Tuesday, December 21, 2004
Take Tea and See
I was quite touched by this concern for the future of the people who will make classical music as expressed by Dale Keiger.
That's because I've known people who have gone on to make careers in music. Some became famous, and others quite famous. Some worked in the entertainment industry. Some sold a lot of records. And some actually seemed to be doing something.
Although I've encountered plenty of singers and instrumentalists, lots of people who would perform classical music, I barely knew anyone who had a career in that field. Of that pitiful few, none met with fame or fortune nor, really, can I imagine that they ever even in their most secret of hearts expected to, but what do I know?
After a lifetime of lessons and countless hours devoted to practice for performance, one moved on into a lifelong career of teaching and conducting at a small college in the desert. Aside from him, and another who avoided the scene but whose mother was a recital organist her whole life and guild leader of some repute, there are but a scant one or two others.
Classical music sometimes seems to be an environment of rare and endangered species. And a topic that is rarely, if ever, mentioned. In fact, the last time classical music was brought up in conversation, I was shocked. A person I know expressed something close to bitter envy. A classmate of his from a prestigious Eastern school switched majors in his last year and now has a career in music, he being recruited and hired to conduct the symphony in an outpost town.
Does everyone have a secret self that wants to be an artist or musician? Or to just be a bohemian, in a loft or garret somewhere, living out a bohemian life?
Someday I will make a list of names. I'll list all the people I have met or known who made art (well, if not Art per se, then music and literature and theater and poetry and movies) … all the famous ones whose names you might recognize.
I'm promising myself today I'll eventually get around to doing that. Because a long long time ago, a friend asked me along when she stopped by to take tea with a lady friend. Her friend, a much older woman, had been part and parcel of the Romany Marie's circle.
Romany Marie's
She had many insights and casual anecdotes about the strange mix that made up the literary and artistic circuit in New York of that earlier now near-mythological era. A place where there was always a giant pot of soup boiling, and occasionally gypsy tea-leaf reading, where poets, writers, artists, thinkers, and even paleontologists literally just returned from the far reaches of outer Mongolia would casually bump into each other. She was there.
Listening to but some of her stories for just an afternoon or two long ago, back in the mid-sixties, "there" sounded to be a heck of a lot better place.
She’d got to hang out with the likes of Marcel Duchamp, Ford Maddox Ford, and Huddie Ledbetter. Also Henry and June (that's exactly how she mentioned them the first time to my friend some time before, as if she were on a first name basis with them), but, yes, she knew them, too. And not only well enough to call them by their first names, but she'd maintained correspondence with them over the years, and she still had some letters from each of them.
What could I conceivably say at that point that wouldn't seem irrelevant or made small by comparison -- "Henry Miller … he picked up a friend of mine hitch hiking in Big Sur … " -- That would have been a ridiculous thing for anyone to say, but say it I did because it was something that had happened.
Henry Miller, the famous writer and watercolorist, at last report to me was a real living and breathing, braking and pulling over to pick up a hippie hitchhiker sort of person.
At that time, I'd only read one of Miller's books, "The Air Conditioned Nightmare". I found it in a paperback edition. It probably cost fifty, sixty cents brand new off the rack. It wasn't even published by Grove or New Directions and you could tell by the art on the cover. That was saying Henry Miller was hitting the mainstream. And a lot of people read that book. I mean my copy, because it made the rounds.
You could tell straight away it wasn't published by Grove or New Directions. First off, the cover wasn't their typical black and white.
That edition was coated with a particularly garish yellow and purple cover. I remember it vividly. The background was kind of orangey and the lettering was … No … that's not right. The print on the cover was a bright and sunny canary yellow bleeding into a desert sunset yellow tinted with a hint of about to move into orange and the background could have been a grand canyon spectacular sunset purple. But it wasn't. That shade of purple was selected to clash and look shockingly tasteless and the cover was designed to be outlandish. Yeah, that was the one. I mean, it was the sixties, or beginning to be the sixties when that book came … Miller had written his own version of "On the Road" years before that more famous one, and I much preferred Miller's.
Does everyone have a secret self that longs to hit the road, Jack? Maybe. (Best keep in mind before you turn the key in your ignition, his road trip was taken far back in time, before the monogelatinous mush had homogenized its spread and oozed its unimaginative steadily increasing and unrelenting way, sliding into, settling into, and taking up far too much in the way of permanent space everywhere before encroaching outwards even more throughout the entire environment, as it currently is today.)
