Settling the Score: Essays on Music

Index

INTRODUCTION

Two considerations guided the assembling of these essays: homogeneity of tone and non-duplication of material still in print. I have been writing about music since 1959, when obliged to do so as composer-lecturer at Buffalo University. After the publication of two Diaries in the mid-1960s I began writing on other matters—geography, fiction, decoration, clothes, sex, indeed anything requested by such diverse organs as Commentary and Christopher Street—albeit always from the vantage of a musician. Since 1966 I’ve published six collections, each a very mixed bag with no central focus and each, except for Setting the Tone, long out of print.

Settling the Score is therefore my first anthology that, whatever its failings, can boast purity of subject: everything is on music. Now with the complementary volume Setting the Tone, almost all my non-diary prose is available—some 120 articles (minus scattered pieces on non-musical matters that will turn up in some future book). The non-duplication premise makes for minor inconveniences. For instance, my most reprinted essay, The Music of the Beatles, composed in 1967 for the New York Review of Books and now in Setting the Tone, would have been useful between the present covers, since it was the springboard for ensuing pieces on the Beatles and on other pop considerations appearing here. Similarly articles on Poulenc and Debussy and Ravel, featured in Setting the Tone, might have lent a sense of completion had they been included here.

Chronology has been ignored; rather the entries in Settling the Score have been organized by category. Thus the earliest writing, Flanagan’s Music (1959), follows the most recent, A Medal for Lenny (1987). It seems fitting that this span of twenty-eight years should be flanked by portraits of two dear composer friends.

It also seems fitting (I’d not noticed it until I began writing this paragraph) that of the sixty-two essays only one, Variations on Mussorgsky, concerns pre—twentieth-century music; only one, Homage to Julius Katchen, concerns an interpretive artist (I am, after all, a live composer preoccupied with my fragile species in the fragile present, while many another writes about the past); and only one, Robert Jacobson Gone, concerns a musical nonpractitioner.

Robert Jacobson’s venerable magazine Opera News is where most of my writings on contemporary opera first were read, always in conjunction with productions at the Metropolitan Opera: Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, Mussorgsky’s Khovanshchina, Poulenc’s Dialoguesdes Carmélites, Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier, and Weill’s Mahagonny. The color, the emphasis, the shape, even the grammar of an article depends not only on the year it was penned, but also on the occasion. So the sometimes-academic stance of these opera essays is dropped for the more buoyant moments of public speech. Why I Write as I Do, for example, was designed to be read aloud at a meeting of the American Music Center in January 1974. (What shall I talk about? I had asked Hugo Weisgall, chairman of the meeting that would feature three other composers. Oh, just talk about why you write as you do, and keep it down to fifteen minutes.) A Medal for Lenny was likewise tailored for microphone, the occasion being the bestowal by the MacDowell Colony of an honor to Leonard Bernstein. William Flanagan: In Memoriam was delivered at a memorial concert at the Whitney Museum in April 1970. (The aforementioned Flanagan’s Music first came out in the American Composer’s Alliance Bulletin.)

Other entries, originally spoken, are more informal still, having been improvised for television (on a Critics Roundtable shared with Alexander Cockburn, Harold Hayes, and Jack Richardson on New York’s PBS Channel 13 in 1974 to 1975), then written down after the fact. These include Dancing to Ravel, Rubinstein at the Movies, Anita Ellis and Barbra Streisand, A Paragraph on Crumb, "Cage’s HPSCHD," and "A Note on Barber’s Antony and Cleopatra."

