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I Childhood, Family, Education, Early Career: 1926-1944― [Interview 1: November 6, 1996] ## ―
1. ## This symbol indicates that a tape or tape segment has begun or ended. A guide to the tapes follows the transcript. Zebulon, North Carolina; Introduction to Music and Piano; A Move to Richmond, Virginia, 1938; Grandmother Laws and Summers at Lake George; Studying at Harvard, 1942-1944; Life in Greenwich Village and Accompanist for the Vilzak-Schollar Ballet School and Balanchine's School of American Ballet; Piano Study with Israel Citkowitz CrawfordI'd like to start by asking you what in your early years led you to music. Was there musical talent in your family? Pippin There may have been buried talent--talent that was never exposed to the light. My grandfather, who looked somewhat like an aged Uncle Sam, was a very reticent man--in fact, I don't remember ever hearing him utter a word. We lived in a small town in North Carolina, and we used to go away for the summers to join my mother's family in upstate New York. He stayed at our house one summer while we were gone. Before we left, he told my mother that she could turn off the electricity. He would not be using it. Of course, she didn't turn it off, but nonetheless he was true to his word. The neighbors, ever vigilant, reported that they never once saw the lights go on. They also reported something strange: every evening after dark they would hear the sound of the piano. The music would go on for hours, soft and beautiful. The old man was evidently playing to himself, confident that no one could see, no one could hear. We came back in September, he returned to his own quarters--quarters that I don't remember ― 2 ―
ever seeing--and I'm sure he never touched a piano again. I am equally sure that he had never touched a piano before.
Crawford Was he known to be musical? Pippin How can you accuse a decent man of such a failing? A book came out a few years ago called Real Men Don't Eat Quiche. [laughter] Nor do they play the piano. It's well known that the Victorian lady had to be scrupulously careful in order to keep her reputation intact, but the restrictions on a man's conduct were at least as stringent. The risk of losing one's virility was just as perilous as a lady's risk of losing her virtue. Do I dare smell a rose? Crawford You assume he had wanted to play. Pippin I'm not at all sure that he would acknowledge the temptation. But alone in the dark--ah! Crawford He was your mother's father? Pippin No, my father's father. His mother, my grandmother, I don't remember at all. I believe she died before I was born [December, 1926]. I was told that she had an extraordinarily sweet, cheerful disposition. Eventually the mother of four children, she was never able to walk because as an infant she had been left unattended, too close to an open fire. Both of her feet were burned off. She never went to school; she was illiterate. Who knows what treasures lie concealed inside a box that's never been opened? In my early years, we had no piano, but every Sunday we visited relatives--an uncle's house, a farmhouse--with an upright piano in the living room, and so I would play the piano all day, long before I started to take lessons. Crawford Reading music? Pippin Nothing so prosaic! No, I played like a virtuoso, flailing away. God knows what came out. The grownups discreetly shut the door, no doubt to preserve their own sanity, and I was left on my own. I felt completely at home with the piano and gradually discovered that I could pick out the few simple tunes I knew, which of course was very exciting. But mostly I seem to have gotten endless pleasure from just banging away. At the age of seven, I was given a choice of whether to take lessons in Expression or Piano. I chose Expression! Who knows what magic door would open? I never found out because ― 3 ―
the Expression class never materialized, and as a result I didn't start piano lessons till a year later in the third grade,
when I was not quite eight--a fortunate postponement, I believe. Starting earlier is usually not a good idea, unless one happens
to be Mozart.
We still didn't have a piano, but I would go to other people's houses to practice. I took to it immediately, partly because it was one of the few games that I seemed to be good at. Within a year, I was seriously interested and in a couple of years I was a fanatic. Crawford Without parental prompting? Pippin Quite the contrary. My mother would have much preferred that I spend my time outdoors playing. Crawford Music was all-encompassing. Pippin It became the central interest in my life. Though in this new land, I was still something of an alien from outer space. For example, when I was about ten, I discovered that one could actually purchase music. There was a company called Century that put out a selection of piano solos for fifteen cents apiece, which I began gradually to acquire. And then I discovered G. Schirmer, which published the entire Beethoven Sonatas, the collected Preludes and Nocturnes of Chopin, and things like that. The big problem was money. This was in the Depression era and we were poor. Although the family had sort of an aura of gentility, the foundations were shaky. My father's livelihood was extremely erratic. Crawford What was his occupation? Pippin He'd done a number of things. In the early years he was part owner of a chair factory, which reproduced models of patterns that had been developed in the rural South. Old-fashioned furniture, simple, severe and well made. We still have some of it and it remains as sturdy as it was seventy years ago. Crawford That's a big industry in North Carolina? Pippin I don't think it ever rose to that level of grandeur. But discovering and cultivating handicrafts and finding ways to market them became one of my father's great interests. One night, around 1935, the chair factory burned down. With few prospects in Zebulon, my father went to Washington, where he became enmeshed in the New Deal. His goal was to ― 4 ―
create interest and generate support for his handicrafts project. But the New Deal, for all the great things that can be said
for it, was chaotic and in constant flux. One never knew from one day to the next whether one's job still existed.
