Setting the Tone: Essays and a Diary

by Ned Rorem

Overview

A sterling collection of essays, commentary, reviews, and personal recollections on art, love, and the musical life, from Ned Rorem, award-winning composer and author extraordinaire
Ned Rorem, the acclaimed American composer and writer, displays his incisive, sometimes outrageous genius for artistic critique and social commentary with a grand flourish in this engaging collection of essays and diary entries. Fearlessly offering opinions on a wealth of subjects—from the lives of the famous and infamous to popular culture to the state of contemporary art—Rorem proves once again that he is an artist who tells unforgettable stories not only through music, but with a pen, as well. Setting the Tone gathers together essays and commentary previously published elsewhere and combines them with pages from Rorem’s ongoing diary, offering readers a vivid and enlightening view of Rorem’s world along with an honest portrait of the author himself. Whether he’s lambasting critics and former friends and acquaintances, vivisecting opera, or presenting his views on theater, film, books, or composers and their music, Rorem is ingenious, incorrigible, and madly entertaining.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781480427747
Publisher:	Open Road Media
Publication date:	06/18/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	383
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Ned Rorem is one of the most accomplished and prolific composers of art songs in the world. Drawing on a wide range of poetry and prose as inspiration, his sources have included works by Walt Whitman, W. H. Auden, Paul Goodman, Frank O’Hara, Gertrude Stein, Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery, and Paul Monette. In 1976, Rorem received the Pulitzer Prize in Music for his orchestral work Air Music. His prodigious literary accomplishments include the publication of thirteen books, nine of which were released as ebooks by Open Road Media in the summer of 2013. Rorem lives in New York City.   
Ned Rorem is one of the most accomplished and prolific composers of art songs in the world. Drawing on a wide range of poetry and prose as inspiration, his sources have included works by Walt Whitman, W. H. Auden, Paul Goodman, Frank O'Hara, Gertrude Stein, Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery, and Paul Monette. In 1976, Rorem received the Pulitzer Prize in Music for his orchestral work Air Music. His prodigious literary accomplishments include the publication of thirteen books, nine of which were released as ebooks by Open Road Media in the summer of 2013. Rorem lives in New York City.   

Read an Excerpt

Setting the Tone

Essays and a Diary

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By Ned Rorem

OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA

Copyright © 1983 Ned Rorem
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4804-2774-7

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CHAPTER 1

THE PIANO IN MY LIFE

I.

I am my ideal pianist.

Quick, an explanation.

If I'd rather hear myself play than anyone, it's not that I'm better than anyone (there is no "better than"); it's that my fancy fills in missed notes, the inner ear camouflages mere sloppiness. I play just well enough for perfection, while virtuosos play too well for perfection. Most great pianists perform the same repertory. They can't all be right. But I am right for me. Perhaps the gambit should read: The only pianist for my idealized performances is me.

I have never needed to lament, "If only my parents had forced me to practice!"

In 1972, when I was forty-eight, I wrote in my diary on April 30: "Margaret Bonds is dead. So closes the miniature dynasty of female piano teachers who taught me all I knew by the time I was fifteen. Nuta Rothschild, Belle Tannenbaum, Margaret Bonds, two Jews and a Negro, all dead. In this day or any other it's scarcely revolutionary for a pupil to have a woman tutor. But for a white child to have a black music teacher was not standard practice in Chicago during the 1930s, and is there a reason not to be proud of it? (Margaret was only ten years older than I.)"

In 1975, while working on a "memoir" for Maurice Ravel's centenary, which occurred March 7, I made this aside: "Needing tangible references I remove from an old storage box, labeled Ravel: Piano, dozens of crumbling Durand editions procured in high-school days. Keyboard facility then was a curse; wanting quick results I acquired early the skill of fakery, and never practiced. Today my hands recall like yesterday how I counterfeited fingerings. I still play the music in the same wrong way. Would it have been so painful to have learned it right? (Recurring dream. Jailors tell me: Sight-read this unknown Ravel scherzo an augmented fourth higher than written, without an error, and you will go free. Miss one note and you are burned alive ... But who is the judge?)"

In 1978 on the sixtieth anniversary of Debussy's death, I talked with a friend, and later noted: "JH takes exception to the remarks on Debussy, refuting my claim that melody, like sex and food, is actual experience, enjoyable in the present as it unfolds. JH contends that harmony is Now; that melody depends on what has happened while harmony is what is going to happen. Well, both reflections—they are reflections, not assertions—hold water. Reflets dans l'eau."

