[This is one of the many “Manhattan composers” of the era. There were DOZENS back then, and they knew each other well. They wrote lots of letters to each other, not having an Internet, and they listened to the radio. Those were the days, the golden days, the GILDED days. I hope you have some sense of what it was like then; I know that for me it was kind of like HEAVEN!]
ONE
“Old man.” Every DAY my father is called “the old man.” Yes, the doctors told us to “take care of the old man.” Which we did. Well, I sort of did.
But now I think he wasn’t a typical “old man” at all. I don’t know why I’ve created that particular pattern: he is kind of youthful, and alive…
Yes, gradually, over the years, I’ve grown to understand him…
*****
I found it! An old tape, hidden away, and you can hardly hear it. It was composed by my Dad in 1946, Symphony 2. I remember Howard Hanson conducting the piece, at a 1966 “American Festival.” It was half an hour long; it built and built, meandering around, dissonant, until it TRULY became like the war. Yes, he remembered World War One, the intensity, and the sad quiet times…
I remember Daddy that day, limping… and then just listening, listening, his eyes closed and his arms moving a little, and the conductor dancing… Yes, the feeble “old man” is bringing the music ALIVE!
Gunther Schuller (Pulitzer Prize winner, Grammy’s, etc.) said it all about Philip in his autobiographical A Life in Pursuit of Music and Beauty. He placed my Dad’s music as “beautiful, poignant” and said:
I really loved these pieces, and if I had at this long distance to say which more or less modern music of the time I admired most it was Philip James’s music. Alas, he is now virtually forgotten…
“Alas, he is now virtually forgotten…” Yes, he IS forgotten!
*****
I talk a lot about the spirit of music, and how it relates to my Dad. What exactly do I mean by “spirit?”
When Daddy was a boy he grew up with the organ, and he absolutely loved it. He felt it was an altar; it felt sacred, and holy. In other words, it WAS spirit.
He was ALWAYS working on his music, symphonic and religious. When he was older I saw him sit at the “architect’s table” and jot his silent notes…
Unknown, unremembered… but it’s spirit, it’s SPIRIT!
*****
OK, I am born in 1954, in New York City. My father is 64, my mother (Helga) is 30, my sister (Vivien) is one year old. Helga is German: the Nazis killed her grandmother, young children, cousins – all seven of them. She didn’t tell us exactly about it when we were young – she felt it would have been too horrible.
No, I won’t bother you with Helga just yet… or Vivien… First HIS bio, or at least some of the early days.
Daddy was born in 1890, in Jersey City, before cars, before airplanes. Horses were how you got around.
His father was Welsh – a locomotive engineer – and his mother was German. They lived pretty poor. But he learned piano and violin from his musical sister Mildred, and organ from his church; in other words he learned to COMPOSE.
By 1899 he had written his first published piece of music. And by 1907, age 17, he was traveling by foot and by horse all around New Jersey, giving concerts:
He started to go to concerts. I have dozens of programs from back then. For instance Mahler, 1910 and 1911:
In 1912 – the BEGINNING of cars and airplanes – he wrote impassioned anthems and cantatas: Dearie, Because of You, Laddie, My Heart Is Like a Sweet-Toned Lute, Little Room o’ Dreams, A Million Little Diamonds…
He taught more and more students, voice and piano, walking from house to house in Manhattan, walking and talking…
He spent a bunch of time in London and Paris, practicing organ, writing the fanciful romantic Meditation à Ste. Clotilde, which still gets played once in a while. And he came back and started spending time with “Miss Eady.”
Now Miss Millicent Eady was quite a bit older than he was. She had a summer house in Amagansett, along the ocean, and the two of them got married at a “dune church.” He stayed at the summer house for years after she died. I remember the house, and the walks he would take: an old man walking SLOWLY along the beach, alone, with the endless, endless waves.
She died in 1945. He immediately wrote an improvisation called Galarnad, Welsh for “lamentation”: all the aches, all the pain, all the sorrows, dedicated to Millicent. And every car that we EVER had he named “Millicent.” It was kind of like Gunther Schuller: Gunther composed his 1994 Pulitzer Prize composition Of Reminiscences and Reflections, in beautiful memory of his own recently died wife.
