms called his works "symphonic boa constrictors", with some justification. I recall the first recording of a Bruckner symphony I ever bought (No. 5), and my impression. I gave it away, and was just not receptive to its long-windedness and sometimes abrupt, disconnected gestures alternating with passages in which he seemed unable to let go of an idea. It took a live performance of his 9th symphony with Bruno Walter conducting the L.A. Phil. to convince me that there was more to his music than the hypertrophism. That pregnant and mysterious opening, with its Wald mystique, those granitic fanfares, the breadth in the spacing of the chords in the third movement, and that anguish in the last of the completed movements, finally brought to a near nostalgic, peaceful resolution at its conclusion, all finally got to me. Some of his symphonies are uneven, with superb movements alongside those that could have been improved with some rethinking of the intrinsic interest, or lack of it, in his building-block materials. First movement No. 6 - so imaginative compared with the last. First movement of No. 8 - the only one to have the kind of internal torment we appreciate so much in the best of Mahler. But to me it is worth sitting through the occasional dead patches to experience the vast cathedral of the overall architecture, to sense the convinced spirituality of the last composer to have dedicated his music to "the glory of God", and to appreciate the harmonic virtuosity when he isn't just stuck on a tonic chord. I think enough of him to have spent an afternoon, night and morning at St. Florian on my one and only trip to Austria, where I viewed his sarcophagus, and early in the morning heard the boys' choir singing motets by Bruckner from one of the upper rooms in the school. There is a plaque on the house where he was born, in a nearby village from which he used to walk to the school. There are places in that little town from which one can see a good deal of Linz. Anyway, much as I love and revere the music of Brahms, his opinion of his contemporary has not dissuaded me from finding the heart in Bruckner's music. After all, composers are notorious for being so locked into their own aesthetic that a different one can seem to be anathema. (Tchaikovsky on Brahms: "He erects beautiful pedestals for melodies which don't appear." Mahler on Brahms and Bruckner: "What a curious pair of second raters, one in the casting ladle too long, the other not long enough." Schoenberg on Hindemith: "That boy in knee pants." The list of such comments by those who should know better is appallingly long.)

Tomorrow I go for a bone scan and MRI, although x-rays have already revealed that I have a super compressed disc in my lower spine. What will be done about all this I've no idea. Meanwhile, I hobble around Boston using a cane, bite a mouthful of bullets and just ignore the fire in my left leg when I'm on my feet all day in front of classes. I find medical problems, my own, that is, intrinsically boring, so this is just intended to be a succinct report of one of the realities in my life.

I picture you reading this in an upper room, away from the area in your house which echoes with unpleasant associations, and wonder what you think of my music. Well, one day, when you've had time to digest that which I sent, you'll write me a very perceptive letter about it.
I've been asked by a conductor friend in the L.A. area to compose a piece for the Beach Cities Symphony, a ….group a cut above the usual community orchestra. But he has warned me not to use dissonance, and sent me an example of the kind of recent music for which his audience is receptive, which turned out to be a piece resembling any overture by Flotow, Adam, or other 19th Century composer of light works. Not a bad piece, mind you, but like my "Classical" symphony, a work totally out of our time. I wonder if I have it in me to even want to revisit that past in terms of writing as though I lived in it, and at the same time it would be great to have an orchestral performance again. Ambivalence has been defined as watching your mother in law drive your new car over a cliff. I don't feel quite that negative about my mother in law, but I am similarly torn about this project. Thank goodness there's no deadline. Perhaps a compromise will be found.

You've no idea how much it heartened me to learn that you have, in fact, been writing and using your estimable creative abilities. If circumstances, and your own feelings about how the products of your labors should best be used, haven't allowed them to be realized, it is the doing that is the most important, isn't it? I'd go nuts if that doing were taken away. Perhaps you feel similarly. I'd rather write for the mind's ear and the drawer than not to write at all. Anyway, the fascination of archaeology, the evolution of man and the attending physical and cultural history notwithstanding, I was truly concerned that you might have submerged your originating side. I'm more than delighted to know that all of that in you is still alive as well.

And now the mundane sides of life call, and I will soon discover whether or not the latest storm will impede my using my 4 wheel drive vehicle. Our plowman has no doubt done his job, but there's an ice sill right in front of the garage door, and one can get hung up on it if it's too high.

Keep well, dear heart. And thanks for your good, long letter.

Love,

Dear Jackie,

It was so good to see that envelope from American Archeology in my mail. Another thoughtful, stimulating, provocative letter from you!

