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Interview with Faubion Bowers, Marlene J. Mayo Oral Histories Page 1 University of Maryland, College Park ORAL HISTORY PROJECT O

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Interview with Faubion Bowers, Marlene J. Mayo Oral Histories Page 1 University of Maryland, College Park ORAL HISTORY PROJECT O University of Maryland, College Park ORAL HISTORY PROJECT on the ALLIED OCCUPATION OF JAPAN Interview Subject: Faubion Bowers Place: The Bird Room, The Kennedy Center, Washington, D.C. Date: July 22, 1982 By: Marlene Mayo Q: Mr. Bowers… FB: Call me Faubion. Q: All right, Faubion. I want to say at the start that there is a previous interview that was done by Beate Gordon, years ago. About 1960, I would say, for the Columbia University oral history project. But I thought that your experience in the Occupation and your reputation in the Kabuki theatre and in writing about Japanese drama and indeed East Asian theatre generally, all of that was such that we should probe a bit more and find out more about your experience and more about your background. FB: If there’s anything left, mine it. Q: So, I would like to begin as Beate did and go back and find out where you were born, where you grew up, a little bit about your family, your early interests. FB: I was born in 1917 in Miami, Oklahoma, but Tulsa was sort of my home base. That’s where I grew up. My mother, of course, wanted a girl, which is why she picked this name, Faubion, which could be anything -- as I turned out to be anything. And my mother was very interested in opera, and as much as I disliked her, and as much as I’m relieved – it’s like a mill stone removed from around my neck that she’s dead -- I do owe her a debt. And it’s taken 65 years before I’d sort of admit it. But she did take me Interview with Faubion Bowers, Marlene J. Mayo Oral Histories Page 1 to hear Tetrazzini in Muskogee, Oklahoma. And she took me to Kansas City, where I heard Mary Garden and Melba in Faust. You know, that’s astonishing. And Pavlova. I even saw Pavlova as a child. I think the most determining factor, though, was something that I did on my own, which was to go see the Denishawn Dancers, Ted Shawn and Ruth St. Denis, and all that Orientalia and it absolutely flipped me. Q: Was that in your teenage years, or when, when you saw the Denishawn. FB: Bare teenage, 12, 13 of age, I guess I was. Where was I… oh. In Junior High School, there was a teacher who had been born in Japan. She taught French. And it was the first time a foreign language had ever been taught in Tulsa. And she had been born in Japan and had some sort of pictures of Japan. And that kind of turned me on, because I was madly in love with her and I was her pet pupil. And you know, there’s nothing like that Junior High School crush on a teacher and the teacher liking you a lot. So that turned me on to Japan. And I read everything Lafcadio Hearn ever wrote. And this is Junior High School. Well, anyway, Oklahoma was pretty barbarian in those days. And being called Faubion was bad enough, but being sort of an arty-tarty type was much worse. Q: And your father wasn’t living then? FB: No, they were divorced. He was an insurance salesman and then later became a tax collector. My mother was a school teacher. And so I got out of there as fast as I could. And I graduated from high school very early, when I was 16, and went straight up to college to the University of Oklahoma, because I was deeply interested in music. I wanted to be a musician. I fancied I’d be a composer, which was the nuttiest thing. It shows children just aren’t in touch with the reality of themselves. And I wanted modern music, advanced music. Q: Did you play a particular instrument? FB: Piano. And that summer at the University of Oklahoma, Old Dean Holmberg, whom – the music hall is named after him now – Holmberg Hall. We called him Humbug, naturally, and he was a humbug. He had the most extraordinary quality – no matter what hour of the day or night, he could wake up or he Interview with Faubion Bowers, Marlene J. Mayo Oral Histories Page 2 could be walking down the street, and he never had a watch, but he always knew exactly to the second what time it was. It was sort of like perfect pitch. I never knew anyone like that. So, he was offering a course called, “History of