*****
America and Germany: the “war machine.” The war machine began in the twentieth century, “the MALE stuff,” the airplanes, submarines, bombs… and poisonous cars on all the roads, the whole world getting noisier and noisier, and MONEY…
He was drafted in October of 1917. At first it was wondering, wondering when the war would BE. He wrote on Christmas day, with music, “Blow, bugles of battle, the marches of peace; east, west, north and south, let the long quarrel cease…”
And then he went to France. He learned tenor sax, and he arranged and conducted General Pershing’s well-known band. Fortunately he kept a detailed diary, full of soldiers, the “bandsmen,” the “doughboys”… the diary is truly a remarkable document. You can see an ADDENDUM for WW1 at the very end of this article, but for now the diaries:
Sounds unpatriotic but I don’t think I could kill any man no matter how sinful his country.
The sky met the water and the horizon was a harmony of green and pink… the sea is beautiful, not rough and choppy but broad and sweeping like Beethoven’s Eroica or the mighty Fifth.
Off we are at sunrise… birds are just bursting with song and I hummed parts of Brahms, Variations on Haydn’s theme, Beethoven 9th Symphony… It is interesting to note how we get the facility of telling the difference between shells, bombs and planes by the sounds. It may be a musician’s ear.
I notice the youngsters here all sing our popular songs in English such as “They Go Wild, Simply Wild Over Me,” and “Over There.” But they sing them so quickly and with such rhythm that it makes them sound like old folksongs of France. These children are certainly born with rhythm!
We had been ordered to bury the dead which are still remaining here, and there are hundreds of bodies which have been left for weeks without burial. Sanitation squads have been overworked as well as all the chaplains… About 8:00 in the morning we started in digging graves, making and marking crosses and then burying the men who were principally Germans. I hope I shall forget the horrible sights. Nearly all were in bits from machine gun fire and we had to collect them in blankets, some rotted, some almost skeletons, find their identification tags with long nippers of pliers and finally bury them with prayers etc. The stench was horrible to say the least.
My band was practically broken up and we did first aid and stretcher work at the front until the very end. At one time, after caring for our patients we carried them on stretchers nearly three miles through trenches, traversing barbed wire, through mud and heavy rain night after night under heavy shell fire. We were right in the thick of it on two of the four hottest fronts our division held. When we were not at this work we were burying the dead, both German and American, and also worked in field hospitals.
Glenn Watkins wrote a book called Proof through the Night: Music and the Great War:
In April 1919 Philip James returned to the United States as conductor and commanding officer of the Allied Expeditionary Headquarters Band, now known as “General Pershing’s Band.” He led the band on a nineteen-city tour… James’s concerts were wildly received as emblematic of America’s contribution to final victory in the Great War.
Age 80 or so my Daddy often poured himself a drink, then sat slowly down and asked me to “come over here and talk to me.” Well, I spoke a little, but then he talked all about composers and especially “World War One.” He talked and talked and I listened. And it was pretty damn interesting! I mean, with a couple of drinks he could smile, and gab… and then he would have ANOTHER drink…
He talked about the “Broadway scene,” for instance the composer Victor Herbert, who heard and hired him right out of the War, as a conductor and musical director. Philip led the songs and dances for the musical My Golden Girl: A Little Nest for Two, Ragtime Terpsichore, I’d Like a Honeymoon with You, The Jazzy-Jazz Dancing Lesson, What Shall We Do if the Moon Goes Out… And they went out afterwords, drinking. Philip claimed that Victor Herbert was indeed a true teacher to him; unfortunately he died of cirrhosis in about four years.
Daddy falls asleep with the drink in his hand, snoring loudly in the beat-up old naugahyde chair – it has a variety of rips in it. I go out to the garage. I jump on my pogo stick, one hundred jumps; or I ride my too-small red Schwinn bike…
Yes, we moved. We lived out in the “middle class suburbs” now, in a tacky “split-level.” Kind of alone out here…
The quiet, QUIET Oaktree Lane. Our yard has an old oak tree, which I climb up with a library book and read, and read…
And an electric garage door, it goes up and down several times one month: a jet flies over, and their radio seems all of sudden to startup the electric garage doors.
And OLD photos of musicians, “famous” autographs hanging on the cheesy paneling; or his Army medals, displayed on the wall, faded; or the ceramic alabaster bust of him, as a young man… It was all the 1930s versus the 50s and 60s…
I wander around in the sunshine, and I sense that something is missing: what happened to my Daddy’s big fat orchestral pieces? I mean, they are gone now, completely gone. He spent his whole LIFE writing for orchestra, but now he was composing what I thought of as simplistic songs, out in the burbs. Wow, what happened?