Crawford But did he find help for the artisans? Pippin Well, he certainly tried. For several years. Crawford The Depression. Hard times. Pippin Especially in the rural South. As I said, we were of the gentility. We did not make our own soap. Nor did we keep chickens, not to mention pigs, in the front yard. We wore shoes, even on weekdays. And we had a radio! On principle, my brother, my sister and I were given money--an allowance of twenty-five cents a week. Crawford Enough to buy music? Pippin No, this did not satisfy my hunger for music, but we were also given fifteen cents a day for lunch. Crawford Ah, I know where this story is going to end. [laughter] Pippin My misappropriation of funds went on for months till I was finally discovered. Crawford By an inexplicable loss of weight. Pippin It seemed that I was getting listless in the afternoons. Crawford You were feeding your soul. Pippin My fanatic soul. My teacher was easygoing and undisciplined--supportive, encouraging, but giving the loosest kind of guidance. This, incidentally, I think is by no means the worst way to start out. Concealed within, there must have been a sterner, grittier side to her nature. In college, she had practiced two hours a day and six hours a day on weekends, until her wrists collapsed. I was resolved to do the same. And for the most part I did. Never mind the wrists. Crawford Would you like to mention her name and give her some fame? Pippin Mrs. Dwight Barbee. In the seventh grade I was taken to a more exacting teacher in Raleigh, twenty miles away. Distances were much more formidable in those days. ― 5 ―
Crawford
How did you travel? Pippin By train or bus. I would go to Raleigh on Saturdays to take a piano lesson with Miss May Crawford at Meredith College. I thought it a grand thing indeed to be going to college, and I adored Miss Crawford, who normally did not take children. She brought me back to a much simpler level--it was like being demoted several grades in school. But she did it in a way that I found thoroughly acceptable, exciting and challenging: "Dare we try a Chopin Nocturne?" Or "You know, I think a Beethoven Sonata, but there are only three that I could trust you with at this point. You can choose." Crawford Oh, lovely. So which did you choose? Pippin The very first--Op. 2, No. 1. But life was soon to change. My parents were getting a divorce. I didn't know this till a year or so later. Crawford Because your father had been living away? Pippin That's right. They were never really compatible, and I'm sure that one reason my father was so eager always to find work elsewhere was because he wanted the separation. Crawford That was difficult. Pippin Very much so for my mother, to whom divorce was scandalous and disgraceful, indicating a way of life that was strictly confined to Hollywood movie stars. So it seemed to practically everyone in the world that we lived in. Although my mother had good friends in Zebulon, she never dared appear in Zebulon again after the divorce--though I imagine this said more about her own sense of moral propriety than Zebulon's. As for her family, they saw my father along the lines of the villain in a melodrama, who seduces and abandons the innocent virgin. But feelings aside, it meant that she had to find a way of earning a living. To my relatives' horror, the divorce settlement contained no provision for child support. Crawford How old were you and your brother at the time? Pippin My brother is two years older, and I was twelve--it was 1938. So my mother went back to nursing school for a brush-up, which meant the family moving to Richmond, Virginia. For me, this was like dying and going to heaven. Crawford Big city. ― 6 ―
Pippin
Lights, action, music! This was what I had truly longed for. In Zebulon, nothing happened! Access to music was almost nonexistent. Still, unlike most families, we did have a radio, and there was a program on Sunday afternoons called The Magic Key, which would generally feature about ten minutes of fine music. I remember to this day some of the things I heard. Crawford Crumbs. Pippin Yes, but crumbs from a rich cake. And these crumbs have probably nourished me for the rest of my life. I remember the first movement of the Mendelssohn G Minor Piano Concerto played by Serkin. I remember Rosenthal playing the Chopin E Major Nocturne, also the middle movement of his E Minor Concerto. You know, when you hear very little, what you do hear makes a formidable impression. But aside from this, there was one major oasis. When I was about ten, my mother, doing the ironing, turned on the Metropolitan Opera. Crawford The Saturday broadcasts. Pippin That's right. Till then, I had blindly accepted the only opinion I had ever heard expressed. Opera was a subject strictly for satire, the incarnation of snobbery, social pretension and boredom. To my amazement, I was entranced. That first opera was Die Walküre. Crawford You still remember your first opera. Pippin I listened every Saturday from that point on, until the trips to Raleigh made it impossible. How I combined this with six hours of practice I have no idea, but I did. During that year, I remember Lucia, The Tales of Hoffmann, Norma, La Traviata. The only one that I did not like was Siegfried. In fact I even turned it off about half way through. Crawford You had liked Die Walküre. Pippin But Siegfried is another matter. The first hour or so, I believe, is entirely male voices, which I found harsh and unappealing, altogether too guttural! Crawford So you've never translated it? Pippin No. In fact, I didn't hear Siegfried again until nearly sixty years later, and I'm ashamed to say that I liked the first half about as little as I had before. And I still like Die Walküre as much as ever. ― 7 ―
Crawford
So Richmond was another story. Pippin My dream come true! By this time, thanks to Miss Crawford's wise and patient nurturing, I played the piano quite well for my age. I was taken to a teacher said to be Richmond's finest. His name was Quincy Cole, and he immediately took a shine. My mother had to be frank about our finances. He charged nine dollars a month for lessons, a truly forbidding sum. Crawford So it must have been in those days. Pippin A hurdle, but not insurmountable. Mr. Cole claimed to have a benefactor who had offered scholarships to a limited number of students. He would call and find out if the benefactor would consider another scholarship. Well, sure enough, he did. Crawford Mr. Cole must have been impressed with you. Pippin He was a generous, outgoing person. We immediately started with three lessons a week--an unheard of schedule--and I was his bright boy. The lessons were long and usually at the end of the day, after which he would drive me home. In the car we would have long conversations in which he would tell me about the old-school pianists he had heard and known as a student in Berlin. To me, they were like the gods of the Pantheon. It was a time, prior to World War I, when Berlin was truly a great musical center, especially for pianists. Here the great ones gathered. Mr. Cole knew many of them and had many stories to tell. Especially to an audience as fascinated as myself. Crawford Who were his teachers? Pippin Josef Lhevinne and Rudolf Breithaupt, primarily. But he was well acquainted with idols like Schnabel, Cortot, Moiseivitch, Theresa Carreno, and--king of the gods--Paderewski. Crawford Were recordings of their performances available? Pippin They existed, but for me they were not very accessible. At the time, a single 78 (seven or eight minutes of music) cost two dollars. Translate that into modern currency! However, at this point I did get a phonograph, that came with twelve records--twelve 78s of one's own choosing. Crawford I imagine you remember what you chose. Pippin Oh, indeed I do. Cortot playing the Chopin F Minor Fantasy, also the first and second impromptus, Harold Bauer playing the Appassionata, Jose Iturbi playing the Mozart A Major Sonata, ― 8 ―
Horowitz, the E flat Sonata of Haydn, and a few others. All piano. And of course I listened to them incessantly.