Six years after Debussy died in Paris, I was born in Indiana where my father was teaching accounting at Earlham College. At the age of eight months I moved to Chicago, taking the elders with me. My parents, then financially lower-middle class (on a professor's salary), were culturally highbrow, and as liberal citizens they were already what they remain today: well-read left-of-center Quaker converts. Mother (Gladys Miller), whose younger brother had been killed at Belleau Wood in 1918, bore that trauma by joining the Society of Friends and becoming a "militant pacifist." Father (Rufus Rorem), the first in his enclave of Norwegian farmers to receive a Phi Beta Kappa, was fomenting the notions on medical economy which—once maligned as Socialized Medicine—would evolve into Blue Cross.

Although not specifically musical, our parents "exposed" my sister Rosemary and me to concerts, mainly high-class piano recitals.

I recall the hoary sight and sound of that archetypical genius, Paderewski, furrowing his brow 'neath a snowy mane and curving a digitus o'er his own Minuet in G. (Did you know that Paderewski's heart—his pickled heart—reposes in a Brooklyn bank vault, deposited there by patriotic Poles when he died in New York in 1941, a relic not only of the man as musician, but as first premier of the newly created Polish nation in 1919?)

I recall the giant specter of Rachmaninoff, his salt-and-pepper crew cut set off by a military tux, hovering over his inevitable Prelude in C-sharp minor which he deigned to offer as his after a gorgeous version—and my first hearing—of Beethoven's Opus 31, No. 3. I wasn't yet aware of Rachmaninoff as final embodiment of the nineteenth-century virtuoso wherein pianist and composer were one, the composer being not only his own best interpreter but a finished performer of other men's music. Nor was I aware of Rachmaninoff's self-destructive youth by which I would later justify the poignance of my own.

I recall the businesslike stance of Josef Hofmann, acolyte of the legendary Anton Rubinstein, seated at his forty-five-inch Steinway keyboard specially built to accommodate his little hands. Hofmann too was a sometime composer (pseudonym: Michel Dvorsky) and a sometime carouser who in 1926 became for twelve years the director of the Curtis Institute among whose students I would eventually be listed and among whose faculty I currently preach.

Was it not meet that, on reaching the age of reason, the artistically disposed son of intelligent parents should commence formal training in music?

All piano teachers are women, and they are all called Mrs., the noun—or is it an adjective?—of the safely mated or widowed. There exists no such breed as the male music instructor for beginners, men having more solemn concerns.

Such misconceptions are no less prevalent today than in 1930 when, age seven, I began to "take piano" from the first of seven women who would represent Art in my early life. Mrs. Pickens, who lived two blocks away on Chicago's Kenwood Avenue, wore purple, and served tea brewed from senna leaves after each lesson. With her guidance I quickly mastered "Cherry Blossoms," all on the black keys, and another more complicated number named "Mealtime at the Zoo" in which I crossed hands. Soon I graduated, to Mrs. Hendry, befriended by my parents at Friends' Meeting. At her students' recital on Blackstone Avenue I played, badly, the Brahms A-flat Waltz, after which I felt undeserving of the hot chocolate and oatmeal cookies served to the assembled families. To this day I'm queasy about eating if I've not worked well, and I still nurse a vague guilt—increasingly vague, thank God—about taking money for the exhaustingly agreeable task of composing music.

After Mrs. Hendry came Aunt Agnes—Mrs. Thompson—who was considered the musician of our clan. (Her daughter Kathleen became First Viola of the Toledo Symphony, married the First Flute, and their son Ross Harbaugh is the Cello of the New World Quartet.) But Aunt Agnes lasted for only an Oberlin summertime. In the autumn I began "taking" with Mrs. Davis, spouse of a paternal colleague, and in the spring came the luminous Mrs. Rothschild.