Or conducting himself, way back in the early twenties: he founded the New Jersey Orchestra. He had to use the Montclair High School, didn’t have a main New Jersey venue yet. Check out the known “Assisting Artists” of the time, for instance Pablo Casals:
But NOW?
Well…
That’s who Daddy IS, I see him now as a WHOLE being. He’s a sentimental dreamer, who laughs and who cries, and who cares. He couldn’t walk much toward the end, limped slowly around the quiet neighborhood with a miniature dachshund (“Seppel”) on a leash – and he wore a ragged coat, and a beret, and carried a gnarled ‘shillelagh’ cane… but… but…
But he was OUR DADDY!
*****
There are two things that positively GLEAMED through our house: my Dad’s music and him playing piano. Yes, I especially loved that instrument – roaring noises, tiny unreal sounds. My father used to wear his glasses, grab a pencil and paper, and sat at the piano, sometimes improvising. To my young ears it was WONDERFUL! He wrote a letter to the musicologist Nicolas Slonimsky:
In my piano playing days I remember the avidity with which I plunged into the first book of Debussy’s Piano Preludes… and my first compositions were greatly influenced by impressionism. Not that I tried to imitate Debussy and early Ravel, but to be unconsciously influenced by their guiding principles, their vitality and balance and color, and to apply these principles to the so-called American scene. As the years progressed, I discarded all traces of impressionism and my music became more and more polytonal and polyrhythmic…
I used to play imitations of him, just like Daddy. And we had sheets of music kept alphabetically. At first it was building up, trying, from Albéniz to Webern… I played it all rather badly I’m afraid; but DAMN, I loved it! It would sink away – time wasn’t THERE any more!
I loved to play the eccentric (and I mean eccentric!) Percy Grainger – it was WONDERFUL music. My Daddy knew him well. I used to help him file the “Grainger letters” – lots of them. I got a quarter, or sometimes a whole dollar.
Grainger was a “superstar” in Australia but ended up moving to New York – you’ll have to read about him, he was an absolutely fascinating character. And he ended up very depressed. He began working with Burnett Cross, a young physics teacher, on “free music machines.” The first of these was a simple device controlled by an adapted pianola. Next they made the “Estey-reed tone-tool,” a form of giant harmonica which in 1951 would be ready to play free music “in a few weeks.” A third machine, the equally bizarre “Cross-Grainger Kangaroo-pouch,” was sort of completed by 1952:
But he always, ALWAYS wrote kind words to my Dad. This one, for instance, is about Philip’s anthem ‘By the Waters of Babylon:’
*****
I had a Daddy who LISTENED.
He would never, ever complain, it didn’t matter what I sounded like. No, I didn’t ever learn a “right or wrong way” to play. I’ve always felt uneasy around bigwig musicians, ALWAYS. I’ve found my own way: I’ll play it how I want to play it. And it wasn’t ever, EVER about money. Nope.
I must have been eight years old. My father asked if I would like classes in “harmony” now. “Sure,” I responded eagerly, not knowing exactly what it meant.
And all at once I learned it, harmony in four parts – truly magical! He would write a melody in the bass, or maybe soprano – and then I would have to follow the rules in harmonizing it. He always found a mistake – “woops, watch for that parallel fifth!” He’d smile as I was writing; I felt like a genuine composer!
And another time: I was fifteen and improvising at the piano. I even jotted notes on some music paper – but when I came back it was gone. I figured it must have been thrown away. Then two weeks later it appeared on the piano again, only instead of my messy notes it was beautifully drawn by an old student of my father, and it proudly proclaimed that this was music by me, Philip Dylan James!
He taught me to “sort of” conduct, in just one or two lessons; I read the textbooks on conducting, practiced on my own, reading scores and records. It felt absolutely wonderful.
He taught me to play ten or so “introductory” lessons on organ – and he composed a last piece in 1974, before he died, again for organ solo. It was meant to be a funeral piece, called Sortie – French for Exit. It started and ended with a corny JOYOUS sound. That was Daddy. It was definitely made of spirit: I see him smiling and singing every day.
*****
Ah, the people, the traffic, ALL nationalities… hearing the history… I felt New York City was what I loved, NOT our tacky suburban home! We stopped in some tiny 3rd Avenue store where my father knew the owner, who offered me a glass of dirty-looking water. “Don’t tell Mommy,” Daddy whispered. Or we’d stop on the East River watching the tug boats pushing ships ashore.
Memories, memories:
We had a very small but fashionable apartment, looking out on Central Park. On Macy’s Day the giant balloon Mickey passed by our window: I could almost touch him.
