Wayne Alpern

HOW AND WHY I BECAME A COMPOSER

My earliest memory of music making was playing piano and taking lessons as a child. My grandmother Annie Alpern bought me a baby grand piano for my Bar Mitzvah in 1961. She was an excellent pianist and would sit next to me as I played. I owe my musical birth to her. I studied the classics with a beautiful older woman named Mary Maas. She was distinguished but very sexy and always wore a low cut dress. I remember making mistakes on purpose just so she would lean over the keyboard to correct me. I was fairly good but never able to get through a single piece without making a mistake. I played Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, and Chopin. The more I played, the more I strayed from the score and began to experiment. It gradually dawned on me I could make up my own pieces, and even though they weren’t as good as the famous ones, I liked them more because they were mine. At one point I tried playing the saxophone so I could play with other kids rather than be all alone. I actually wanted a trumpet, which is what I thought was called a saxophone. I didn’t get very far in any event because I found the breathing interfered with my music making. I competed with a boy named Johnny Unger to be Mary Maas’s best student. But when I heard Carol Goodfriend play, I knew I wasn’t that talented at all. And then there was Matthew Mischakoff, a superb violinist, which was really intimidating. Musical performance seemed problematic.

One day I heard a gregarious boy named Jerry Kramer play popular music on the piano. I was deeply jealous and determined to learn how to do that. I got the name of his teacher (which I don’t remember), and studied with him. It was a breakthrough for me because I could improvise and perfection didn’t matter so much. It wasn’t about exact rendition and we changed the written score anyway. But I gradually drifted away from piano and in the 1960s, like a lot of kids, took up the guitar. I was in a band in high school called The Big Daddies with my friend Larry Warner and we played “Mrs. Brown, You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter” by Herman’s Hermits at graduation. Growing up in Detroit, home of Motown, almost all the music I listened to before the Beatles was soul music. My buddy Jeff Davis and I could sing virtually every Motown hit. We felt black at heart. In 1965 I went to Oberlin but was in the College rather than the Conservatory. I liked it because it had music, but I didn’t study music there at all. I majored in sociology, but played rhythm guitar in a top 40s rock band called the Schades. We were the only band on campus and performed a lot. We eventually morphed into a soul band with some brass instruments. I was deep into 1960s music like most people, and could play many of the famous songs on guitar. My roommate Kim turned me onto Stravinsky, but other than that I knew no modern music at all.

It was a tumultuous time. In 1969 at the age of 21 I went to Harvard Divinity School to avoid the Viet Nam draft. I soon dropped out, and lived with the Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn for a while. Eventually I picked up and went off to Cuernavaca, Mexico to attend a radical school called the Centre for International Documentation (CIDOC) run by the social critic Ivan Illich. There were Black Panthers and Latin American activists there. One day I met an older American dancer from Los Angeles by the name of Carol Galante, who called herself Princess Summer Cloud, the Princess of Art. Many people thought she was loony tunes, but I didn’t. I was deeply influenced by the mystical and daemonic writings of Hermann Hesse at the time and fell under her spell. She believed that every person is an artist inside, and our mission in life is to become a particular kind of artist. Some are writers, some are painters, some poets, dancers, others performers, and some composers. She said she learned this from an American Indian Chief who was her mentor, and she was passing this on to me. The Princess told me I am a
composer, and that is my destiny and obligation to fulfill. I knew she was different and very strange, but she was also extremely powerful and charismatic. I felt she knew me deeper than anyone I had every met, and could see into my soul. She lived alone in a tiny cellblock with a metal door and no windows and studied the anatomical writings and drawings of Leonardo da Vinci. There was a small music school in Cuernavaca, a branch of the National Conservatory of Mexico. The Princess and I would go there alone each day for months. Her instructions to me were to create, compose, and improvise my own music while she danced, collaborating with each other, playing off each other’s energy and inspiration. When we weren’t playing, she made me copy scores of Bach and Mozart, simply writing them out by hand. In exchange, she cleaned my apartment and cooked meals. Our relationship was not amorous or sexual, but artistic and spiritual, like a disciple-mentor relationship.

I composed several pieces with the Princess which I kept. After a number of months, I decided I had to leave Mexico. I returned to the States in the summer of 1970 and went to Interlochen Music Camp where I met Randy Coleman, a composer and Oberlin professor who was teaching there. I didn’t know him at college. Coleman introduced me to New Music, Webern, Schoenberg, Xenakis, Cage, and Feldman. I wrote my first atonal pieces with him. That fall, after moving back to Oberlin with him for a bit, I entered the Masters program at the
University of Michigan. I had to essentially do a second Bachelor’s degree in music, since my undergraduate degree was in sociology. I studied composition with Bill Albright, Leslie Bassett, Ross Lee Finney, and briefly with Bill Bolcom. One day in Ann Arbor I met a violinist named Louis Gesensway in the Philadelphia Orchestra which was in town. He told me I would learn nothing in music school and I should come to Philadelphia to study with him. I dropped out of Michigan and moved to Philly to study with Gesensway. He taught me several basics about traditional tonal music which he said were inherent in the nature of music itself. I felt a conflict
between Coleman and Gesensway, between new music and old.