Well, after a year's refresher course in Richmond, my mother got a job as a public health nurse on Long Island, and the family moved on. Crawford Without you? Pippin Mr. Cole wanted me to stay in Richmond and continue studying with him, and strangely, my mother agreed. And so I wound up in a boarding house, the home of an elderly lady named Mrs. Flippo. The other boarders were a couple of old ladies who daily fought the Civil War, along with Mrs. Flippo. It's amazing, because although they were old, they were not that old. The Civil War had certainly been concluded ten years or so before they were born. Crawford But not for Mrs. Flippo. Pippin Far from it. It was a daily indignation. The defeat of the South was an indelible stain that each day they tried to remove. My own participation was remote, to say the least, and I would usually get away from meals as fast as possible. Crawford Was there a symphony orchestra in Richmond? Pippin No, Richmond was not quite the mecca for the arts that I supposed. Still, in comparison with Zebulon, it was Athens in its heyday. [laughter] But the National Symphony in Washington gave about three concerts a year there. In fact, I was a soloist in one of them. Crawford You played a concerto? Pippin The Saint-Saens Fourth Concerto. Before that, I had played the MacDowell D Minor Concerto with the Norfolk Symphony. And I must say that the reviews for that were quite sensational and convinced everybody, including me, that I had no choice but to become a concert pianist. I'd never before really taken this as a serious possibility. Crawford Why not? Pippin I think partly it was a legacy of the South. I assumed that a concert career was for the giants that lived elsewhere. Coming from a backwater, this was a world that we could not hope to enter. My passion for music was undirected. I could envision ― 9 ―
myself becoming a teacher, but that was about as far as I could stretch it.
Crawford So you didn't seek these performances. You were invited. Pippin I didn't seek them, but Mr. Cole did. He was most intent on promoting my career. Crawford It was marvelous that you found him. Pippin So it was at the beginning, but it was not so marvelous later on. Because the most unexpected thing happened--I lost interest. Crawford Burnt out maybe. Isn't that what we would say today? Pippin Perhaps. It was painful, bewildering, embarrassing. I felt that I was letting a lot of people down. But there was no getting around it. The fire had gone out. There were many factors, but for one thing, I was becoming interested in other things. It was also tied up with my disillusionment with Mr. Cole, whom I had so thoroughly idealized. Idealization is always dangerous! Like young people the world over, I was mercilessly intolerant of human frailty. Generously forgiving in the abstract, but woe to the person close at hand who falls short. Mr. Cole was certainly caring and concerned, but he was also shallow and narrow-minded. He was a snob. He was anti-Semitic, which absolutely baffled me, especially considering how many gods in the pianistic pantheon were Jews. His approach to music was geared mainly to showmanship. I often felt that I was being trained like an animal on display. In his world, a concert career barred everything else. Anything that was not the piano was an unnecessary and unwelcome distraction. So the choice became clear: is it to be the piano, where you're literally a caged animal showing off, or are you going to explore life? Are you going to live? Crawford Did he play well? Pippin I did not like his playing, which was another sore point that stiffened my rebellion. He was always after a big, big tone. That's fine if you can do it, but unless you're very careful, unless you let the tone grow naturally through daily cultivation, it simply becomes insensitive banging. Practicing became like hammering nails. Despite all this, I stayed with him for four years, because I really liked living in Richmond. ― 10 ―
Crawford
You were in high school at that time? Pippin Yes, and that was where life was opening up. I did not question Mr. Cole's authority. I thought that his approach was probably the way it had to be, but I didn't want to do it. It was not for me. I would still try to practice every day, but where I used to practice for hours at a time, now I could barely hold out for ten minutes. The soul had gone completely out of it. Of course, he was dismayed and confounded because my progress which had started with such promise was going downhill so rapidly. And so a kind of friction developed, parent and rebellious child, where both are tugging and the knot gets tighter. Oddly enough, my feeling for music took an unexpected turn. For some reason, I developed a burning passion for the German language. I loved German because it was the language of Beethoven, of Mozart, of Schubert, composers that my musical study had completely abandoned. I was now in the world of Saint-Saens, of Liszt, cadenzas and concerti. But somehow or other, German took me back to the sacred source, and for a couple of years it almost replaced music. I also became interested in journalism and in creative writing in general. Crawford This was all taking place in the context of school? Pippin And also in the context of feeling that it was expected, assumed that I was to be a pianist, that this was my preordained destiny. Oh, yes, I took myself quite seriously! Furthermore, I could not forget that my mother had made huge sacrifices to prepare me for a musical career, by now the last thing I wanted. ## Crawford Your mother had moved to Long Island? Pippin With my older brother and younger sister. Crawford Is that where her family was? Pippin No, she was from a very small town in upstate New York called Fort Ann, where the family roots ran deep. Part of the family tradition was a strong emphasis on education. Her mother, my grandmother, for example, was a college graduate in the l880s. ― 11 ―
Crawford
Remarkable. Pippin Almost unheard of. In the nineties, she was left a widow with five children under the age of ten and no visible means of support. Yet every one of them went to college. Of the five children, one became a doctor, another became a classics teacher at Wellesley. God alone knows how she made this happen. Crawford Do you remember her? Pippin Yes, though I never felt close to her. She grew old before her time, for understandable reasons. She was arthritic and her life had been difficult. People aged quickly in those days. So I remember her as a very old woman. My mother often said it was a pity that we never knew her as she really was. Crawford Did you spend holidays with her? Pippin We went to Lake George every summer. Around the turn of the century a great uncle had acquired some property there for very little money. At that time, places like Lake George were not nearly so desirable as they are now because they were hard to get to. Nowadays when one can dash up from the city, such property would be almost beyond the reach of money, but back then, it was just out in nowhere. Certainly Lake George is one of the most beautiful places on earth. Yet at the time I must admit that summers weighed heavily. The school year in North Carolina was less than eight months, ending promptly at the beginning of May. Summer vacations were long, and seemed endless. There was too much time. Ever since, I have fretted that there was too little. Crawford There was no music? Pippin One of my aunts had a collection of about thirty classical records. Not LPs, of course--78s. I was the only child that was allowed to play the records because I would treat them like holy icons. I would listen to those thirty records every day, but other than that--oh, and then I eventually found a piano in a farmhouse about a mile down the road. So between that and swimming and reading--[laughter]. Crawford You managed. Pippin I managed. But I've never been good at indolence. It's crazy to complain with such obvious advantages, and yet I would have ― 12 ―
fared better, say, in a school on Manhattan, with some form of organized activity. Something challenging.