Daddy played piano, the ‘Pop, pop, pop goes the corn’ song, or he’d put on accents as he read the Sunday comics to us. Oh yes, I remember laughing as he picked up the ringing phone and shouted in a fake German accent: ‘Campbell’s Funeral, nierenstein und blasenkranker…‘ – that meant ‘problems with the kidneys and liver.‘
He would have parties, loud laughing and drinking parties, fancy dresses of the 1950s era. They were all musicians, all characters. I would fall quietly asleep, hearing bursts of laughter at my Daddy’s partially-drunk jokes.
TWO
But Daddy wasn’t always “smiling and singing.” His first wife (Millicent) died in 1945, and he married his second wife (Helga) in 1952. That space of seven years was a sort of growth for him, it really was. For instance he wrote his second symphony without even a trace of humor – but it was gorgeous. Same thing for many, many serious pieces during that time.
He spent his summers at the MacDowell Colony, the rural home for artists and composers. He loved it! Three meals together at the same time, discussing what you’re working on. Marion Bauer just about lived there, and Louise Talma…
And he once again took up writing Welsh-based tunes, beautiful modal melodies: Passacaglia on an Old Cambrian Ground Bass, Gwilym Gwent, The Marsh of Rhuddan, The Stranger, Song of the Miners, Beloved Land… We used to have the Welsh symbol hanging around at our house, a bright red dragon.
*****
NYU, New York University: he had worked there from 1923 to 1956, and in 1933 he became Head of the Music Department. He taught composition, orchestration, and conducting, and he was good friends with Marion Bauer, who also taught there. Neither of them had a degree; that’s what it was like then, although he was sometimes called Doctor James. He was pals for years with his students, for instance Milton Babbitt, who called him in later interviews an “extraordinary musician”:
…While I was at NYU, I heard all kinds of music. Those were great days. You had a major symphony orchestra at every radio station. Philip James, who was one of my teachers at NYU, was the conductor at WOR where they had a symphony orchestra. One night it was the symphony orchestra, the next night it was the wind ensemble, the next night it was a string orchestra. So there was this enormous amount of music. So I heard, I began to catch up, as I said.
And then there was Helga.
Helga was short and beautiful and had a fairly thick German accent. She was working toward a Master’s degree in musicology. As recorded at the Holocaust Museum in DC:
Helga was born on October 1, 1924 in Berlin Germany. She attended German public schools until Jewish students were expelled; she later attended the Jewish Goldschmidt School. She left Germany in August 1938, with her parents [Hans and Augusta], and came to Liverpool, England; she then sailed to the United States and arrived that September.
Helga’s paternal grandmother Julie Bujakowsky was deported with Transport I/7 from Berlin to Theresienstadt on June 17, 1942; she perished at the age of 83. Hans’ brother Fritz, with his wife Else and young son Walter, were deported from Germany to Auschwitz where they perished in 1943. Another brother, Kurt, who had worked as an editorial assistant fled to Vienna in 1936 to escape the Nazis. He, his wife Dina and daughter Stephanie (“Steffi,” b. 1937) then immigrated to France after the Anschluss; from there they were deported to their deaths in Auschwitz with Transport 30 from Drancy on September 9, 1942.
So Fritz and Else and Walter and Kurt and Dina and Steffi and Julie were killed… so many deaths, so many deaths.
*****
She changed her name to Helga Boyer, after the actor Charles Boyer. And she married a fellow NYU student, Bill Shank, from 1948 until 1951. She did NOT believe in killing, even Nazis. Bill Shank wrote:
I really had made up my mind that I was not going to go into the Army, that I had a philosophical objection to war, that I felt that war was immoral, that I thought it was futile, that I thought it was evil, and that I just didn’t want to have anything to do with it.
He had been to the “conscientious objector” camp at Waldport, Oregon, during the War. Steve McQuiddy wrote a wonderful book called Here on the Edge, the Story of Waldport. The cover reads:
There, pacifists and political objectors to World War II spent their daylight hours planting trees, crushing rock, building roads, and fighting forest fires—fifty hours a week, for no pay. At night, they published books, produced plays, and made art and music… They called themselves the Fine Arts Group at Waldport, and their focus was not so much on the current war, but on what kind of society might be possible when the shooting finally stopped.
More Bill Shank:
To hear these works it was just such a thrilling and inspiring thing for me that I became very deeply and profoundly interested in music and some of the people there who were musicians guided me. One person gave me piano lessons and I was able to sit in on rehearsals and this became an important part in developing my career. When I started going to college and wasn’t sure just what to do, I started taking music courses and eventually became a music major and eventually became a music librarian.
