ASHBERYANA 1920’S I Had Recently Recorded

31 No program on this Da Camera season evokes as many personal memories as tonight’s musical tribute to the great American poet John Ashbery (1927–2017). Touching on many years of friendship and going back to my earliest days at Da Camera, the phrase that inspired our season theme, “time future contained in time past,” seems particularly true as I look back on the interweaving connections and memories that lie behind the music and poetry we hear tonight. I first met John Ashbery in upstate New York in the 1990’s when I was teaching at JOHN ASHBERY Bard College. John and his partner David lived nearby in Hudson, and we quickly The New York Times called John Ashbery “a poet whose discovered that we were also neighbors in teasing, delicate, soulful lines made him one of the most influential figures of late-20th and early-21st-century Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood. John American literature.” was a remarkable character, absolutely Ashbery (1927–2017) was a poet, art critic, playwright, original in his modest yet deep erudition, and translator. He published more than twenty volumes shyness coupled with bursts of outrageous of poetry and won nearly every major American award humor, and his embrace of the American for poetry, including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book vernacular in all its forms. Countless dry Award, the Yale Younger Poets Prize, the Bollingen Prize, martinis, obscure camp movie reruns the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Griffin International Award, with titles I no longer remember, art and a MacArthur “Genius” Grant., and National Book Critics exhibits and poetry readings, summer Circle Award in 1976 for his collection Self-Portrait in a birthday parties in July, dinners cooked Convex Mirror, and at least as many major international together in the large kitchen of his awards. In 2012, Ashbery was awarded a National Victorian house on Court Street—these Humanities Medal by President Obama. images of shared moments and past John Ashbery’s books included Some Trees (1956), laughter come floating up decades later. The Tennis Court Oath (1962), The Double Dream of Spring (1970), Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975), An astute art critic and voracious music Houseboat Days (1977) Girls on the Run (1999), Chinese listener with a taste for the forgotten and Whispers (2002), Where Shall I Wander? (2005), A lesser known, John Ashbery’s musical Worldly Country (2007), Quick Question (2012), listening habits embraced many periods and Breezeway (2015), and Commotion of the Birds (2016). styles. Our friendship began with talk of John Ashbery attended Harvard University and the Russian avant-garde composers of the received an M.A. from Columbia in English. He was ASHBERYANA 1920’s I had recently recorded. He preferred originally associated with the New York school of poetry recordings to concerts, finding the audience of the 1950s and ’60s, which also included Kenneth a distraction, and often he turned on the Koch, James Schuyler, Frank O’Hara and others. Ashbery “hi-fi” for musical inspiration before putting was an art critic and collagist, and his work was often compared to Abstract Expressionism and Surrealism. pen to paper. I recently came across on my In addition to his numerous awards, John Ashbery was bookshelves a photocopy of an encyclopedic the poet laureate of New York State from 2001 to 2003. entry on the German composer Walter He also served as chancellor of the Academy of American Braunfels, with John’s scribbled inquiry in Poets and was the Charles P. Stevenson, Jr., Professor the margins as to whether we could find a of Languages and Literature at Bard College. His Norton place for a Braunfels work at a future Bard lectures at Harvard were published as Other Traditions. Music Festival, the festival I launched with Leon Botstein in 1990 that specialized in musicological “rediscoveries.” Digging up the unknown gem, stumping me with a composer I had not heard of—merited or not—were among his pleasures. 32 PROGRAM • 2019 John Ashbery and Sarah Rothenberg in Ashbery’s downtown Manhattan apartment in 1992. Photo by Charles Harbutt, courtesy of Bard College. In my first season at Da Camera, and, at John’s insistence, visit the poem, and spontaneously announced I programmed a concert entitled, Moody Mansion. to the audience following the Ancient Greeks and Modern Americans Years later, the Works and Process performance, “That’s what I was trying to celebrate the opening of the Menil’s series at the Guggenheim Museum to say.” The composer was thrilled. Cy Twombly Gallery, and invited John in New York presented a program of Back in 1994, as I was packing up my Ashbery to Houston to read his poem, new works inspired by John Ashbery’s house in Germantown, New York in Syringa, which had