Archives for 2014

Betty Comden and Adolph Green sing “Carried Away” on Art Ford’s Greenwich Village Jazz Party in 1957, accompanied by the Cy Coleman Trio. The song, by Comden, Green, and Leonard Bernstein, is from On the Town, and was sung by Comden and Green in the show’s original 1944 Broadway production:

(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday and Wednesday.)

“I found kindness and encouragement on all sides, and soon discovered that good talkers regard attentive listening as a sign of acute intelligence.”

Ivor Newton, At the Piano: The World of an Accompanist

From 2004:

To be sure, the one thing a new friend can never do for you is say I knew you when, and I find it rather sad that there are so few people in my life who can speak those words. None of my closest friends in Manhattan knew me when: we didn’t meet until after I’d figured out who I was and what I wanted to become. On the other hand, the friends of our youth present their own problems. They are part of the train of memories that we all pull behind us, the one that grows longer with each passing day, and for that reason harder to pull. “The friend of your youth,” Robert Penn Warren wrote in All the King’s Men, “is the only friend you will ever have, for he does not really see you. He sees in his mind a face which does not exist anymore, speaks a name—Spike, Bud, Skip, Red, Rusty, Jack, Dave—which belongs to that now non-existent face but by some inane and doddering confusion is for the moment attached to a not too happily met and boring stranger.” Old friends knew you when, but new ones know you now, and now is when it is and where you are….

Read the whole thing here.

“We possess art lest we perish of the truth.”

Friedrich Nietzsche, unpublished aphorism, 1888 (published in The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann)

I’m teaching a graduate seminar this semester at New York’s Mannes College of Music. It’s called “How to Write and Speak About Music,” and my seven students (whom I refer to, though not in their presence, as “my kids”) are all hard-working, immensely likable, and half my age, meaning that I’m learning at least as much from them as they are from me.

The other day I mentioned that Haydn was one of my favorite composers. One of my students told me after class that his music had never spoken to her. I said that I warmed to his humor and (in Alec Guinness’ apt phrase) “clear common sense,” an opinion that I expressed at greater length nine years ago in an essay for Commentary.

“Maybe I’m still too young to appreciate those things,” my student replied, without any perceptible glimmer of irony.

I wonder whether my face betrayed the astonishment that I felt upon hearing her perfectly serious words. When I was in my twenties, it would never have occurred to me to say anything like that about any known subject, least of all to a much older person. From early adolescence onward, I took it for granted that (A) I knew everything about everything and (B) my point of view was ex hypothesi more valid than that of my seniors. It wasn’t until I moved to New York at the age of twenty-nine that I came to the belated conclusion that I was, in fact, all wet.

Mark Twain is generally credited with the following quip:

When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.

Perhaps not surprisingly, it turns out upon further investigation that he may or may not have said it, and that if he did, he almost certainly said it very differently. Be that as it may, Twain (or whoever) was right and then some, a fact that has since been pounded into me over and over again from the hardest possible experience. My father, who wasn’t a reader and so was never given to talking in quotations, did like to trot out from time to time the following untraceable proverb: “Too soon we grow old, too late we grow smart.” He always said it with rue, an emotion that is also mostly alien to the young. Now I know better, about that and countless other things.

Hence my extreme surprise upon hearing my student say what she said. I’m sure she meant it, too, since she strikes me as utterly guileless, albeit in the nicest possible way. And I find myself wondering: is her modesty in the face of experience a generational characteristic, or is it just her?

I don’t know, and I doubt I ever will. To be sure, most of my friends, as I’ve remarked more than once, are younger than I am, and I like it that way. I learn from them, and I also draw vitality from their youthful energy. At the same time, though, I’m well aware of the importance of keeping a respectful distance from them. Nothing is more inappropriate, or more potentially humiliating, than for a middle-aged man to engage in the practice of what Kingsley Amis testily described in Girl, 20, my second favorite of his novels, as “arse-creeping youth.”

Here’s something that I wrote in this space a decade ago, on the occasion of my forty-eighth birthday:

Must there come a moment when it’s wiser to stick to the cards in your hand, to deepen your understanding of what you already know? My hair stood up when I stumbled on the following sentence in Jack Richardson’s Memoir of a Gambler: “As we moved along in the police wagon, I had the slightly unclean feeling of the man who keeps company with those much younger than himself.” Might I have reached that terrible time without knowing it—the time when middle-aged people embarrass themselves by pretending to be that which they are not, forgetting that they shall never be again as they were? That’s a scary thought.

So I have no plans to probe my student as to her overall attitude toward the Wisdom of Her Elders, such as it may or may not be. Nevertheless, I’m impressed by her own wisdom, at least as it applies to the music of Franz Joseph Haydn. I mentioned Alec Guinness a moment ago, so allow me to circle back and quote here the complete passage from his diaries to which I referred: “For me there are two salves to apply when I feel spiritually bruised—listening to a Haydn symphony or sonata (his clear common sense always penetrates) and seeking out something in Montaigne’s essays.”

Guinness was a very old man when he said that. I hope my student will be lucky enough to feel the same way when she grows a bit older—but I wouldn’t dream of telling her so. I know better than to push my luck.

* * *

Alfred Brendel plays Haydn’s Sonata in E Flat, Hob. XVI:49, at Aldeburgh’s Snape Maltings Concert Hall in 2000. He was sixty-nine years old when he taped this performance for the BBC:

An electronic Festschrift of tributes (my own among them) to the literary critic D.G. Myers, who died in September of prostate cancer, has now been posted on line. Edited by Patrick Kurp and Gregory Wolfe, it leaves no possible doubt of David’s distinction, or of the high esteem in which he was held by his friends and admirers, who continue to grieve at his loss.

In the words of Patrick and Gregory:

Two themes unify the following tributes and remembrances: while few of the contributors met David in the flesh, all felt welcomed into his world; and the bond they forged transcended politics, religion, and literary tastes. To know David was to be challenged and rewarded.

To read it, go here.

Conchita Supervia sings Puccini’s “Quando men vo” (from La Bohème) in the 1934 film Evensong, directed by Victor Savile:

(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday and Wednesday.)

“I once walked with her by the Arno, in Florence, where navvies engaged in road work put down their picks and stared in frank admiration as she passed. Supervia, without even a glance in their direction, sensed their admiration and visibly preened herself.

“‘You surely don’t enjoy men looking at you like that?’ I asked.

“‘I do,’ she replied, amused at such a very Anglo-Saxon question. ‘I don’t find it unpleasant to think that they are all saying to themsleves, ‘If I was a rich man, that’s what I’d want.’ You see, Italy is a woman’s country. In your country, if I walked down Bond Street,’ she went on lightheartedly, ‘not a man would notice me unless I pushed him off the pavement.’”

Conchita Supervia (quoted in Ivor Newton, At the Piano: The World of an Accompanist)