Yes, that’s when it ALL started, with Helga. They were both taking music classes, were both music majors at New York University. I haven’t the slightest idea where they lived; it was DEFINITELY poor. She always spoke of restaurant jobs, laughing and getting fired, and “cold water” apartments, almost tiny places on Bleeker St. or MacDougal St.
The “avant-garde” poet Kenneth Patchen lived in NYC at the time, on 12th Street with his wife Miriam. Helga and Bill would go over there on Sundays to hear him read poetry.
Sometimes it would be a poem written just for Bill:
for Bill, with the warmest good wishes of Kenneth Patchen –
O the lions of fire
Wait in the crawling shadows of your world
And their terrible eyes are watching you
The lions of fires
Shall have their hunting in this black land
Their teeth shall tear at your soft throats
Their claws kill
O the lions of fire shall awake
And the valleys steam with their fury…
Or:
*****
Helga took an orchestration class with Philip; she says he smiled at what she had composed “Russian-style.” She laughed too, and he wrote at the top of the page “An Afternoon in Minsk.”
And she divorced Bill. And married Philip.
There are MANY speculations about how it happened, but nobody really knows. I don’t think it was for money – that wasn’t what she was like, that wasn’t her. I think it’s because she was falling in love, in real love!
She went to Florida, getting her three-month “Daytona divorce” – it was somehow required. She had rats in her tiny apartment – they would chew and chew his letters.
Here is the “risqué” part of a letter Philip sent her. He almost always called her “Helgie,” or “Helshin” or “Helgala”:
Helgie –
After dinner we had some music and then your father showed me his German movies. In the former was Mlle. Helgala: Helga in her bath, playing with the boys, chasing bees, Helga on her first ice skates and all accompanied by oohs and ahs of the audience.
Today I addressed about 200 envelopes for Christmas cards as I am going to get them off as well as my presents before I leave for the south and my Queen.
I am so anxious to get down to you and am nearly crazy awaiting the day of departure. I just long to undress you and undo all those strange mysterious buttons, zippers etc. before unfolding to my ecstatic touch and gaze your most beautiful body which you have given me. Darling – what a life is to be ours for evermore!
THREE
Helga was like no other woman, a truly unique being. She was smart, oh my God, YES! But however smart she was, there was also something broken in her, a sad missingness, a loneliness… yes, I saw it in her eyes…
She was ultra-shy, especially around the composing “famous men” at cocktail parties. And nervous. And she was scared of heights, scared of the police, scared of uniforms… She would occasionally break down, get worried, and fall on the bed crying.
Yes, she was afraid of Nazis. That’s what she was like when we were kids. For instance one day my father decided we’d eat at Luchow’s, a German-style tourist restaurant. We’d only been there a few minutes before my mother started arguing with the waiter. He was a tall old German man, and he yelled at her “I am not a Nazi!”
“Yes you are!” she shouted back, and LOUDLY! Well, she knew he was a Nazi. They never quite died away, those Nazis.
And then there was disease, she was ALWAYS getting some slight disease. She usually showed “palpitations,” whatever they were. And I guess I got sick a lot too: mumps, measles, “the croup”… But I actually liked it, being sick. My Mom brought me new toys and lots of books, and she smiled at me WONDERFULLY.
Ah, the way she’d loudly sing just the way she would, on three notes, singing that dinner was ready: Vash hands und sit down! [Pause.] Vash hands und sit down!
Of course dinner being ready was pretty lame: liver cooked and COOKED, and lamb chops cooked HARD, showing off their rather disgusting bones and fat…
And she ordered a “Barber Kit,” frequently sold in those days – but Helga was NOT an artist. I was embarrassed as hell, looking like a weirdly irregular mop. I even was called into the principal’s office, where he asked me how I’d gotten the haircut. I said it was at a barber shop in another faraway, faraway town…
I remember Helga loving animals, absolutely LOVING them – dogs in particular. I remember her smiling almost humanly with “Seppel,” the miniature dachshund in our funny family. Once a minister came over, I don’t know exactly why, but Seppel LEAPT at him and furiously humped his arm, to which we all (including the minister) cracked up.
And Helga and Philip smiled together, too. They talked. They played four-hands piano, composed by Dvořák- they loved his old work! He gave her sentimental perfumes, jewelry, even a 20-minute organ piece dedicated to her: Variations on a Theme of Schubert. And she gave him vests – yup! – and he liked them too.