Between 1972 and 1974 I wrote a dozen pieces for The New Republic. These include Stravinsky via Craft, "Britten’s Death in Venice," Our Music Now (1974), and Smoke without Fire; also reviews of a book about Elliott Carter and of a new opera by Virgil Thomson. A word on these last two: since adolescence, although my cultural vocabulary has broadened, my taste has remained the same. Other than once disdaining and now enjoying the sound of Brahms, I’ve experienced no esthetic about-face. But I have altered attitudes about colleagues. The words on Elliott Carter, written nearly sixteen years ago and reproduced here, strike me on rereading as careful, a touch remote, certainly respectful. A few years later I would write of Carter dithyrambically as deserving of all praise. More recently I’ve became sharply critical of him. The violent shift does not reflect a change of heart about Carter’s music, which has never really meant much to me; rather it’s a lashing out at having been, for the first time ever, duped by a highly paid public relations machinery that marketed the notion of Carter as Great Man. The words on Thomson’s opera, and by extension on Thomson’s work in general, reflect another kind of lashing out, this time at a person who during my formative years was as crucial as a parent from whom I needed to be weaned. Like Carter’s, Thomson’s music never spoke to me, but it wasn’t until reviewing Lord Byron that I confessed this to the world. Virgil, not thrilled, dropped me for some time. I justified my action by claiming that if as a critic Virgil had dished it out for decades, he should be able to take some of the same medicine. In fact, Virgil felt the student had betrayed the master. When our friendship shakily began to repair itself, I vowed never again to counter him. Years later, at a revival of Lord Byron, I had reason to revise my opinion, now finding both the score and Jack Larson’s libretto witty, touching, exquisite, and honest. Meanwhile I’ve elsewhere written about Virgil’s music in phrases that I believe have pleased him. Then why reprint this review, and in a book that under other circumstances I might have dedicated to him? Because it’s history, because it’s me at a certain period, and because it does contain some novel truth.

Where Is Our Music Going? and About Toscanini first appeared in the American Record Guide. So did the first two paragraphs of Copland’s Birthday (at Seventy), presented, along with a score of other homages by friends, to the composer at an Essex House banquet in November 1970. The additional paragraphs were added when the article appeared in my book Pure Contraption. Copland at Eighty-five was commissioned by the Sunday New York Times fifteen years later to the day.

The Sunday Times was also the first home of Song Singing in America, On Nearing Sixty, The American Composer Speaks, A Strauss Biography, Peter Yates on Twentieth-Century Music, Great Songs of the Sixties: A Book Review, and "Nabokov’s Bagázh" (the last five in the New York Times Book Review).

And the Sunday Times was responsible for Against Rock, which it printed on October 26, 1969, as an attack on rock critic Richard Goldstein, fostering it into a cause célèbre, which editor Sy Peck relished in those days. Goldstein (whom I’ve never met but have since come to respect for his pages in the Village Voice) answered me disparagingly the following Sunday, and for two Sundays after that the Letters column teemed with pros and cons. Against Rock was concocted as an antidote to my infatuation with the Beatles. As they decayed pop music became, and has remained, a strictly commercial blight, even as the proselytizing around it became increasingly solemn and silly. Today I reject it utterly, and fear it.

Afterthoughts on the Beatles was first published in my book Music and People (1968), while Last Thoughts on the Beatles came out in the Village Voice in the autumn of 1967. The Voice also hosted Francis Poulenc: A Souvenir on the occasion of that composer’s death in 1963.

Other articles were conceived as liner notes for records: Notes on Debussy, Pelléas and Pierre, "Notes for Debussy’s En blanc et noir," Ravel and Song, Poulenc’s Chamber Music for Winds, Richard Cumming’s Songs, and "Last Poems of Wallace Stevens: An Album Note."

Foss Improvises was first in Musical America, Looking for Sam in the Carnegie Hall program booklet, Bernac and Poulenc in High Fidelity, and Afterthoughts on Francis in Music and People. Commentary published Ravel in remembrance of that musician’s hundredth birthday in 1975, and Architectural Digest commissioned Ravel’s House in 1986. I based the latter study on instinct and common sense, using what I love about my favorite composer’s works and superimposing that onto my reaction to the fabulous color reproductions, supplied by the magazine, of the villa at Monfort-l’Amaury. I’ve never set foot in Ravel’s house.

Ezra Pound as Musician first served as a preface to the reprint (by Plenum Press in the early 1960s) of a small volume called Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony written by Pound in the 1920s.

The remaining essays first saw light as follows:

"Charles Rosen’s The Classical Style" was originally a letter to Philip Rahv about why I couldn’t review Rosen’s book for Rahv’s new magazine Modern Occasions. He deleted Dear Mr. Rahv and Sincerely yours and published the letter as a critique in 1971.

Ladies’ Music came out in Vogue in 1968, with the title hideously changed to Woman: Artist or Artist-esse? (Ten years later I wrote a complementary essay called Women in Music, which appears in Setting the Tone.)

Notes on Sacred Music dates from the January 1973 issue of Music: The Magazine of the American Guild of Organists.