Contemporary Music”, and that was right up my alley. Already I was a Scriabinist, Scriabin was my baby. I’d sort of discovered him because, you know, he was crazy and a sex maniac. And he started all this multi-media stuff that’s now so in vogue – all these light shows, he was the first to conceive of those things. Actually doing music and lights at the same time and many other things. Anyway, you can read my book on Scriabin for all of that. And so old Holmberg, who was a violinist, just played the Messiah for us and we sat there. And after about the third week, I said – he wasn’t even Dean then – I said, “Professor Holmberg, when are we going to get into [Darios Mio, and Enniger] and Scriabin and all of those things I’m interested in?” He said, “Modern music? Why? Listen to this dominant ninth chord! [Hengel] was modern!” You know, we laugh now. We laugh now, Marlene, but I assure you that as a 16-year-old child that was a traumatic experience and it turned me against academe totally. I was embittered. And I got out of Oklahoma as fast as I could and I hated anything academic. And to this day, I’m very nervous about it. I’m totally self-educated. I did go to Columbia and flunked out. They call it drop-out. Q: To the college? FB: Yes, in New York. Paul Robeson was a classmate of mine in Russian. And my teachers were terribly distinguished and all of that. And I made A+ in music, A+ in Russian, A+ in French and 0 in History of Contemporary Civilization, F rather, and in Physics and all that. I just didn’t understand them. I tried. I truly tried, but I flunked out because I just couldn’t cope. I couldn’t learn. I was very slow in blooming, not sexually, but academically. To this day, I can’t add and subtract. I couldn’t learn how to take tests. I had to love whatever I was doing. So after flunking out, that hurt me very much too. I hated myself and all that. So I went to France, and there I discovered myself. I was totally happy. I was totally accepted. Interview with Faubion Bowers, Marlene J. Mayo Oral Histories Page 3 There was no snickers over my name. It was assumed that I was an educated, young American man who played the piano rather well. Q: And this was in [Poitiers]? FB: Yes, [l'Université de Poitiers]. I played in every small town in France and got mixed notices. Q: How old were you when you did this? FB: 19. Q: 19. FB: And then I came back. And of course the Scriabin thing was burning inside me. And, at that time, the Juilliard Graduate School of Music, you couldn’t pay tuition, if you tried. It was all scholarship. And, I’ll tell you an interesting thing -- in those days, all the teachers were very, very great. Carl Friedberg was there, who was a pupil of Brahms. And if I was playing the Brahms concerto, or something fancy like that, I could stop Mr. Friedberg in the hall and say, “Mr. Friedberg, how should this passage go?” and he would say, “Well, Brahms played it this way.” And my teacher was Alexander Siloti, and this is why I went to the Julliard – S I L O T I – because he had been a great friend of Scriabin’s. And his wife was madly in love with Scriabin, and so forth. And I’d hoped to learn a lot about Scriabin from him. But he was 80 at the time and quite gaga and he would tell you all kinds of things. One reason why I’m nervous about this oral history review is because I’m not sure that my memory is accurate and I’m not sure how much of a liar I’ve become over the years. For instance, Siloti would say (he was a pupil of Liszt), he would say, “Oh, when Liszt played the Campanella in that [_____] D sharp, his fifth finger would always land right in the middle of the black key.” Well, I know that’s not true. But, so. Anyway, all the teachers were great and there wasn’t a decent pupil in the whole bunch. Eugene Liszt, who’s the world’s worst pianist. And, now, the teachers aren’t celebrities or pupils of anybody celebrated. And yet, the Julliard just pores out master pianist after master pianist. They all play the same, but they’re all marvelous. Ok, that’s enough of music. Interview with Faubion Bowers, Marlene J. Mayo Oral Histories Page 4 Q: [Now there’s a string player.] FB: Mostly from Japan and Korea. Q: Korea and Japan, right. So how did you get this interest then in going to Indonesia? FB: Oh, well, I heard Javanese music.
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