THE DUSKY GEM: a Musical Autobiography
Introduction
What follows purports to be an autobiography documenting the evolution of my musical style, and it is true that the compositions I’ve chosen for review appear in chronological order. But I have allowed the narrative to digress - I might almost say these digressions, forming a meditation on the course of my life, are my true subject, the musical works under discussion providing for that meditation a tenuous framework.
That life whose course I wish to trace I now see as a failure - not in the sense of unrealized promise, but of compromised ideals and disillusioned dreams. But in that recognition lies the possibility of change, and in any case casting guilt - on the self, on others - is less helpful than seeing the world as a work in progress, a bright and precious gem rising from out the dusky haze of the past.
It may seem odd to find so much attention lavished here on a body of work that’s virtually unknown, some of which has already fallen irretrievably into oblivion. But despite my messianic yearnings (documented below) I never was any good at self-promotion, and with the coming of the internet I abandoned the task completely, so it’s possible that, despite the obscurity of its maker, this music has some value. In any case it is sometimes true that the experiences and insights of artists whom we consider modest in stature are especially penetrating, for the very fact that they lack that genius which, in the case of the true masters, renders self-reflection unnecessary.
As an autobiography this work is woefully incomplete: a full description of those people closest to me over the years is missing for the simple but embarrassing reason that, in my habitual self-absorption, I rarely paid them the attention they deserved. My memory is both inaccurate and selective, with the consequence that the past appears to me now in the form of an archipelago, a series of vivid fragments afloat in a sea of oblivion. At least one will find here no scurrilous tales, no scathing assaults on the character of colleagues or embittered friends. My own shortcomings and flaws, however, form a crucial part of the narrative; if I write of them with a certain humorous effect that should not be understood to mean that I take them lightly. I fall asleep most nights sighing audibly over a lifetime of regrets.
Prologue
My grandparents came to New York City as teenagers in the early years of the twentieth century - on my father’s side from Calabria, on my mother’s side from rural Greece - never having used a telephone or ridden in an automobile, and they never looked back. I, on the other hand, having been spared their experience of the stifling heat and crumbling stone, the ignorance and the poverty of their birthplaces, like to imagine that my predilection for vocal music can be traced to Italy, the land of song, and that those deeper convolutions sometimes found in my work bear the mark of my Byzantine inheritance. This proposition is dubious, not least for its geographic fuzziness, but I offer it as evidence of my desire to avoid that mythologizing element one finds so often in the self-narratives of modern musicians like John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen, wherein the author seeks as much as possible to disavow his past, to deny the formative influence of family, of teachers, and of friends, and to appear miraculously to have sprung from out the sky.
In fact the question of identity is as emotionally fraught as it is ultimately unfathomable. For those characteristics we acquire both through nature and through nurture, though impossible to deny, and often quite positive, nevertheless strike us as an imposition, a condition to which we have been yoked without our consent, while those aspects of our behavior that we choose, even if through the exercise of poor judgement, give us a certain pride, reinforcing as they do the belief that our lives are independent and our paths free.
The real problem, of course, is language, that precious tool by which human beings communicate, and of which music forms a special sub-category. Phrases like nature and nurture and freedom and bondage enable us to form meaningful distinctions in the absence of which choices and actions would be difficult, but I suspect that such antitheses, at a deeper level, are illusory, or, at most, meaningful in a limited and purely subjective way, so that our understanding of ourselves and of the world must always be, on the one hand incomplete, while on the other hand elegantly suited to our needs. Like birds and like flowers, we know what we need to know, each in our fashion, while those ultimate questions, to which our minds are drawn irresistibly, remain for all our lives the jealously guarded secrets of the universe.
My mother and my father both had the wisdom, while still young, to embrace those elements of their cultures they found worthy while refusing to be defined by their limitations, one crucial example of this being their decision to marry outside of their ethnic boundaries, a choice that brought upon both their heads a host of recriminations the modern reader would find difficult to comprehend, and that resulted in my siblings and I being raised in what was very much an American household where the most noticeable vestige of Old World living was the prominent use, in our meals, of olive oil.
I grew up alongside a sister and two brothers, and though our parents never acknowledged any hierarchy amongst us siblings, I took it upon myself, in a quiet but methodical way, to assume a certain unwarranted authority, particularly over little Joseph, whose mischievous designs I delighted in thwarting, going so far as to surprise him, leaping out from behind the shower curtain in the dark when at dinner he would excuse himself from the table to go to the bathroom with the intention of flushing his vegetables down the toilet, our actions causing my father to raise his eyes heavenward, and eliciting from my mother, unimpressed as she was both with my brother’s shenanigans and my unsolicited vigilance, the simple command to return to the table and finish our dinner.