The Well-Dressed Composer, under its original title Makers of Manners, was confected at the wish of my old friend Patrick O’Higgins, who gave it to Harper’s Bazaar, which refused it as being too chichi, so Vogue published it in 1968.

The piece on Julius Katchen was written as an epitaph and published by High Fidelity in 1969. If Bill Flanagan had been my best friend among composers, Julius was certainly my best among pianists. I thought of him as my pianist, even as the late Nell Tangeman and the late Donald Gramm were my singers. I owe them everything.

Our Music Now (1984) was one of a dozen contributions by members to ASCAP In Action, all of them, except mine, optimistic.

Jesus Christ Superstar was in Harper’s Magazine, June 1971.

The More Things Change: Notes on French Popular Song was written in the summer of 1968 for Leo Lerman’s Mademoiselle.

Poetry of Music was originally presented as a lecture titled Words without Song, delivered in April 1969 at New York University, commemorating the one hundred-fiftieth anniversary of Walt Whitman’s birth. (The Postscript on Whitman was at that time part of this lecture.) It was first published in London Magazine.

Anatomy of Two Songs, as explained in the context, comes from a long-ago diary and was printed in my first collection, Music from Inside Out, in 1967.

As always I am deeply indebted to Jim Holmes. He provided the book’s continuity, edited every page, and came up with the title Settling the Score.

To Marie Arana-Ward, my editor at Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, I extend a bouquet for her belief in such a noncommercial project and for her mannerly patience about matters of which she is aware.

Ned Rorem,

August 10, 1987

ONE

AMERICAN COMPOSERS

Tributes and Reviews

LIVING WITH GERSHWIN

Although I was only thirteen when he died in July of 1937, George Gershwin had already grown so crucial to the collective unconscious that half the world seemed to stop. Five months later when Maurice Ravel died (I was fourteen now), the other half stopped. The realities of love and death were suddenly as real as they would ever become.

I’ve just listened nonstop to fifty-three songs by George and Ira Gershwin, and the effect is no less exhilarating than if the songs had been by Robert Schumann or Charles Ives or indeed by Ravel. George’s tunes are as memorable, Ira’s texts as apt as those of the truest songmakers of yore. Ella Fitzgerald, the wistful baritone (she’s as content cooing below the staff as sopranos are fifteen steps higher) proves as ideal a match for this team as Lotte Lehmann and Donald Gramm and Maggie Teyte were for the others. How she tints the tones (never an irrelevant ornament, only an occasional tilde) one by one, like those gray roses blushing toward pink in early Technicolor movies, then blends them into a bouquet of melody that evokes, over and over and over, your own first love. For the songs are virtually always about love—lost, found, longed for, disposed of—never about death. Death will come only with Porgy and Bess.

Hearing the songs in one fell swoop, most of them familiar as family, I realized I’d been living with Gershwin since the age of reason. Actually each of us lives daily with this most famous of modern composers, whose art surges forth from Musak all over the globe. Weaned on him, like most kids of the swing era, I never differentiated between Gershwin’s basic worth and Ravel’s but took him for granted (as I did Ravel) without analyzing wherein lay his charm and craft. At ten, thrilled by Paul Whiteman’s theme song, I bought Rhapsody in Blue at the store next to the Frolic moviehouse on Chicago’s Fifty-fifth Street (sheet-music shops, now all but extinct, grew all over town then), and it still reposes on the piano, with my name childishly scrawled upon that friendly blue-and-gray Harms edition. Two years later my parents, ever alert to the Urban League and other racial betterment groups, came home late one night, flushed and dazzled and forever changed by the local premiere of the Negro spectacle Porgy and Bess. I envied them. Summertime took its place on the piano next to Rhapsody in Blue. Over the next decade, while learning by schooling the concert repertory from Couperin to Copland, I was learning by osmosis the words and airs of every Gershwin song. In the mid-1940s, as pianist for Eva Gauthier, I was often regaled by tales about another pianist she once hired, the young George Gershwin, who, on a program that began with piano-vocal excerpts from Schoenberg’s Gurreleider, accompanied Madame Gauthier in Stairway to Paradise, Innocent Ingenue Baby, Swanee, and Do It Again. They brought down the house—with nobody questioning the legitimacy of such odd bedfellows. In 1948 I won the George Gershwin Memorial Award for my Overture in C (the piece did not deserve the prize, but I did), the premiere of which, under Mishel Piastro and the New York Philharmonic, was my first brush with the big time. On the program were Alec Templeton playing Concerto in F, Avon Long scatting It Ain’t Necessarily So, and Oscar Hammerstein, who in front of the audience handed me the award money, which was spent on a ticket to France where I stayed ten years. By the early 1950s, now myself an American in Paris, I was catching on to the Gershwin songs by their local plumage (Quelqu’un m’adore for Somebody Loves Me, Journée brumeuse for A Foggy Day), which seemed as smooth in French as in Ira’s spirited English.