*****
At the same time as getting married, Philip was also making a record, his very first commercial one, with conductor F. Charles Adler and the Vienna Orchestra.
F. Charles Adler had studied conducting with Gustav Mahler and served as chorus master at the premiere of Mahler’s Eighth Symphony; he made MANY recordings of Mahler. He also promoted lots of modern music in the “SPA Music Festival” he led at Saratoga Springs, in the early 1950s. These records are few but stellar: George Antheil, Darius Milhaud, Charles Ives, and yes, Philip James – all composers that he KNEW.
Now Charles Adler couldn’t afford to make records right away, so he asked around. Finally a jeweler came to the fore, Norman Fox, a highly successful businessman in Saratoga Springs. Fox would lose lots of money, much of it on records, but he didn’t care a whole lot. And he put out “postage stamps” of the SPA participants in 1949 – I don’t know exactly how they worked this out, but it was SUPPOSEDLY to make money: Ernst Krenek, composer; John Corigliano, NY Philharmonic concertmaster; Robert Casadesus, pianist; and Philip James:
Charles also couldn’t afford cover-layouts, he had to draw them as an “amateur artist.” The shapes and colors were – well – DIFFERENT.
F. Charles Adler and Philip James wrote and WROTE to each other, full of intricacies about Daddy’s symphonies and stories about other artists as well. I still have dozens of letters. They are all clowning and smiling, and Philip called Adler “Charlie.” And yes, there WERE lots of sellable records being made by Coplands and Stravinskies and Bartoks, but they were quite different: the “sleek elite.” That’s OK. My Daddy had F. Charles Adler and music music MUSIC. And he had Helga.
*****
First she was Vivien, and then me, one year later: Philip Dylan James. “Dylan” was for the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, who had just recently keeled over dead drunk, age forty-one. My father ADORED him, no matter how drunk he was. He brought home records of him reading his poetry, in a loud booming Welsh voice that seemed to go on with no sense of TIME. I loved it:
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light…
AH!!! This was what I chose to BE when I grew up: a composer and a writer!
And there at school – private school – I became a geek, a nerd, a dork, a dweeb… a very smart one, but still one of those weird guys. The slick athletic boys would sometimes laugh and sneer at me. I didn’t care. Yes, I wanted to compose and write…
…and PLAY! Courtney and Bruce were two friendly nerds. One of them, Courtney, carried a briefcase; the athletic boys would laughingly steal it and hang it from the ceiling, calling him “double-o-seven.” We’d go outside in the bright sun; we ran and ran, carrying branches that represented the guns of Nazis and the US, shouting loudly as bullets – eh-eh-eh-eh-eh. My father called us “The 3 Stooges” and that’s exactly what we were, three damn dummies!
I used to go to evening dance class, all dressed up in my Brooks Brothers suit. I learned to DANCE: the Lindy, the Tango, the Bunny Hop, the Twist… and I LOVED IT! The girls loved it too, with their white gloves charging across the room, towards ME! Once we wore costumes; I put on several bedsheets, the “sheik” that kept falling off of me. And I won “the Twist” together with “Dino,” that tall mysterious girl dressed as a popular dinosaur.
There weren’t any good music teachers, nope. But there were EXCELLENT English teachers. And I became friends with the colorful playwright John Ford Noonan. It was very weird that he taught here, at the Buckley Country Day School, in his somewhat ragged clothes. He taught us Latin, in seventh or eighth grade. He stood smoking a cigarette halfway in the hall, then suddenly he would say “Would you like to hear some of my play?” Sure! He sat down at his desk with the notebook called, tentatively, The Year Boston Won the Pennant. “Do you like the title?” he asked. Sure! Then he read the dialog – high for the women, low pitch for the males, searching, discovering… His expressions would get stronger, and his LISTENING – every piece of dialog would have a secret. “Whad’ya think?” he asked sheepishly. “Is it all right?”
Ah!!! And he read us STORIES: Chekhov, Faulkner…
I kept in touch with him for several years. For a while he became a stage manager at the Fillmore East; I’d go with him from time to time, meet the musicians. Once it started playing he would dance wildly, like I’ve never seen ANYBODY dance!
Noonan and I drank and drank – especially at a bar called Jimmy Ray’s, FILLED with drunk actors, some of them “famous.” In a way, he WAS my Daddy. He laughed, he smiled. It was too bad about the drinking, though: he died of it years later, in the Lillian Booth Actors Home, in Englewood, New Jersey.
