A Dynamic Voice in Twentieth Century Music and Beyond
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MANHATTAN SCHOOL OF MUSIC New York, New York THESIS ERIC SALZMAN (1933-2017) A Dynamic Voice in Twentieth Century Music and Beyond Scott Joiner 29 Middagh St. Brooklyn, NY 11201 (917) 297-9975 Spring 2020 DMA, Voice Dr. J Mark Stambaugh, advisor Dr. Peter Andreacchi, second reader Dr. Jeffrey Langford, Associate Dean of Doctoral Studies CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 2 INTRODUCTION – 4 CHAPTER ONE – EARLY LIFE 7 CHAPTER TWO – THE 1950S – EDUCATION AND EUROPEAN TRAINING 20 CHAPTER THREE – A FULL RANGE OF ACTIVITY (THE EARLY 60S) 42 CHAPTER FOUR – COUNTER CULTURE, EUROPE AND THE AVANT GARDE 52 CHAPTER FIVE – THE NUDE PAPER SERMON, FEEDBACK & THE LATE 60S 88 CHAPTER SIX – NEW MUSIC THEATER 113 CHAPTER SEVEN –PRODUCER, EDUCATOR AND LATE PERIOD COMPOSER 131 Appendix 1 – ESSAY: SPEAKING IN TONGUES, OR WHY SHOULD ECLECTIC BE A BAD WORD (By Eric Salzman) 165 Appendix 2 – WORKS PRODUCED BY SALZMAN AT AMTF (with commentary) 170 Appendix 3 – AMTF ALUMNI 180 Appendix 4 – SALZMAN: SELECTED WORKS 187 Bibliography ACKOWLEDGEMENTS It is an extraordinary thing to be able to write a research paper with so many living sources to illuminate the subject. I would like to thank all of my interviewees: William Bolcom, Peter Westergaard, Marjorie Samoff, William Schimmel, Judy Collins, Richard Marshall, Jim Schaeffer, Theo Bleckmann, Kristin Norderval, Victoria Bond and not least of all, Eric Salzman himself, who sat for six hours of interview in the years before he died. I am likewise indebted to my email correspondents who not only responded to direct questions, but provided invaluable recollections and information: Joshua Rifkin, Michael Dellaira, Bob Elhai, Robert J Gluck (SUNY Albany), Alexis Lathem, Rachel Vandagriff (San Francisco Conservatory), Lisa Jakelski (University of Rochester), Beth Anderson, Martin Hennessy, Richard Kostelanetz, Rinde Eckert, Michael Chanan (University of Roehampton), Wade Stevenson, Vance Koven, David Rosenboom, Bill Edwards, Pete Gershon of Signal to Noise, Chelsea Spengemann (Director of the Stan VanDerBeek Archive) and Carl Schroeder (Minnesota Orchestra program editor). Mark Berger, the extraordinary audio transfer specialist at the former Dreamhire, applied enormous care, ingenuity, knowledge, taste and patience in helping Eric and me restore, transfer and edit many hours of reel-to-reel tapes into digital files and became a friend along the way. The amazing family of Eric Salzman – Lorna Salzman (his widow and spouse of sixty- two years), and their daughters; poet Eva Salzman and composer Stephanie Salzman – has been profoundly welcoming. When Eric asked me to be Artistic Executor to his estate in 2015, our lives became permanently intertwined, and they have provided inestimable resources in my research. The support of my parents, Gary and Karen Joiner, throughout my DMA and this dissertation made it all possible. They encouraged me to attend the Manhattan School of Music, where they believed I could thrive. My major professors during my Doctoral studies at MSM 2 were Dr. Jeffrey Langford, Dr. Reiko Füting, Dr. J Mark Stambaugh, Dr. Peter Andreacchi and Neil Rosenshein, without whose knowledge and patience my musicianship and my imagination would not be what they are. Finally, I must thank all of the artists who brought Eric’s music to life, both before my time and in the projects I produced. One of these artists, soprano Jessica Fishenfeld, deserves special mention. She met Eric Salzman in 2016, became a terrific interpreter of his music along the way, and as my fiancée and my biggest supporter throughout this entire dissertation, she deserves endless credit for getting me through. To my wonderful friend Eric Salzman, whose passion for music, art, nature and life was irrepressible, I dedicate this thesis. He showed me great generosity, entrusted his music to my voice, championed my compositions and brought me wholly into his world. I will never forget our five years of adventures. I hope that this thesis does justice to his wildly creative life. As he himself would always say: Excelsior! – Scott Joiner October 21, 2019 3 INTRODUCTION Acoustic musical instruments all have two important components: a driver, the part of the instrument that makes the sound; and a resonator, the part of the instrument that vibrates with and amplifies the sound. To describe Eric Salzman in these terms seems a fitting analogy for a life and a personality like his. Salzman not only generated music as a composer, but he vibrated so ecstatically with the music that bounced off of him, constantly adapting to and engaging with the artistic movements in the environment around him. Yet his greatest legacy to the music world was as a tireless amplifier of the sounds, music and artistic concepts that he was passionate about – as a writer, broadcaster, record producer, concert/theatrical producer, teacher, colleague and collaborator with so many of the century’s musical giants. Preparing a biography of one who was so thoroughly engaged and productive turned out to be, inherently, a