No, dear friend, there nothing wrong with my tape deck (JVC TD-W5, used with Kenwood KR-A56R receiver and BSF Equalizer {10 bands per channel}, which is practically brand new, but there could easily be something wrong with my brain. Most likely I labeled the tape, knowing what would fit on Side B, was called away from the project by school work, exigencies of existence, whatever, and returning to the tape a day or two later thought I had completed it because it was labeled. ( I recently received a tape from a conductor friend that was missing Side B, half of the concert he had recently conducted, consisting of Brahms' Symphony No. 2. Naturally I returned the tape to him to be completed, indicating that probably one of his cats was an avid Wagnerite, still engaged in that great late 19th Century contretemps 'twixt followers of Brahms and Wagner. Not being able to stand the thought that he'd have to listen to Brahms, that Katz put a hex on the tape.) Anyway, I have included the missing items on the enclosed, plus things you have not had before, I think. - I should have written down what I've sent your way at the time, since short term memory just doesn't seem to be what it was once. I keep forgetting little things like last month, the date and where I live.

There are so many ways of listening to music, and none of them are invalid, provided they have at least something to do with what is actually there. Some folks (present company certainly excepted) use music to make statements about their ethnicity, self-image and the like. You hear/see them every day as they drive by, radio on full blast, windows open, trying to make a statement to everyone else. Some folks want music to provide them with only one kind of emotional experience, and so one must say that they use music as a kind of drug. Many of the less thoughtful people think of music only as a stimulus to physical movement, and are uninterested in content. (If they were, it wouldn't do them much good to listen to the kind of music they "use" - constant percussion marking the most obvious element, (where the pulse is), easily digested harmonic patterns using a very limited palette, over the top intensity all the time with little dynamic variation, pointless improvisations, no larger scale architecture or developmental thinking, and so on.)

You mentioned that you have a strong visual-musical sound connection, and I must say I do too. The only way one could understand and apprehend a composition in its entirety, all at once, is with some kind of visual analogue, graphic, notational, whatever works for the individual, since a piece heard all at the same time, in one instant, would be just a jumble of sound. Visually, one can see the whole piece, its interior connections, overall design, what it is as an entity. Of course one of the pleasures of listening to good music is hearing/seeing that inevitability gradually unfolding, placing the immediate sense oriented now in the scheme that makes the music live and have a sense of purpose. - On our departmental bulletin board someone tacked up an article about a study done on listeners of various types, measuring brain wave response to music, and using some kind of thermal imaging (I think) to see which areas of the whole mass were being more active, less active, engaged as it were. It turns out that musicians use a good deal more of the left lobe, non-musicians mostly the right lobe, when listening. That is what might have been expected, though I suppose it's a good thing to have it confirmed. I think that in any of the arts the production end might require more left brain involvement than the consumer end, though one hopes for involvement of both lobes. Since music is the least concrete of the arts it may be that it allows the greatest scope for the right lobe, but please don't hold me to this speculative statement.

This touches upon the issue of music and meaning, a subject to which I'll return in a moment. First I wanted to say that however the patterns (visual) that suggest themselves to you, or arise more or less spontaneously, might relate to the "what" that you are hearing, there can be nothing wrong with that. Maybe they relate to the shapes of the lines, maybe to the textures, maybe to the style of the music, maybe to your own personal symbologies. As I say, there are so many ways of listening to music, and I don't think any of them are invalid, though I'd have to say that if music is being used as a backdrop to fantasies, as a kind of background or soundtrack to imagined activities, that a real listening is probably not taking place, though as a general activity it's no doubt harmless enough. I know that what one might call "personal training" has influenced my own aural-visual connections. A P5 has a specific size, a M3 another, and so on, and developing something along these lines was necessary, as an internal measuring scale, since I don't have "absolute pitch". Timbres can have their own visual characteristics also. To me, a bassoon emits a kind of fuzzy strand of sound, its thickness depending on the player and the "school" to which he/she subscribes. (The French play with a brighter, thinner sound, and the construction of the French instrument differs from that built by Heckel and others who base theirs on the German model. I know of no one in this country who plays on a French model instrument.) A horn produces a more enveloping sound, possibly somewhat golden in hue (to me), and with a larger specific gravity than that produced by the bassoon (thereby introducing another sense into the mixture I guess). Anyway, though I think such cross sense interactions are secondary to the sounds and their organization, they can be useful, and an aid in gaining control over the materials.

You'd think that with so many centuries in which aesthetics of music (and metaphysics) have been written about, argued about and bandied about, the questions of meanings of and in music would have been settled, but in many respects they haven't. There are some sterile types who feel that music does not and cannot have meanings beyond itself, that it's all fantasy. Some of these are composers, most often those for whom the sounds are the incidental by-product of a cabalistic mathematics, or those at the opposite end of the spectrum, who engage in nonsensical chance procedures (those are mostly gone now, a true dead end). One has to understand the context when Stravinsky said, in his raspy voice, "Music expressed nothing. Mood? That's for old ladies." When he was young he wrote about "The Rite of Spring" with passion, and with prose as purple as you'll find anywhere. It was only when he was old and crabby, disgusted with a public which was always at least three steps behind his stylistic changes, and mostly writing music about music, that he made that statement. I take it as a matter of conviction that if the vocabulary used, and the intent, are understood by everyone in the chain from composer through performer to listener, a communication of a kind can take place. Of course reactions will vary some, just as reactions will vary among people to anything, even when all involved share the same understanding.