Crawford Did you read a lot? German novels? Pippin No, those were still pre-German days. But I did read a lot--scads of children's books. Later on, George Eliot, Dickens, Mark Twain, et cetera. Crawford Was there good company at Lake George? Pippin Yes, very good. My mother's family was close, and so every evening the extended family gathered on the wide front porch for conversation. I don't remember anything that was ever discussed--no politics, no religion, no philosophy. Yet life seemed to provide ample and lively material. To me, it was the nicest part of the day. As you can readily see, I have much, much to be grateful for. Crawford You stopped going there when you were about twelve? Pippin By that time I was spending the summers in Richmond to concentrate intensely on the piano, although that was to become more and more a pretense. By the end of high school, it was obvious that I was not going to go on with music, so what next? I had done well in school. In fact, I was first in my high school class, and my aunt, the one that taught at Wellesley, thought that I should go to Harvard. Looking back, this seems an amazing leap of the imagination. I was utterly naive, uninformed, and had no idea of what "going to Harvard" implied. But it was suddenly possible, because a great Aunt had died and left me five hundred dollars. Crawford Was she somebody that you had a close relationship with? Pippin Not really. In fact, I never thought that she much liked me, or for that matter anybody else. Though she claimed to prefer me to her other nephews because I was quieter. I thought it a poor recommendation. [laughter] Crawford It wasn't your musical genius. Pippin No, as long as I was quiet, I was likeable. But she did leave me five hundred dollars, which of course in those days was an awesome sum of money. A year's tuition at Harvard cost four hundred dollars. This included, of course, room and board. Crawford So you had a fortune! ― 13 ―
Pippin
Beyond my wildest dreams! So I took the college entrance boards, which I remember vividly. A six-hour exam--three hours for measuring aptitude, where I presume I did all right. The other three hours were on specialized subjects. One of my subjects was Latin. Crawford How many years of Latin? Pippin Three. The exam gave us Latin paragraphs to translate, followed by questions about the contents. I could translate none of the paragraphs and felt that I would have done just as well on the test if I'd never studied Latin in my life, or if the test had been in Latvian. Pure guesswork. On more general subjects like history and social studies I was almost equally at sea. But Harvard accepted me and gave me a scholarship. I still wonder if they got me mixed up with somebody else. Crawford What year did you start at Harvard? Pippin The fall of '42. Southern schools offered only eleven years, so I was only sixteen when I started. What a shock! For the first time, I met boys close to my own age who were vastly better educated than me, and seemed vastly more intelligent. It was like Gulliver going from the land of the Lilliputians to the Brobdingnags. Crawford Where had they come from? Pippin Some had gone to private schools, to Exeter, to Andover. But others, like myself, were the product of public schools. I was drawn to the very ones that I found most intimidating. Crawford You felt that you were from the provinces? Pippin From kindergarten was more like it. Hardly in condition to feel competitive. I was enrolled in broad lecture courses in history, literature and philosophy. It was like being taken from a backyard swimming pool and plunged into the ocean. Each of them had huge reading assignments, far more than I was able to absorb. I soon became alarmed that I might not keep the B average necessary to hold on to the scholarship. This alarm changed into the unthinkable: Good Lord, what if I flunked out? It seemed that the harder I tried, the denser, the soggier, the more impenetrable my brain became. ― 14 ―
No, I was not doing well, and ironically, the family was convinced that it was because I was goofing off--that I had made it to college and now it had gone to my head. Well, shameful to say, I wanted them to think that. [laughter] Better to be thought frivolous, inconsiderate, uncaring, ungrateful--any of these things, rather than stupid. Ah, youth! Crawford There must have been compensations. Pippin Indeed there were. By sheer chance, my roommate was passionately fond of music, and extraordinarily knowledgeable as well--as he was about almost all of the arts. His name was Robert Shuder, from Mill Valley. Not pedantic, not scholarly, he was driven by pure passion. He was highly unusual in another respect. At that age, even the most enthusiastic, or especially the most enthusiastic, tend to become narrowly opinionated: if they like Bach, there's no room for the romantics. Love of chamber music precludes love of opera. Mozart eliminates Schumann. Bob would have none of this nonsense. Up to this time, my own musical education, while intense, had been extremely limited. I was barely aware of the existence of such a thing as chamber music. Every evening after dinner, Bob would take me to a small music room with a phonograph, and we would listen to a piece of music--a trio, a quartet, a sonata. This was my reintroduction to music. I even started to play again, though I had no interest whatever in resuming study. Crawford You had chosen English more or less randomly? Pippin This was the standard choice of those who didn't know what they wanted to do. But it was a welcome discovery to find that I wanted to play the piano after all, when I could play music that was close to my heart. That year I learned much of The Well-Tempered Clavier. Crawford You hadn't played Bach before? Pippin Not since the Two-part Inventions. Not a single piece. So I rediscovered music during this year, but it was a difficult year. My ego took a beating, and at the end of the second term, I wanted to leave college for two reasons. The main reason was in order to get ready to come back better prepared. Crawford Come back to Harvard? ― 15 ―
Pippin
