Institute for Studies In American Music Conservatory of Music, Brooklyn College of the City University of New York NEWSLETTER
Volume XXXVII	No. 2 Spring 2008
Inside This Issue: Inside This Issue H.W.H.’s Newsletter (1971-92) by Carol J. Oja I.S.A.M. Beginnings by H.W.H. Everbest: Remembering H. Wiley Hitchcock by Susan Feder H.W.H., Cowell, and New Music by David Nicholls H.W.H. Reflections by Ellie Hisama and Nancy Hager Sitting for a Virgil Thomson Portrait by H.W.H.	Mail from Wiley (1961-76) by Richard Crawford Janet and Wiley Hitchcock One of H.W.H.’s early students, Richard Crawford, would himself become a pioneer in American music studies. Below are Crawford's reflections on fifteen years of correspondence with H.W.H. I have in my cabinet a dogeared manila folder with “Hitchcock” written on the tab. In fact, I have more than one such folder. The oldest piece of paper in any of them is dated 26 July 1961: an attractive blue-tinged form letter signed by the Librarian of Congress thanking Professor H. Wiley Hitchcock for his recent gift: The Papers of Andrew Law in the William L. Clements Library, by Richard Crawford and H. Wiley Hitchcock. Ann Arbor, 1961. (2 copies). Paper-clipped to this document is a note to me in the co-author’s hand: “We are now filed / and catalogued / in the / Library of Congress. / —E pluribus unum.” Running to about seven pages, Crawford and Hitchcock’s booklet was the twenty-six-year-old “senior” author’s first publication, its subject suggested by the thirty-seven-year-old “junior” author. Out of this encounter with the life and work of one early American psalmodist flowed a stream of questions: enough to fuel a Ph.D. dissertation, a published biography, a network of bibliographical studies and thematic indexes, and a clearer idea of how organized music making took root in North America. In this endeavor, and all later projects I tackled as a musicologist, I had the good fortune of feeling that my erstwhile junior author would always be there with counsel and criticism, in case I got too full of myself. I corresponded with H. Wiley Hitchcock over the better part of five decades. In the weeks and months since his death last December, I have revisited the file of our written exchanges with a mix of emotions that comes with losing a beloved friend who lived six hundred miles away, and whom I actually saw only a few days each year. On one of my last visits to see him in New York, I asked Wiley—surely one of the world’s most physically robust musicologists—how he was coping with the diminishments and indignities his illness had visited upon him. After a long moment’s pause, he answered: “I’m an optimist.” From a man who knew and admired eloquence, this hardly amounts to an eloquent response. Yet it was more personal than anything I’d ever heard him say. Now, however, I’ve come to see the ordinariness of these words as a good fit with Wiley’s way of being in the world. Never one to talk much about himself or his thoughts, he was a man of action—of deeds and delights. I met Wiley in 1958 when, as a graduate student at the University of Michigan, I enrolled in his American music class. In 1961, he left Michigan for Hunter College in New York City. There he emerged as an upcoming scholar of French and Italian baroque music who also had American interests. A letter written on October 26, 1969, brims with news of Caccini and Charpentier, and the scholarly harvest from a fifteen-month stay in Europe that Wiley and his art-historian wife, Janet Cox-Rearick, had just enjoyed. “I invited myself to read a paper on ‘Interpreting Le Nuove Musiche’ at the first meeting of the Glorious Greater New York Chapter of the A.M.S. this fall,” he reported. Having arranged to work live performance with singer Robert White into his paper, he had spent the fall “training my hamlike hands to glide smoothly over a harpsichord keyboard.” Moreover, spotting a doer when they saw one, music publishers had floated the idea of a “Charpentier Oeuvres complètes” in Wiley’s presence. The notion of such a project, however, triggered a vision of “years and years of continuo realizations stretching ahead of me,” and he’d spotted an escape hatch: “To write a piece called ‘A Monumenta Charpentieriana????’ and have done with it.” “So,” he signed off cheerily, “the fate of American-music projects is at present in your hands.” A letter written on 13 December 1970 shows the pendulum of Wiley’s scholarly life swinging back toward America. He voiced regret that a sudden illness had forced him to miss the November meeting of the American Musicological Society in Toronto, where he’d been scheduled to chair a session on music in the US and Canada. He also regretted missing an informal meeting there of “Americanists” (his word)—a previously unrecognized AMS category of specialist. (Had anyone made a list of who showed up?) Then he shared three major news flashes. First, he wrote, “I’m transferring to Brooklyn College next fall.” Sherman Van Solkema, the chair of Brooklyn’s music department, had convinced him to leave Hunter by offering a lighter teaching load, plus “the directorship of what we’re tentatively calling an Institute of Studies in American Music.” “No firm plans yet,” he wrote, “but lots of possibilities and the sky’s the limit; the president of the college is firmly behind the idea.” The second piece of news was just as striking. “I’ve joined the Executive Committee of the 6^th Edition of Grove’s Dictionary. It’s planned for 1975: 12 vols., 1,000,000 words per volume, with an emphatically Anglo-American turn to the whole thing.” His responsibilities: nothing less than to suggest “all entries having to do with music on the ‘American continent,’” and to identify authors for them—“a huge job,” he admitted. Finally, AMS president-elect Claude Palisca had asked him “to head an AMS committee to plan some sort of musical or musicological observance” of the US Bicentennial in 1976. The letter’s last paragraph tersely noted the shifting tide in his own scholarly bailiwick: “Charpentier and Caccini are having trouble keeping their heads above water.” In 1972, a flow of Hitchcock letters poured in, many having to do with Grove articles I had agreed to write, and most written on I.S.A.M. stationery, with letterhead info in a bright, distinctive blue. In 1973-74 my family and I moved to the New York area, where I served for a year as Senior Research Fellow at the Institute: an assignment tendered by Professor Hitchcock, and gratefully accepted. Since I was on the scene, and we saw each other far more than at any other time in our lives, not many letters were exchanged that year. But one sent my way on 11 November 1973, showed clear symptoms of Grove fatigue. “My Dear Professour Crawford,” it began: Odd how things happen, is it not? I was on the point of requesting a brief autobiographical statement from you for submission to the editours of Grove 6 (as we familiarly refer to the forthcoming edition of that dictiounary) when Lo! The very same was fourthcoming—albeit unsigned, alas—from Ann Arbour. After another paragraph of similar stripe, the letter closed, over Wiley’s signature, with a lordly snippet of condescension: Kindly advise whether the last name of the subject is in fact spelt ‘Crawford’ rather than the more widely accepted CRAWFOURD. Faithfully youours, . . . The fall of 1974 saw Wiley embroiled in another massive American undertaking: acting as co-director, with Vivian Perlis, of the Charles Ives Centennial Festival Conference, co-sponsored by Brooklyn College’s Institute for Studies in American Music and Yale University’s School of Music. A letter he wrote on 17 September claimed to have caught a whiff of impatience in a letter of mine for his being slow to answer an earlier one. The first paragraph bellies up to the writer’s impeccable reputation as a correspondent and wryly exposes the calculation behind it: I think I detect a tinge of pique in your latest—probably over my not having acknowledged, let alone acknowledged with the proper appreciation, your second latest. Sorry, but this convention we’re moving into has me straight out and I’ve had to suspend temporarily my program of leaving for posterity a long string of letters proving what a swell, appreciative guy I really am. By the summer of 1975, however, the scholarly pendulum had swung eastward. A letter from Florence on 29 July 1975, with another thirteen months overseas to go, notes some challenges of being bi-musicological—especially as the US Bicentennial year drew nigh and, back home, American music study seemed to be inching toward respectability. “Here I am, doing my Italian thing again,” he wrote, “except that there are so many American-music loose ends to knot up that so far it’s been an All-American stay.” Among many, one was that, in his role as editor of the I.S.A.M. Monograph series, he was at work on an item that demanded a rewrite of “almost 100%.” Even so, he admitted, “it’s been fun, sort of like writing a fairy story, to try to do that in Florence, Italy.” With quick messaging still far in the future, “I send off almost daily memos” to Rita Mead—Wiley’s assistant at I.S.A.M.—“to check this or copy out that, and then some.” He also delighted in the well-being of Casta and Diva, the Hitchcocks’ Siamese cats. “They are having a ball—grass, earth, garbage cans, birds, bats!