Because we cannot concretize it does not make it any the less real. The rub comes because unless one is more or less inculcated with a musical language, a vocabulary and syntactic assumptions, by having it around from birth on, a period of familiarization, perhaps even study, may be necessary for that understanding to be there. Should be obvious, shouldn't it? Well, you'd think so, but on the production side you'll find some angry composers who think audiences should be able to follow them with no assistance, and on the other end you'll find some who just reject whole slews of compositions because they don't provide them with the already familiar experience that they seek. A part of the answer lies in providing arts education to kids, but that seems to be a dead issue in this country, except perhaps in some of the better private schools.

By the way, Jackie, I want you to know that I value your comments about my music, whatever they may be. I don't expect analytical discussion, but I wouldn't reject it. When I send bits of myself to you, well you could say that I'm just reifying my thought in tones. I try to make everything I write, each piece, the best it can be as itself, but that doesn't mean I expect you to love each and every one. And if there's something you don't like, that's O.K., and doesn't imperil friendship/kinship. There are bound to be differences between us, and if there weren't, your letters wouldn't be as interesting to me as they are.

I think we'll just put Bruckner over to the side. Yes, he developed a counting fixation, had a morbid interest in corpses, was nonorcistic, quite authoritarian as a pedagogue, and in many ways a rustic all of his life. I feel a kind of compassion for the man, who erected monumental edifices to please his God, and recognize that his music is an acquired taste. So let us not make this any kind of bone of contention.

About politics, I really should have phrased things better, and didn't mean to tweak your nose so hard about George W. Naturally I assumed you supported him, and his policies, as a Republican. You voted for Ralph Nader. I might have voted for the Libertarian candidate, had I thought he had a snowball's chance in Hell of "making it". As I've said, we aren't presented with nationally viable candidates to vote for, just politicians to vote against, hoping for the lesser set of evils….

I don't feel competent to respond in any depth to your comments about Tintoretto. You've viewed his works in context. I've only seen a limited number of reproductions ( a very few originals at the L.A. County Art museum and in New York) Nor did I know that the products of his school were quite so dominating (in Venice, at least-from your point of view) When I think of him I think of good technique, high finish and something bordering on sentimentality. I believe that in general the best will out, at least in terms of informed perception. I've never heard of anyone placing him above, say, da Vinci, and though his works may have crowded out some artists who could have offered larger vision, greater depth, he probably occupies about the place that he should in the general pantheon. I'm reminded that Bach was really the third choice for the position of Cantor at Leipzig, behind Telemann and one other (Kunau, I think). Well, we still play Telemann because he was also a good composer, but despite Telemann's greater poularity at the time, it is old J.S. who we value the most.

You sort of asked about my whirlwind tour of parts of Germany and Austria. That was in the summer of 1985, which feels quite a long time ago now. This was in the company of a very good and wealthy lady, born in Germany, who had a doctorate in economics and had made many wise investments. She rescued me during a period in my life when I was nearly suicidal, wanted me to marry her and give her children (something I was just not prepared to go through again), and was willing to build a villa for me anywhere that I wanted to live, in Germany, Austria, wherever. I could never be accused of being a gold digger. I felt too keenly the fact that the financial resources were so much greater on her side, didn't feel that I had been all that great as a father with the children I already had (have) and could not have weathered the strain and pain having more would have entailed, and just could not manage her directive qualities. (It's one of my self-confessed failings. No doubt it relates to the time in my life when I was a crippled kid, in a sense, not allowed to do much of anything, and at everyone's mercy. I just can't stand being told what to do.)

Anyway, the qualities that sundered us aside, she was more than just an excellent guide, but our time was limited so that I couldn't experience everything that I wanted to, and missed even more that I didn't know much about but would have enjoyed. For a time we stayed with her mother in Koln, where I visited the cathedral and heard an excellent organ recital, but one necessarily taken in slowish tempo because of the excessive periodicity of the reverberation in that environment. Of museums, I experienced that museum of antiquities in what was then East Berlin (Pergamon? Something like that, which will come to me accurately in a day or two, no doubt.), the museum in West Berlin having to do with escapes over the still very much extant wall at that time, another museum there which was featuring Egyptian artifacts at the time, the Residence in West Berlin which was having an international flower show, and that bombed cathedral/monument, as well as the Brandenberg Gate (ostentatiously guarded by Soviet troops; there had recently been a shooting), the large park, and so on, and heard a concert with the Berlin Philharmonic. I enjoyed Berlin, and felt that it was a city with a lot of electricity. Made a joke as we were preparing to fly out through the corridor, and was delayed for half an hour as my passport was examined under a microscope. I felt very comfortable in Vienna, where I heard concerts by the Vienna Philharmonic and by Viennese piano students, saw a large exhibit concerned with artists who were Nazi collaborators (von Karajan appeared very high on that list, Richard Strauss very low) together with such memorabilia as the photo biographies of Hitler, Himmler, Goering, etc., that were distributed to children during the Third Reich, enjoyed the Prater, had torte at Sacher's, and so on. Forgot to mention Bonn and the BeethovenHaus, Linz, Salzburg, San Florian, and our attempts to see the remnants of the OberSalzburg, the trip through Bavarian mountainous country, the heady breakneck speeds on parts of the Autobahn in a rented car…I had a felt need to return to the U.S. the day before we were ticketed to fly, and insisted we do so. Good thing, or I would be here no more. The part of the airport Renata and I would have been in was blown up by terrorists (Frankfurt). I had no premonitions, but it can give me goose bumps to think of being in a line next to a planted bomb.