By all means. But the war was the other reason. Many of my classmates had already left to be drafted. My eighteenth birthday was approaching in December and I fully expected to be drafted as well. So it seemed best in every way to leave immediately, get a job for six months, spend as much time as I could studying, get drafted, and then--well, who could envision what would come next? Crawford Would you have been drafted if you were enrolled? Pippin Yes, that would have made no difference. Going to college was no exemption. Crawford Sure enough, you got your letter six months after you'd left in June. You completed your first year? Pippin That's right. As planned, I got a dull, undemanding job, spent my spare time reading, doing some writing and so forth. Well, the draft examination came and I guess all went well until we reached the psychiatrist. He seemed a kind, thoughtful, friendly person. He asked a good many questions. Now I should say that at this point I had acknowledged to myself that I was homosexual, but I had not, nor would I have dreamed of acknowledging it to anyone else. I should also say that with my isolated background, I knew very, very little about this, and what I did know was appalling: that homosexuals were vampire-like creatures that lived in dark alleys, that emerged from sewers, that lurked in shadows to snatch out at the innocent unprotected young. In the few plays or stories that I'd read in which the subject came up, when a young man discovered that he had these tendencies, it was assumed that he would kill himself, or at least try. Crawford This didn't get straightened out at Harvard? Pippin Not yet. Not yet. To me, there was no question about it: if that's what I am, so be it. I have to admit as well to a cold, furtive shiver of excitement at the thought that I--such a good boy!--was in fact branded for life as an outsider, a freak and a criminal. Life might turn out to be a rather larger adventure than I had bargained on. How many thousands have faced a similar shock of recognition! But mine was a deep secret, to be disclosed to no one. Crawford Even at Harvard, among your friends? Pippin Deep silence! Later on, I discovered that many of my friends were wading through the same quagmire. But when the army ― 16 ―
psychiatrist asked questions, I answered truthfully, but only up to a point. He never actually put the dreaded question directly.
I probably thought it was because it was too unspeakable to be uttered. At the end of what I think was a fairly long interview,
he said in a paternal way, "Army life will be rough. Do you think you can handle it?" And I said I thought I could.
Crawford So you really welcomed it? Pippin No, I didn't welcome it, but I was not going to concede that I was unfit. I thought it was a duty that I could cope with. But mercifully, he must have thought otherwise. God knows what would have happened had this interview taken place, not in Manhattan, but in some other parts of the country. But sure enough, I was rejected on his recommendation. So this meant that I was suddenly free. Crawford So you had a fair share of relief. Pippin Yes, a fair share of relief. No, vast relief! I was prepared to go into the army, but God knows it was not something I looked forward to. Instead, I went back to Harvard, where I stayed for another year and a half. Incidentally, I do not expect to bring up the subject of sexuality again. It would be pleasant to infer from my silence that the facts were too scandalous to be made public. But in truth, I regret to say that full disclosure would be altogether too disappointing. You will not be surprised to hear that my second encounter with college was much more rewarding than the first. Though it was still far from smooth sailing, I was no longer terrified that the boat would capsize and sink. But just imagine! Daily contact with the likes of Shakespeare, Donne, Keats, Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Blake, Swift, Chekhov, Dostoyevski, Thomas Mann. Though I had paid dutiful homage to Shakespeare before, this was the year that started my lifetime devotion. Granville Barker gave six lectures on Antony and Cleopatra, acting all of the roles better than I have ever heard since. An amateur production of Hamlet brought the play to life. And I myself took part in a college production of Much Ado About Nothing. Another revelation! Returning to Harvard for a brief visit some thirty years later, I was overwhelmed by the flood of rich memories. But the more I felt opened up to a larger vision of life, the more I chafed under the restrictions that college imposed. I wanted to be free to go my own way. It became increasingly apparent ― 17 ―
that I was not academically oriented or inclined or gifted. I tend to work obsessively at the things that interest me, and
in fact I think obsessive pursuits have characterized the major part of my life.
Crawford But passion makes the best academics, doesn't it? Pippin Absolutely. But my passion could not be imposed from without. And what I cannot do is flit around: an hour of French, an hour of history, an hour of metaphysical poetry. And unless driven by passion, there are limits to what the mind is willing to absorb. The reading assignment for one course was one hundred Elizabethan and Jacobean plays. Well, if you do justice to a dozen, that's quite an achievement. Crawford You thought that the demands were unreasonable? Pippin Well, certainly more than I could cope with. The mind is a hard thing to force. If it doesn't want to go someplace, it just refuses to go there. My college career had never been particularly distinguished. But towards the end, I made the disconcerting discovery that the less I studied, the better I seemed to do--a discovery that seemed to reinforce my view that the main thing college was teaching me was to bluff. Crawford Preparing you for life. Pippin Yes, [laughs] no doubt. Yet I do aim for higher things. Again I wanted to leave college, and this time I felt quite strongly that I would not come back. And of course I've not. Crawford You did not plan to go elsewhere? Pippin What I wanted desperately was time and freedom to pursue my own interests, whatever they might wind up being. I don't know whether to call it sheer innocence or sheer stupidity, but I never for a moment considered the practical consequences of having or not having a degree. My greatest dread was getting stuck in a dull, meaningless, all-consuming nine-to-five job. But suddenly a new possibility emerged. I heard about a friend, a pianist also, who had left college for New York, where he accompanied ballet classes for two dollars an hour. A magnificent salary! Four times what I had ever earned before. Fifteen hours a week would do it! And so the dream came true. It was the fall of '45. The atom bomb had put an abrupt, unexpected end to the war. The country breathed a collective sigh of relief. And I got a job ― 18 ―
in a ballet school and a room in Greenwich Village at 40 Perry Street on a ground floor--a nice, big, front room for forty
dollars a month.