By dint of their own efforts and without the benefit of any example my parents had risen from the ghetto to the middle class, acquiring along the way an astonishing amount of culture and erudition; they were determined to provide us with those opportunities which they as children had lacked. And so our household was filled with the sounds of classical music and, beginning at the age of nine, I took music lessons. Thus did I find myself, in our Irish-American neighborhood, like Chopin in Paris, in the position of the exotic “outsider” who played the piano.
It was my great good fortune to have as my instructor a Hungarian emigre of unusual talent and insight, and an enthusiast of the music of Bartok, whose Microcosmos - a collection of children’s pieces that introduce the young musician to novelties both rhythmic and harmonic - she insisted her students learn. I can still see, in my mind’s eye, my father’s face in the back of her living room on the occasion of one of our recitals, twisted in a grimace, though I will never know whether it was the bitter Hungarian brew she served or the dissonance of the repertoire she chose that was its cause.
My enthusiasms were many. In school I once constructed a diorama that earned the praise of my teacher, though my mother, characteristically laconic and practical, advised me, “Take it easy - it’s not that great,” effectively arresting, for the next forty years, my artistic development. My literary efforts met with firmer encouragement, and my friends and I formed a school magazine and newspaper. Around the age of eleven I wrote a short story in which I questioned, for the first time, the nature of my responsibility to the world’s poor. Doubtless such moral compunctions had much to do with my Catholic upbringing (for being a child I took the Gospels literally, which is to say as they were intended to be taken) but in addition there was in my nature, even at that early age, a streak of dreamy Romanticism. I would lie awake in my bed at night constructing elaborate fantasies in which I featured as the heroic underdog - a runaway slave freeing Jesus from the cross, or a peasant who rescues a princess from the clutches of a glutinous monarch: I was the kid who saves the world.
With the coming of adolescence music became for me both more important and more vexing. I remember skating about the hockey courts with the memory of some Mozart sonata in my head and suddenly being assaulted by the sound of a boom-box. The grainy vocals, the crashing drums, the sexual abandon, were a revelation, and, as if in an effort to retreat into the innocence and simplicity of childhood, I skated away, attempting to recall my sonata. But its elegant symmetries, its emotional restraint, its timbral purity, now seemed a puerile facade masking something dark and vital. Later that evening, as I practiced the piano, the Viennese master regained his supremacy in my heart so completely that, when I attempted to recollect the experience with the boom-box, its memory struck me only as vulgar and shameful. Perhaps here, for the first time, I became aware that, trapped within one’s body, there are, it seems, many and competing selves.
Meanwhile, as I skated, unbeknownst to me, a girl, a few years younger than me, was watching (though unaware, I’m sure, of my peregrinations). To her I was “Joe’s brother,” and in the years to come, after many and tortuous turns of fate, she would become the enduring love of my life. Thus does the future sometimes reveal itself to our gaze though in the present we see it not: for our actions can only appear to be freely chosen on the condition that we remain oblivious to their consequences.
When I was about fifteen, my teacher, sensing my serious nature, made the unlikely and inspired suggestion that I familiarize myself with the symphonies of Anton Bruckner, and it was through the experience of those vast and sublime sonic landscapes that I first became aware of that noumenal essence to which musical sounds stand as signifiers. From that moment, the world of keys and chords, of themes and developments, became for me more deeply real than that of tables and chairs, and to become a musician, to learn to speak fluently in this alternate, magical language, was my greatest desire. These many years later I can say with confidence that I’ve mastered the grammar, but, to my surprise, to my frustration, and to my delight, I’m still not sure what it all means.
I sleep-walked through high school, and so my parents rejoiced at my discovery of a vocation as I entered, in my freshman year of college, the halls of the Manhattan School of Music. Little did I know it would become for me, as a teacher, my second home, and the vibrant center of my musical life. They rejoiced - but with a certain skepticism, belonging as they did to that admirable generation which, never having had the luxury to develop its own artistic talents, found it difficult to believe in the existence of such qualities (piano lessons notwithstanding) in its progeny.
Their doubts were probably justified: I have a good ear, a sensitive touch on the piano, and no lack of creative imagination, but a lifetime of exposure to remarkable musicians has taught me the same lesson I’ve learned through decades of pick-up hockey: there are people out there who can blow me out of the water.
I’m ok with that. I inherited from my father (as my children have inherited from me) a steadfast belief in doing with my life what I wish to do, for its intrinsic pleasure and value, while caring little for the opinions of others. The reader can judge for himself, as this story unfolds, the merits and the drawbacks of that attitude.
Like a desert flower inundated with sudden rain, I blossomed, growing almost overnight from a callow child into a husband, father, graduate student, and professor. I had pulled up anchor and set sail upon the sea of life - like everyone else, but in my unique way, without the necessary preparation which, alas, only experience can bestow.
