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Inside
This Issue: Inside This Issue H.W.H.’s Newsletter (1971-92) by Carol J. Oja Mail from Wiley by Richard Crawford 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 |
I.S.A.M. Matters (1992) by H.W.H.
Composer Lou Harrison with H.
Wiley
Hitchcock and Carol J. Oja at the
Henry Cowell Centennial Festival,
March 1997 Photo © Jack
Vartoogian/FrontRowPhotos In Fall 1992, as he prepared for
retirement, Wiley contributed his final piece as editor of the Newsletter. In his
editorial comment he mentioned he was “exercising some prerogatives:
moving the regular ‘I.S.A.M. Matters’ column to page 1 from page
3, signing it with a byline instead of leaving it anonymous, and making sure
that the double meaning of the column’s title is clearly
understood.” His article provides an eloquent retrospective of what had
taken place at the Institute during the twenty-one years of his leadership. I.S.A.M.
matters. You bet it matters. It’s mattered for a long time. And it will
go on mattering, I’m happy to say, having suffered the equivalent of
Hamlet’s “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,” not to
mention his “sea of troubles.” With a lot of help from our
friends—among them many of our Newsletter readers, Many of our younger readers may not be too clear about the beginnings and the early years of I.S.A.M., so first I’ll provide a bit of history. I.S.A.M. was the brainchild, not of me, but of Sherman
Van Solkema, who back then (about 1970) was chair of The
student of Beethoven [or] Marenzio or Louis Couperin is concerned with music
that can be brought to life; but Francis Hopkinson or Lowell Mason or
Theodore Chanler [and here Van Solkema, an old friend from our overlapping graduate-school days together at the University of Michigan, had a characteristically bold, visionary reaction to my article: he persuaded his college president that a research and information center focused on American music was needed; he then crossed the East River to persuade me to leave my position at Hunter College and move sideways within the CUNY system to join the Brooklyn College faculty and become Director of the new center. Thus was I.S.A.M. born in 1971, with a firm commitment from the college and initial extra support from The Rockefeller Foundation. Its goals were expressed, in rather lofty language, in an announcement brochure: The basic function of the Institute is to provide a suitable academic framework in which to encourage, support, propagate, and evaluate research in music of the United States ... past and present, cultivated and vernacular, classical and pop, jazz and rock, white and black, inner-American and inter-American. Those multiple goals of I.S.A.M., in a context of affection and respect for all American musics, have been energetically pursued for more than two decades. There is not the space here to give a full account of the many ways in which the pursuit has been carried on. A couple of years ago, needing a fundraising document that would tell the whole story but in a summary way, I prepared a curriculum vitae of the Institute. (You can imagine the headings: Name; Address; Date of Birth; Field of Specialization; Staff; Academic and Professional Recognition; Publications; Conferences; Concerts, Colloquia, and Colloquia with Concerts; Lecture Series and Single Lectures; Research Fellowships, Senior and Junior, Bibliography.) The I.S.A.M. c.v. runs to twenty pages, much too long to print here. But I can’t resist glossing a few items in it—moments and memorabilia in the Institute’s past: ¶ I.S.A.M.’s first public event (Spring ‘72), all about ragtime. (Those were the early days of the ragtime revival.) An afternoon colloquium with panelists Rudi Blesh, William Bolcom, David Jasen, and Eileen Southern was followed by an evening jamboree with six pianists: one by one, Bolcom, Jasen, Bob Seeley, Trebor Tichenor, and Dick Wellstood led up to a climactic appearance by Eubie Blake. (What an evening!) ¶ During the 1972-73 academic year, Gilbert Chase’s sometimes prickly but always stimulating and provocative presence, in seminars and out, as I.S.A.M.’s first Senior Research Fellow. (Rockefeller Foundation support enabled us to bring him, and others, during our first three years; thereafter, the college provided the support, and Chase was followed by a remarkable parade of Fellows, both male and female—not only scholarly stars but composers of distinction, our conviction being that, as Milton Babbitt has suggested, composers are often among the most profound musical researchers in our culture.) ¶ During five beautiful October days in 1974, the Charles Ives Centennial Festival-Conference, the first international conference ever centered on an American composer. Co-chaired by Vivian Perlis and co-sponsored by the Yale University School of Music, with more than sixty participants and thirty “discussants,” the Ives F-C was a melange of six symposia and eight All-Ives concerts. For me, the most magical moments were the performances—on the same concert!