summer news 2014 10 Questions for Tarik O’Regan omposer Tarik O’Regan Csays classical music is experiencing a “Golden Age” that fills him with excitement to be alive and working in the company of peers he admires. In this recent PHOTO: THATCHER KEATS interview with Amanda Holloway for Sinfini Music, O’Regan touches On Manifest Destiny on a great sense of energy in the By Philip Roth contemporary music field, a trend ulitzer Prize-winning author Philip Roth In the summer of 1964 I was 31, the that we have observed in our was greeted with loud applause and a author of two books, Goodbye, Columbus residency program. Our admissions standing ovation as he accepted the and Letting Go. Alimony payments incurred panels are seeing fresh voices in P inaugural Yaddo Artist Medal at our May 14th by a childless three-year marriage in my musical composition with diverse New York City Benefit. Roth, who had his first twenties had emptied my pockets and backgrounds and innovative ideas. residency at Yaddo in 1964 and then returned stoked my spleen. I had barely been able Increasingly, composers who come six times over the next eight years, wrote most to write a worthwhile sentence during the to Yaddo are part of a collaborative of Portnoy’s Complaint, The Breast, and The previous two years (and didn’t yet know team – working with a writer, a Great American Novel at Yaddo. He dedicated that the drought was going to last some visual artist, or a filmmaker on The Breast to Yaddo and its then Executive two years more.) projects that often blur the lines Director Elizabeth Ames as “the best friends Instead, I had been enmeshed – to be of definition – and we’re noticing a writer could have.” Fellow Yaddo artist and more precise, I should say “ensnailed,” an increase in applications from longtime friend Alison Lurie introduced Roth given the reduction in volume one composers working in musical and presented him with the medal. His remarks sustains in such dessications – I had theater and jazz. O’Regan, 36, followed and it is our great pleasure to share been ensnailed in a descending spiral of is currently working on projects them with readers of the Yaddo News. (continues on next page) with the Dutch National Ballet, (continues on page 4) ABOVE: Philip Roth greets an appreciative audience upon receiving the inaugural Yaddo Artist Medal. Philip Roth Then – the transformation. NO – the (continued from front cover) transfiguration. At Yaddo, there was no courtroom appearances where an aging, cheery matrimonial judge urging me cherubic municipal judge, who intended helpfully toward Hollywood. There were only to be charitable when I reported to no courtroom appearances headlined, him that I was broke, advised me Poloniusly as mine had been, in the New York from the bench that rather than publishing Daily News, “Walks Out on Platinum” – short stories in the Paris Review for $50 a meaning Blond. And there were no reviews piece I should instead write for the movies. intimating that my second book proved Philip Roth at Yaddo in Go West, young man, he triumphantly my first to have been no more than the December 1968 informed me like Horace Greeley – out excrescence of a precocious child, no © Bob Peterson West my manifest destiny would indubitably censuring reviewers to bring me up on the be to rake in tons of money for a single charge of beginner’s luck. distraction, futility, treachery, and, not film script. The judge read me wrong: my Instead, there was a sandwich and a least, from the encompassing miasma of manifest destiny was Yaddo. celery stalk in a lunch pail. Instead, there everyday malice. One could not but sense Two years earlier, in 1962, a massive was a Monkish bed amid the tchotchke- weariness down to the bone with flawed novel replete with the weightiest epigraphs laden grandeur of the mansion. Instead, humanity and enfeeblement approaching I could find from Thomas Mann and there was an unprepossessing cabin- collapse before a demented world. How Simone Weil, a book so solemn and morally studio tucked off by itself in the summer agitated an emergency can one life be? in earnest that it might have been taken weeds. And, at workday’s end, there was Yaddo beckons. to be a voluminous plea proferred for a a pool where I swam my laps each day Those fellow colonists: secreted novitiate in the Society of Jesuits – Letting as if to be ritualistically cleansed of the in Saratoga Springs from everything Go, as it was called, had been gently bewilderment that was at a boil over wickedly conspiring to prevent them from dismissed by Time and Newsweek for Humpty-Dumpty’s first great fall. At 4 p.m. practicing in peace their sullen art, any failing to keep the “promise” of Goodbye, daily I immersed myself in the pool as if I number of them