Back to the realm of the visual arts, my own forays into that realm have been more opportunistic than according to any plan, and I consider you to be more experienced and more knowledgeable than am I. I have seen the permanent collections at the L.A. County Art Museum, the NY Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Cloisters, at the Huntington, at the first of the J. Paul Getty Museums…(About that last I'd have to say that I found the context, the duplication of a sort of villa at Herculaneum (sp?) to be more interesting than the collection of mostly second class art. The da Vinci sketches there were good enough, and some of the period furniture was/is exceptional, but I think Getty got into the world of art collecting rather too late, after folks like A. Hammer and others among the wealthy had gobbled up most of the best "stuff" that wasn't already in museums elsewhere.) Of course I've seen a number of the traveling exhibits - a huge collection of Monet's water lilies, modern Italians, the artifacts exhumed by Carter and his team from King Tut's tomb, a large collection of objects and canvasses, etc., by Andy Warhol, and just about any exhibit by modern artists that came through town, since I guess you could say my proclivities lie in that direction. Sometimes I deliberately examine works by those artists who have reputations but don't strike me as exceptionally worthwhile, just to see if my own perceptions are just too personally skewed, or maybe I've just missed something. For instance, I went to an exhibit of a huge chunk of Rothko's work, thinking that maybe my range of appreciation was just too limited to have thought him special, or maybe I am/was just a clod after all, and at any rate I'd better experience his work first hand, since as we all know, reproductions only offer a limited kind of approximation of the works themselves, often with distorted color values and with little sense of scale and size. Well, his earlier, more figurative work proved to me that his later choices were not made because of limited technique, or because he had no aptitude for other approaches. I tried my best to become enthusiastic over the color effects, and what might be called color textures - some cool, some warmer, some offering subtle contrasts - but I finally left still thinking that here was a man stuck on one idea, one thought, who merely rang up seemingly endless small variations on a limited concept. I suppose there might be something admirable in the monolithic effect of the whole series, and in the single-minded pursuit of a singular end, but what a paucity of ideas.

One of the most stimulating exhibits I ever saw was of theatre plans, visual art works, architectural constructions (models) and such by artists working in the Soviet Union during that brief period between the Revolution and the crackdown on artists, musicians, poets and so on, when even some of the finest minds of that era thought social revolution also meant a revolutions in the arts. (This coincided, rather broadly, with the time of Shostakovitch's Second Symphony, and the beginnings of Soviet industrial realism in music. The earlier of Stalin's Five Year Plans in the economic sphere gave rise to such pieces as Moslov's "Iron Foundry" and Matheus' "Symphony of Machines", which includes a movement with the deathless title, "The Dnieper Hydroelectric Power Project".) I was impressed with the grandiose architectural designs of the near genius, Tatlin, and especially by the oils of the group who were called "Supremetists". (I still do not know the origin of that appellation.) There one saw paintings reminiscent of Duchamp, but with a difference, cubist works a bit like Picasso's, but with riotous colors, a veritable hotbed of modernist thinking that one would never guess came out of the Soviet Union. What was sad was then to read the brief bios of the artists - artist X, was sent to labor camp on such and such a date, and never heard from again, artist Y arrested on such and such a date and disappeared - again and again, and yet again. In the book based on interviews with Shostakovitch, "Testimony" (by Volkov I believe; my copy is not available to me at the moment), one learns much about the flavor of those times, when Stalin was, in effect, creating and enforcing a kind of cultural suicide. As but one small example, he had ca. 300 blind musician-singers shot because they knew only traditional folk melodies, and he considered them incapable of learning the new patriotic music.) Dmitri S. describes what it was like to keep a suitcase perpetually packed, waiting for the midnight knock on the door, because he had "seen" so many of his artistic friends just disappear. Anyway, I had had no idea of what to expect from the "Supremetists", and what a tragically sad but wonderful surprise it was to see these works that had been hidden away somewhere in the S.U., or taken out of the country but not exhibited, just before the curtain was drawn around that "country".