Ira’s spirited English concerns me here. If as the stuff of good songs his words (called lyrics in Tin Pan Alley) don’t quite vie with Goethe’s, they are less bathetic and a good deal tighter than some of the poetasting used by, say, Schubert and Fauré. Witty, too, and ingeniously contrived. In the whole catalog I find but one trite line (Oh if we ever part/Then that might break my heart), and but one strained inversion (And so all else above/I’m waiting for the man I love). It’s fun to play games of comparison (You’ve got what gets me/What gets me you’ve got, writes Ira Gershwin in Girl Crazy; I adore what you burn; you burn what I adore, writes Henry James in The Tragic Muse), or ponder the implications of lines like I want to bite my initials on a sailor’s neck or All the sexes from Maine to Texas, which seem every bit as equivocal as the Erlkönig. Ira likes to drop names such as Schopenhauer as something de trop when Eros is near (who disagrees?), or to suggest that any Russian play will guarantee fewer clouds of gray than when Eros has gone. The antiliterary Ira scores literary points about love, even as the learned Prioress in Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites loses meditational points about death when she realizes in her agony that a lifetime of prayer comes to naught in the end.

Ira’s points are set to music by George according to the conventions of his day. He doesn’t stretch the vocal line beyond a major tenth; is not melismatic—that is, doesn’t use more than one note to a syllable (neither does Poulenc, his exact contemporary); and the shapes of each song are pretty much the same: a casual prelude succeeded by the requisite thirty-two-bar refrain of a-a-b-a. Yet there is as much variety—rhythmic, chordal, speedwise—as in the vocal output of Ravel. If a mannerism appears common from song to song, it’s the tendency toward pentatonicism—arches confected from black-key rambling. Take at random The Lorelei, They All Laughed, Maybe, The Half of It, Looking for the Boy, and see how each is built from the same rising sequence. Also the so-called blue note, a lowered third or seventh that was jazz in the 1920s (Darius Milhaud, striving toward timeliness, used more blue notes in his Création du monde of 1923 than did Gershwin in his Rhapsody of the same year), might seem overused were it not that each impulse takes on its own identity, then soars with a virile energy evoking a world as vulnerable and vast as the current world seems cool and stunted. For one belonging to both worlds, I find that every song still sends shivers of excruciating nostalgia up my spine, something no other music, past or present, seems to do anymore.

I’ve gone on at some length to show that George Gershwin’s songs are no different in quality from those of the other named composers. But they are profoundly different in kind. His are popular, theirs are classical—the two halves of the world that seemed to stop for awhile, at least for me, back in 1937. These two genres have forever traveled parallel paths, but so distant as to be not even rivals.

Popular and classical, of course, have come to be meaningless categories, the one referring to being well liked, the other to a specific period in musical history. Some classical music is in fact popular, some pop songs have turned into classics. Still, I shall continue to use these terms here, since most readers know perfectly well what I’m talking about, but will redefine the terms as variable and invariable. Popular music is variable in that notes are improvised according to the player’s mood. Classical music is invariable in that the same notes are played on all occasions. If in fact the two forms of music do sometimes trade devices (slick arrangements on the one hand, aleatoric cadenzas on the other), they nonetheless remain psychologically separate in the public ear.

