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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780252037603 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Illinois Press |
| Publication date: | 03/08/2013 |
| Series: | American Composers |
| Edition description: | 1st Edition |
| Pages: | 176 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 8.60(h) x 0.70(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Alec Wilder
By Philip Lambert
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Copyright © 2013 Philip LambertAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-03760-3
Chapter One
AwakeningsMusical Experiences through the Early 1930s
FROM THE MOMENT OF HIS BIRTH, on February 16, 1907, in Rochester, New York, Alexander Wilder was a child of privilege. His father's family were prominent local bankers. His mother's family, descended from the Chews of New Orleans, had similarly prospered at the First National Bank of nearby Geneva. His full name, Alexander Lafayette Chew Wilder, sustained a legacy from his mother's father, Alexander Lafayette Chew, whose godfather was the Marquis de Lafayette. Writing about his early life years later, Wilder recalled a childhood of comfort and affluence in a large house well stocked with material possessions and maintained by servants, alongside an older brother and sister. He did not, however, remember a warm, nurturing home. After his father's sudden death in 1909, his mother was ill-equipped to manage the household alone and descended into alcoholism and depression. The baby of the family, who was known as "Alexander" or "Alex," not yet "Alec," developed an orientation toward domestic instability that he would carry with him throughout his life.
Music held a rather ordinary presence in Wilder's youth. He recalls witnessing a shaky piano performance by his Aunt Emma of "The Whistler and His Dog," a tune made famous by Arthur Pryor's band and published in sheet music in 1905. In his memoirs he also mentions records playing on the Victrola in his house, including "Esmeralda" (perhaps an arrangement of Cesare Pugni's ballet music of 1844) and "Dark Town Strutter's Ball," in the 1917 recording by a saxophone sextet, Six Brown Brothers. His sister, he recalls, sang popular songs such as "The Girl on the Magazine Cover" (Irving Berlin, from Stop! Look! Listen! [1915]) and "Wait till the Cows Come Home" (Ivan Caryll and Anne Caldwell, from Jack o'Lantern [1917]), showing special affection for tunes from the currently hot songwriting team of Jerome Kern and P. G. Wodehouse, including "My Castle in the Air" (Miss Springtime [1916]), "The Crickets Are Calling" (Leave It to Jane [1917]), and "And I Am All Alone" (Have a Heart [1917]). But young Alexander did not harbor a particular affinity for music and did not study or perform music in any formal way during his childhood. He was given freedom and independence, and he spent much of his time alone, with books and fantasies.
After Wilder attended private schools for a few years in Rochester, his family moved downstate in pursuit of broader educational opportunities. For the family's youngest, however, a year at St. Paul's School in Garden City, Long Island, and a few months at the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey brought only frustration and distress. A sensitive soul with relatively esoteric interests, he was unable to feel comfortable with earthier, more athletically inclined classmates. He was bullied and harassed. He finally found solace at the Collegiate School on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where he met kindred spirits and flourished in a nurturing academic environment. He was well-liked and active, a member of the debate team and glee club, and he graduated in 1924 as "Most Likely to Succeed."
But succeed at what? He had failed his regents exams, New York's barometer of college preparedness, and was not destined for a traditional postsecondary education. He had no clearly defined career goals. For more than a year after finishing high school, he thought of being a writer and labored over poems and stories, finally deciding that he had "learned a lot about writing" but "didn't know what to write about" (Life Story, 17). He had a brief flirtation with an acting school. Mostly he and his friends Carroll Dunn, whom he had met at the Jersey Shore a few summers earlier, and Lavinia Faxon enjoyed lives of leisure, in day trips up the Hudson and longwinded discussions over late-night dinners. Wilder recalled, "Those were the innocent twenties with their romantic speakeasies, their flappers, their laughter, and their benign ignorance of what the world really was. Oh, those long, intense discussions late at night in Chinese restaurants drinking tea and eating almond cakes, for the speakeasies didn't reach us until later. Our probably corny foolishness, our love of poetry and arrogant and naive speculations about life, life, life!!" (Life Story, 23).