Did I ever mention that Shostakovitch, Kabalevsky, Krenikov (sp.?he was the party hit-man representative, the head of the Central Union of Composers, or whatever that pile of horse shit to which composers had to submit their music for approval was called at the time), and the writer Leonov all came to USC when I was a Freshman there? Shostakovitch looked just as he did in the film footage and photographs, sickly pale, with those super thick glasses, and smoking those oddly long Russian cigarettes with their oily looking paper. Kabalevsky looked a bit like a boojum, kind of like a gray, inverted carrot, but he conducted us quite competently in his Second Piano Concerto. We played their music for them, including Prokofiev (who had died about the same time as Uncle Joe Stalin). Dmitri seemed quite pleased with Wm Schaefer's arrangement for band of his Ninth Symphony, which he had not heard before. I found myself thinking, "What a wonderful opportunity to defect, since Krenikov can't keep his eye on Dmitri all the time", but of course his wife, and son, Maxim, were still at home, held as insurance that this "national treasure" would return. - One can never forgive those who were lesser composers than he, dragging the ailing Prokofiev before the central Committee and reading him the riot act for his "decadent, formalist music", something that Dmitri S. also suffered.

Time for me to cease bending your eye. If I include any more this will not fit into any known envelope. - You inevitably raise many issues which require introspection and deep thinking, which is of course one of your valuable attributes….Do not think that I ignore or gloss over anything you have to say just because you might not have an immediate response. On the contrary, you have a wonderful way of shaking me out of my complacencies, and your thoughts deserve the serious consideration that can only be had by living with them for awhile.

I'm hopeful that the surgery scheduled for May will be successful, and allow me to be fully ambulatory again. At that time, or I should say, after that time, when anemia should no longer be a factor, and I can confidently feel that I can make it from point A to point B without my left leg collapsing, I will definitely make it a point to confirm (or perhaps deny) that the Buddha and other treasures you mentioned are where you remember them being located. God, I hope I'm not becoming a whiner by telling you that for the last several months I have quite literally been in constant physical pain, which excessive amounts of pain killers only help to a limited degree. Standing in front of a class of students I have to consciously stop my legs from trembling, while my lower back-pelvic area feels like someone is striking me with a tire iron But I assure you, I will revisit those museums, and attempt to view them through your imagined eyes, just as soon as I'm able, and will report back ASAP.

All my best love to you too,

Dear Jackie,

These are further thoughts, provoked by your last letter (last if they're not crossing in the mail again). I'm typing with a non-erasable ribbon I accidentally bought, so any mistakes will necessarily be messily corrected (or not at all).

The historic Jesus - well that's a giant topic, and I can easily understand why you would be interested in pursuing it. I don't doubt that he actually existed, and that the central thrust of his message was generally as represented. One doesn't know how many of the miracles attributed to him were real, or symbolic or exaggerated in the retelling. My view of the bible in general is that it contains an interesting but distorted history, providing insights into the philosophies and psychology of certain Semitic tribes. Sometimes certain among my Christian friends try to persuade me of the veracity of the New Testament by pointing to the corroborative nature of the gospels, and I quickly point out that they were all written years after the events (it's easy to write prophecies after the fact), and that agreement doesn't necessarily mean factuality. The signatures near the beginning of the Book of Mormon attesting to the reality of Joseph Smith's golden plates don't persuade Catholics, Lutherans, Jews etc. of the veracity of the Nephi, etc. et al. Anyway, I think that treating the whole subject area of afterlife, the existence of God, the divinity of Jesus (or any other Holy Man) as truly knowable is largely an exercise in fantasy. With so many main stream religions, out of the way doctrines and multitudinous cults all claiming to have the true clue, they certainly can't all be right, and could easily all be wrong. I tend to think of "God" as a kind of trashcan category (meaning no disrespect) in that one can put almost anything in there and call it "God", personalizing it, objectifying it, attributing various qualities to it, with no real evidence but the say so of someone with an agenda of his/her own. And since the question of how God came to be created can't be answered, it's simply like placing the Earth on the back of an elephant which stands on a turtle. On what does the turtle stand? Existence probably just is, and if there's more to it, it's probably like the tendency of any energetic system to order itself in some way - call it the will to order, or the will to exist - it really doesn't matter much. Of course we all long for an afterlife, and hope we'll see loved ones who have died once again. But imagine what a horror it would be to have eternal life, and be responsible for a never ending consciousness, never able to just wink out. That's a far more fearful matter than death (I know you disagree) (though the matter of how one might die can be a legitimately fearful matter). If there's something after death, well, there it will be. If there is nothing after death, then to fear death is to fear nothing. We simply won't be around to observe ourselves in the undignified state of being dead. End of sermon.