One: The Apocalypse of Saint John
My life as a composer began in the parking lot of an outdoor shopping mall in Yonkers on a summer afternoon in 1980. I was twenty-three, and had been writing music for some time, as I imagined, in search of a “voice”: I discovered that voice, or invented it, then and there, under the spell of Saint John the Evangelist, portions of whose Book of Revelation I had decided to set to music in the form of an oratorio. The godparents at this occasion were Olivier Messiaen (whose example persuaded me that one could be heroically religious in a secular age, that dissonance could be ecstatic - in short, that the practices of the Catholic Church could coexist with those of the musical avant-garde) and Johann Sebastian Bach (a series of whose cantatas I was resurrecting in their tarnished Lutheran majesty before a dumbfounded congregation in my role as music director at the Church of the Good Shepherd).
The shopping mall, as impressive a monument to modern materialism as are the cathedrals of France to medieval faith, represented for me a kind of hostile stronghold, chief glory of an evil empire in whose midst my indignant soul was incited to creative rebellion.
Not that I sought the place out - I’d have been content to stay away and hone my craft in a more congenial setting: I was there for the sake of my young wife - that is, my first wife, a lyric soprano who acted, at that time in my life, as a kind of liaison between the realm of art (she sang my songs) and the domain of worldly pleasures (she took me to malls). As she shopped (for shoes, for blouses, for jeans) I wrote (of the seven trumpets of Judgement Day), sitting in our car in the parking lot with the windows down. As time would tell, our temperaments and tastes diverged perhaps too widely to provide the basis for lasting happiness; but it was in the reflection of her fond gaze that I first recognized in myself (perhaps too well), at the dawn of adulthood, a man of unlimited potential.
The conviction I cherished - that the human race was in need of redemption - I trace to that Roman Catholic upbringing that held so natural an appeal for my serious and romantic nature. I now see that influence as a mixed blessing. On the bright side, its clearly articulated values galvanized me, and rescued me from triviality. On the darker side, the certainties of its creed encouraged my intransigence and intolerance, while discouraging that spirit of curiosity that is the natural state of the young.
As for the music, it was, I believe, a minor miracle: flawed, to be sure, but hot like burning coals. And epic - a solid hour of vocal solos (the Evangelist as tenor, Jesus as baritone, God the Father as basso, an angelic soprano) surrounded by orchestral conjurations. I’ve learned a thousand tricks of the musical trade since then, but never come closer to a real breakthrough. In a sense, my life after that has been a big anticlimax.
So many things I did back then for the first time I now see as establishing patterns of behavior I’ve adhered to unknowingly ever since. In my impatience to hear the work I hastily assembled an ensemble of uneven talent, and with minimal rehearsal produced a rather messy performance. Afterward I seemed not to care, being convinced that in due time there would be many and fine performances, for the artist, like the lover, finds it difficult to comprehend that his feelings are not shared by all the world. But my career is a story of premieres with no second performances, and in any case the score of the Apocalypse was thrown away one day in a frenzy of cleaning, while the single cassette tape upon which it sounds were recorded has been lost. Vestiges of that work and those that followed exist in a sextet composed years later, where they are counterpointed with other favorite themes from my youth, forming a vivid impression of my unconscious musical mind. Vivid, but private, and half the pleasure of that sextet - that half that recognizes with fondness the network of allusions - is accessible only to the composer.
From the fire and the ice of Revelations I moved on. Just as the early Church, finding the apocalyptic moment delayed indefinitely, relaxed its eschatalogical fervor, elaborating its ceremonies, developing its doctrine, erecting its places of worship, so I came to develop that more controlled, that subtler style one finds (or could have found until I threw away the scores) in those subsequent oratorios, The Last Supper and the Exultet. The early, “Christian” phase of my work is rounded out by the opera, The Legend of Saint Julian, the Hospitaler Knight, with a libretto adapted from Flaubert.
Through that entire period I disdained all new music, except for my own and that of Messiaen, as naught but passing fashion; it seems I was anxious to do this, for there lurks in the prospect of pluralism a threat to the supremacy of any one voice. How I was to regret that dismissiveness later, as I discovered, with belated wonder, the marvels of Liget, of Stockhausen, of Takemitsu - too late to be of use to my development!
First Interlude
But none of the above was meant to be: there is another life I was destined for, a life that I’d nearly forgotten, the realization of which is perhaps still possible: a life of service in the Peace Corps.