I was enthralled by the ballet. The Vilzak-Schollar school was headed by two Russian émigrés, distinguished dancers from the Nijinsky era--roles that they filled to perfection, volatile, tempestuous, warm-hearted and delightful. In hindsight, I see them as quintessentially operatic: what they felt, they expressed! Molto passionato! I loved them. The school was frequented by some of the great dancers of the day: Irina Baronova, Alicia Alonso, Igor Youskevitch, et cetera. Anatole Vilzak was especially musical, and he wanted his classes to be fueled by a lively, inspiring musical beat. And of course that was just what I wanted to give, so I was performing for all I was worth, for three hours a day. Crawford Did he choose the music? Pippin No, I could play whatever I wanted, with certain restrictions. The music had to be in eight-bar periods, which meant that it sometimes had to be chopped a bit in order to fit. Vilzak would prescribe the rhythm and tempo, but the rest was up to me. The New York that I found was an exhilarating change from Harvard. I was meeting people for the first time in years where intellect and erudition didn't matter. [laughter] In going to Harvard, the great revelation was in meeting people where intellect did matter. But it was even more of an eye-opener to meet again people where it did not. Crawford What did matter? Pippin What mattered? Oh, just being alive at the same time, in the same place. My room was rather conveniently located, so that lots of people drifted in for a casual visit--for me, a decidedly new experience. In Zebulon, music had been a protective wall. In Richmond my friends were of an older generation, with one great exception. Ben Johnston shared my interest in music and led me into other interests. At Harvard, friendships tended to be strained by intellectual competitiveness. You had to be careful about the opinions you uttered unless you were ready to back them up. Crawford Not very relaxed. ― 19 ―
Pippin
There were exceptions. The fact is that I myself lived on shaky ground, and was inclined to feel that I had to prove myself. Crawford So New York was just right for you. Pippin I loved it. But wouldn't you know? After a few months of pleasant conviviality, my sterner side again took over. I was wasting time. I was not going to accomplish anything unless I returned to a more solitary existence. So I moved to a tiny, tiny room on the fourth floor. In the same building, but no longer a place where people would drift in. It was about the size of a ping-pong table, but it had a big window and even a little terrace, which gave an unlimited sense of space. And I really enjoyed the new isolation and the return to the writing that I had hoped to do. Crawford What were you writing? Pippin Oh, exploring. A journal, for one thing. Thoughts, impressions, notes for stories. But I was again barking up the wrong tree. If I had any talent for writing, I had not discovered where that talent lay. Crawford Did you love the theatre at that point? Pippin Very much so. As I had for a number of years. Crawford When did it start? I know that you go now to London on vacation for theatre. Pippin I can tell you exactly what moment the seed was planted. In the third grade I was taken to a marionette performance of Hansel and Gretel given by the seventh grade. To this day, I am flabbergasted by the quality of the marionettes and by the lively way in which they were handled. I remember them vividly. They were marvelously constructed. And in fact I must have been so visibly entranced that it was suggested I stand backstage at a second performance where I could watch the inner workings close at hand. Crawford So you were already an impresario in the third grade. Pippin [laughter] No, not an impresario; just a hopelessly enamored spectator. Sheer magic! For some time after that I tried to construct marionettes myself, but the only thing that my hands are good for is playing the piano. ― 20 ―
Crawford
Where did they get the marionettes, that they should have such quality? Pippin They made them themselves--seventh graders! How they did it is a total mystery to me. That remained my single blissful experience of the theatre for some time to come. I didn't go to a real, professional performance of a play until 1940. Crawford When you were in your early teens, I guess. Pippin I quickly became star-struck, intrigued by the glamour of the theatre. And like most of my interests, I kept it secret. Crawford Why? Did you feel it wasn't proper? Something your family wouldn't have wanted? Pippin No, far from it. I suppose it was from a general deep-rooted fear of self-exposure--rather a paradox for someone whose ambition was to do precisely that as an artist, a term incidentally that I would have shied away from using. Crawford Your music had been so encouraged. Pippin Yes, it's hard to stay secret about playing the piano, often to my chagrin. I was always embarrassed when people found out. I especially did not want my schoolmates to know. Crawford Were your brother and sister involved in the arts? Pippin Not to my knowledge. But perhaps they were secretive, too. I'm very fond of both of them and we have much deeply in common, but I didn't find this out till years later. Crawford I think we left you in solitary confinement. Pippin Yes, back to my cell-like room in Greenwich Village. Undistracted, alone with my talent, I became increasingly doubtful as to whether it existed at all. So what was I to do? Life sometimes turns up with surprising answers. It was the middle of summer, and I got a call to play for some ballet classes at a music camp on Cape Cod for three weeks--an unexpected turning point. I was now an old man of twenty, and here I was surrounded by kids--fourteen, fifteen, sixteen--all so active, so involved musically. There were some excellent pianists. I remember Lillian Kallir. Does the name-- Crawford Yes, I know the name. ― 21 ―
Pippin
At the time she was fourteen years old. So intelligent, so mature, so charming. I remember her playing the Mendelssohn Variations Serieuses. It must have been her Mendelssohn summer. She played the D Minor Trio, also the G Minor Concerto with the camp student orchestra, besides Bach, Beethoven and Chopin. This camp was the vision of my childhood finally realized. To my surprise, I felt an intense craving to practice again, and I dived into it. I had to make up for five lost years. When the three weeks were up, I went back to New York, but now convinced that I had found my vocation. In the fifty years that have followed, I have never seriously wavered, although the vocation has undergone a number of unexpected permutations. The intensity has remained. I got a job at the School of American Ballet. Crawford Balanchine? Pippin Balanchine. I liked the atmosphere at the American school even better than Vilzak-Schollar, partly because of another fortunate encounter with a Russian émigré, also one of the greats of the pre-Revolutionary era. His name was Pierre Vladimiroff. Now Vladimiroff was generally considered mad. [laughter] He was indeed eccentric, and he had the reputation of being difficult to play for. There were about six pieces that he insisted upon over and over and over, and he seemed uneasy or distressed whenever a pianist tried to leave this too, too familiar terrain. I would start to play. "No, no, please! Beethoven Ecossaise!" Or, "No, no, no! Chopin Nocturne!" Crawford Did you know these pieces? Pippin Only too well. But I kept trying to expand the repertory. One day after a few weeks, he demonstrated a step. Unwilling to give up, I started to play an unfamiliar piece. A look of enlightenment came over his face. He came over and said solemnly, "From now on, you play what you want." And he kept to his word. If I made a mistake or played something that didn't quite fit, "No, no, no, I change! I change. Not you. I change!" [laughter] Each class became a concert. These were professional classes and so, as at Vilzak-Schollar, they were frequented by some of the leading dancers of the day: Maria Tallchief, Andre ― 22 ―
Eglevsky, Alexandra Danilova, the list goes on and on. I loved playing for Vladimiroff, but I could not say the same for Balanchine.