{Parergon to the above: if there is such a thing as "Heaven" it must be highly personalized. A punk rocker would want such music in his Heaven, but I certainly don't. "Hell" would have to be equally personal. In Hitler's Hell he'd probably be Jewish} {And what about an instrumentality whereby we might actually accomplish things? It would be Hell to me to be an eternally passive observer.}

Just reread your wonderful third letter, and what a warm, reassuring and very welcome sentiment is found in the first paragraph. You really made my day, and more.
Jackie, you've not told me about your archeological work-where you went, what you did, except in somewhat inferential terms. Fill me in a bit, "would ya?"

And not too strangely, I suppose, I was thinking a couple of days ago that I never really got to know your father much at all. I really only saw him three times, you know. Once was quite en passant. Once was at Christmastime. There was angel hair on the tree, and other trappings of Christmas in your living room. Somewhat embarrassed, or I should say ill at ease (who could know what this rather taciturn and forbiddingly large man might think of the adolescent calling on his daughter), I played with your Lincoln logs. The only other time I recall was when your mother had gotten a new car, and he was saying, "that's a lot of automobile". Tell me about him. Was he related to Robert the Bruce, famed among the Scots?

In Re: The Third Reich
Yes, it's fascinating to me too, and I've read a bit about it also, starting in about 1959-60, right after the capture of Eichmann. The first I read was "The Scourge of the Swastika" by Lord Russell of Liverpool, then a number of topical books about Eichmann. Since a number of the sources I was reading quoted from "The Black Book of Polish Jewry", the first publication to include photos of the ghettos and mistreatment of the Jews, smuggled out of Germany, I thought I'd better have that one too, and had Rosemead Books track down a copy (o.p. even then). Since then I've gradually built up a fairly decent war library……

To talk about how Hitler could have become the idol of the German people would be to tell you what you already know. Your real question, how could the beast in man be so close to the surface, is best answered, I think, by looking at the dark spots within ourselves. Envy, fear, the admiring of strength which is only an inch away from violence, and the feeling that the world would be better off without certain people--I recognize some of these within myself, and of course deal with them in ways that I think are more constructive than kicking the Hell out of someone. I think I'm not alone in getting out anger and such in relatively benign ways. I have to honestly ask myself, if I had been born in Germany around 1927, and from the time I was six or seven had been brainwashed with Nazi ideology, played the board game "Judenfrei" with other children, had joined the HitlerJungen around ten or twelve, would I have been any better than they were? Of course with the body I was actually given I might have been a candidate for euthanasia, but I know that you understand me in principle. The answer to a question like that can be more than just frightening. Maybe that beast within us, like some of the rest, is hard wired right into the brain, and activated by the testosterone that courses through the veins of both men and women. Kill your enemy, fear the stranger…use force and violence to achieve your ends because it is so much more efficient for some purposes than persuasion…It seems that this beast has always been with or in us historically, with political and religious histories characterized by wars, torture, assassinations, and so on. In our own lifetimes we've had not only Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot in Cambodia, Amin, the list goes on, but persisting genocides and such in Yugoslavia, in African countries and elsewhere. Suppress the beast in one area and it seems to arise again in another. Perhaps the best that the most of us can do, those who are not really crusaders by inclination and who have dedicated ourselves to other than social causes, is to give our little inch of support to that which we believe to be just, and protest that which we feel is unjust…

You're right that the accomplishments of the polar explorers may seem to be cheapened by becoming commonplaces in time. But those, like you, who remain interested in "how things came to be the way they are" will never forget the Amundsens and Shackletons. In a way, the one we remember most is the one who didn't make it, Scott. I guess it is because of the epic and tragic qualities that his expeditions seem the most striking. Incidentally, the few color photos that Ponting (sp?) took, using a process involving dyed grains of starch, bring the reality of that last expedition into the present in a vivid way. I have seen only four. Perhaps more exist.

And that puts me in mind of a book I had to buy the moment it became available, of color photos taken in Russia (commissioned by Czar Nicholas), shortly before the Revolution. This involved a four plate process, exposed sequentially, one at a time, each of a different color, so that things which move are not well registered. But what a difference it makes to see life in Kazaan, in various parts of the country, and the only color photograph of Tolstoy - brings all of that era to life in a way the abstraction of black and white cannot. I showed this to an older lady friend of Dennis's (both now deceased), who said that it made real all of the stories her grandfather had told her of life in that area before the Soviet Union. He is supposed to have taken color photographs of the royal family as well, but it was hardly safe to be carrying them around the country while the Czar and his family were themselves being murdered, so he buried them in some undisclosed, and never found, location. I'd love to be able to see, in color, Nicholas, Alexandra and their children, resplendent in their finery. Perhaps he even took a color photo of Rasputin as well - The taking of the picture took about four-five seconds to complete, very fast for the times.

Well, I'm happy to report that I think I've found the solution for a way to write a piece that won't embarrass me or offend the audience for the Beach Cities symphony's concert. The final movement of this Serenade No. 2 is completed (I'm putting it into fair copy even now), and I have some tentative plans for the rest.