monumental effort of absorption and selection. This experience was made significantly richer, but not easier, by the fact that Salzman was a close friend for the last five years of his life – one whose music I performed, produced and archived. While still in his late seventies, he asked me to consider being his artistic executor after his passing, and so began a very fruitful account-taking of what materials existed, long before the idea of this thesis was born. Currently, I am President of Quog Music Theater, founded by Salzman in 1970, and which houses the Salzman Archives at the composer’s home of more than sixty years. Nonetheless, this thesis represents many thousands of hours spent reading books, letters (thankfully saved by his widow, they include notes and letters on various subjects from the likes of Milton Babbit, Harry Partch, Leopold Stokowski, Gian-Carlo Menotti, Gordon Mumma, Paul Fromm, Joseph Fuchs, Earle Brown, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Julius Rudel, Luciano Berio, Thais Lathem, Cathy Berberian, Stanley Silverman, Audra McDonald, Friedelind Wagner and countless others), and several hundred essays and articles. I also recorded (and transcribed) over ten hours of interviews with Salzman and his colleagues, 4 listened to large quantities of music (not only Salzman’s own, but the music he was writing about, producing, and the music of his close colleagues), studied scores and attempted that ever-elusive task of trying to come to an understanding of an individual whose vastness truly contained multitudes. The issue of what materials to select and include was difficult, since Salzman lived through a period of enormous change in which cultural and classical musical perspectives shifted drastically. I have tried to imagine and to counterpose what might be of interest from a human narrative point of view (how a unique life was lived), with what was important to the living “dramatis personae” of a particular point in time (even if that importance is diminished through our modern lens), and finally to encapsulate what seems most relevant and indispensible about the time periods in question and Salzman’s role in them from our current perspective. Something that may have seemed straightforward, typical or quotidian to Salzman might be considered of enormous interest looking back from a future century – and vice versa. Needless to say, the author could have easily filled a book with the stuff of memoire from letters and anecdotes of years spent travelling, listening to concerts and meeting interesting, consequential people. Similarly, the author could, and plans to fill a book with a selection of Salzman’s evocative, critical, erudite and entertaining writing on music. As a biography and a research paper, this thesis will examine Salzman’s body of work, as well as his life, addressing certain aspects of expression that correspond to the general musical, artistic and cultural scene (even occasionally making use of non-musical parallels, for example, the literature of Philip Roth). As the terminus of a DMA in Voice Performance at the Manhattan School of Music, it will spend considerable time on Eric’s major fascination with the relationship between words and music, his advocacy for New Music Theater as a genre and his passion for the communicative power of the human voice in general. 5 The first chapter in Salzman’s The New Music Theater (co-authored with Thomas Desi), under the heading “The Voice,” surveys the development and employment of the human voice throughout centuries of music, theater and artistic communication, from primitive roots in sexual display and communication, through the advent of language, following the threads from Greek theater through opera to the digital age. This is, in fact, the point of intersection for all of Salzman’s diverse endeavors and thinking about music. The questions of what music is, where it came from and where it is going – framed by Leonard Bernstein as Charles Ives’s ‘Unanswerable Question,’ “whither music?” and its relatives (as Bernstein lists them), “whence music?” “what music?” and “whose music?” – are also the questions to which Eric Salzman devoted most of his life.1 To the aforementioned, Eric would likely have added, “how music?” The subtitle of Salzman and Desi’s book, “Hearing the Body; Seeing the Voice,” is a paradox with an implicit warning to the reader: be ready to question assumptions. It also evokes the very physicality of the body and voice. Salzman was interested in the “nature” of things, of the body and the expressive power of communication between living things (it is not surprising that he and his wife were naturalists or that Eric even became a respected expert in birdsong). In the activities of his artistic campaign for a comprehensive approach to music and theater, he was both subject and object; thus uniquely positioned to advocate for the art form. He was driven toward the big questions about music by a deep love of all music – the very potential of music’s existence – and it was the dynamism of his approach, attacking the questions from every possible side, that made his life and work consequential.