True, the thirty-two-measure layout with its restricting lyrics does constrain the standard show tune’s sense of structural adventure, keeping that aspect of it … well, invariable. (The term lyrics applies, I suppose, not to a species of verse but to words written simultaneously with, or sometimes after, the music. In the domain of so-called art song, music is built on pre-existing words, words sometimes hundreds, thousands of years old. Except for Messiaen, is there a living art song composer who writes his own lyrics as so many of the jazzmen do?) True again, the more fluid texts generally chosen by classical composers permit them, from one song to another, to vary the shape and length ad infinitum. Beyond these exceptions any pop song can, genuinely and persuasively, be played fast, slow, high, low, soft, loud, and be sung by any sex in any language with any accompaniment from guitar solo through chamber septet to a 1,000-piece orchestra. But can you imagine, say, Debussy’s piano-vocal setting of Mallarmé’s Soupir being sung by Sarah Vaughan with her irritating oversell, in English translation, transposed down a fifth, speeded up to allegro, and backed by the Boston Pops?

Given these distinctions, where does George Gershwin fit in? Gershwin’s songs, his show tunes, are pure pop, or—as he would have said, ignoring our myriad current subdivisions—jazz. They withstand all manipulation, from the fuzzy-tragic wail of the late Billie Holiday (who was not even a fact when Gershwin died), with her vague groups of jam sessioneers, to Ella Fitzgerald’s cool-as-sherbet diction backed by Nelson Riddle’s great big band dolling up the tunes to within an inch of their lives. His concert music, notably An American in Paris and Concerto in F, is classical in that it is not adapted by stylists but performed intact. (Alone, Rhapsody in Blue inhabits a halfway house, being ostensibly a konzertstück but reshuffled, like Chabrier’s España, for every profit-making combination imaginable.)

Porgy and Bess? Porgy and Bess is grand opera in the highest sense and belongs in the world’s great theaters. As a show-tune composer Gershwin is pop, as author of Porgy he is classical, but he is never both at the same time. The only other musician to straddle this schizophrenic fence successfully is Leonard Bernstein. Can it be more than coincidence that both men are American Jews and that both have been obsessed with musical realizations of the dybbuk? The dybbuk is a split-personality-inducing soul that, according to Webster’s, enters the body of a man and controls his actions until exorcised …

Gershwin’s ever-thwarted wish to study privately with the Great led to the oft-quoted reactions of Ravel—You would stop writing good Gershwin and start writing bad Ravel—and of Stravinsky—With your royalties it’s I who should take lessons from you. Interestingly, although Gershwin did write a lot of good Ravel, his opera shows no influence whatsoever of Stravinsky, not even in the balletic picnic scene marked Molto barbaro where he could have nicely appropriated the eccentric aboriginal cross rhythms of The Rite of Spring. But jazz, finally a more magnetic lure for him than any classical composer could have been, derives not from an eccentric but a steady beat; indeed almost nowhere in the hotly danceable oeuvre of Gershwin does one find meters other than in a normal four. The brief 5/4 dance in that picnic scene, or the trouvaille of offbeat accents in early tunes like Fascinatin’ Rhythm, would seem as child’s play to even a Tchaikovsky or a Brahms. In the long run Stravinsky, with his early Tango and later Ebony Concerto, took more from Gershwin than Gershwin ever took from him.

The texture of Porgy and Bess, like that of all jazz, derives (via its original Creole ambiance?) from French impressionism, rather than from German romanticism. Scarcely a chord is built on other than major or minor sevenths (or ninths or elevenths), à la française, rather than on the dominant or diminished triads and sevenths in use across the Rhine. Not that Gershwin’s nest, like the magpie’s, wasn’t laced with a bit of everything around. Porgy and Bess, which was launched in Boston on September 30, 1935, owes a trick or two to Wozzeck, which had been performed seventeen seasons earlier in Philadelphia, not to mention to Tosca of 1900, as well as to (Gershwin had foresight) Peter Grimes, West Side Story and Dialogues des Carmélites. It was as influential as it was influenced.

For example, in my well-thumbed score I’ve noted that the opening scene alone, within the first four minutes, features the Honey Man’s arietta which wavers, as Britten loved to waver, twixt the Dorian and Lydian modes; the invocation of the men’s chorus (Roll dem bones!), which melts from a C-sharp dominant into an F-sharp minor seventh even as Poulenc’s women’s chorus melts, in the same key, from Dominus tecum into Benedictus tecum; and Serena’s admonition (See that hussy drinkin’ like any man!), instantly preceded by Puccini’s chimes in parallel fifths and succeeded (as Bess guzzles) by gurgling clarinets out of Berg’s water music, then followed head-on by a Bernsteinian sequence of blue harmony in a minor-on-major stack-up. And does that onstage out-of-tune piano come from Wozzeck, from Weill’s Mahagonny, or is the device as old as theater itself?