*****
Yes, in a way Noonan WAS my Daddy… but it didn’t do any good, no, not really. My Daddy was somehow simple, radiant, sunlike.
Ah, DADDY! We’d go out holding hands and walking, BEFORE he had a heart attack.
And even after he’d been sick, we’d walk then too, though less often…
Oh, I just remembered vacations – VACATIONS! Once we were going to the gorgeous Blue Ridge Mountains – no concerts, it was PURE vacation. My Mom was driving about as nervously as she always did, worrying about the stove being left on, and my Daddy sitting on the passenger side, peeing in a chosen Mason jar. My sister and I were in the back seat, staring in wonder at the ice melting down the mountainsides. Or we’d be laughing about how roadside blueberry pie – popular in those days – stained my Mom’s mouth. Ah VACATION: Williamsburg, DC, the Blue Ridges, even Mennonites… yes, it was VACATION!
Or vacation in France, when I was older, maybe 14:
Marcel Dupré was a French composer who’d been a friend of Philip’s since the 1920s. He’d been a teacher of the famous Olivier Messiaen as well as others, and he played at the St. Sulpice organ just about every Sunday since 1934. He usually played improvisations, made-up on the spot. I sat with him on his bench – my father couldn’t make the winding rickety stairs – while he played and PLAYED, on an exquisite Sunday French morning. The organ CRIED, cried its loud wailing – and it was beautiful!
Daddy and I went into a brasserie in Paris; I am 14 but it doesn’t matter that I drink. We are talking like real grown-ups, all about the old composers. I have to keep him from falling on the way home…
Or we wander into a fancy Paris record store; ALL of the records are of modern composers, Boulez, Stockhausen, Cage… My father seems somewhat sad, “out of his league”… but I love it, LOVE it!
*****
Memories, memories…
Each morning Daddy would read the obituaries – there were more of them every day. And he almost always turned on the radio, a dark portable Zenith. WQXR was about the only all-time classical radio station, and it was… well, boring. But he was ALL about it, all about LISTENING…
Yes, he had a radio program back in the thirties, back when they hired full orchestras; it was the ultimate crème-de-la-crème. And money, money money MONEY: radio advertising! Adam Hats, Carter’s Little Liver Pills, American Safety Razors... all rather ugly. Time Magazine wrote in 1932:
Radio gave U. S. music an added puff last week. Philip James of Manhattan won $5,000 for ‘Station WGZBX,’ a midget symphony which ingeniously describes lobby confusion at a studio, interference, ‘static,’ a slumber hour, and microphone hysteria.
He had a lot to say about “jazz!”
Thomas A. DeLong’s book, called simply Radio Stars, said this:
James considered radio work the finest school, technically, for the embryonic American conductor and orchestral musician. ‘We must look to our radio stations, unorganized and inconsistent as they are in many cases, for an American school of conductors,’ he said in 1936. He became conductor of WOR’s orchestra in 1929 – the first chamber ensemble to broadcast weekly. He made it a point to present one American composer each week.‘
Wow: ‘He made it a point to present one American composer each week…’
And even later, from the forties, he was creating radio for KIDS, for MY age group:
Well, in boyhood I didn’t know ANYTHING about it except “your Dad used to work on the radio.” And let’s face it, I DID see in him a sort of old man, who couldn’t even throw a BALL my way…
So we got a TV. I watched Hogans Heroes, My Three Sons, Bewitched…
And my father: he lay down on the guest-room bed and watched the soap opera General Hospital. I think he thought a LOT about his time in the hospital. And he filled out the crossword puzzle in the TV Guide – it USED to be called the Radio Guide. He was always needing to ask about the modern stars: ‘Let’s see, its second letter is T, who is that?’
*****
My Daddy truly cared about women composers – I’d hear about them almost every day. They were big in his life: Marion Bauer – a huge influence – and Louise Talma, Miriam Gideon, Mabel Daniels. Some of them came and visited us once my sister Vivien was born – especially Louise Talma. They wrote quiet spectacular music – nothing like the big American kitsch, so prominent in those days. No, they were deep and profound: Ruth Crawford Seeger, and Florence Price, and Lili Boulanger, and Peggy Glanville-Hicks… and on and ON…
Those women STRUGGLED to achieve. Music is communication; it speaks, it sings, it wails and howls – but it has nothing to do with money. EVERY composer knows this.