Yes, I have afflicted you with another tape, this time of comments to be used or be perused by any interested parties at the U of M prior to Prime Directive's concert, together with some other material that I don't think I sent you before. Unhappily I only just found out that the concert has been postponed to some undisclosed date because of the difficulty in getting together the much larger forces, larger than those called for in HOMAGE TO INGOLF DAHL, required for another piece also on the program. That makes my tape seem rather silly, which perhaps it is anyway. Armando Bayolo (which he pronounces "Byjolo") wanted me to speak to the faculty and students prior to the concert, and I had thought that this tape might act as a kind of substitute, maybe placed in the library for interested parties. Anyway, for what it's worth, this is a copy. I wish I had spoken more of feeling content now, and that my one broken front tooth (which I have got to do something about - it's right by the incisors) hadn't made me so nervous about articulation to the point that I actually stuttered at times, something I never do. But it's addressed to music students, not to a generalized audience, so that matters verging on the technical become more important than the rest.

Hearing my String quartet No. 1 is still a little odd to me, at this date. There I find the young Leroy staring me in the ear, pouring his heart into his music. I was about 20 years old when I wrote it, and it was not as much out of step with the times then as it is now. But things have a way of coming around again, and who knows?
Gotta go now. Do keep writing, dear heart.

Love,

P.S.
Actually this is a continuation of the same letter, a couple of days later, rather than a Post Scriptum proper.

First, a very brief medical update. The result of the tubeworm like experience of having an MRI, the radioactive bone scan, which unhappily did not leave me glowing in the dark (I was kind of hoping for that effect), and ordinary x-rays all confirm that I have a severely herniated disc in the lower spine, which accounts for why my left leg feels as though it's on fire all the time. Surgery is scheduled for mid-May, after which I'm hopeful that I'll no longer have to hobble around Boston clutching a cane and biting a mouthful of bullets. If I come out of it paralyzed or something, I'll just bail Kevorkian out of whatever jail he might be in currently. After several days without cigarettes I'll probably feel like committing mayhem in the hospital anyway, and maybe I'll be the one to end up in jail.

We have been very delicate, discrete if you will, in avoiding any discussion of our spouses, and our respective relationships. Perhaps it's a subject you'd rather leave unbroached, and it's one about which I'd feel rather uncomfortable discussing in letters, or probably even by phone. It's an "in person" kind of topic, I think, and one which is difficult in any case, because it's so easy to be unfair, and because of the implied confidences a relationship entails. I did pick up, before you were interrupted by someone at the door, that you and your husband do not communicate much any more. At this end, I will only say that there is a good deal of warmth and intimacy missing. It's a subject area we might take up one day, if you should like to do that, but at some time when we don't feel pressured for time, and when we're in each other's physical presence.

Jackie, you know that in some ways I'm a hard headed sonofabitch, and more inclined to believe in coincidence and serendipity than fate, but maybe…..there is some purpose in our both ending up on the East Coast at the same time. Wherever may come of it, I'm truly very happy that you are in my life again, even if only in an epistolary and telephonic way at present.

Among my friends in Los Angeles is Dr. Carroll Kearly, a philosopher who taught at LMU while I was there (he was there a good deal longer than I was, and I was there for fourteen years), and former Jesuit, now retired. He writes poetry of a kind often steeped in nostalgia, sometimes about his boyhood in Wendell, Idaho, sometimes of a more generally philosophic sort, and mostly about his observations related to characteristics of specific people. He has a good ear for the subtler kinds of poetic rhythm, only occasionally uses rhyme and in what I think is an apt way, and writes in a concretized métier, rather than being a deconstructionist, probably closest to such living poets as B.H. Fairchild and Mark Cox. Anyway he sometimes writes what I would call portraits of the homeless people he encounters, and interacts with, in his walks in Santa Monica. He presents them unvarnished, without sentimentality or pity, but with a kind of human, loving concern. Among his poems of this type are seven about "Nameless", a rather large woman of Italian descent possibly, who maintains pride in her privacy, in not sharing her life story. He has also written about others, including an informally connected couple.

I had seen many homeless when living in Los Angeles, especially around and near the area of City Hall and the County courthouse, sleeping on butterflied cardboard boxes, burning tires in the street to keep warm on chilly nights, sometimes living in tiny, hastily assembled structures fashioned from varieties of found materials, in untended alleys. As you know, there are fewer in Boston, since the weather does not favor sleeping outside and attitudes toward those who have fallen through society's cracks are a bit less benign in Massachusetts. But homeless there are, and some years ago I determined to choose one, come to know him/her some, and help him or her out in small financial ways from time to time.