been set to music by poetry, and John suggested that I preparation for my move to Houston, I Elliott Carter. He was eager to come. moderate the conversations with him received word that I had been granted (Carter was supposed to participate and the guest composers. The concert a National Endowment for the Arts in the performance, too, but a serious opened with the world premiere of the solo recitalist grant. For that occasion, bout of pneumonia kept him away. ingenious work by John Zorn which I commissioned the composer Joan We feared it was the end for the 87 opens our program tonight, based Tower, a close colleague on several year-old composer, but Carter recovered on Ashbery’s Girls on the Run. This fronts, as she had been the founding and continued to live and compose dizzyingly virtuosic work for coloratura pianist of the contemporary music another 17 years.) The day before the soprano and percussion captures the group, Da Capo Chamber Players, prior concert John, David and I made our untranslatable virtuosity of the poet’s to my taking her place as the group’s way through the Menil Collection’s relation to the English language pianist, as well as being on the faculty art treasures and then set off on an by, paradoxically, being a wordless at Bard. (It was as a performer in Da excursion down to Galveston to meet vocalise. John was delighted with this Capo that eight months earlier I had up with painter Rackstraw Downes unexpected non-verbal setting of his first come to Houston, playing here at 33 the Menil Collection on the make me sad. I didn’t play Satie happened, I gave birth to twins right Da Camera series.) Joan Tower had in those days when our friendship before the scheduled premiere of already composed a piano piece was most active, preferring the Ashberyana at the Menil Collection, with a title from a John Ashbery complexities of Messiaen and others, so that concert was delayed by a poem, Like a…an Engine, for the and the subject of Satie feels like a year; but I did perform in the world wonderful pianist Ursula Oppens, conversation we never had. Friends premiere at the Guggenheim in New and I asked her to compose a are friends even in absence—we York six weeks after my children companion piece for me. Like carry on conversations in our heads were born. a Daisy was the second of what with friends who are distant; even Ashberyana has had a deservedly ultimately became a set of four forgotten friends can suddenly be rich life since the premiere pieces, and I performed the premiere spoken to in our minds when an conducted by the composer. With at New York’s Miller Theatre at outside stimulus brings them back. the Brentano Quartet we have Columbia University in 1996. But absence and death are not the performed the work with Maestro John and I also shared a love of same thing; and so the imaginary James Levine conducting and also things French and the city of conversation about Satie brings an recorded it for the Naxos label. Paris. One summer we met up in ache of loss. John Ashbery often The Da Camera all-Wuorinen CD the quartier Saint Germain and described himself as a surrealist, entitled Ashberyana also includes wandered the streets together. and Satie may have been the first the composer’s transcriptions of He and David were staying in Surrealist. The musical scores of the French Renaissance composer one of those minuscule left bank the miniature Three Distinguished Josquin des Prez (c.1450–1521) hotels off the boulevard where the Waltzes of a Jaded Dandy are composed for the Brentano Quartet, rooms require a certain amount of filled with idiosyncratic narrative Josquiniana. Utterly beyond time, the choreography to maneuver between instructions to the performer that rhythmic inventiveness of this early I long to read to John; I cite here a bed, doors and drawers. John was a composer is a natural inspiration for remarkable translator of French to few: above forte octaves the pianist the modernist Charles Wuorinen, English (in addition to Rimbaud, is admonished, “Do not cough” and, who transposed six 3–5 voice works Max Jacob and others, he translated at the very end, we must “Continue, for string quartet, noting that the works of his former companion without losing consciousness…” “some of the pieces are of doubtful French poet Pierre Martory, who The Guggenheim Museum concert authenticity, but are worth including was with us on one of those Paris that I mentioned earlier, where on purely musical grounds, whether afternoons.) I remember sitting with the Zorn work was premiered, Josquin wrote them or not. In him at a reading by contemporary included a work by the Pulitzer particular the last (El Grillo) is French poets in a New York art Prize-winning composer Charles probably not by Josquin, but was too gallery where a French line of poetry Wuorinen.

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