taking merciful refuge Columbus. Lastly, a two-year stint as might wash away all my stupidity. from tribulations that, as they are chillingly a writer-in-residence at Princeton had And then there were those others described to me over a late-night beer at come to an end and there was no other wandering about, those strangers, the Spuyten Duyvil, are more dire even than sugarplum in sight. twenty-five or thirty of them, who, like me, my own – punishing tales of degradation, So it was that in the summer of 1964, astonishingly found themselves revived in a both personal and professional, that bring exactly a decade out of college and flash by as humble as a man-made artifact the darkness of Russian literature to mind. feeling more like a tramp down on his luck as a Yaddo lunch pail. (I cannot mention And yet breakfast mitigates all. The than a young writer who four years earlier often enough the salutary effect of the very next morning the once disheartened had received a National Book Award, I Yaddo lunch pail.) will perk right up, knife and fork in hand, arrived at the gates of Yaddo, discouraged, Who were these fellow colonists? As before a generous stack of syrup- sad, not a little desperate, still bearing I would discover in chats after playing drenched pancakes, invincible now, happily the emotional traces of a final courtroom Ping-Pong at West House or between trips invulnerable within the paneled walls of the defeat whose injustice I would eagerly to the betting booth at the harness races, grand dining room where, decades earlier, lament to as many as would listen, and more than a few were hiding within the the patrician financier Spencer Trask fearing that it might require something sheltering shadow of the ancient spruces took dinner with his poet wife, Katrina – like a feat of magic for me to recover such from their biographies: some retreating splendid exemplars each of the gentility of force as I was all but sure had originally from enslavement to philistine wives or late-Victorian refinement burnished by the been in me. I allude to the force that Dylan worse, others from a not-so-secret aversion splendor of the Gilded Age. Thomas tells us, “through the green fuse to maddeningly selfish husbands or worse, The superfluous artist vindicated! At last drives the flower.” I could swear that I’d still others from zany lovers, serpent- the existence to which our calling entitles once had it. toothed children, dim-witted colleagues, us! Why shouldn’t we dine like the rich! My patient sidekick through all this unscrupulous rivals, illiterate students, “Give me your tired, “entreats Mother leveling, my Sancho Panza, was an Olivetti dunning bill collectors, unmet deadlines, Yaddo, “your poor…the wretched refuse… Lettera 22, a loveable manual portable noisy upstairs neighbors, and cramped yearning to breathe free. Send these, the typewriter of that era on which, alas, I living quarters, artists and would-be-artists homeless, tempest-tossed to me!” could write nothing but crap. in flight from a superabundance of triviality, A fellow Yaddo sponger salutes you. 2 Yaddo Summer News 2014 The Art of Our Medal hen the idea of Yaddo honoring and was elected to Yaddo’s Board of a seminal artist first came up, Directors in 2011. WJames Siena – the notable painter and sculptor who serves on our “The medal was based on an engraving I Board – generously agreed to make did in 2004, coming out of a body of work the medal itself a thing of beauty and (Upside Down Devil…the title came to inspiration. me in a dream) begun as early as 1996,” Siena explained. “I actually engraved PHOTO: THATCHER KEATS The front of the Yaddo Artist Medal, the lines that make up the art side of produced by the Walla Walla Foundry the medal, and the folks at the foundry “It’s a great pleasure for us to begin a in Walla Walla, Washington, features a created the relief image based on the new tradition by presenting Philip Roth relief image divided into five sections, length of the individual lines.” with the first Yaddo Artist Medal,” said symbolizing the artistic disciplines Yaddo President Elaina Richardson. “It’s represented at Yaddo – film, literature, Selected excerpts from Yaddo’s long been our custom to award a medal musical composition, performance, and handwritten founding document appear in for achievement and service to two the visual arts. The production process their original cursive form, with help from graduating seniors at Saratoga High began by creating a 3D model based on Harlan & Weaver Intaglio, on the back of School, and we’d wanted for some time designs submitted by Siena, which aided the medal: to expand on that tradition in a way that in considering a variety of fabrication reflected our core history, and century- options.