For, as that short story written in my youth reveals, I knew, from an early age, of the family of man, and it was with remorse each day that I threw away enough food to sustain a child in Africa. But the compromises and hypocrisies of this world are woven with great subtlety, and as one grows, the limpid honesty of youth is clouded by personal ambition. There was a moment, as I was completing my undergraduate work, with career prospects looming alongside the lure of love, that my conscience called out to me one final time, beckoning me back to pure and foolish hopes, but I turned away, consoling myself with the thought that music (which is what I wanted to pursue) could change the world (which is what I felt I should do). These many years later the fatuousness of that proposal is laid bare to me, though it took nearly a lifetime to face the truth, a truth I’d never have arrived at but for the indifference of the world, along with the growing conviction that I’ve nothing left to say. So here I sit, a bogus messiah, now in search of his own redemption in the rice fields of Cambodia.
Two: The Transcendental Railroad
Around the turn of the millennium, on a sweltering August afternoon, I find myself standing inside a large, empty, outdoor swimming pool in Brooklyn. Five loudspeakers have been set around the perimeter, from each of which prerecorded electronic music will soon be sounding. The audience (whom I was assured would number in the hundreds and who would soon be arriving) will be encouraged, through my program notes, to move about “from station to station, lingering as they like, enjoying the in-betweens, choosing their own path, creating their own adventure.”
Things go wrong. The batteries powering the music run low, causing the sounds to slow and deepen in a moribund glissando. A construction site nearby commences drilling, so that those precious and complex sonorities I’ve created with such care now are mingled with the noises of the street. A rogue free spirit takes from her backpack a number of empty soup cans she carries about with her for such occasions, tosses them on the cement floor, and invites some of the neighborhood children to kick them about. In the midst of this confusion an earnest young couple, perhaps new to the New York scene and eager to enter into its spirit, asks me when, exactly, the music will begin…
The debacle of The Transcendental Railroad marked the culmination of years of growth and development, both musical and spiritual. Already in the late 80’s I was gravitating toward a more pantheistic view of the world in works such as Light Transfigurings, wherein patterns of pitch, rhythm, and timbre hide beneath a random-seeming surface. I became sympathetic to eastern and ancient spirituality, and found, in the music of those cultures, a cultivation of tone-color and nuance like unto mine.
I have often wondered since then about the motivations that led me, around this time, to turn away from my Catholic heritage, toward the cyclic theories of Hinduism and Buddhism. For in my personal life I was not blameless, and though I remained a steadfast and loving father, I was (as I’ve been told) a difficult partner. Did I prefer to the non-negotiable prospect of eternal torments promised by the Church the opportunity, over countless incarnations, to mend, at my leisure, my errant ways? We shift our positions, we alter our opinions, we change religious affiliations, we move worlds, before we are willing simply to improve ourselves.
The three deeply related aspects of my musical language that emerge in this period are the employment of electronics (as in New Mongol Warrior), the prominence of percussion (as in Ceremony of Mythical Beasts), and the exploration of microtonality (as in A Beating of Angels’ Wings); the work in which these aspects are united is The Mythmaker’s Tale, an ambitious attempt to reconcile the raw energy of rock music with the sophistication of classical structures - it’s Mozart and the boom-box revisited - all at the service of an eclectic religious narrative.
The thread that unites these endeavors is the idea of creative spirituality. For as it turns out my interest in the ancient east was passing, and served to sever a bond; in its aftermath I came to the conclusion that the modern world requires its own authentic ritual forms. And so, shirtless, with beads about my neck and a white horn glued to a backwards baseball helmet, I became Tzhing the unicorn, symbol of creative imagination, improvising at the keyboard in The Language of Wonder and Delight, seeking through timbral richness to arrest the temporal flow, to penetrate the plenitudinous present, to capture the eternal moment.
It is significant that both the complex, fluidly metamorphic, and above all novel timbres I fashioned and the microtonal melodies I played are based on the integer relations found in nature’s harmonic series: the consequent blurring of the distinction between what we invent and what we discover reveals my sympathy at that time for the music and mystical thought of Alexander Scriabin (an artist rivaling me in self-esteem but with better reason).
With a giddy sense of a secret mission I lived back then a double life: by day I was a mild-mannered professor, espousing the values of the Classical tradition; at night I’d slip into a nearby phone booth and emerge as a superhero of the avant-garde, boldly going where no one had gone before. New sine-wave combinations, I would point out, make new timbres, and new timbres open up a world of new feelings - as much to the surprise of the composer as the listener. And since the creative process now occurred at the micro-level of tone-construction (a kind of genetic engineering applied to music) the concepts of rhythm and form were necessarily altered in dramatic fashion as well, so that events unfold both more quickly and more slowly than in conventional music.
I think I enjoyed, in those days, appearing both quixotic and down-to-earth, the quirky iconoclast and the Little League coach. More seriously than ever I cherished the hope of transforming society through art; it’s almost as though the more outlandish my dreams became ( I pictured images of Tzhing plastered across the buses of New York) the greater was my confidence in their realization. Not that I had any concrete plans - God knows, I was busy enough between work and family - only that old naive certitude (that can probably be traced to my introspective nature, for in solitude, undisturbed by confrontation with the world’s intractability, the imagination blossoms in strange ways) that one day everyone would see things my way.