His decision to pursue a career in music came in 1925 or early 1926, following a passion that had been growing for some time. During one recent summer vacation he had taken up the banjo and had learned to play well enough to be hired for dances and welcomed into local bar bands at the Jersey Shore. He had also begun teaching himself to play the piano and read staff notation. He had amassed a collection of popular sheet music and had made a few attempts at writing songs of his own. A turning point in his musical ambitions, he believed, came during travels in Italy with his father's sister, Clara Haushalter, in the summer of 1924, just after graduation from Collegiate. During this trip, he later wrote, he "must have decided to become a composer" (Life Story, 21). While in Italy, he rented a piano and worked through piano reductions of Wagner scores. He wrote an "innocuous little piano piece." The countryside, and the attentions of a sweet Italian girl, had inspired him. Subsequently, during his postgraduation sabbatical back in New York, he followed Carroll Dunn's advice to "try something more ambitious than songs" and wrote what he called a "tone poem" for piano and then a choral setting of a Kipling poem that Dunn had given him.
These were the musical experiences he brought with him, along with a desire to get away from his family in New York City, when he decided to return to Rochester in 1926, seeking enlightenment in the elegant halls of a relatively new institute for serious musical study.
At Eastman
The Eastman School of Music of the University of Rochester had been established five years earlier, on a twelve-million-dollar bequest from George Eastman, the founder of the city's signature corporation, Eastman Kodak. Since 1924, the school's director had been Howard Hanson, already celebrated as an educator and administrator and just back from three years of study in Rome as a recipient of the Rome Prize for his ballet California Forest Play of 1920. Wilder's arrival at Eastman in 1926 reflected a certain commitment toward a future in music, even if the exact direction and dimensions of that career path remained hazily drawn. Up until that time he had only dabbled, and he was hardly confident that a professional music school was the right place for him, or that he would even be welcomed into such a community. But he was self-aware enough to trust his instincts, and he had the financial wherewithal to pursue a blossoming passion. He became a familiar figure in Eastman's main hall and in coffee shops and speakeasies of the surrounding neighborhood in the late 1920s, known for eccentric behavior and attire and for generous financial gifts to Eastman students. A sizable inheritance from his father, which was officially released into his custody at age twenty-one in 1928, sustained him for several years, eventually extending into the bleakest days of the Great Depression.
Wilder was a presence at Eastman during that time, but he was never formally enrolled as a student. He never applied or auditioned. He simply appeared at the office door of a faculty member, Herbert Inch, seeking an opinion on his choral setting of the Kipling poem that Carroll Dunn had given him. As Wilder later explained, Inch "kindly suggested study" (The Search, 39). Wilder took private counterpoint lessons with Inch for several semesters starting in 1926, studying Bach and writing model compositions. It proved to be a formative experience in his musical development, breeding a belief that "counterpoint is the bones of music. Harmony and rhythm are fascinating, but to me they represent flesh as opposed to bone. And without the strength of interdependent lines, the musical building may collapse" (Letters I Never Mailed, 84). Wilder came to regard Bach as "the greatest genius of them all" (Letters I've Never Mailed, 86) and "the high point of Western civilization" (Life Story, 33). Not just a linear orientation but actual contrapuntal techniques such as fugue and canon would become vital elements of the concert music Wilder would later compose.
He had a less fulfilling experience with another Eastman professor, Edward Royce, the son of the renowned Harvard philosopher Josiah Royce. In a series of private composition lessons, Royce attempted to impart a working method grounded in logic and order. "Everything must be foursquare," Wilder recalled. "I certainly am all for order and discipline, but Mr. Royce had me almost in a musical straitjacket" (Letters I Never Mailed, 85). Wilder does not explain the full details of Royce's system, offering only general accounts of methods that seem to rely more on planning and technical organization than on instinct or spontaneity. With Royce he also studied Beethoven piano sonatas, apparently with an emphasis on the intellectual basis of compositional decisions. Wilder wrote that he respected Beethoven's "orderly mind" but that he was "not nearly so enthusiastic about his music as Mr. Royce would like me to be" (Letters I've Never Mailed, 86).
