Excerpt

‘I Can Do That!’

A budding composer realizes who’s really listening.

By Charles Strouse ’47E

As a composition major, I worked diligently at honing my sense of pitch (via endless exercises of copying down notes and harmonies played by someone else), as well as four-part writing in the style of Bach. We did endless analyses of the Beethoven Quartets, and of the piano music of Mendelssohn and Brahms. It was incredibly challenging. Learning had come easy to me when I was younger, but this was something completely new, and I was feeling my way in the dark, not knowing what was at the end of the tunnel. I couldn’t even see the light.

I dutifully spent my days buried in musical theory and practice, but patriotism (plus the fact that I lost the expensive fountain pen my brother and sister gave me as a going-to-college gift and wanted to replace it) prompted me to take a job at a war plant helping to make shells for navy rockets. Each shell weighed fifty-seven pounds, and was very hot. I had to lift each one from a passing rack (wearing thick gloves and protective shoes in case I dropped one), then measure the shell’s width with a caliper, and weigh it. I did this each evening from 6 p.m. until midnight. Then, the next morning, it was back to Bach and Palestrina.

Besides being exhausted, I was homesick.

In an act of desperation, one night I phoned home collect and begged my father to let me end the pain by leaving school and coming home. He was having none of it.

ART’S PLACE: Strouse, who was 15 when he enrolled at the Eastman School, says the experience “swerved my life . . . from somebody who merely had aptitude into somebody who developed a love of the art.”

“A man’s got to finish what he starts,” he proclaimed.

So I persevered. Lacking the imagination yet to have, or even seek, my own voice, I would go to classes and to concerts, not knowing if I liked or didn’t like the music. I just listened, absorbed, and later tried to write music in similar styles.

In 1945, the first George Gershwin Memorial Award (Gershwin had died in 1937) for a new symphonic work was presented to Peter Mennin ’45E, ’48E (PhD), a graduate student at Eastman, who later went on to become the president of Juilliard. As I listened to the workmanlike and energetic piece, I thought (as lyricist Edward Kleban in A Chorus Line put it), “I can do that!” Suddenly, I knew that I could be 1946’s George Gershwin Memorial Award winner. This could be the answer to all my problems. Everyone would notice: friends, family, teachers . . . the whole world!

The piece I wrote was called Narrative for Orchestra, a cunning title, I thought. The orchestration was sonorous, and the composing itself was sober, yet not without charm—filled with humor and craftily put together. I became more and more convinced that this was my time. I would have my moment in the sun.

After waiting for what seemed an eternity, the letter from the judging committee finally arrived. It read, “Thank you for your submission. This year, out of the many submissions we received, we didn’t find any worthy of the prize.”

I reddened as I read it.

I’d studied and worked so hard. But no one cared. No one, that is, except my friend Bill Flanagan, to whose dorm room I ran for solace. Bill was just reassuring me that I was a really good composer when my insecure side piped up. “What does it matter if I’m a good composer, anyway?” I asked. “Nobody’s listening.”

“Does it matter?” Bill replied, as he took another puff on his cigarette.

For me, it was as if a light bulb had just been turned on. What was that slogan MGM used after the lion roars at the beginning of every movie?

Ars gratia artis. “Art for art’s sake.”

That same year, in 1946, I wrote a short opera that was never performed and never shown to anyone. In it, two musicians—a violinist and a cellist—in a trio that plays dinner music in a restaurant are waiting in the kitchen for the third player, the pianist, to arrive.

When the tardy player finally gets there, he is sloppily dressed and full of attitude. The violinist, the eldest of the group, tells him his demeanor must improve.

The young pianist says, “Who cares? We’re just background music for eating. Nobody’s listening.”

The cellist says, “We’re listening. That’s somebody listening.”

I was beginning to learn what that MGM slogan really meant.

© 2008 by Charles Strouse. The essay is excerpted from Strouse’s book Put on a Happy Face (Union Square). Used with permission. All rights reserved.