—and are pretty completely Italianized to boot. The other morning Casta said ‘Ciao’ instead of ‘miaou’ . . . to which Diva replied, ‘Basta, Casta.’” Another letter from Florence, this one written on 27 January 1976, followed a hiatus of a few months in our correspondence. Since summer, Wiley had tied up many American loose ends—chiefly the book manuscript that he and Vivian Perlis had “worked up from the Ives Festival-Conference papers and panels”—while, between October and Christmas, he’d written a short book for Oxford University Press on Charles Ives’s music. The past summer had also seen the death of his mother. (His father had died some years earlier.) “I was with her for the last week, and I think that during the first couple of days . . . she recognized me and knew I was with her; I hope so.” The stateside visit had also enabled him to visit his daughter Susan and his son Hugh. He noted, too, the recent founding of The Sonneck Society for American Music, a group that would hold its first annual meeting in the spring of 1976. Another major American project, New World Records, was taking shape in his absence, though he belonged to its editorial board. In this case, his whereabouts had “effectively prevented me even from reacting to whatever they’re doing” because “minutes, lists, etc.” had been sent to him “by sea mail!!!” And finally, the last paragraph reported another tidal shift: “I’m back into Caccini now.” As some readers of these words already know, the early 1970s witnessed the building of an infrastructure for American music research, with H. Wiley Hitchcock as chief architect, contractor, and occasional hod-carrier. A chronological list of the enterprises that he began, or led, or contributed to would go a long way toward outlining the story of that achievement. This brief digest of one phase of our correspondence during those years shows that Wiley managed this feat through a divided consciousness: that of a cosmopolitan American, able to alternate his labors between the Old and New Worlds, and to stay productive in both. Yet another divide also shows up in our correspondence. Or rather, it shows up in our mail, which includes articles and quotations that Wiley sometimes sent my way. The divide in question was a social category that Wiley believed in: the Expatriate Midwesterner (ExMid). The subject’s pioneer researcher is New Yorker writer Calvin Trillin, younger than Wiley by a dozen years, a Kansas City native who has lived and worked in New York since 1963, and a self-described ExMid. Not once but twice, Wiley sent me a copy of the same column by Trillin—undated but obviously written during the administration of President Gerald Ford. An ExMid, writes Trillin, “is someone who lives on either coast or abroad but still prefers to think of himself at least partly as a Midwesterner.” Describing the type as male—and probably with a sophisticated wife from the East—he explains that an ExMid differs from other former Midwesterners in harboring a particular fear: “the fear that his mother or aunt or cousin will be cornered by some neighbor at his hometown supermarket and informed that he has become too big for his britches.” Trillin offers President Ford, who for years represented in Congress the part of Michigan that includes Grand Rapids, as an example of the type. “Clues to his attitudes,” he explains, “will be found not in the attitudes of a hypothetical Pontiac dealer in Grand Rapids,” but in those of the Pontiac dealer’s hypothetical brother, a stockbroker on Wall Street who firmly believes that on the day he starts wearing Italian shoes and drinking foreign wine an old high school buddy from Grand Rapids will arrive to make fun of him for doing so. Mindful of his roots, says Trillin, the ExMid abhors the notion that his move away from “the Mother Country” has “changed” him. I think of Wiley—born in Detroit, raised in one of its suburbs, and trained in Michigan as a scholar and teacher—as an optimist of the Midwestern kind: the kind who, for all his brilliance, poise, and accomplishment, would remain ever vigilant against the possibility that he might seem to be getting too big for his britches. Traits linking him with Trillin’s ExMid outlook come crowding to mind. But rather than listing them, I’ll close with a hypothetical. If you knew Wiley well, and came upon a sheet of printed letterhead proclaiming “Institute for Studies in American Music / H. Wiley Hitchcock, Founder and Director” you’d suspect an April Fool’s Day stunt with the director as victim. —Richard Crawford University of Michigan ISAM home Who we are Contact us ISAM Conferences and Lectures Monographs ISAM Web Documents Newsletters Links Copyright © 2005 Institute for Studies in American Music, Conservatory of Music, Brooklyn College. All Rights Reserved. Site designed by J. Graeme Fullerton & maintained by Carl Clements, Managing Editor