— of Ives’s First Piano Sonata by William Masselos (its premiere performer, in 1949) and the Second “Concord” Sonata by John Kirkpatrick (its premiere performer, in 1939). Kirkpatrick said afterwards that he felt he had been more successful than ever at “letting the music play me, instead of my playing the music.” ¶ Our first few I.S.A.M. monographs, published on a shoestring (and priced accordingly) but selling well enough to provide income with which to publish more monographs (they now number thirty-three). With No. 1 (Richard Jackson’s United States Music: Sources of Bibliography and Collective Biography), I.S.A.M. led off with a clear message of intent to help provide scholarly support for American-music researchers. No. 2 (Gilbert Chase’s Two Lectures in the form of a Pair: [1] Music, Culture. History / [2] Structuralism and Music) established a precedent: bringing into print Senior Fellows’ public lectures. No. 3 (Bruce Saylor’s The Writings of Henry Cowell) was the Institute’s first monograph to derive from a graduate-student essay (and the first in a series of I.S.A.M.’s documentary studies about Cowell—the others so far, Martha Manion’s Writings About Henry Cowell: An Annotated Bibliography and William Lichtenwanger’s The Music of Henry Cowell: A Descriptive Catalog, being the biggest monographs I.S.A.M. has published, with more than 400 pages each). ¶ The I.S.A.M. Newsletter’s first issues (Vol. I, No. I, appearing in November [more or less] of 1971): miniscule, poorly designed, typographically of dubious distinction ... but mission-conscious, news-filled, proud, and also breezy. (About ten years later, the review journal Come All-Ye pleased us by characterizing the Newsletter as “one of the best ... witty, irreverent, eclectic, and inventive” and as having “a winning style and thoroughness.” Right on! was the cry around the office.) ¶ In 1977, an
N.E.H.-supported festival-conference on “The Phonograph and Our Musical
Life,” the excuse being that a hundred years earlier Edison had
invented phonorecording technology, and our lives had never been the same
since. The affair went on for several days, with conference sessions,
concerts, panel discussions, and other events. We invited John Cage to be the
keynote speaker. He declined, saying he would be in A few days later Cage sent a handwritten set of instructions and a sort of scenario for his new piece, which he had titled 33-1/3. In the backstage area we were to assemble a group of about ten tables in a kind of crescent. On each table were to be a long-playing record player (hooked up to loudspeakers), a turntable, and a bunch of long-playing records begged or borrowed from the Brooklyn College Music Library—any records at all, chosen at random and piled at random on the tables. Downstage, in front of this set of tables, was to be another, long one, with microphones for five or six of the scholar-conferees. They were to be seated behind this table facing the auditorium, before its rear doors were opened to the audience members. The latter were to be ushered in a circuitous route through the empty auditorium, to the stage, up some stairs onto it, through a group of musicians at one corner playing some music by Erik Satie (a favorite of Cage’s), back past the silent, seated conference panelists, and to the tables with the records and record-players. There each audience member was to approach a table, choose any record she or he wished, put it on the turntable, lower the tonearm, and adjust the volume of the record player ad lib., move on to another table and play another record, etc., etc., and finally walk back down into the auditorium and sit down. When all of the “audience” had gone through this business and were seated, the “panelists” were to comment on what they had just experienced, in any way they wished. (I put “audience” in quotation marks, since of course they had been the performers of the first part of Cage’s piece—which also included, appropriately enough in an academic-conference context, the discussion that followed among the “panelists”—who had been the “audience” during the first part!) ... 33-1/3 had only that single performance, as far as I know. And it was never published. But it was a quintessentially Cagey piece, conceived for particular circumstances, totally relevent to those circumstances yet spontaneous, unpredictable to some degree, and above all invitational—to experience sounds and activities, in a sort of musical-theater environment, and to reflect on and think about it all. Cage honored I.S.A.M., and its centennial festival on the phonograph, and the phonograph itself with 33-1/3. ¶ Several challenging commissions that came I.S.A.M.’s way: in 1979, one from the National Endowment for the Arts, for an evaluative study of the NEA’s Composer/Librettist program; in 1981, one to provide research and editorial assistance to Macmillan (London) in the preparation of the encyclopedia that was published in 1986, in four volumes, as The New Grove Dictionary of American Music; in 1980, one from the Koussevitzky Foundation for a comprehensive discography of 20th-century American concert music, realized in I.S.A.M.’s book American Music Recordings, edited by Carol J. Oja, who had overseen the project from the beginning. Mention of Carol Oja leads directly to my conclusion,
after these few ruminations and reflections. As a CUNY doctoral student
(working on a dissertation that was to become her prize-winning critical
biography of Colin McPhee), Carol succeeded Rita Mead in 1980 as
I.S.A.M.’s research assistant. Four years later, she decided to turn to
teaching, and was succeeded at the Institute by a chain of dedicated and
indefatigable assistants: R. Allen Lott, Emily Good, and K. Robert Schwarz. But —H.W.H. ISAM home Who we
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