Crawford Really? What were your impressions? Pippin Well, I respected him enormously, as did everyone else, but we were at crosspurposes. I liked Vladimiroff's classes because he wanted me to inspire the dancers with real music. Balanchine, on the other hand, simply wanted me to keep time. Why he didn't simply use a metronome instead of a pianist I don't know, because he wanted the music to be absolutely cut and dried, just the simplest, bare-bones beat. Naturally, I wouldn't dream of arguing with what he wanted, but it was not what I wanted to do. So I thoroughly disliked his classes-- which in fact I seldom played--and after about a year and a half I was summarily fired. Crawford By Balanchine? Pippin Well, as a matter of fact, I was. He had a friend arriving from Europe who needed work and I was the most dispensable of the pianists, all the others being much older. So I was summoned and told that I used the pianos too much. Of course, they'd never told me to cut it out. Crawford You were practicing? Pippin Yes. You see, they had three different studios, and almost always one of the three studios would not be in use. So I would go into the unused studio between classes and practice. Again, they never complained about it until I was fired for doing so. Crawford They had to find something, didn't they? Pippin They also complained that I had turned down classes. Well, I had turned down classes only at the occasional request of another pianist who was eager for the money. As always, I was eager for free time. Again, no fuss had been made about it, but suddenly it was used as an excuse to fire me. With three days notice, incidentally. The other pianists were quick to rally to my side. They offered to go on strike, which I think would have been thoroughly justified. Crawford That's lovely. ― 23 ―
Pippin
It was lovely, and it was much appreciated. But I had no desire to stay. I thought, "If they don't want me, that's that." So I was suddenly a freelancer in New York. Crawford Were you studying at the time? Pippin Very much so. As soon as I got back from the summer music camp I was lucky enough to find, through a friend's suggestion, an extraordinary teacher named Israel Citkowitz. Citkowitz was a rarity among so-called advanced teachers in recognizing that the secret of progress lies in probing at the roots, in going back to basics, in cultivating the elementals of playing. His own vocabulary was so precise and unpretentious, it's hard for me to do it justice. Crawford What was his approach like? Pippin His goal was the perfect, effortless rapport and interplay of hand and ear. He insisted that technique, rightly understood, was about 90 percent of the problem. Only when a person's technique is in good working order can natural musicality take over. In fact, that is the essence of technique: the unfettered ability to let one's musical feeling express itself. I've seen it so often with my own pupils. Whenever a pupil seemed to have not a jot of musicality, it was always bound up with poor coordination. As soon as the coordination, or technique, improved, instantly the music would blossom forth. Of course, that's not the whole story. Music is a vast world that requires total immersion--a fact that Citkowitz did not minimize. But still the sine qua non is simply having the means to bring it about. The piano can be deceptive, because facility is easily mistaken for technique. I was always blessed with an abundance of facility. Control of it was another matter. Crawford Because you had paid little attention to technique? Pippin Well, because no rigid discipline had been imposed upon me, I played in a natural, easy, fluent way. This is the basis of good technique, but it doesn't go nearly far enough. Citkowitz worked with me most painstakingly on the application of very specific ideas--ideas that I have continued to feed on for the next fifty years. Fifty years of unending discovery. The goal of technique is to feel perfectly at home with the instrument, a rapport that is based on precision and economy. It could be compared to the cultivation required of a sport like tennis or golf. Or like ballet. All of them requiring total, ― 24 ―
spontaneous physical coordination. The result, musical revelation.