This attitude had repercussions both at work - where I failed to apply myself adequately and build a career (but how could one worry about becoming the chair of a department while struggling to alter the landscape of the universe?) and in my private life, where my love and friendship were sought by people whose feelings deserved more consideration than my hubris and sentimentality would allow. Looking back on my life, my keenest regret is that I could not summon more often the self-confidence to be compassionate and kind.
The sense of imminent transformation, the feeling that big changes were on the horizon, shared by Scriabin and Messiaen before me (though none of us anticipated an apocalypse with such breathless suspense as to prevent us from enjoying our daily pleasures), occasionally gave way to the realization that it was all a dream, that the world’s indifference was permanent and absolute, even that my music was of little consequence beyond the satisfaction afforded me by its creation. This insight, intermittent but profound, required an explanation which, after some effort, I arrived at: the world, I concluded, no longer needed a savior, and the idea of artistic genius was a vestige of outmoded Romantic thinking. In my new utopian vision the boundary between performer and audience would disappear, and each individual would discover his personal expressive voice - in which case my failure to impact the world became, rather than a flaw, a virtue. Thus does the superman will the destruction of his cosmic role - provided that destruction is accomplished by him, in an ultimate, supremely egotistical, salvific act.
So back and forth I swung (indeed the pendulum is still in motion) between an exaggerated sense of my destiny and a self-effacing equanimity, this being one of numerous examples which seem to indicate that life presents us with a series of irreconcilable, mutually exclusive propositions. Were it not, I think, for the fact that we find it impossible to espouse two contradictory positions at the same time, but only in alternation, we’d be incapable of acting, of making a decision, even of moving our feet.
In spite of all these philosophical and moral contradictions, and despite the fact that, by the time of the Transcendental Railroad, I had come to feel that the modern mentality had outgrown its sympathy for myth and ritual, the music of this period still seems compelling to me today, and I find little in it to regret besides the continuing bad performances. But what can beauty signify in a fallen world, and what can love mean in a heart corrupted?
Second Interlude
Somewhere around the midpoint In Proust’s novel, In Search of Lost Time, Marcel, the protagonist, falls in love with a girl named Albertine, despite - or perhaps on account of - her being ill-suited for him in every way. The author tracks the consequences of the relationship to their inevitable, tragic conclusion with remarkable insight, humor and sympathy.
But Marcel, as faithful readers of this gigantic novel will have remarked, should have known better, for, as they know from an earlier episode, he was aware of a similar love affair from years earlier, involving an old friend of his family, Charles Swann, whose reckless passion for the courtesan Odette blinded that highly respected man of society for years to the true, vulgar nature of his beloved.
And I, as a reader of Proust, should have known better as well. But in my forties, my first marriage long over, and my second long-term relationship in shambles, I too succumbed to the dubious charms of a much younger woman, and found, to my temporary amazement and delight, that, in Proust’s phrase, “ a life more real and true” was suddenly mine. The world became for a while a magical kingdom where all I had desired - nay, desires of which I’d never dared dream - were granted, and, like Swann, like Marcel, I could never understand why my acquaintances seemed not to share my enthusiasm, but to be shaking their heads.
It was a sham. And when the spell was broken I was left shaking my own head, wondering how ever I could have been so mistaken, and acted in a manner so contrary to my nature. Those closest to me, with exquisite kindness, pretend to this day that the episode never occurred, but in truth it did, and that leaves me puzzled.
For it seems to me now that the “normal” me, that persona I present for public view, who disappeared precipitously and without a trace during that period, only to reappear, much abashed, in its aftermath, is little more than a facade, an artificial construction designed by some deeper self of whom I am unaware. At the same time, that self whom I became for a brief, intense period, who experienced that miraculous breakthrough to a deeper plane of existence, appears to me now as a kind of comic monstrosity, his revelation an embarrassing delusion. Reality itself, it seems, is unfathomable, and in that case it should not surprise us that we are to ourselves an enigma, nor that the object of desire, so fervently sought in myriad forms, should prove unnameable.
The demise of this affair inaugurated a crisis for me, personal and creative. I became aware, for the first time, in a real sense, of the meaning of death, and found its prospect terrifying. It was as if those turbulent emotions that had been slumbering within me, and that found expression in this episode, had revealed to me the existence, beneath the rational surface of daily life, of a substratum of chaos, an irrational ground where can be found those primordial feelings one knows as life begins and will remember suddenly at its end.
