Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog

Rome, 1963

   This photograph was taken during a 76-hour "cutting and pasting" marathon.  I was settling in for my first year in Rome on a fellowship in composition at the National Academy of Saint Cecilia, when suddenly I received a cable from Gunther Schuller in New York.  In it, he told me that my Composition for Nine Instruments had been chosen for performance at the New School for Social Research, as part of the International Society for Contemporary Music festival at New York City, and asking that I airmail the score and parts for the piece right away.

    Of course I was elated.  This was the big-time  ("in E-flat") !  But then I looked at the date on the cable:  it had lain, neglected, in the main Post Office at Rome for something like two weeks before  being delivered. (!)

    Well, there was nothing for it but to take the bull by the horns.   This meant that nine full scores of a very complicated piece had to be prepared for performance and proofread, at fifty pages each; and rehearsals were to begin (as I recall) within four days.  It looked impossible;  but I had to try it--the alternative was simply to give up, and this was far too important to my work to permit such an ignominious retreat !


    And so the marathon began.  I think this picture was taken very late, somewhere around the middle of  night-two.  My friend Robert Einaudi, with whom I shared a floor in Campo dei Fiori, just sort of eased into my main studio-bedroom and snapped several pictures, of which, I like this one the best.  I have edited the result as well as I could, but of course it can only be tweaked so far.  (By the way, the black spot on my cheek is not mine--just a flaw in the negative; also, my hair-color as rendered here is not accurate;  it was very blonde.  Ah well, after so many years, we may be forgiven a little vanity, I think.)

    The "job" consisted in the fact that, since the work was so extremely difficult, I had decided that each player must have a full score (in an effort to keep people from getting lost during performance and rehearsal).  This meant that, for each transposing instrument (clarinet and bass-clarinet) a part had to be written out, matched to the score-size, and literally pasted into every page of the score--all by hand:  in the photo, you can see that I am cutting strips of score to size on a large, glass plate, with a razor blade.  Rubber cement was the adhesive of choice at the time.  Since there were no such things as personal computers, these primitive means were all we had for new works that had not been published.  Here, this meant 100 pages of transposed, cut and pasted parts (hence the mountain of "shards" on the floor), forming a total of nine complete scores.   Fortunately, I had already finished a fair copy of the score on "onion skin" paper, and that was reproduced, by means of a chemical-and-light process, one for each of the nine players.

    My friend, the late Fred Myrow, also a composer, dropped by and helped out with some proof-reading, and I had some help of a "grunt" nature from another friend; but the lion's share of the work fell unavoidably to me, since I was the only person who really understood the work and the score, hence no one else could make the thousands of decisions that were necessary to this mad venture.

    Fortunately, all ended well.  I put the finishing touches on the scores, wrapped and addressed them sometime around 8:00 A. M. of the third day, and my Roman girlfriend hand-carried the package to Fiumicino airport and put it on a Boeing 707 with her two lovely hands.  (Bless you Antonietta darling, wherever you may be !)   I fell in bed, then, and slept for a couple of days without awakening.  The scores made it to New York (barely) under the wire for rehearsal, and the work was duly performed at the New School.  Needless to say, I was pleased.  Very pleased.


    [ The caption to the above photograph is of course stolen from the book of that title by Dylan Thomas;  I would love to take credit for it—but fair is fair ...]

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A Stroll at St. Peter's—and a Light for the Troops, in a High Wind

Rome, 1964

    Antonietta should have been in this picture instead of snapping the photo; she was much prettier.  We had taken a walk from my apartment on the Janiculum Hill (Gianicolo, about ten minutes' walk from St. Peter's) and ran into these two tourists, who needed a light but were out of matches.
It was Sunday, and there was no one else in this huge Piazza—the only time I think I've ever seen it empty.  (Must have been the weather;  kind of raw, early-Winter day.)