Arrival Pt. VIII
The Great Conservatory
Four and a half months into the adventure of New York my parents flew into town for a wedding. My father’s oldest friend Peter (a refugee like my father, since 1949) was giving his daughter away. I still have the booklet of Jewish ceremonial prayers – embossed with the bride and groom’s name. The date is also there as a great bookmark for what was to become the beginning of a beautiful friendship. It was October in 1985.
The reception – somewhere in Long Island – was a staid but pleasant affair held among numerous round and numbered tables. In the background was my mother’s encroaching illness – a cancer that had been late-detected almost three years earlier
and was simmering and slowly morphing into its next phase. For now there was dinner and a wedding. Peter, now in his cups, made a dark and for him uncustomary joke about a shared kiddush cup shouting “I hope she doesn’t have AIDS!” Laughter in the room. My father responded, “not funny,” in a semi-serious admonishing voice across the room – both he and I somewhat surprised at Peter’s freewheeling Friar’s Club aplomb. This was a time for leaving actual grave matters outside and celebrating only the moment.
At our table were friends of one family or the other and one nice woman who had taken an interest in me as a new arrival to the city. I mentioned that I was accompanying modern dance. Her response seemed rather far-fetched to me but not so much that it could be completely ignored. “I know they need people at Juilliard” she said. “Where?” I thought.
She may just as well have advised me to apply for an English tutoring job at Columbia. Sure. Juilliard, one of the great conservatories of the world, must be begging for musicians like me; I mean where would they find trained pianists? It seemed absurd, but again not so much that it wasn’t worth investigating. The wedding and my parents’ visit moved on.
I don’t remember how many days it was until I lined up the courage to enter the Juilliard School, but I suspect it was the next available weekday. Juilliard’s grand entrance on West 66th Street was nothing more than a pair of double glass doors entering off of a most forgettable little space off the sidewalk. A credenza of marble jutted out parallel to the building, creating a little cove of stone and cement. It seemed almost foolhardy to enter such a keep, but there was no other way to find what I might need there. Upon entering the building there was a long foyer and a box office on the left. At the end were more glass doors. I went through.
The lobby itself reminded me of an old hospital registry. An older man and an elderly woman sat behind a marble reception desk; the man was dressed in a security uniform. I asked the lady where the dance department was, and she directed me to the third floor. There were no badges or stickers, no photographs or fingerprints. I was on my way. I thanked the lady (who had a distinct Irish brogue) and found an elevator. I was on the third floor, now starting to hear sounds of a conservatory – horns being blown behind closed doors, drum paradiddles offsetting xylophone scales and orchestra bells amid a satisfying of discord – chaos in medius res. I kept walking past dance studios which followed in a long line all the way to the back of the third floor where, passing through two more glass doors, I finally arrived at what appeared to be a dance office.
“Can I help you?” said a somewhat gaunt and very Russian-sounding woman at a desk. I responded that I understood that the school (which I didn’t name) needed accompanists. “Hahve you ballet experience?” she asked. “Some,” I almost stammered, “but I’m mainly a modern dance musician.”
“Then I think you would be veeery uncomfortable. Her pronunciation of “uncomfortable” particularly resembled the formidable style of Maria Ouspenskaya who often added atmosphere to American horror pictures of the 30’s and 40’s. For a moment I thought we were reenacting a scene. “This IS the modern dance department, isn’t it?” I asked. “Oh no,” responded Ouspenskaya, now appearing almost cheery. “They are on the fourth floor.” I had somehow been directed to the late George Balanchine’s School of American Ballet which occupied a portion of the building. Both of us were now relieved of the situation, and I promptly thanked her and headed back to the elevators.
The fourth floor looked a little brighter than the third but was the same maze of corridors, this time flanked by rows and rows of tiny practice chambers, mostly sporting pianos. These provided yet another sea of discordant notes in a soft backing track to the scene as I followed the signs. Around a corner appeared the dance office. There was a small room with a reception desk, two chairs, a long wall of filing cabinets, and another office room behind the first with a long window at about eye-level, overlooking Broadway.
Somewhere between the two rooms, after hearing “can we help you” I uttered my rehearsed phrased to the young woman sitting at the desk in front and to the gray bouffanted woman behind the desk below the window. “I understand you may need accompanists here.”
The older woman looked up as if pleasantly surprised and drolly uttered “Oh isn’t he a doll?” in her pronounced chain smoker’s voice with a downward emphasis. I have little recollection if anyone agreed with her, but I was no doubt adorable. What I can recall is her offer. “I’ll tell you what. We’ll try you, and if you’re good, welcome to the family. If not, to HELL with you.”
Despite loving the response, I felt that I had been offered the greatest honor one could imagine – figuring that I would probably be good enough, and thrilled to be invited in with such directness and a touch of Joan Rivers and Bea Arthur. A day or two later I was playing there. I cannot remember what the first class was, but it was either Doris Rudko’s (former dancer with Hanya Holm, Doris Humphrey, Charles Weidman, Martha Graham, José Limón, and Merce Cunningham) composition class or Danny Lewis’ (former principal with Limón) José Limón technique class. In either case I was invited to continue.
In Rudko’s class there were bright-eyed students who spent several minutes questioning me about my musical philosophy. Coming in off the street as I did I almost felt like an imposter – playing at Juilliard, just like that? What is my approach? I couldn’t have had more fun than those Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, never mind that the school was among the lowest paid in the city. I didn’t worry about that. It was an affiliation worth celebrating. During these classes I would provide music for compositions being created by the students.
This was something that had come naturally to me starting years earlier. I could see a dance phrase and match it with music – much as a silent movie accompanist underscores the action and story. I had an ability to anticipate what the student was about even before he or she began to move. I had a connectedness to the process and loved every second of it.
Technique classes were something else – a lot had to be learned to understand what the teacher wanted to impart, phrase by phrase. Counting was at the top of this game. This also meant comprehending each technique and its emphasis. Limón took the body through swings and arcs. Graham had its dramatic contractions and releases. Classes (always 90 minutes) ended with enormous outpourings of energy, and this was decidedly fun – certainly for a 23-year-old musician looking to make a statement. “I don’t know how the piano survives you,” had come a comment from a student a year earlier in Cleveland. Nevertheless, I survived.
In all, I managed to stay at The Juilliard School for eight seasons.
Here’s a little postscript. The two people (one a guard) in the lobby were Nora and Joe – both characters seen daily by hundreds of students and professors. Nora’s Irish brogue and silver hair were well-known. She was nearly 80 years old when I first met her. Both had apparently been there for a long time. Sometime in late 1988 Robin Williams, then appearing at Lincoln Center in Waiting for Godot with Steve Martin, visited his old dramatic school at Juilliard. Word had gotten out at least to the Dance Division that he was coming. I sat in the black box theater in a room crowded with acting majors and watched Williams, in usual high gear, take the crowd on a journey through that day as he came back into the building. Within his review of this stream of thought was his reunion with Nora who apparently told him to “Go on up; they’re WAITING fer ye!”
The woman on the mistaken third floor was Natalie Gleboff - the director of the School of American Ballet. She died twenty-two years after our brief encounter. Mary Chudick – the hard-talking but kindly and long-lived Dance Division administrator – stayed in touch with me from her Bronx apartment for a number of years, even after I left the school. I never was informed just when she died.