So, back then, talking with her about the people she'd known, the people she chose to share with me. Most importantly, I felt a living breathing connection to art as it was simmering and bubbling up from the past, maybe even great art, that something made by larger than life characters, or persons of great reputation if not brought into being by monumental people of mythic proportion. And I was only there in her kitchen for a little bit, and others more fortunate to be in the area got to prolong the experience and just steep in this stuff if they chose.
Henry and June are more famous now, especially since their sex lives have been made into a major motion picture (adapted from a book by the same name). When that movie came out, I wondered what she, the lady who poured from the teapot, would have said about any of it if she were still alive.
Or this week, I to her?
"Hey, that Marcel's really famous again!"
For at the moment, he is currently regarded as the creator of the most important art there ever was (actually he was just awarded the Turner Prize for the most influential modern art work of all time). But back then when she knew him, he'd also been a French painter and the founding member of the Dada movement in New York slightly after World War I; he was the inventor of "ready-made" art, and fashioned many non-functional machines. Ford Maddox Ford was an English writer (I didn't know much about him then and still don't, but he apparently had a lot of influence on two writers I once liked a lot, Joseph Conrad and Ezra Pound.) And who wouldn’t recognize the name Huddie Ledbetter.
Me! I actually met someone who'd not just seen their works in galleries, or read their books, or heard their music on scratchy records, or just sat in the same room with them, but who had known them all if even a bit ... talked with them ...
Who, if she were at all impulsive or were merely lacking good manners, actually could have reached over the table and touched them all. She was lucky, to be in that place and at that time, wasn't she? At Romany Marie's?
This was important to me because, in the mid-sixties, when I spoke with her, I felt like I was getting the cheap imitations of art with Andy Warhol and some of the New York "writers", "poets", and "musicians" I’d just encountered, and they seemed to me to be living a pale imitation of both life and "Art". That New York bunch, they were just becoming ... there was no word for what they were becoming, but I would say "well, they're in Life magazine this week" because they were, but it seemed something more monstrous than that, not monstrous like "Philistines" but ... And I did not look on this response of mine as being at all snobbish.
She was lucky to spin around the Romany Marie's circle. Look who I got. I'd encountered Frank Zappa by then and he was about to become much more well known, which means hated and maligned, and lauded and respected.
And, OK, I admit it. I met Andy Warhol a time or two, but that was after he'd become famous in New York. Not the same. And I wish I had some interesting or colorful anecdotes about him. The last time I saw Andy Warhol was (need I say many years back?) at the San Francisco airport when he was catching a flight out of town. He was in a waiting section seated in a molded gray plastic chair, designed somewhat like a student chair with extended writing tray, but on that tray was bolted a small gray plastic box with a television screen. He was watching the television.
Like now, back then I was still looking for the bright side of the spectrum. Even as fueled as some were with boundless youthful optimism ... it didn't feel even then, when taken together as a mass, that all of my friends and acquaintances contributions combined would ever, could ever add up to fill a teaspoon resting on the saucer at Romany Marie's. I mean, we didn't even have a Romany Marie's, or even a pretense of one.
So I recognized that no one that I knew then or might ever know or work with or even meet at any time in the future might in any way ever rise to fame or fortune or become in any way respected for doing what made the real living heart in any one of them drive and pound. But I sure as hell wished they would!
So, how do I tie all this into the future of classical music? When my only real connection with classical music has been through recordings, concerts, and sometimes radio. A world and a culture I know almost nothing about. But the music on occasion has been a life preserver for me, particularly during those times when there's nothing good on the radio (or on new records, to be read in new books or even in any one of countless thousands of magazines, or to be seen anywhere in the new movies) and those severe periods of cultural drought can go on sometimes for over a decade stretching easily into even two or three without anyone realizing too much they've managed to go without life-sustaining fluid for so long they're all about to die of thirst.
Classical music, I don't know too much about it at all, much less being able to guess who might make it in the future or how it might be received and written about. But I admit I felt uneasy when Yo-yo Ma took the stage at Constitution Hall for a performance with Dr. Condoleezza Rice.
And I fully understood the measured response of a friend who remarked only that it's both fascinating and interesting to find that persons more famous for political careers have talents, interests, and artistic skills not often afforded public expression.
As for me, next time maybe I'll tell how I got a classical musician a paying gig on Frank Zappa's first record. Today, that seems to be the singlemost biggest thing I ever accomplished in the world o' entertainment.
Or maybe I won't. That's kind of a long story because it involves people you've never heard of, travel, a few attitudes in operation, and artistic intent.
