A Breakthrough

Lee Street Beach, Evanston

The summer after my freshman year (1962), I worked as a life guard on Lee Street beach in Evanston, my first real paid job. In the evenings and days off, if I wasn't going to Grant Park with my father, I'd usually work at music, practicing, and writing.

By then my interest had turned fully to modern compositional techniques. I was studying everything I could get my hands on, but especially Stravinsky and Webern.

buffalo bill's
July 28, 1962

That summer I completed two compositions. The first was buffalo bill's, a setting for soprano, alto saxophone, guitar, and piano of the short poem by e.e. cummings of that name. It was a serial composition, and was strongly influenced by Stravinsky's music of the fifties, such as his great ballet Agon.

String Quartet
1962

The big turning point came when I wrote my first ``real'' String Quartet, a serial work in four movements (titled I, II, III, and IV) of compact, sparse music. This was influenced more than anything by the astonishing String Trio by Webern, a work that stands apart even among his own compositions. When I returned to school in the fall, the quartet was not finished, but almost. All I had left was some editing and refinement of dynamics.

The 1962--1963 school year I studied with Hunter Johnson, a composer whose main claim to fame was a work for small orchestra he wrote for the Martha Graham dance company. Hunter seemed to me to be a man with quite an inferiority complex. His music was in the mainstream Americana tradition, whereas most of the better composers at U of I had taken up the pursuit of the new advanced techniques. Hunter Johnson, already an older man, felt left behind. But he did like me personally, and regarded me as his most talented student. He allowed me free reign to do whatever I wanted, partly because he felt he had little to offer me regarding technique, which turned out to be true. In retrospect, I should have studied instead with Kenneth Gaburo or Ben Johnston, both gifted composers, and men I got along with and who respected me.

The String Quartet was finished in November, whereupon I plunged into a piece for 21 brass instruments, using a graphical form of proportional notation. I gave it the silly title Genesis 51. The Bible book of Genesis has only 50 chapters, which I knew at the time, and the music has absolutely nothing to do with the Bible. Genesis 51 never got so much as a reading. This was by my own choice, as I was unsatisfied with it myself, though Hunter thought it looked impressive.[9]

[9] By amusing coincidence, one chapter beyond Genesis is the first chapter of Exodus, referring to the departure of a large number of people. Somehow this factoid does seem strangely relevant to this work after all.

My String Quartet was performed twice. The first time was at a student convocation in Smith Music Hall, the music building. I'd been unable to attend any of the rehearsals, so heard the work for the first time myself at that concert, a nerve-wracking experience. The second performance was at a student composers forum at Iowa State University. The first violinist in the quartet was David Preeves, the son of Milton Preeves, principal violist in the Chicago Symphony, and my father's stand partner and friend for years.

One night I was listening to the Schönberg Piano Concerto, played by Glenn Gould, to which I owned the score. As I immersed myself in the sound, I perceived a technique of continuous development at work by which the musical material was presented. Whether what I heard was Schönberg's intent I will never know, but it provided me with a flash of inspiration.

A few hours later I had worked out the tone row and laid out the entire formal structure of my next work, Sonata for Piano, to be written for my friend Roger Shields. Why I labeled it a sonata I no longer recall. The form of the piece is unique unto itself and not remotely related to the classical sonata form.

This piece took me the rest of that year and until July the following year to complete. In 1965, it won the prestigious Joseph H. Bearns Prize from Columbia University, an award that had been granted previously to such notables as Samuel Barber, Milton Babbitt, Charles Wuorinen, and Mario Davidovsky, and which came with a sizeable cash prize, big enough that about a third of it went to buy myself a brand new Holton bass trombone. The rest was spent on records, carousing, and living expenses.

Esteemed previous Bearns Prize winners