For those feelings there are no words, and music, a kind of language of its own, also fails. What’s left is terror, mute and inarticulate, a negative reflection of that exalted state formerly revealed to me. In order to express these emotions (and to do so seemed to me crucial) I turned to visual art, a field in which I had shown little inclination since, decades earlier, my mother had dismissed my diorama. Like a child, like a primitive, like the Abstract Expressionists of mid-20th century New York, I began to paint, unencumbered by technique or tradition, without plan or purpose, searching through the world and through the mind for I knew not what.
Eventually words returned, and finally music. But, to his surprise and delight, the bold purveyor of the avant-garde now found himself connected to a school, a member of a group, part of a tradition.
Three: The Ofterdingen Phenomenon
It all began innocently enough. In the Spring of 2003 I was teaching an elective, Musical Styles; I thought it would be instructive to ask the students, in addition to studying the scores of various composers, to create little pieces emulating those great masters. For the final project I proposed that each student invent a musician from the past and write a piece in his name that exemplifies his style. By way of demonstration I decided to create my own imaginary man and music.
But immediately it became evident to me that an individual voice could only arise from a real personality, so it became necessary to invest this character with a biographical sketch outlining his life, work, and influences. That life, those works and influences, in turn required a world in which they took place - and here I made the fateful decision to locate that world not in our past, but in the past of an alternate universe, parallel to ours, with its own history.
The composer I named Heinrich von Ofterdingen, the piano piece, The Blue Flower. Waxing enthusiastic, I then created an alter-ego for myself, the zany musicologist Peter Ceniti, who claims responsibility for the discovery of this gem in a cave in Germany where, he says, it leaked through a rift in the space-time continuum, though he is widely suspected of composing it himself, harboring as he does the conviction that he is a Romantic genius living in the wrong time. The delusions of Professor Ceniti are encouraged and amplified by his friends in the Ofterdingen Gesellschaft, who proceed, over the next seven years, to discover more works by Ofterdingen and to scrutinize them with their scholarly gaze.
It was literature at this time, more than music, that provided me with creative models - the works of Calvino, Nabokov, and especially Jorge Luis Borges. But whereas, in that writer’s short story, the imaginary world of Tlon is only said to have been constructed “in vastness and in minute detail,” in the case of the Ofterdingen Phenomenon I really did the work, composing symphonies, chamber music, and vocal works, each accompanied by an explanatory monograph.
My happiness knew no bounds, my fecundity no limits. In a way no modern musician can be, I was free from stylistic anxiety, belonging as I did to a brotherhood, an artistic (if imaginary) community, esoteric and arcane. The transparency of the conceit, the silliness of the premise, I felt, deflated any potential pretentiousness: behind the mask of an unknown master, the frustrated fictive scholar could aspire to beauty, could sing of love, while the real composer, the man of ceaseless searching, could discover, through pretence and in a conventional language, that elusive, authentic voice.
The musical style one finds in these works differs from that of our nineteenth century in important ways. In preference to the familiar dichotomy of major and minor keys, Ofterdingen’s system (influenced by the poet Hoelderlin who, in that alternate universe, enjoys a high reputation) features three modes, the Heroic, the Lyric, and the Fantastic, which, along with the supple rhythms, the varied textures, the spontaneous forms one finds in the music, speak of a happier, less complicated world than ours.
To heal the wounds of time, to remake the past, to free ourselves from a dark inheritance, so as to make possible a brighter future - this was the serious business going on behind the scenes. Which shows, I suppose, that I still clung both to those old, messianic dreams (albeit now disguised beneath a display of self-deprecating humor), and to the belief that music could change the world. At the same time, the Ofterdingen Phenomenon raises provocative questions of an aesthetic nature, for the existence of this sincere Romantic music seems to suggest that beauty, even beauty of a certain artistic quality, even in the context of a somewhat conservative language, is still possible in our time, despite all that’s been written, despite the calamities of the 20th century - but on the condition that we believe, inaccurately, that beauty to have been fashioned in the remote past.
But Heinrich von Ofterdingen wouldn't stand still! - and this is evidence of how life-like he’d become: from one work to the next his style exhibits a steady evolution, so that, whereas early works (such as the song, Mignon, the Violin Sonata, and the Tangerine Concerto adhere rather rigidly to that tripartite modal system, later works (such as the symphonic poem, The Frozen Troubadour) display a freer use of chromaticism. In his last years Ofterdingen’s style becomes less Teutonic, more Gallic, and moves from the 19th toward the early 20th century in its language (see, for example, the Vinteuil Septet).
That evolution was inevitable, since Ofterdingen was me. And so the day had to dawn when I awakened from that labyrinthine Romantic dreamworld, blinking in the cold light of the new millennium, wondering who, after all these years, I am.