In themselves the ingredients of Porgy and Bess—harmony, counterpoint, rhythm, melody, orchestral color, vocal concept for both solos and chorus, and the integrity of overall construction—are each first-rate in quality, professional in execution, and, despite the stolen threads common to most creators, utterly personal in impact. Like Mussorgsky, Gershwin was an elegant primitive; his own ways were ultimately more telling than those of his slick adapters. As to from where he learned, other than from Schillinger and from trial and error, not only the craft of instrumentation but the art of imbuing his music—first in single songs, later in whole garlands of song called musical comedies, finally in a three-hour drama—with the salubrious sap that makes it blossom and cohere from top to bottom, I wouldn’t know. Does an artist learn such things?

Gershwin’s meter, then, is mostly square, albeit with contagious syncopations within and over the bar, while his harmony is mostly built on secondary major and minor sevenths or on triads with added sixths (and those streams of parallel seconds, so rife in the Rhapsody, flow years later onto the set of Porgy). What of the other ingredients in his opera?

Melody, being the most personal, is the most memorable component of any composer’s dialect. Melody is what makes a composer a composer. The vocal solos in Porgy and Bess are arias rather than songs because they are nonextractable; because the tunes follow—though sometimes deviously—where the words lead rather than being stuffed into a thirty-two-bar cage; and because they float upon an expanded operatic range. Unlike show tunes they do not have introductions, though they might have recitative preludes, even very constructed ones (Bess’s preparation for the second-act duet—It’s like this, Crown …—rises in a brief space from a relaxed low E to a wrenching high B). Nor are they as uniquely syllabic as show tunes. Each character has his theme, including the comprehensive quotidian character of Catfish Row, whose lilting 12/8 berceuse is never intoned. But alone Porgy has a leitmotiv, that is, a strictly instrumental shadow that precedes or follows him. The sultry nature of this leitmotiv—a sequence of ascending parallel fifths supporting a design made from a descending fifth swooping to a blue note attacked by a lewd acciaccatura—has come to be identified with fallen women more than with crippled men. Thus Porgy’s tune, for those who don’t know the context, sounds like Bess’s.

Excepting the ubiquitous Summertime, the closest thing to a straight song is the Strawberry Woman’s air, nine sweet measures, concise and poignant as a Chanler Epitaph or an Auvergnois ditty (like Poulenc, Gershwin had a gift for inventing his own folk music). But have you ever heard this air sung as written, without those cute selling interpolations of squealed ritards? Why do performers mistrust simplicity?

Gershwin’s prosody was as good as it needed to be. He probably didn’t think much about it. Like most natural songwriters he was just that, natural, letting the impulse trail the curve of speech, colloquial and even Jewish though that speech might be. If a syllable seems falsely stressed, it is the false stress of folk song wherein a verse is nudged to fit the tune, not vice versa. In Serena’s plaint "Ole Man Sor-row," the dislocated emphases on the second and fourth beats are there to match the correctly emphasized "My man’s gone now." Here incidentally is a song about death if ever there was one (in 3/4 time, unlike nearly every other aria in Porgy), concluding with a cadenza right out of a Jewish funeral.

Counterpoint, in the schoolbook sense of the noun—five species, Palestrina, canon, undifferentiated simultaneous voices (is a fugue a family in perfect accord, or a madman talking to himself?)—plays no stronger a role in Gershwin’s than in any other twentieth-century composer’s works for the lyric stage, with the possible exception of Hindemith’s. But in the sense of the verb counterpoint, Gershwin’s opera is filled with it. Small woodwind motives sneak between big vocal phrases and garnish, or counterpoint, the main surge, as in Summertime. All around the choral lament for Clara, threads from other fabrics (mainly the Bess-Crown duet) are rhythmically and melodically counterpointed. In the final spiritual cum rumba I’m on My Way, Porgy’s solo is counter-pointed with, in the orchestra, both You Is My Woman and the bass’s own leitmotiv. In the hurricane scene a six-part chorus screams out for several minutes, a tour of storm force in an unmetered simultaneity no less ingenious than Lucia’s sextet, whose six exponents deliver six independent notions at the same time. However, in the 600-page vocal score there is but one short moment, a 2-page bridge of strings (at the start of the second act, leading from It Takes a Long Pull to I Got Plenty O’ Nuttin’), that could properly be termed counterpoint, a sort of aborted fugato to no purpose.