Wilder's reaction against the hyperrationality of Royce's approach and Beethoven's music might initially seem to be at odds with his high regard for Inch's tutelage and the constructive complexity of Bach's counterpoint. But Wilder is simply making a familiar distinction between strict and free composition. He places high value on the "strict" contrapuntal skill required to produce canons and fugues, but he also believes that "free" treatment of motives and themes is just as valid. In his writings, he praises composers whom he believes embody creative freedom, even if he has to apologize for it: "Forgive the sacrilege (since they employ little or no counterpoint), but I admit to great affection for Debussy and Ravel—particularly the Debussy string quartet, Ravel's Daphnis and Chloé, and what I've heard on records of Debussy's Pelléas and Mélisande" (Letters I Never Mailed, 86). He can value the craftsmanship of Bach while also responding to the "sentimental, unaggressive nature" of Debussy (Life Story, 33). There is room for both, as Wilder would go on to demonstrate, time and time again, in his own musical creations of the decades to come.
Wilder wrote some short piano pieces for Royce but did not continue with an extended course of study. He also attended some of Howard Hanson's classes without any formal arrangement. Mostly he set out on his own, absorbing the sounds he heard in performances by Eastman students and faculty. He learned orchestration not from a class but from private study of Cecil Forsyth's manual.3 And he began to write music of all sorts—short pieces for flute and for cello, settings of poetry by James Stephens and Edgar Allan Poe.
Eventually, during his first years at Eastman, Wilder wrote music of sufficient distinction to be programmed on some of the American Composers Concerts, a series started by Hanson in 1925 to promote new young talent. In the 1927–28 season, only his second year at the school, six of Wilder's songs for voice and orchestra appeared on one of the concerts, and a program from the following year included Wilder's new tone poem, Symphonic Piece. That his music fails to appear on similar programs in subsequent years may be a result of Wilder's mishandling of the latter premiere. At one of the rehearsals of the work, it became clear that Wilder had made errors in scoring the trumpets and horns, and Hanson had gone in and fixed them. Distressed and embarrassed about his mistakes, Wilder declined to be in the audience for the performance and receive Hanson's acknowledgment, opting instead for an alcoholic haze at a nearby speakeasy. It was, Wilder wrote, "the night I lost Dr. Hanson."
Upstate, Downstate
Wilder was a regular presence at Eastman between 1926 and 1929 or 1930. He blended in with the academic life and developed close friendships that would last for decades, with students such as Mitchell Miller (studying oboe, long before television singalongs), Frank Baker (studying voice), Joe Schiff (viola), Frances Alexander (later Mrs. Mitchell Miller, piano), Jimmy Caruana (clarinet), and the French hornists John Barrows, Jimmy Buffington, and Sam Richlin. Through Joe Schiff he met another lifelong friend, the photographer Louis Ouzer. In the early 1930s, with the country in economic crisis, Rochester continued to be Wilder's base, but he surrendered more and more to a restless urge for mobility and changing scenery. He began a love affair with train travel that he would maintain for the rest of his life, an impulse to depart on a moment's notice for far-flung destinations, with no or very little purpose. Wilder explained:
Music was the constant factor, the dominating compulsion, but never to the exclusion of my love for railroads, of reading or of spending time in strange communities. I say "strange" because, in spite of my love for a few people, I still preferred to spend most of my time alone, and I was happier in towns where I knew nobody, had no fear of the phone ringing, no threat of appointments or dinner dates.
So I went to Abington [Massachusetts], Virginia, Charleston, New Orleans, Chicago, St. Petersburg, and countless villages whose names I've forgotten. But they had one trait in common: they all must be reachable by railroad. I disliked entering a town or city by automobile. Railroads to this day make a romantic mystery of travel. (The Search, 73)
He was especially drawn back downstate via the Empire State Express, which ran frequently between central Rochester and Manhattan's Pennsylvania Station, along the banks of the Erie Canal and Hudson River.