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My re-emergence was gradual. While abandoning the Ofterdingen project in theory, in practice I continued, like Rip van Winkle, to grope toward an understanding of the present state of the world, filling in the gaps in my knowledge - gaps left not only by that seven-year Romantic hiatus, but more generally by a life that had been focused so narrowly on personal preoccupations as to have left me with no more than a superficial understanding of the contemporary world and its art.
So I picked up where Ofterdingen had left off, discovering for myself methods of composition common in the previous century such as total serialism ( in Archipelagos) and extended playing techniques (in Wreath of the Hours). I was, in a sense, working my way through the 20th century at an accelerated pace, and when, in the middle of this process, I was asked to prepare an introductory course on the history of modern music, I was chagrined and delighted in equal measure to find that the sequence of ideas I had hit upon mirrored in microcosm the trajectory of music in the 20th century. Like the backwater genius in Garcia-Marquez’s Hundred Years of Solitude who discovers by his private calculations, against the prevailing wisdom of his town, that the world is not flat and bounded, but round and in orbit around the sun, I could have been informed that this was not news, while being congratulated at my perspicacity in coming independently to such insights as I did.
Throughout this period I continued to write poetry and prose though, in comparison with music, the world of words has always felt to me like a second language, a certain mastery over which I’ve acquired only with painstaking effort. Many of these poems came to serve as texts for later musical works (the 2017 recital, Dreamscapes, is filled with them), and while the esoteric and ritualized forms of my earlier work are no longer employed, these poems (in particular the collection, The Immortal Conch) often hark back to themes explored in the period of creative spirituality.
Meanwhile, if the project to reclaim the past seemed to be abandoned, it was actually transposed from the musical to the personal realm. That second long-term relationship of mine, described earlier as having fallen into a shambles, was taken up, and eventually I married again. (And lo: it was the girl who, so many years before, in the innocence of our youth, had watched me as I skated about the park!) But this time it was true love: not love at first sight, nor comi-tragic delusion, but the real thing - by which I mean not that somehow we two find it possible truly and fully to know one another, nor that each of us finds in the other that perfect match, that heaven-sent mate for whom we were intended - God, no - but that, on the contrary, we find one another impossible to understand, difficult to appreciate, unsuitable in most every way for coexistence, and are drawn to those differences, attracted by those difficulties, so that the domain of human relations, like those of self and world, is become an arena for exploration and discovery, as well as for a certain heartache which seems at this stage proper to the human condition.
For it is both strange and sad that we should look back upon those moments in our past when, temporarily, we felt ourselves most fully alive and happy, with consternation and puzzlement, as if life were a joke and love a narcotic. At least, in my present state, there exists the dignity of choice and the opportunity to build, over a lifetime, something palpable, a body of shared experiences, thanks to which a relationship like ours can grow stronger, become more actual, over time. Like a peasant in some old story who, as a babe is mistaken for the king’s son and, coming of age, rules the land with greater justice than is found in the bloodlines of the monarchy, this love of ours, unordained and unsanctioned, has brought us, in the respite between our conflicts, greater bliss and deeper satisfaction than the empty promises of mere infatuation can bestow.
And so it came to pass that, like Prokofiev who, achieving international fame, considered it safe to return to the Stalin’s Russia, but once there, found himself ensnared in the Soviet web, I, in the independence I enjoyed between relationships, came to imagine the freedom to which I’d become accustomed to be a permanent state, but found, over time, that I’d been lured back into the world of shoe-stores and shopping malls, not in Yonkers now but New Jersey, where I sit once again in my car or on the easy-chairs outside of Bloomingdale’s, wearing the old wistful smile, and struggling, in the midst of the fortress of materialism, to save, if not any more the world, at least my soul.
Third Interlude
It’s a typical Tuesday afternoon in Shoprite, one of those modern supermarkets with spacious aisles, daily discounts, and endless selections. I push my cart along, stopping to gather my weekly supply of vegetables (a necessity these days), tofu (in preference to meat), and Twinkies (since even the healthiest diet won’t bequeath immortality, and we must be happy while we live).
Many of those whom I pass along the way are of my generation; some have a bearing of intense resolve in which one can detect the persistence of those survival instincts that must have been so prominent in the era of hunters and gatherers. But others are smiling faintly, with a dim, distracted air, and I realize with a start that I am too.
The source of our gladness is not difficult to determine: music is being piped through speakers in every aisle at a moderate volume, and with delight we children of the fifties and the sixties recognize the tune. It’s a song by the Rolling Stones, sanitized in an arrangement for flute and harp, and like a kitten, declawed and deprived of his reproductive functions, it glides harmlessly across the horizon of our minds, kindling fond memories of a time when a revolution seemed possible, a time when we believed that music really could set us free - from possessiveness and greed and triviality and hate.