Do you do your own orchestration? the layman often asks classical composers, having been struck with the contradictory idea, fostered by old movies about pop composers, that orchestration, being arcane, needs to be farmed out to hacks. In fact orchestration, that most tangible aspect of a composer’s craft and hence the easiest to talk about, is not an art but a physical science dealing in checks and balances that can be mastered by anyone. The answer to the layman’s question is: If I don’t, who does?

Is orchestration part of composition? Yes, insofar as a piece is composed of—made up of—various ingredients, including instrumentation. But no, insofar as a piece of music, unlike a painting, must exist before it is colored. True, few Broadway and no Hollywood composers orchestrate their own music (union regulations); still, their music is there to be orchestrated. They may have the colors in mind while composing, but the coloring and the composing remain separate processes.

After 1923, which saw the advent of Rhapsody in Blue, his first so-called classical concert piece, Gershwin orchestrated all of his own music. And although we know more about Monteverdi’s operas than we do about Gershwin’s so far as procedure of orchestration is concerned (the lead sheets, abbreviations, makeshift rehearsal scores for Porgy having all vanished), the net result is crystalline, never overladen or intrusive. Aware of the basics—that strings are the body of any orchestra, woodwinds the soul, brass the clothing, and percussion the jewelry (the less you wear, the more effective)—Gershwin did occasionally go against typecasting. By and large, though, he didn’t take more chances than, say, Respighi, whose sonorities he emulated a bit too closely for comfort (on page 508 of the Porgy score you will not hear, as marked, a Sleeping Negro but The Pines of Rome). Yet somehow, indefinably, his scoring is identifiably his. Who but Gershwin would have chosen, as background for Serena’s impassioned recitative Oh, Doctor Jesus, a soft trill, not on a drum or a cello but on a piano!

Just as the neighborhood Catfish Row plays its musical part in Porgy and Bess, so does the Chorus announce its own intense identity in a role longer, timewise and pagewise, than that of both principals combined. As cast member the Chorus is more indispensable even than Carmen’s chorus, being composed of personalities. Yet so familiar are the seventeen arias that we forget they are almost incidental—some a mere ten measures long—as against the grand set numbers of the group that account for three-quarters of the opera. The opera, thanks in large part to the choruses that support it like marble pillars placed between moments of slapstick and joy and horror and death, is in any case adeptly structured, with slows and fasts and highs and lows and mobs and solos and sads and sillies, all satisfyingly intermixed, each exquisite in itself. George’s innate sense of unity owes much to the dozen earlier collaborations with Ira. (The book for Of Thee I Sing, sans music, won the Pulitzer prize in 1933.) Yes, the third act flags, especially when Crown’s meaningless A Redheaded Woman comes out of left field, and later when a resetting of the normal tone seems to drag on forever before the ghastly truth is sprung on the hero. But beyond this there’s scarcely an uninspired or superfluous minute in all of Porgy and Bess. In effect the framework would seek to disavow (not with entire success) the set-piece format of Gluck or Weill, or indeed of Gershwin’s own show-biz past, in favor of the unbroken line of Debussy and Wagner. Porgy, no more than Pelléas and Parsifal, needs applause.

Another lay observation: You write such good songs, you’re meant to write great operas. The two expressions, if not mutually exclusive, don’t often overlap. Schubertian gift is of tune and poetry, of short breath, of shaping form while the iron is hot, of starting and ending a work in a frantic inspirational space—in sometimes the mere time it takes to notate it. Verdian gift is of theatricality and prose, of the long line, of reworking matter even when cold, of spending perhaps years in getting it down. The opera composer’s talent is dramatic first, lyrical second—and sometimes never. The song composer’s talent is the reverse. A few—Mozart, Poulenc, Britten—play both the Elysian fields, and George Gershwin is one of these blessed.