The times were very unstable and so was I. At one point I had to move to my parents home and was seeing a therapist three days a week. During this period I composed sketches for a large work called The Princess Ballet. Eventually it became clear I had to be in a more conventional and structured context for the sake of my own health, so I entered Yale Law School. I composed several pieces at Yale, all in a popular idiom, and performed almost every day in the Yale Law School dining hall during lunch for the likes of Bill and Hilary Clinton. I
composed a Jewish musical called The Wise Men of Chelm and presented songs at the BMI Musical Theatre Workshop. I sent Richard Rodgers a letter asking to study with him, but he said he had nothing to teach me. I wish I could find that letter. One day I discovered that the great jazz pedagogue John Mehegan lived not far from New Haven. For two years I drove each weekend to study jazz piano with him. This opened up an entire new world of jazz harmony and improvisation to me. I showed Mehegan my compositions. He said they were too composed and I had to “fu__ the piano” to get anywhere at all. I learned an enormous amount from John and am deeply indebted to him. I eventually dropped out of law school and returned to Michigan to finish my Masters in composition. I then returned to Yale, receiving my music degree in 1975 and my law degree in 1976.

That summer I attended a program called June in Buffalo run by Morton Feldman, which I also did the following year. Each summer Feldman brought in guest composers to teach a small number of students. The first year I worked with Feldman, Cage, Earl Browne, and Christian Wolff. The following summer I worked with Feldman, Steve Reich, Iannis Xenakis, and George Crumb. Feldman was a significant influence not on the nature of my music, but on my approach to composition. He was the most aesthetic person I have ever met and demanded the utmost integrity toward composition. Reich, however, became my friend. I have known Steve for over thirty years. I was his copyist in pre-computer days for several of his pieces. Reich helped liberate me from the fractured spell of “new music” and rediscover tonality and metrical rhythm.

For a while I worked as a sheet music editor at United Artists and arranged some popular songs for piano, like Crystal Gayle’s “Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue.” Ironically I married a dancer, Nancy Bielski. I eventually decided I had to get a real job to support our family and ended up practicing law in New York City for nearly 17 years, primarily in the area of litigation. I continued to compose all the time. Eventually, however, the conflict between law and music became too stressful. I ended up in the hospital with a major disc herniation. I suffered a sever spinal injury and had to relearn how to walk. I was unable to wear normal shoes for many years. In 1994 I decided to finally leave the law and entered the doctoral program in composition and theory at City University of New York. I studied composition with Thea Musgrave, atonal theory with Joseph Straus, and Schenkerian analysis with Carl Schachter. I wrote my dissertation on the influence of legal training on Heinrich Schenker, who curiously like me had studied both law and music. I also composed a lot of atonal music.

One morning it occurred to me in the shower that I couldn’t sing a single piece of mine in that style. I had no visceral attachment. About that time I came across a remark by Henri Matisse that if you want to know who you truly are as an artist, look at your earliest work. I pulled out my first scores I had composed with the dancing Princess of Art in Mexico. They were tonal, rhythmic, stylistically imitative, but catchy. I began to compose again in this manner. It was far from Feldman, but I felt it had his integrity. My old teacher Randy Coleman, since become a friend, always encouraged eclecticism and taught composition as self-discovery. The problem was not how to write this or that, but how to become yourself. It was more psychological than musical, and involved self-knowledge and self-acceptance. Gradually I began to recover my early connection with popular music and jazz, and integrate that into my composition. It amazed me that I could so easily remember songs from the 1950s and 1960s, and simply play them on the piano. I also became interested in musical standards, because these were iconic vehicles that everyone knew and could therefore become the framework for recognizable musical transformation. I recalled that great composers like Beethoven, Mozart, and Haydn took popular songs as starting points, not to mention the history of Renaissance imitation masses and Stravinsky’s eclectic borrowing from Pergolesi and Tchaikovsky.

The shift from modernism to post-modernism facilitated my musical kleptomania, and made it seem acceptable, even fashionable. Post-modernism was all about taking existing musical styles and objects and transforming them. I didn’t want to be a slave to any of these styles, including minimalism, which I saw Steve had done better than anything I could produce. I was more interested in stylistic amalgamation and reinvention. If I could do this with the tastefulness, wit, and cleverness of Stravinsky, then I felt I could drop the pretentiousness of so
much “new music” and “classical music.” I wasn’t looking for the grand statement, but the charming statement, even though my old friend Kim thinks charm is superficial. I remember playing my music one day for Bruce MacCombie, who was Dean of Juilliard at the time. When he said it was witty, urbane, and sophisticated, I knew I was on the right track. I felt after decades, in a late stage in life, I had found my authentic musical self.

I taught theory at Mannes College of Music for around fifteen years. It gave me a place to go. The most important thing I did there was establish and run the Mannes Institute for Advanced Studies in Music Theory, a revolutionary think tank for leading music theorists from around the world. It had a significant impact on the field. I eventually won the Lifetime Membership Award from the Society for Music Theory as a result, which is only held by people like Milton Babbitt and Alan Forte. It was a great honor, but the more I succeeded in theory, the more I realized I had strayed from composition. I eventually discontinued the Institute and have since left Mannes. As a result I am once again getting more in touch with my own musicality, editing and revising an enormous backlog of compositions I’ve written, composing new ones, and reconnecting with the musical journey I began so long ago. I don’t know where this will lead or how it will end, but I’m grateful to Phil Rashkin, a former student of mine and member of Washington Square Winds, as well as to his entire group, for being so positive and receptive to my music, and for honoring me as WSW Composer of the Month. I’ll end with a little tidbit I wrote some years ago summarizing my musical aesthetic in a pithier way:

My musical grammar is neither radical nor experimental. Its vitality lies in the familiarity of genres, recollection of themes, and the unpretentious interpolation of the dance floor, the saloon, and the iPod. It tempers serious music with the social, inviting listeners to come as they are. It opens the window to the street and lets in fresh air. And though it may aim slightly lower than the concert hall, what it concedes in erudition may hopefully be compensated in charm. If it succeeds, its reward is less an applause, and more a smile.

Wayne Alpern
December 1, 2014
New York City