Wherever he found himself, he continued to write music, building on his experiences at Eastman. He wrote many more art songs, filling manuscript books with earnest efforts in search of a distinctive compositional voice. Many of these survive in what have been designated the Wilder "songbooks" (see "Selected Works," section I). They include musical settings of a variety of poetic voices, from the classic (John Keats) to the recent and conventional (James Stephens) to the deeply introspective (Emily Dickinson). They also cover a wide musical terrain, some aspiring toward a simple elegance ("Nancy Walsh," "Autumn Chant," "Wild Swans"), others pushing boundaries of dissonance and style ("I Hide Myself," "I Felt a Funeral"). Some of the poems he chose are multi-stanza "epics" ("Annabelle Lee," "The Fifteen Acres"), but he more often chose shorter poems and wrote music to match the poetic focus and intensity. Harmonically the songs are lush and colorful, many showing the influence of Debussy, although some sound more like Satie ("Song, I Am Tired to Death"), and others capture an ethnic or folk quality of the original poem ("Besides That"). Generally speaking, the songs have many original moments, often betraying a sensibility that veers away from the boundaries of a conventional "art song" and borrows liberally from popular traditions. Even in his earliest efforts at musical composition, Wilder employed ideas and adopted attitudes that would become his trademark.
He seems to have responded to Emily Dickinson with particular ardor, and his settings of eight of her poems in Songbook B are among the most musically inventive of these early works. "I Felt a Funeral," for example, begins with thick, dissonant harmonies changing on each downbeat, like the tolling of distant bells on a dark night, or the pacing of a motley funeral procession (Example 1). Some of the chords are recognizable tonal structures—the G[??] major triad at "brain" especially stands out—but most consist of clustered dissonances, often bringing together notes of a whole-tone scale. The vocal line snakes upward to the climactic phrase "sense is breaking through," usually doubling notes from within the piano chords. But the melody itself is hardly the primary focus; the central idea of the song is the sound of the piano's chords with the interweaving melody. What seems to have captured Wilder's interest most intensely is the challenge of creating a novel, expressive progression of harmonies. This would become a familiar motivation in much of his later work.
Wilder does not say whether he heard any of these early songs performed. He may have had them in mind when he later recalled "all those concert songs I've never heard sung" (The Search, 166). But some of them might have been given informal readings by friends (such as Frank Baker and Frances Alexander); at least eight were copied out separately in ink, as if to provide scores for performers. Performance prospects or not, he continued to write. His series of art songs essentially represents a compositional laboratory, the work of a creative artist teaching himself to compose, as he had earlier taught himself to play banjo and piano. In similar fashion, he wrote a cello concerto for the principal cellist of the Rochester Philharmonic, George Finckel, who "never got around to even trying it out" (Life Story, 54). Wilder does remember hearing a reading by Finckel of some "short cello pieces" and a performance in nearby Geneva of a piece for cello and harp (Life Story, 54). Mitch Miller has recalled playing a new piece by Wilder on his graduation recital in 1932. While the scores for these works have not surfaced and may have been discarded, score and parts do survive for a five-movement string quartet dating from this era, an ambitious blending of stern contrapuntal passages, dense motivic development, and jazzy, syncopated rhythms. Wilder later described this work as a "bumbling burst of joy over having discovered the marvel of music but with no technique or sense of direction to guide my hand" (Letters I Never Mailed, 100). He remembers showing scores of his string quartet and cello concerto to Aaron Copland (Letters I Never Mailed, 100–101, 113–15). (Wilder recalls Copland's reaction: "You said I was more interesting than my music.") Years later, Wilder told Whitney Balliett that he had found a notice about a possible performance of the string quartet in his mother's purse after she died, in 1932.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Alec Wilder by Philip Lambert Copyright © 2013 by Philip Lambert. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
PREFACE....................ixA NOTE ON SOURCES....................xiii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS....................xv
1. Awakenings: Musical Experiences through the Early 1930s....................1
2. Breakthroughs: First Professional Successes in the 1930s and 1940s....................17
3. Evolutions: Compositional Maturity in the 1950s....................46
4. Loyalties: The Prolific 1960s....................73
5. Celebrations: Reflection and Reaffirmation in the 1970s....................92
6. The Music of Alec Wilder: An Assessment....................111
NOTES....................115
SELECTED WORKS....................131
FOR FURTHER READING....................143
SUGGESTED LISTENING....................145
INDEX....................147