Is there a Negro voice? Maybe—though Ella Fitzgerald doesn’t much have it. We are not all the same; opposites attract. It’s no fiction, contends Margaret Mead, that black folks all got rhythm, though it’s not heredity either. Since the poor can’t afford nursemaids, they carry infants on their bosoms or backs; the papoose thus continually interacts with his parents’ daily doings and has only to knock if he wants something. He is reared in purposeful metrical throbbing, which well-off nontactile Wasps are not. Similarly group singing, with its extrovert interpolations by Baptist soloists, makes for the gleeful croon, the silky tear, which have come to be associated with the black sound. Leontyne Price retains it throughout her repertory (except in spirituals!). Younger black singers raised in the North can fake it, which is more than Helen Jepson could do in the old Red Seal recording of Summertime.

If Porgy and Bess belongs in the world’s great theaters, does that mean it could be played convincingly by an all-white cast? Yet if you claim that Puccini and Wagner are credible with blacks so why not Porgy with whites, doesn’t the claim deny Porgy’s identity as a demonstration of the black condition? Tosca and Tannhauser are not demonstrations of the white condition. Is there a white condition—and by extension a white voice?

These notions nagged me when in the early 1960s I received a grant to write a work for the New York City Opera. What finally emerged as Miss Julie was only the last of several projects, some half completed, then dropped. Among these was Mamba’s Daughters, a darkly violent play adapted (for Ethel Waters) from the novel by DuBose and Dorothy Heyward, which I was making into a libretto. The story unfolds in the same milieu, known as Gullah, as Catfish Row. Working first with James Baldwin, I had regularly to audition my arias (Betty Allen learning them on spec) for the motherly Mrs. Heyward, who always found them not Gershwiny enough. She was betting on another Porgy, which, being one of a kind, was a losing proposition. Yet she put me in touch with Eva Jessye, choirmistress of Porgy’s first production, who actually rehearsed my choruses. Feeling compromised, I dropped the project. By the time Jenifer Heyward, after her mother’s death, came up with the rights, I was otherwise engaged. My true reason for the engagement, as I see it now, was that I had no right to those rights. How could a white artist, however compassionate, presume to depict a black nightmare from the inside out? I could identify with femaleness perhaps, since half my ancestors were women. But none of my ancestors was black. Artists contain all sexes but not all races. Still, shouldn’t a true artist be able to enter any psyche? And weren’t the Heywards and Gershwins white? Yes, but maybe theirs was a white man’s image of the black man. I sensed that the difference between black and white corresponded to the difference between jazz and classical, and I didn’t want to seem like Grace Moore, missing the point by rolling her r’s in Minnie the Moocher.

Philadelphia, September 21, 1984. Is there a black person still around who had once known Gershwin? Although we’ve both taught at the Curtis Institute for years, our paths (because our days are different) have never crossed. So this afternoon by prearrangement I stop by the Barclay Hotel for an hour’s chat with Todd Duncan. Manly and gorgeous at eighty-two, effusive yet proper, radiating culture and enunciating with the resonant voice that created the role of Porgy in 1935 and repeated it 1,200 times, Mr. Duncan asks after my parents whom he’d met years ago, and seems touched to learn that my first true piano teacher had been his friend Margaret Bonds. I tell him a bit about my adventure with Dorothy Heyward. He proffers keen appraisals of today’s singers. We decide against having tea. Then he talks about Porgy and Bess.

There was, he tells me, a sort of switch from typecasting at his first meeting in 1934 with George Gershwin. Duncan, a sedate and formally trained thirty-two-year-old bass, had been summoned from his studies in the South to audition for this brash and brilliant white boy in a 72nd Street penthouse where only brother Ira was present. Duncan was the hundredth candidate for the role. Yet after his rendering of a three-minute canzonetta, George asked, Will you be my Porgy? (The very young Jean-Pierre Aumont, after a three-minute audition in Paris that same year, heard Cocteau declare, Vous serez mon Œdipe. Those were the days when creators loomed larger than their interpreters.) Duncan’s answer: Well, I’d like to hear your music first, Mr. Gershwin. With Ira as kibitzer, George sang what existed of the opera in his awful—awful but wonderful—voice, which was pure Charleston Negro. I was disconcerted, says Duncan, even appalled, by the crassness of the piece. Until ‘Summertime.’ Then I literally wept for what this Jew was able to express for the Negro.

Did he ever feel that Gershwin was outside looking in? That Gershwin condescended? No, Duncan never once questioned the book’s integrity, nor the music’s, despite being publicly chastised by certain of his people for playing a crippled criminal. Indeed the whole production was denounced by black groups for its Uncle Tomism and phony dialect (which in