Crawford So this is where he wanted to start with you? Pippin And start he did. But I was not ready. I could not grasp the direction we were going. After a few weeks, I left him for another teacher whose concentration was quite on the other extreme. Lillian Bauer, herself a remarkable pianist, tended to be dismissive of technique. The all-important thing was to listen, to hear accurately, and to be sure that you were getting out of the piano exactly what you intended. Who could argue with that? Having gone so long without a teacher, without an outside ear, this was a most necessary corrective, and so I made a lot of progress with her for a year and a half. But then I happened to run into Citkowitz by chance. I'd always had a vast respect for him and a regret that I had not understood better what he was aiming at. He invited me to come up and play for him--his studio was in Carnegie Hall. He was impressed by my improvement and asked if I might be interested in working with him again. I thought this would be just the time, so I stayed with him for the next two years. My education began! Crawford Could you elaborate on his approach? Pippin It's hard to do so away from the piano, and without actually working together and demonstrating. The words alone might seem dry and mechanical--heaven forbid! I'll have to give you a few lessons! Briefly, playing from the shoulder, the arm supporting every note, loose hands, firm fingertips, cultivating rebounds and reflexes, always resilient, never forcing, maximum efficiency with minimal effort, exploring the cross-fertilization, as it were, of the different kinds of touch: legato, non-legato, legatissimo, portamento, staccato and staccatissimo. But technique is something that one discovers through doing rather than through listening to explanations. Crawford It sounds like you were putting in many hours at the piano. Pippin Like a maniac. Until I got fired, I was putting in seven hours a day at the ballet school, mostly doing my own thing. At night, because I didn't have a piano in the tiny room where I lived, I would rent a piano studio on Broadway for an hour. Nobody noticed whether you stayed three hours, four hours, five hours. I would often stay until two in the morning. ― 25 ―
Crawford
Did you ever sleep there? Pippin No, I never got quite that far. But the twelve- to fourteen- hour day has never been a problem with me. When I am absorbed, I don't like to stop. I always want to go further. Getting started is sometimes problematical. [laughter] Crawford When practicing, were you reading new things? Pippin No, I had spent too much time in the past doing just that, covering lots of ground superficially. Now I was bent on greater perfection. I worked on Chopin études, scherzi, ballades. Also on a good deal of Bach, Schubert, Brahms, Debussy--works that I had previously skimmed through. Crawford With the idea of performing them? Pippin By this time my ideas of the future had not solidified in any way. My motive was pure and simple: I wanted to see how far I could go in mastering the instrument and in becoming a rounded musician. I knew for certain that I wanted to dedicate my life passionately to something, and music was the most likely thing. Crawford You didn't want to be an accompanist? Pippin I did not scorn being an accompanist. In fact, I was earning--well, eking out a living by accompanying singers, mostly for lessons or for practice sessions. It was, believe me, a precarious, hand-to-mouth existence. I had few connections and no credentials. By this time I did have a piano and was looking for a place to live where I could put it--no small challenge, though nothing like today. I wound up with a very odd living arrangement indeed. Going into a bookstore out of the rain one afternoon, I found myself standing beside an elderly woman who looked like a frightened, furtive animal that had crept out of the shadows and recesses of New York. She began talking, apparently to no one, and I gathered eventually that she was going on a trip around the world and was looking for a student to live in her three-room apartment while she was gone. Well, my ears perked up. She said that she was a doctor, that she studied in the library on 42nd Street until ten o'clock every night, that she planned to be gone for an entire year, and was desperate to find a reliable person. I told her that I was a student with a piano, which she said would be no problem. The location was in Hell's Kitchen, on 54th Street, close to the river--bleak and squalid. ― 26 ―
I moved in two days later, with piano, and soon started to practice, most cautiously and gingerly. Definitely a tenement, about ten families lived just beyond these walls, which were about the thickness of tissue paper. I could hear every word that transpired among them, which was no great feat because they were usually shrieking at each other. Nonetheless, I was leery about how they would receive my piano playing, and feared that disapproval would be expressed by a brick through the window. Sure enough, after I'd practiced for about ten minutes, there came a loud, firm knock at the door and I thought, "Well, this is it." What it was was a man from the gas company come to turn off the gas for nonpayment. What a relief! I guess I paid the bill on the spot. And I never once heard a word of complaint from the neighbors. I waited confidently and serenely for Dr. Sweet to start on her trip around the world. I waited and waited, until it dawned on me that the trip was a fiction, a way to get somebody to rent her dark and tiny third room--so tiny that it could not possibly accommodate an upright piano. But her own room did, so that was where the piano went. Her room also had the light. A small kitchen separated the two rooms. True to her word, she was out every day until late. So I had the place to myself till ten-thirty at night, and practiced to my heart's content. Crawford She was a medical doctor? Pippin I doubt it. But there was no doubt that she was severely paranoid. She accused me of stealing from her. Stealing pancake flour, stealing her shoes, God knows what. She became convinced that the neighbors had somehow conspired to get me into the apartment so that I could kill her. She was in constant contact with the police, baffled that they were so unresponsive to her complaints. One drama after another! [laughter] Certainly a bizarre situation. You may wonder why I didn't move, but poverty doesn't leave open many options, particularly with a piano. Fortunately, I didn't have to see a great deal of her. So despite the rich concert life and a few good friends, New York was not an appealing place to live under these circumstances. For one thing, throughout the cold winter the apartment was entirely without heat. But the summer of '50 brought a welcome breath of fresh air. Through a friend, I got a summer job on Nantucket as a bellboy in a rambling hotel ― 27 ―
called The White Elephant. What a lovely summer! Did I say that I was never good at indolence? Huh! Away from New York heat
and squalor, away from my own frantic drive. And leisure! The job itself was about as undemanding as a job can be, and the
island was enchanting. Modest in its beauty, but utterly compelling.
Away from the piano and free from a self-imposed bondage, I was able to feel things out again, and somehow new possibilities seemed to sprout. Even writing was not out of the question. At the end of August, I came back to New York in a glow, ready to reconsider all possibilities. During my absence, Dr. Sweet had been taken away to a mental hospital. I went to see her a few times where she now claimed that I was her only friend. But it was delightful to have the place to myself, and with a little money saved up from the summer, I was in no hurry to take the next step. I waited until I was literally down to fifty cents. Crawford Before you went out looking for a job? Pippin It was high time! As I headed out, I ran into the mailman. My mail had been accumulating because I'd lost the key to the box. He opened it for me, and it was stuffed with mail. Instead of going out to look for a job, I went back upstairs to read my mail. The mail included a letter from Ben Johnston, my dear high school friend. Ben was as interested in music as me, and infinitely more creative. He has gone on to write marvelous music. In his letter he said that he and his wife Betty were living on a ranch about a hundred miles north of San Francisco, on the coast, overlooking the ocean, a place called Gualala, where he was studying with Harry Partch. Crawford Oh, yes, I know about Partch. Pippin I'll go into that later. But Ben had come across a book by Harry Partch, explaining his theories on music and on the basic sounds of music. Ben, whose bent was scientific as well as musical, was fascinated. This led to correspondence with Harry, who invited him out to study with him, and so now Ben was inviting me to join them, to live on the ranch as their guest, and to learn something of Partch's music. Well, I ask you! The choice between a ballet studio in grubby New York and a ranch on the coast of California! Not difficult. ― 28 ―
Crawford
Was Harry Partch well known then? Pippin Not to me. I am sure that he was well known to a coterie, to a cult. He was always a cult hero, as he still is. |