Arts and Letters

I suspect that there must have been those who felt obliged to conclude that Juilliard politesse makes strange musical bedfellows as, over some two decades, they observed Vincent and me, with our colleagues and students, or alone together at work and play, even playing at work, for so dissimilar were our biographies: geographical, academic, and musical; so different, even opposed, were our musical dispositions assumed to be; so disjunctly located our milieus on the spectrum of musical society. Our sole biographical intersection was birth in Philadelphia, a year apart, but my mother took me to Philadelphia to depart from me by birth, and we both departed Philadelphia a few weeks later, before I knew where I was. Vincent remained a staunch Philadelphian all his life; even when he joined the faculty of the Juilliard School in 1947 he continued to live in Philadelphia, commuting for the next forty years. His schooling was entirely Philadelphian; his musical training was entirely Philadelphian; he was the organist and choirmaster in Philadelphia churches; he left the city only for brief spells as the accompanist of and collaborator with the likes of Piatigorsky and Stravinsky. His ubiquitous involvement in the musical life of Philadelphia provided the self-fulfilling confirmation of his description of Philadelphia as an “artistically nutritious city.” So, while my formative formal and informal conditioning was in the Deep South, his was deeply in south Philadelphia.

When I joined Vincent at Juilliard, the immediately warm colleagueship which we enjoyed was probably explained by some with the observation that “Vincent can get along with anybody,” but—from the beginning—we did more than merely get along, for we had long known that our “public images,” and there really wasn't that much of a public, obscured what must have been more significant affinities. Over a decade earlier we had been the two judges in a competition for orchestral composition in which over fifty anonymous scores had been submitted. Individually, without any consultation, we had examined the scores, and selected our own “winners.” When it turned out that our choices were identical, and that the selected work would not have seemed close to either of our musics, the sponsors of the contest were delighted and relieved, until the celebrated conductor who had agreed to conduct whatever became the winning work, as an integral part of that award, refused to do so. Presumably he disapproved of the work's “tendencies.” The award never was offered again, and Vincent never forgave that conductor, a onetime schoolmate, and he constantly cited that incident as an outrageously characteristic example of unprofessional behavior, or professional misbehavior.

For Vincent's life was a parable of professionalism, vocational and avocational, as composer, performer, teacher, and in the complete and original senses of the word: morally, personally, and societally, and even in the exercise of his other talents. His contribution to a series of reminiscences of our colleague Roger Sessions was a pencil portrait of Roger which displayed just those knowing insights into persons which invested his teaching and his language. Vincent had strangely individual ways with words; his oral discourse often was not just wayward but oblique, even enigmatic, as if to demand responses which could not be prefabricated, borrowed, or feigned. And from the range of texts that he chose to set in such a range of ways, it is clear that he loved playing with words almost as much as playing with notes, and he knew and loved so very many notes. Another of our shared experiences, reflecting our misspent youths, was from the realm of musical kitsch, triviale Musik, which Vincent had purveyed as accompanist for a long line of encore players, and which I had performed from such volumes as Saxophone Pieces the Whole World Loves. There were “Angel's Serenade,” “Valse Bluette,” “Berceuse” from Jocelyn, “Souvenir,” and many, many others; we knew the titles and we knew the tunes, and we spent much of our life together trying to match them. We never quite succeeded, and we received no assistance from our benighted students and colleagues.

There were times when the scope of the by no means trivial repertory that was literally at Vincent's fingertips appeared unexpectedly, such as that day when Vincent, David Diamond, and I were conducting auditions for composition applicants at Juilliard. David presented to a succession of some twenty-five aspiring composition students just the theme of the Art of Fugue and the opening of Opus 131 for mere identification; there was not one identifier in the bunch. And long after we had concluded that the generation gap was an education gap, and gloom and darkness had descended on the examining room, the final applicant appeared, and appeared the least likely to provide a happy ending to the tragic day. But he responded to the two examples so quickly, even with a trace of surprised contempt, that Vincent, clearly curious and intrigued, took over at the keyboard and led the examinee on a fast, wild journey through an increasingly recondite, absurdly concatenated succession of fragments of compositions. The young man knew them all. Finally, in what was intended as a gesture of surrender and admiration, Vincent played a luxuriantly pedalled and fancifully arpeggiated version of “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” the young man's knuckles tightened and whitened while his face reddened, and finally he dared quaver the query: “Could it be by John Field?” We laughed and dismissed him, only to realize that he apparently felt that he had failed the crucial test. For the three years of that student's tenure at Juilliard, Vincent never encountered him but to apologize and explain that it was a joke in the spirit of respect. But Vincent never did it again, but—then we never had an applicant like that again.

So justifiably legendary were Vincent's multiple skills as performer, sight reader, score reader, and improviser that in later years he tended to soft-pedal them. He performed little and even stopped teaching classes in which such capacities were expected to be displayed. For he began to suspect that those extraordinary abilities led some to infer that he composed easily, quickly, and therefore facilely, even glibly. But he insisted that he composed slowly, carefully, and thoughtfully, and that the number and scope of his works resulted from long and hard work, and the evidences of such care and craft exude from every thirty-second note of works as extended as his remarkable, hour-long setting of poems from Harmonium, or as concise as his “Parables,” particularly those for solo instruments, creations for virtuoso performers by a virtuoso composer. And so, too, the nine symphonies (yes, nine), the twelve piano sonatas, the works for band, and there is even an opera, but not a grand opera, since Vincent, for all his half-Italian heritage, disliked opera, because—he said—he loved singing and loved singers; so, his opera is a children's opera, in which singers can be heard as well as seen.

In none of these works is there any lapsing into current prelapsarian compositional modes, though, with his high command of the repertory, he could have done so easily and expertly. He had no appetite for the apatetic reflection of every fashionable facet of our fragmented musical universe, although his compositions display an encyclopedic array of technical awarenesses.

Vincent was given to characterizing his teaching of composition as the mere cosmeticization, the titivation of his students' music. But, of course, he did much more to and for their music, and to and for them. By disabusing them of any view of their music as a vehicle of competitiveness or as an enabling agent on the descent to celebrity, he attempted to secure for them what he possessed all of his creative life: the ability to fashion his own world of music in order to live at peace with the world of music, without regard for fashion.