Now, none of these women, before Mrs. Rothschild, provided a sense of need. I may have been learning piano but I was not learning music. Nuta Rothschild was the Russian wife of art historian Edward Rothschild, and like many a sensitive university wife she had time on her hands. Our first meeting opened the gates of heaven. This was no lesson but a recital. She played Debussy's L'Île joy euse and Golliwog's Cake Walk and during those minutes I realized for the first time that here was what music is supposed to be. I didn't realize that this "modern stuff" repelled your average Music Lover, for it was an awakening sound which immediately, as we Quakers say, spoke to my condition, a condition nurtured by Mrs. Rothschild who began to immerse me in Impressionism. With Perry O'Neil, our grammar school's official genius (he had a scholarship, and was elsewhere a pupil of Rudolph Ganz), I would go Saturdays to the record booths of Lyon & Healy, and listen and listen and listen. Debussy led us forward to Ravel and Stravinsky, not backward to Brahms and Verdi, and I was unquestioningly at home with the garish roulades of Scarbo and the so-called percussion pianos of Noces before I'd ever heard a Chopin Nocturne. (I say "so-called percussion" because Stravinsky, like Copland after him, is said to have fostered a new approach to the piano. In fact, Mozart and Beethoven and Liszt and Mussorgsky all treated the piano for the percussion that it is. The difference between the keyboard of Stravinsky and, say, Rachmaninoff is not that Stravinsky treats the piano as a percussion instrument, but that, with his leaner harmonies and dearth of pedal, he treats it more percussively. Both are composing percussion music. A piano is always a piano until physically modified, as by John Cage's "preparations," when it becomes a new instrument, but still a percussion.) Such scores and discs as we could not afford with our allowances, we stole. I devoured Romola Nijinsky's dubious portrait of her husband, and Lockspeiser's biography of Debussy which remains, alas, with its mean inexpert biases, astonishingly the only extant book on the subject. I had half-learned all of Debussy's piano repertory when Mrs. Rothschild, upon the death of her young husband, left Chicago forever.

Like every child I hated scales. As soon as I was able to get around the keys I became more intrigued by improvisation than by practice. I spent whole days pounding our baby-grand Starck, making up pieces but not writing them down. (Except for the titles: "Tragic Bubbles on the Ruby Lagoon," "Corpse in the Meadow," "A Streamlined Carol.") Most parents do not have a pre-adolescent son who prefers Scriabin to softball, nor does every son assume that his classmates rush home after school, as he does, to listen to Delius.

"How do you plan to make a living?" asked Father, on learning I wanted to be a composer when I grew up. Apparently I replied, "What difference does it make, if I can't be a composer?" That answer was so un-American as to impress Father who, although a breadwinner, was also a not-so-sublimated baritone. To his eternal credit he agreed then and there to be supportive of the family freak. He has never been a Stage Mother, but Father nonetheless believed in work. It was time for a real teacher.

The Julius Rosenwald Fund in Chicago was not only the backbone of the Committee on the Cost of Medical Care of which Father was coordinator, but sponsor for Negro fellowships in the Arts and Sciences. Among the beneficiaries in those days were Katherine Dunham, W. E. B. Du Bois, Marian Anderson, Howard Swanson, Margaret Bonds. The last-named at twenty-two was a middle-western "personality," having played Carpenter's Concertino with the Chicago Symphony under the composer's direction, and being herself a composer of mainly spiritual arrangements and of original songs in collaboration with Langston Hughes. It was Margaret Bonds—Miss Bonds—who was to be my next piano teacher.

Every Saturday morning I boarded the streetcar for her house on South Wabash. At our first lesson she played me some ear-openers, The White Peacock by Griffes, and Carpenter's American Tango. Had I ever heard American music before? Fired by my enthusiasm, she assigned the pieces on the spot, with no talk of scale-and-trill practice.

Margaret Bonds played with the authority of a professional, an authority I'd never heard in a living room, an authority stemming from the fact that she herself was a composer and thus approached all music from the inside out, an authority that was contagious. She dusted off the notion that music was solely for home use. She also showed me how to notate my ramblings ("Just look at how other composers put it on the paper"), hoisting the ephemeral into the concrete: once his piece is on the page a composer is responsible for it, for it can now be reinterpreted by others, elating or embarrassing its maker.

The first piece I wrote down, "The Glass Cloud," was influenced by Margaret's other prize pupil, Gerald Cook. Gerald was a pop pianist and serious creator who would soon spend a term with Nadia Boulanger. In the years to come his identity with Margaret would shift from student to colleague as the two-piano team, Bonds and Cook, became a glamorous enterprise at Cerutti's in New York, and at Spivy's Roof. When Margaret went her separate way to marriage, motherhood, documentation of Negro song, opera writing, and death, Gerald turned into the greatest living accompanist of the Blues, working first with the lamented Libby Holman, then—and still—with Alberta Hunter. (Accompanists dislike that word and call themselves pianists. Once I identified Song as: "A lyric poem of moderate length set to music for single voice with piano." If the definition holds for everything from Der Doppelgänger to Le Bestiaire, with my own songs thrown in—and I don't write "accompaniments," I write integrated piano parts as important as the vocal—it must be expanded for the Blues which by their nature never repeat themselves the same way. Then what is Gerald Cook? A contradiction in terms, a composer of improvisations, a jazz accompanist who repeats himself literally, and whose repetitions become Art? Hear the discs with Holman and Hunter: how, beneath their subjectively raw but subtle and moaningly spoken incantations, he weaves an icy, classical, velvet, inexorable web to encase and soothe forever the open wound.)

