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1 Interview with Harold Shapero and Sid Ramin

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1 Interview with Harold Shapero and Sid Ramin Interview with Harold Shapero and Sid Ramin Music 194rs: Leonard Bernstein’s Boston February 21, 2006 Professors Kay Kaufman Shelemay and Carol Oja Class Interviewers: Ryan Raul Bañagale, Emily Abrams, and Corinna Campbell Minor editing by Elizabeth T. Craft 0:00 Ryan Raul Bañagale: Today is the 21st of February, 2006. We are in the Davison Room of the music library at Harvard University. My name is Ryan Bañagale and today myself, Emily Abrams and Corinna Campbell will be speaking with Harold Shapero and Sid Ramin regarding Leonard Bernstein’s Boston. So, it’s my pleasure to introduce to the class Harold Shapero. Mr. Shapero was born just north of Boston in Lynn, Massachusetts and has had a distinguished career as a pianist, composer, and educator. He studied composition under luminaries such as Slonimsky, Piston, Hindemith, and Boulanger, and was singled out in 1948 by Aaron Copland as belonging to “a new ‘school’ of American composers.” In 1951, three years after Brandeis University was founded, Mr. Shapero was hired to start the school’s music department where he remained a distinguished member of the Brandeis faculty for thirty- seven years until his retirement in 1988. As I am certain that we will learn more about today, Mr. Shapero had a long musical association and friendship with Leonard Bernstein which may have began in this very building. Mr. Shapero, welcome and thank you very much for joining us today. [Applause from the members of the class] We know something of your years at Harvard and Brandeis as well as something about your compositional career. I was wondering if we might just begin with you telling us something about your family background. Harold Shapero: You don’t want to go though that, do you? [Laughs, class laughs] Bañagale: Briefly, a little bit. [Laughs] Shapero: Uh, um. I had parents who were encouraging and they were very musical and in the ‘20s they had all the – they bought records and things like that. You know, very long playing 1 records – old fashioned, what do you call them? Short playing records... Ah, big RCA Victor discs and I remember... I’ll tell just one memory of my father. When I started taking piano lessons (I was probably six or seven) and I didn’t take the – and my mother sat on the bench with me and made sure I’d practice. And I had a mother who, you know. And so, pretty soon, I caught onto it and I rather liked it. And I remember calling up another six or seven-year-old friend down the block. I said, “You gotta come over here right away! I’m playing this piece that’s absolutely terrific.” And what the piece was, was Schubert’s Marche militaire. You know? [Sings first 10 notes of piece.] It is an absolutely – a wonder of inspiration with the two little lines, you know? And I was thrilled with it. So that is what I remember, sort of - And then my father, later on my father came home with a record of Stravinsky’s Firebird. Can everybody hear me? I hate people that mumble in a group. [Laughter] But if you can’t, speak up. He came home with a record of The Firebird and sort of put it – he said, “They say he’s greater than Strauss,” my father said. So, I listened to it and gave it back and said, “I don’t think he’s so hot.” [Laughter from RRB, HS, and class] A seven-year-old! The nerve and the chutzpah and the stupidity – it’s endless! So, that’s a little of that. I had a very supportive family and they...uh...they sent me to Harvard and gave me...and they gave me whatever I wanted. So, I had no, ah, no... And they were very musical. My mother was very musical. When they played Schumann symphonies at [Boston’s] Symphony Hall, she said, “Ach, Schumann!” Beethoven she thought was terrific, but Schumann she thought was kind of weak, you know? [Laughs] Bañagale: Could you tell us a little bit about when you moved to Newton and your experience coming in[to the city]? Shapero: About 1929, before your mothers were born, there was the Great Depression. We had a wonderful house in Newton and we moved from poor quarters in Roxbury, which was then a Jewish section, into Newton, which became a Jewish section. And we had a wonderful house and...uh...then they lost that house in the Depression. And it didn’t take my father long, and we immediately had another big brick house. And that one has a connection with Lenny because it was on a street called Cotton Street in Newton. And Lenny lived, just by coincidence, in a little house on Park Avenue. Was it Park Street or Park Avenue? Professor Carol J. Oja: Park Avenue. 2 Shapero: Park Avenue, I don’t know what the number was. And uh, I didn’t meet him of course, immediately but, well, you ask the questions. [5:00] Bañagale: Well, we could, we could follow that. Um, you mentioned in the writings you did in the Leonard Bernstein: The Harvard Years book that the first time you met Lenny was – huh, Lenny – Bernstein, was during the Music B seminar that Professor Merritt conducted in the fall of ’38. Is this correct and could you tell us a little bit about your earliest – Shapero: I always tell the same story about that seminar. It was a seminar on sixteenth-century counterpoint in which Tillman Merritt was expert. And, by modern standards, it wasn’t much use for composers. You needed Baroque counterpoint, which was not taught at Harvard, if you can believe it, in those years. So anyway, we go into this seminar and Lenny – Lenny was two years older than I was. So, he was a junior when I was a freshman. And I was a good little student, I did my work everyday and I brought my motets in to Tillman to mark up. And Lenny never showed up, at all. He was already – not, I wouldn’t say famous, I mean, he definitely wasn’t Leonard Bernstein yet, but he was playing piano concertos or solos with the WPA Orchestra. Do you know what that is? WPA is the Works Progress Administration of Franklin Roosevelt. It was a great idea, everybody was broke and didn’t have any jobs and so he started these artificial jobs and among them were musical jobs, like a whole orchestra. And this is all through the country. And they had - they were pretty good. Lenny had already got a reputation with playing with the Boston WPA. And so I’d heard of him, but he wasn’t very famous yet. But, whatever it was, he lived at school and I didn’t, so it was easy for me to be good and not easy for him to be good. He loved to horse around and stay up all night with his dorm guys, you know. I don’t know what it is now, but there were no pot then, but there was a lot of beer, you know? Well, Lenny – Anyway, he didn’t come to class. Around Christmastime it came time for grading time, right? There were no exams and Lenny had to pass in something. So, he came in and Tillman was sitting there and Lenny played this piece. I think, I remember it was a little piece, a dance piece for Anna Sokolow, a dancer who was quite well known then. And I remember it being awful. I mean it was, it was a dissonant – but it was nothing much. He played this piece, and Tillman said in his best Harvard accent [uses a snobby voice], “You know, Leonard, that’s not exactly what we are doing in this class.” [Laughter] And Lenny took his fist and went [bangs fist on table] BANG, like that “I like it!” 3 And you know, imagine this class if that happened, you know – everybody had their tongues hanging out. I was amazed, I thought it was funny, but I was amazed. And I thought it was horrible in taste, too. Um, years later I thought, that’s a wonderful sample of Lenny because his confidence was enormous. Right or wrong, his confidence was gigantic and his confidence in performance was like that too. And he didn’t worry about making mistakes and he was secure. So he was pretty tough right off at the beginning. But it was an awful little piece! [Laughter from class] Bañagale: Do you have any other memories of that time period in the classroom? Shapero: In the classroom? Well, that class was, we just, it was 16th – ah, that’s how I sort of met Lenny almost, really. And then uh, then of course I was trying to get ahead, you know. And he was. And he found out that I could play a lot of piano. I was a pretty good pianist then. And he said, “Why don’t we give some two piano concerts together?” And that is how we started having some fun! So we developed all kinds of things – with him in charge. He got all the jobs and all the venues, as you’s call them. And he didn’t decide what we should play, but he was the motivating force. I mean, I was very passive. Whatever he said I did. But I was a good player and he always, when the piece was hard, he always made me play first [part] too.
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