1960s, composers had to make a big decision, whether they were going to write twelve-tone music or tonal music. I had already made that decision in Chicago, so it was no longer an issue. I was not going to write twelve-tone music any longer. I had done that already. As far as I was concerned, I was over it. Now I was interested in the music of Copland, Harris, Schuman, and Thomson. They were very good composers who dominated the American music scene at the time, and they were my models. Their music was tonal the way a popular song would be. It had melodies that you could sing. It could be beautifully orchestrated and have surprising harmonies in it—it didn’t use routine harmonic phrases. It could be polyrhythmic and polytonal, but it was always meant to be heard and remembered, which was very hard to do with the European twelve-tone style of music.
During the period I was coming of age, these two schools—the American tonal school and the European-American twelve-tone school—competed for dominance. There were bitter arguments fought out in the academies, magazines, and concert halls. For a while, it appeared that the twelve-tone school had prevailed. However, almost any young man or woman now writing music in the new millennium has embraced an openness and tolerance to fresh and new musical styles that make those earlier battles seem distant, quaint, and ill-conceived.
Though I was a very busy and dedicated music student, that wasn’t all I was up to. I had become quickly engaged with discovering New York City. After moving out of my Eighty-Eighth Street room, I ended up moving all over the Upper West Side, usually within walking distance of Juilliard. Soon, I was spending twenty dollars a week for a larger room with a small kitchenette. Along the way I met a young man the same age as myself working as a super on West Ninetieth Street. Michel Zeltzman had just emigrated from France with his mother and (new) American stepfather. As a young Jewish boy with red hair and blue eyes, Michel had spent the war years hiding in a Catholic boarding school somewhere in the South of France. His stepdad was an American soldier who had been stationed in Paris after the war. His own father had been deported from Paris by the occupying German army and sent to die in one of the death camps set up to exterminate Jews, gypsies, and other “undesirables.” In exchange for putting out the garbage and keeping track of the people in the building on Ninetieth Street, Michel had gotten the ground-floor apartment there free.
We became friends on the spot. He was then an undergrad at Columbia with an aptitude for acting and a love of literature. Michel had an inborn reverence for culture, history, and art, and it was a very European point of view. He began teaching me French right away, so that by the time I went to Paris seven years later I had a working knowledge of the language. He would also introduce me to the work of Louis-Ferdinand Céline and Jean Genet, both of whom used a French so rich in argot that I never was able to read them in the original. Besides French and literature, Michel and I discovered all sorts of things together—motorcycles, yoga teachers, vegetarianism, anything to do with India or music, as well as many new friends who were musicians, dancers, actors, writers, and artists. For a time he worked at the French Cable Company down on Wall Street. It was a night job and during countless evenings we roamed around lower Manhattan before he was off to work at midnight.
From the time I moved to New York in 1957 until I left in 1964, Michel was part of my life. Whenever I talk about the things I was doing during that period, he was always there. During the time I was away from New York, from 1964 to 1967, living in Paris and traveling to India, Michel moved to Baltimore to work as an assistant to my cousin Steve, by now a young doctor doing research on fish brains. After some time, Michel decided to become a nurse and
During the period I was coming of age, these two schools—the American tonal school and the European-American twelve-tone school—competed for dominance. There were bitter arguments fought out in the academies, magazines, and concert halls. For a while, it appeared that the twelve-tone school had prevailed. However, almost any young man or woman now writing music in the new millennium has embraced an openness and tolerance to fresh and new musical styles that make those earlier battles seem distant, quaint, and ill-conceived.
Though I was a very busy and dedicated music student, that wasn’t all I was up to. I had become quickly engaged with discovering New York City. After moving out of my Eighty-Eighth Street room, I ended up moving all over the Upper West Side, usually within walking distance of Juilliard. Soon, I was spending twenty dollars a week for a larger room with a small kitchenette. Along the way I met a young man the same age as myself working as a super on West Ninetieth Street. Michel Zeltzman had just emigrated from France with his mother and (new) American stepfather. As a young Jewish boy with red hair and blue eyes, Michel had spent the war years hiding in a Catholic boarding school somewhere in the South of France. His stepdad was an American soldier who had been stationed in Paris after the war. His own father had been deported from Paris by the occupying German army and sent to die in one of the death camps set up to exterminate Jews, gypsies, and other “undesirables.” In exchange for putting out the garbage and keeping track of the people in the building on Ninetieth Street, Michel had gotten the ground-floor apartment there free.
We became friends on the spot. He was then an undergrad at Columbia with an aptitude for acting and a love of literature. Michel had an inborn reverence for culture, history, and art, and it was a very European point of view. He began teaching me French right away, so that by the time I went to Paris seven years later I had a working knowledge of the language. He would also introduce me to the work of Louis-Ferdinand Céline and Jean Genet, both of whom used a French so rich in argot that I never was able to read them in the original. Besides French and literature, Michel and I discovered all sorts of things together—motorcycles, yoga teachers, vegetarianism, anything to do with India or music, as well as many new friends who were musicians, dancers, actors, writers, and artists. For a time he worked at the French Cable Company down on Wall Street. It was a night job and during countless evenings we roamed around lower Manhattan before he was off to work at midnight.
From the time I moved to New York in 1957 until I left in 1964, Michel was part of my life. Whenever I talk about the things I was doing during that period, he was always there. During the time I was away from New York, from 1964 to 1967, living in Paris and traveling to India, Michel moved to Baltimore to work as an assistant to my cousin Steve, by now a young doctor doing research on fish brains. After some time, Michel decided to become a nurse and
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