My homeless person is Charlie MacDoogle, a burned out Viet Nam vet who served as a medical corpsman, and just saw too many bodies that he couldn't patch up, ministered to too many hopelessly wounded while under fire. There can be danger in this, because a person in need can attach himself to you like a barnacle, and might believe that you represent his way "out". But Charlie is not of this type, is far too independent to attach himself to anyone that I can see, and although he calls me his "friend", I encounter him only on a sporadic and ad hoc basis. I call him "Mr. MacDoogle", in part because I think such people receive little or no respect from most folks. He does not know that I have written a song about him, called Charlie, one of the few popular-idiom songs I've written that might fall somewhere North of Mary Chapin carpenter. There are questions that simply cannot be asked directly, but one day I will learn the secret of how such a person survives, I don't mean physically but psychologically, without any evident sign of promise for a better future, without any obvious goals or desires beyond just making it through one more day. I sometimes think he is a kind of POW in his own mind, but he speaks with pride of the past that destroyed him, and still wears his Marine Corps sweat shirt. Is there a point to telling you this? I don't know that there is, beyond expressing the idea that over the years I have found that more people than you might imagine have interesting or heart-rending stories if you have the patience to delve beneath the surface a bit, and ask a few, carefully chosen questions.

Glenn Gould - yes, I remember well the recording he made of the Goldberg Variations to which you introduced me, the first and I believe the better of his two commercials recordings of that work. His program notes were the best and most comprehensive in the business, spilling over even onto the liner jacket in that Columbia "lp" format. Oh, he could be eccentric at times, and sometimes nearly perverse in his interpretations, as in his final recording of late music by Brahms (from Op. 116, 117 and 118) in which he sometimes subverts Brahms' dynamic indications, following his own muse. But whatever he did, he did because he wanted it that way, and he had the technique to do whatever he wanted. And what a character. I remember a broadcast interview in which he commented on the noises he made while playing, saying words to the effect, "It's perfectly awful. I don't know why people put up with it." I have on "lp" the now rare recording of his string quartet, played by the Juilliard Quartet, and from this I'd have to say that he was a better pianist than composer. But even in that piece is the evidence of a mind always at work, agree with it or not, - A sidelight: my friend Ralph Grierson gave piano lessons to Gould's father when he lived in Vancouver, B.C. Evidently the father was less neurotic than his son, and didn't require the room temperature to be thus and so, warm milk baths for his hands or a super short piano bench. - Where will history place Glenn Gould in the pantheon of important pianists of our times? I suspect he will have his own, special niche apart from the brilliant and gregarious Rubinstein, the incisive and equally neurotic Horowitz, and the stunning Byron Janis (one of the relatively unsung geniuses of our age), because his way was so individual that nobody else would want to follow him there. But that spot that he earned, in the splendid isolation to which he largely confined himself, will doubtless be unassailable, and continue to provoke controversy in ages to come.

Speaking of troubled geniuses, even before that TV series about same, I read one of Oscar Levant's books, "Confessions of an Amnesiac". He wrote as he spoke, in a rather staccato fashion, paragraphic one liners. We always associate him with Gershwin, and few remember that he was responsible for Schoenberg writing his piano concerto, or that he sometimes essayed such out of the way repertoire as Anton Rubinstein's Piano Concerto No. 4. It's really a shame that he was being treated for his psychological problems in the brutal days of electroshock therapy and chlorohydrate. (He said that he was taking one pill that had nothing but side effects.) There was a pianist who would known how to play my piano sonata with no instruction from me, if he could have swallowed his anxieties enough to walk out on stage or not cancel the concert. His books contain some inaccuracies, by the way, about Toscanini, about who was conducting the Boston Symphony Orchestra when, and the like, but are very revealing with respect to their author.

In re: the enclosed. By now I'm sure that you recognize that with Waldo, my terrapin puppet companion, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and a little knowledge is, sadly, all that he has, I believe. He claims to have played harmonica in Beethoven's Twelfth Symphony, to have started up a drive it yourself (U-Drive) ambulance service and to have developed a process for making carbonated hamburgers. His most recent entries will speak for themselves.
Please forgive, if I have troubled your eye too long.
Love,

Final installation in a serial letter…

I couldn't leave you without expressing a reaction to your thoughtful comments about examined and unexamined lives, and changes within ourselves. No doubt we've all changed some as we've grown, and grown older. More information in our heads, more in the way of life experiences which give us a larger comparative basis for self-evaluation, a clearer sense of who we are, and with less desperate need to prove to ourselves and to others that we're worthy. But to over simplify a bit, it strikes me that in many fundamental ways we remain who we were, at rock bottom. (Can I use that term, figure of speech, with an archaeologist?) I think that you remain super intelligent, always searching and absorbing, always analyzing in a very independent way, and still have a warm heart. I remain a somewhat more single-minded person (though broader than formerly), with many of the other characteristics you will remember. My own heart may be bigger, and warmer, than was possible to me before I worked my way through at least some of my own bullshit. We can't have changed too drastically, in the places that count the mos