But the flower-children of yesteryear have become the corporate powers of today, while the rock star, beneath his display of defiance, was ever the puppet of an industry that desires the status quo and that contrived to substitute for a real revolution, through the intoxicating effects of music, the feeling of a revolution.
I get on the checkout line; I pay for my groceries and head for home. It’s time for dinner. Peter, eat your vegetables.
Four: Songs from Distant Planets
I have reached the time of fulfillment, the stage of synthesis, and the end of the road. Having worked my way in and out of the mazes of my mind, having composed my way through the recent history of music, and having caught up at last with the contemporary scene, I’ve come to feel, as perhaps Wagner did in writing Parsifal, the effortless delight of one who has ceased searching, who has tried out individually all methods and techniques, and who has learned to amalgamate them to an artistic whole which, for all its diversity, reveals more clearly than ever before the presence of an authentic, organizing voice. And so with a modest satisfaction I can affirm that works such as Songs from Distant Planets (wherein are found poetry and music, speech and song, aleatoric and serial methods, and extended techniques) and The Bewitchment of Dreams (a new electronic work in which recorded samples of everything from seashells raked across the beach to bells and birdsong are transformed beyond recognition and combined with astonishing results) actually please me.
For a composer in another century that would have been enough; for the Classical masters the attainment of a mature style led to the creation of numerous works in a stable language, so many children of a single family, as a Mozart scholar says of his concerti, so many leaves on the tree of a musical life. But my spirit is a vagabond minstrel, and never twice the same song will sing.
And so for me the moment of plenitude, the unveiling of beauty, was a sign of the end. I had promised my students, countless times over the years, that ours is a field in which, while one might not become rich, one will never run out of fresh possibilities: I now had to admit that, like the cosmos itself, the musical universe is vast but finite.
Not that I’ve actually stopped composing. Creative work has become such a habit for me that a day without it feels wasted, while an infertile future wouldn’t be worth living. But whereas in the past the exercise of making music carried for me a moral responsibility, I now write mostly for myself.
And this, I believe, is for the best. For as I am released from the sweet bondage of art, I hear once again, out of the silence and from a great distance, like an echo of the past, that voice that called to me first in childhood and again at the beginning of my career, beckoning me one last time, before it’s too late, to abandon this life of vanity and compromise, to lose and to save myself teaching English to children in southeast Asia, living as they live, in poverty and anonymity.
Is there a family of man? I choose to believe it; perhaps it is through this choice that it becomes true. What father, what brother, what son, would live at peace with himself while his children, his siblings, his parents, went hungry? I’ve spent most of my adult life engaged in a process of self-actualization, and for this I bear no regrets. But we are called not only to be creative but compassionate as well, and our art means little to our neighbor when his stomach is empty. I harbor no more delusions that my actions will impact the world; it would be enough to improve the life of a single human being. And death comes more easily to one who willingly gives himself away.
But our world is grown too large for one to establish a hierarchy of values, and I find myself stymied with doubts. Is it better, after all, to leave family and friends for strangers? Am I actually in search of adventure more than service? And is this plan of mine just one more display of egotism disguised as humility? No sooner do I succeed in imagining myself ensconced in some dusty backwater town than I am plagued by thoughts of a loved one back home becoming seriously ill, or of the members of my village snickering behind my back, or of the U.S. government implementing policies detrimental to the country I serve while using the constituency of the Peace Corps as its apparently benevolent but actually obfuscatory face. Perhaps I’ve simply missed my chance, and come to honesty and wisdom too late, so that it is my punishment to live out my life in a world of whose hypocrisy I’ve become aware, while being unable to escape.
Epilogue
All of the above has been written during the Pandemic of 2020, as an invisible foe wreaks deadly havoc on the world. I continue to teach, but remotely, from the computer in my bedroom. I make music, feeling a little like the mad emperor who fiddled while Rome burned. My wife and I take long walks along deserted shores, and visit our children infrequently and with caution. The Peace Corps has recalled its members from around the world, placing all future projects on hold. The news is filled with stories of courageous sacrifice and with stories of cowardly greed. The world waits, the world strains.
I’ve composed a little piano piece which I am practicing on a rented upright by the Long Island Sound; soon a recording will appear. In the center there is a breakthrough, a moment of stillness and clarity, where, as the clangor of heavenly goldsmiths subsides, something like a radiant gem seems to rise in inspired fantasy from out dark whisps of smoke, and to point beyond itself to that which cannot quite be imagined but which may one day come to be. It is an image of myself that I see in this breakthrough, and an image of the world, wherein all contradictions are resolved in a peace that surpasses understanding.
The moment passes, the music sinks back into darkness, and ends in a shroud of gloom, for there is work to be done in the here and now. Perhaps, after all, the world can be saved...