¶ 12/21/2004 09:11:00 AM
I was quite touched by this concern for the future of the people who will make classical music as expressed by Dale Keiger.
That's because I've known people who have gone on to make careers in music. Some became famous, and others quite famous. Some worked in the entertainment industry. Some sold a lot of records. And some actually seemed to be doing something.
Although I've encountered plenty of singers and instrumentalists, lots of people who would perform classical music, I barely knew anyone who had a career in that field. Of that pitiful few, none met with fame or fortune nor, really, can I imagine that they ever even in their most secret of hearts expected to, but what do I know?
After a lifetime of lessons and countless hours devoted to practice for performance, one moved on into a lifelong career of teaching and conducting at a small college in the desert. Aside from him, and another who avoided the scene but whose mother was a recital organist her whole life and guild leader of some repute, there are but a scant one or two others.
Classical music sometimes seems to be an environment of rare and endangered species. And a topic that is rarely, if ever, mentioned. In fact, the last time classical music was brought up in conversation, I was shocked. A person I know expressed something close to bitter envy. A classmate of his from a prestigious Eastern school switched majors in his last year and now has a career in music, he being recruited and hired to conduct the symphony in an outpost town.
Does everyone have a secret self that wants to be an artist or musician? Or to just be a bohemian, in a loft or garret somewhere, living out a bohemian life?
Someday I will make a list of names. I'll list all the people I have met or known who made art (well, if not Art per se, then music and literature and theater and poetry and movies) … all the famous ones whose names you might recognize.
I'm promising myself today I'll eventually get around to doing that. Because a long long time ago, a friend asked me along when she stopped by to take tea with a lady friend. Her friend, a much older woman, had been part and parcel of the Romany Marie's circle.
Romany Marie's
She had many insights and casual anecdotes about the strange mix that made up the literary and artistic circuit in New York of that earlier now near-mythological era. A place where there was always a giant pot of soup boiling, and occasionally gypsy tea-leaf reading, where poets, writers, artists, thinkers, and even paleontologists literally just returned from the far reaches of outer Mongolia would casually bump into each other. She was there.
Listening to but some of her stories for just an afternoon or two long ago, back in the mid-sixties, "there" sounded to be a heck of a lot better place.
She’d got to hang out with the likes of Marcel Duchamp, Ford Maddox Ford, and Huddie Ledbetter. Also Henry and June (that's exactly how she mentioned them the first time to my friend some time before, as if she were on a first name basis with them), but, yes, she knew them, too. And not only well enough to call them by their first names, but she'd maintained correspondence with them over the years, and she still had some letters from each of them.
What could I conceivably say at that point that wouldn't seem irrelevant or made small by comparison -- "Henry Miller … he picked up a friend of mine hitch hiking in Big Sur … " -- That would have been a ridiculous thing for anyone to say, but say it I did because it was something that had happened.
Henry Miller, the famous writer and watercolorist, at last report to me was a real living and breathing, braking and pulling over to pick up a hippie hitchhiker sort of person.
At that time, I'd only read one of Miller's books, "The Air Conditioned Nightmare". I found it in a paperback edition. It probably cost fifty, sixty cents brand new off the rack. It wasn't even published by Grove or New Directions and you could tell by the art on the cover. That was saying Henry Miller was hitting the mainstream. And a lot of people read that book. I mean my copy, because it made the rounds.
You could tell straight away it wasn't published by Grove or New Directions. First off, the cover wasn't their typical black and white.
That edition was coated with a particularly garish yellow and purple cover. I remember it vividly. The background was kind of orangey and the lettering was … No … that's not right. The print on the cover was a bright and sunny canary yellow bleeding into a desert sunset yellow tinted with a hint of about to move into orange and the background could have been a grand canyon spectacular sunset purple. But it wasn't. That shade of purple was selected to clash and look shockingly tasteless and the cover was designed to be outlandish. Yeah, that was the one. I mean, it was the sixties, or beginning to be the sixties when that book came … Miller had written his own version of "On the Road" years before that more famous one, and I much preferred Miller's.
Does everyone have a secret self that longs to hit the road, Jack? Maybe. (Best keep in mind before you turn the key in your ignition, his road trip was taken far back in time, before the monogelatinous mush had homogenized its spread and oozed its unimaginative steadily increasing and unrelenting way, sliding into, settling into, and taking up far too much in the way of permanent space everywhere before encroaching outwards even more throughout the entire environment, as it currently is today.)
