When Morty Met Stefan

I've not been able to track down the friend, maybe one of the people mentioned in a NY Times review for a concert of student compositions given at the High School of Music and Art in 1943.

Also, it's interesting to note that Feldman, in an interview with Thomas Moore in MFS, admits that he first met Cage at Wolpe's house concerts, not at Carnegie. (I reconstruct this history in my just-completed, soon to be defended dissertation.)

KG replies: Wow - that's slightly earth-shaking. One piece of misinfo I address in my book, taking it from John Holzaepfel, is that Cage met Tudor not through Feldman, as is often asserted, but through dancer Jean Erdman in 1949, whom Tudor accompanied in dances. Best of luck with the defense.

Wasn't Krenek married to Anna Mahler? Luigi Nono married Nuria Schoenberg...

KG replies: You're right, though the marriage lasted less than a year. I wonder why Feldman thought that. Funny, the book is heavily footnoted with clarifying points and factual references, but they missed this one.

One assumes that Wolpe "bawled" Feldman out!

KG replies: [sic]

Regarding Adelaide, Australia: This was the home for many years of Richard Meale, in his prime Australia's best expressionist. (Like so many other leading Australian composers, he turned to writing late-romantic tosh in his late middle age.) Peter Maxwell-Davies also spent some time in Adelaide in the middle 1960s (before Meale arrived, I think). South Australia is the only Australian state not originally founded as a British penal colony, and, as a consequence, Adelaide is still more English, more Protestant, and more concerned with proper etiquette than other parts of Australia. Meale was originally from Sydney, and I think his music reflects the brashness and cultural eclecticism (indeed, the left-coast-ness) of Sydney more than the stiffness of Adelaide.

KG replies: I reviewed Meale's opera Voss for Fanfare, many, many years ago.

Of course the inimitable Vincent Plush was b. Adelaide on April 18, 1950. You can hear an interview with him at www.radiOM.org.

KG replies: Did he ever say anything to offend Feldman? Before 1980?

what's with his weird bitch about Adelaide!

i guess he wasn't to know of the Adelaide Festival for a start (yep, the one in the poster behind Glass in Duckworth's book of interviews) which within its overall international focus has more or less dedicated itself to touring prime American artists - Allen Ginsberg, Peter Sellars, Philip Glass, John Adams, Merce Cunningham, BOAC All Stars, Eleo Pomare, Chaim Potok, Alice Walker, et al. on this front he could equally have slagged off huddersfield, UK, or edinburgh or, dare i say, dallas. :-)

mind you, i won't disagree with peter's comments above; god help me if i ever had to live there.

KG replies: Hey, I got out of Dallas quick to make sure I never composed like someone in Dallas.

I feel I must come to the defense of Adelaide too, and also of the "late-romantic tosh" of Meale, which is actually most excellent music, as is much of the other supposedly conservative Australian music of the 80s and 90s. Style wars are so last-century.

I wondered if the friend may have been Seymour Shifrin, whom Feldman knew at the time.

KG replies: Possibly. Alex Ross speculates that it might have been Meyer Kupferman.

Rob -- Let's agree to disagree about Meale's late style. What I wonder is why so many prominent Oz composers started writing in a similar style, seemingly all at once?

I'm pretty sure the friend wasn't Kupferman, because Wolpe played a movement of Kupferman's "Chamber Symphony" as a demonstration in a lecture he gave at Darmstadt in 1956. Wolpe made generally positive comments about the piece. Thus, it seems unlikely Kupferman is the friend in Feldman's story, since the friend clearly wasn't going to have anything to do with Wolpe after that initial meeting.

(The transcript of the Wolpe lecture was published in the Journal of Music Theory in 1984.)

Besides Seymour Shifrin, another possible conjecture is Allan Blank, also a member of that same circle of young composers (with Kupferman and Feldman) who assembled a reading ensemble for their own works.

KG replies: Ahh, this narrows it down. Alex had told me that Blank, Shifrin, and Kupferman were the three composers at Music & Arts High School that Feldman had had works performed with. Maybe Blank indeed. Now THIS is musicology.

Of course, Blank is the only one of those four still alive -- so one could ask. But if he's actually "the one", hard to know what he'd say about a story like that.