Did I outgrow Margaret Bonds? Why were lessons discontinued? If there was an objection to a seeming glib jazziness chez elle, Margaret thought of herself as classical and deep. (Conversely, I feel as influenced by prewar jazz as by "serious" music. Not the tune itself but Billie Holiday's way with a tune taught me to knead a vocal phrase, just as Count Basie's piano playing still shapes my piano composing.) In any case Margaret and I lost track of each other until we had all moved East during the war. Then we remained close friends until she died.

Only last year I went back to Chicago—to accompany a vocal recital, as it happens. Not one old friend remains in the city which was once my world. The weird thing is how little has changed; a new cast of actors in the same old décor. Or almost the same. Nothing, nothing is left of the brief block of one-story artist studios just east of the I.C. tracks on Fifty-seventh Street. That was once Hyde Park's Montmartre. Rolf Beman, Georg Redlich, Gertrude Abercrombie, how many vanished painters, brought to the fore by the WPA, were toiling and giggling and drinking and dying within a Bohemia that casually bisected the university milieu of my parents! Charlie Biesel was the crosspoint. At one of his parties early in 1938 Mother and Father met and liked Belle Tannenbaum who became my next piano teacher.

Belle was a bigtime local virtuoso and free-lance professor, bitter rival of Molly Margolies who was Ganz's tenured assistant and scapegoat. She immediately tried to discourage my French disposition in favor of the more "honest" repertory of Haydn. Coincidentally, I got special dispensation twice weekly from gym to attend harmony classes in the Loop with expert Leo Sowerby, another stickler for basic training. Belle was maybe fifty, four feet eleven, plump with spindly calves, platinum hair, a huge bosom and tight black dresses, a coarsely amicable social style and the keyboard technique of Horowitz. I adored her. Thanks to Belle we cashed in the old Starck and invested in a new Steinway "B." I can still see us that afternoon in Lyon & Healy's vast storeroom crowded with instruments like wingèd horses, Belle testing the mahogany lids with her tiny fists, kicking at the brittle wooden legs which she likened to her own "piano legs" (though aren't true piano legs those foot-thick cylinders found on earlier models?), sitting now at this keyboard, now at that, each time easily playing—as though opening a faucet of nectar— the infinitely melancholy Prelude in G by Rachmaninoff.

Under Belle Tannenbaum's tutelage I memorized the first movement of Grieg's Piano Concerto which, on June 21, 1940, I performed, in my white graduation suit, with the American Concert Orchestra, a subsidiary of the WPA's marvelous Illinois Symphony, with one William Fantozzi, conductor. That is the only time in my life I have played with an orchestra.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Setting the Tone by Ned Rorem. Copyright © 1983 Ned Rorem. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Prologue
• I DIARY
  • The Piano in My Life
  • Of Vanity
  • Being Ready
  • Paris in the Spring
  • Nantucket Diary, 1974
  • On Edmund White’s States of Desire
  • Setting the Tone
  • Being Alone
• II PEOPLE
  • Women in Music
  • Misia
  • Remembering Janet
  • Cosima Wagner’s Diaries
  • Boulanger as Teacher
  • Thomson as Teacher
  • Messiaen and Carter on Their Birthdays
  • When Paul Jacobs Plays Debussy
  • Thinking of Ben
  • Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich
  • Boulez
  • Cocteau and Music
  • Vera Stravinsky’s and Robert Craft’s Stravinsky in Pictures and Documents
  • Stravinsky at 100
  • An Auden
  • Courageous Coward
  • Shaw: The Great Composers
• III THE MUSICAL VOICE
  • Teaching and Performance
  • The American Art Song
  • More Notes on Song
  • Fauré’s Songs
  • The Mélisande Notebook
  • Fauré and Debussy
  • Considering Carmen
  • Notes on a French Bias
  • A Triptych Notebook: Reactions to the Theater Pieces of Ravel, Poulenc and Satie
  • Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Critic
• IV EARLY PIECES
  • Writing Songs
  • Song and Singer
  • Listening and Hearing
  • Composer and Performance
  • Arthur Honegger
  • The Beatles
  • The Avant-Garde as Démodé
  • Around Satie’s Socrate
  • Paul Bowles
  • Remembering a Poet
  • Remembering Green
• About the Author
• Index
• Copyright Page