So, back then, talking with her about the people she'd known, the people she chose to share with me. Most importantly, I felt a living breathing connection to art as it was simmering and bubbling up from the past, maybe even great art, that something made by larger than life characters, or persons of great reputation if not brought into being by monumental people of mythic proportion. And I was only there in her kitchen for a little bit, and others more fortunate to be in the area got to prolong the experience and just steep in this stuff if they chose.
Henry and June are more famous now, especially since their sex lives have been made into a major motion picture (adapted from a book by the same name). When that movie came out, I wondered what she, the lady who poured from the teapot, would have said about any of it if she were still alive.
Or this week, I to her?
"Hey, that Marcel's really famous again!"
For at the moment, he is currently regarded as the creator of the most important art there ever was (actually he was just awarded the Turner Prize for the most influential modern art work of all time). But back then when she knew him, he'd also been a French painter and the founding member of the Dada movement in New York slightly after World War I; he was the inventor of "ready-made" art, and fashioned many non-functional machines. Ford Maddox Ford was an English writer (I didn't know much about him then and still don't, but he apparently had a lot of influence on two writers I once liked a lot, Joseph Conrad and Ezra Pound.) And who wouldn’t recognize the name Huddie Ledbetter.
Me! I actually met someone who'd not just seen their works in galleries, or read their books, or heard their music on scratchy records, or just sat in the same room with them, but who had known them all if even a bit ... talked with them ...
Who, if she were at all impulsive or were merely lacking good manners, actually could have reached over the table and touched them all. She was lucky, to be in that place and at that time, wasn't she? At Romany Marie's?
This was important to me because, in the mid-sixties, when I spoke with her, I felt like I was getting the cheap imitations of art with Andy Warhol and some of the New York "writers", "poets", and "musicians" I’d just encountered, and they seemed to me to be living a pale imitation of both life and "Art". That New York bunch, they were just becoming ... there was no word for what they were becoming, but I would say "well, they're in Life magazine this week" because they were, but it seemed something more monstrous than that, not monstrous like "Philistines" but ... And I did not look on this response of mine as being at all snobbish.
She was lucky to spin around the Romany Marie's circle. Look who I got. I'd encountered Frank Zappa by then and he was about to become much more well known, which means hated and maligned, and lauded and respected.
And, OK, I admit it. I met Andy Warhol a time or two, but that was after he'd become famous in New York. Not the same. And I wish I had some interesting or colorful anecdotes about him. The last time I saw Andy Warhol was (need I say many years back?) at the San Francisco airport when he was catching a flight out of town. He was in a waiting section seated in a molded gray plastic chair, designed somewhat like a student chair with extended writing tray, but on that tray was bolted a small gray plastic box with a television screen. He was watching the television.
Like now, back then I was still looking for the bright side of the spectrum. Even as fueled as some were with boundless youthful optimism ... it didn't feel even then, when taken together as a mass, that all of my friends and acquaintances contributions combined would ever, could ever add up to fill a teaspoon resting on the saucer at Romany Marie's. I mean, we didn't even have a Romany Marie's, or even a pretense of one.
So I recognized that no one that I knew then or might ever know or work with or even meet at any time in the future might in any way ever rise to fame or fortune or become in any way respected for doing what made the real living heart in any one of them drive and pound. But I sure as hell wished they would!
So, how do I tie all this into the future of classical music? When my only real connection with classical music has been through recordings, concerts, and sometimes radio. A world and a culture I know almost nothing about. But the music on occasion has been a life preserver for me, particularly during those times when there's nothing good on the radio (or on new records, to be read in new books or even in any one of countless thousands of magazines, or to be seen anywhere in the new movies) and those severe periods of cultural drought can go on sometimes for over a decade stretching easily into even two or three without anyone realizing too much they've managed to go without life-sustaining fluid for so long they're all about to die of thirst.
Classical music, I don't know too much about it at all, much less being able to guess who might make it in the future or how it might be received and written about. But I admit I felt uneasy when Yo-yo Ma took the stage at Constitution Hall for a performance with Dr. Condoleezza Rice.
And I fully understood the measured response of a friend who remarked only that it's both fascinating and interesting to find that persons more famous for political careers have talents, interests, and artistic skills not often afforded public expression.
As for me, next time maybe I'll tell how I got a classical musician a paying gig on Frank Zappa's first record. Today, that seems to be the singlemost biggest thing I ever accomplished in the world o' entertainment.
Or maybe I won't. That's kind of a long story because it involves people you've never heard of, travel, a few attitudes in operation, and artistic intent.
¶ 12/21/2004 09:11:00 AM