Toward the end of his life the Repertoire Recording Society (organists) decided to put out another record of Daddy’s music. Once again, it WASN’T the slick Copland/Stravinsky/Bartok type LP. Instead it looked like an old ornate organ wannabe, straining for attention. And the young organist seemed really good at first, but then he was sort of rushing things…
*****
OK, I’ll admit it: I am completely sad about his on-again off-again alcoholism.
After we moved we had a bar in our middle-class home, a sparkling bar from the fifties. Sometimes – though only rarely now that we lived out in the quiet burbs – he had guests over. They’d talk music, pretty darn drunk – then they’d go home, and he’d fall asleep.
Or in the afternoon, he’d limp to one of two antique armchairs, re-covered with smelly “new car” white plastic. He’d pour himself a drink, usually whiskey, and talk and talk.
Worst of all, I’d be at a neighbor’s party and had to help him walk home, fully intoxicated, singing World War One songs and falling. That only happened three times that I remember. I was deeply, DEEPLY embarrassed – and he wasn’t asked back!
And I was hooked on alcohol as a child. I was sneaking tiny sips from every bottle, with other-worldly mysterious tastes… and Daddy had NO IDEA there was a problem.
I could have been strong, I could have resisted, I could have said “No Daddy, none for me, or you either.” I could have been GOOD to him, and to ME. Such is life. Such is addiction.
In spite of his alcoholism, however, and mine, I began to remember his magic: how to write powerful, POWERFUL music, how to awaken the SPIRIT, and how to TEACH. Yes, I realize now that he was one HELL of a teacher! I’ve started to remember those deep smiles of his. I’ve begun to feel his growing dedication.
*****
As my father lay dying I was faced with “music” in one of two ways: it was either “uptown” or “downtown.” My Daddy knew the “uptown” stuff SO well: he wore the right ties, and he bowed deeply… But he didn’t know what was just beginning, the “downtown” stuff that I was just starting to love.
Yes, the loft scene, in New York City’s “soho.” There the musicians started PLAYING! Audiences were small, and tickets were inexpensive – Philip Glass and Pauline Oliveros and Don Cherry – well, they ALL played, played and played! Pauline stood before us with her accordion and let it SING, and Sun Ra in golden costume, and Cecil Taylor BRILLIANT piano, and Steve Reich, and… AH!!! It was like the wind coming toward you, lifting you up, screaming and laughing – yes yes YES!!!
At home it was the old dressed-up stuff: faded autographs on the wall, old-fashioned conductors, ancient composers. Oh well, that’s OK, Daddy. It really is OK. Your spirit is deeply, DEEPLY inside me…
I graduated high school. Helga and Daddy and Vivien moved out to a small house about an hour away, near the woods, on a glistening GLISTENING bay. I took the train out there a couple of times. I remember a dancer came along with me, and she had a nice talk with him, all about an old dancing friend of his, Agnes de Mille.
I don’t think Daddy knew about it at the time, but Agnes had a SERIOUS stroke… and then he had one too, several months before he died. His face was distorted now, his speech was hard to understand. He would get down to 140 pounds, then 130…
By that time he hardly got mail anymore, just catalogs of kitchen and garden gadgets. But he was somehow fun, oh YES, FUN! You just KNEW it when he laughed internally.
Ah memories! Let me give you a small part of Howard Hanson’s tribute at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, written just shortly after Philip died:
…Over the years I have conducted many of his works but I came to know him best through a performance of his latest symphony. He was already, as I remember, in his eightieth year, when a former student brought me the news that this work had never been performed. I asked to see the score and immediately arranged for a premiere at our next Festival of American Music in Rochester. He came, with his charming family, for the rehearsals and concert and it was for me a delightful and rewarding experience.
We, as composers, are a strange crew—and, as a composer, I humbly confess to my own faults. We are endowed with the famous composers’ syndrome, “What have you done for me lately?” Philip James was not such a one. He was a scholar but he was also modest, generous, humane. I hesitate to use the word, but he was a sweet man, in every sense a gentleman. It is not difficult to understand why his students had for him such esteem and affection. He must have been in every respect that unique individual, a great teacher.
And this from another student, 1965: Bernard “Benny” Herrmann, who wrote the music for Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, and Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho and Vertigo, and Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, and on and ON. Yes, Philip was his professor of composition and conducting. He conducted Benny’s first performance of his “Aubade” in 1933, and Benny conducted works by James, all through the thirties and forties. James even hosted a CBS kids’ radio show with him, Wellsprings of America.
FOUR
So that’s it – a composer in Manhattan for the first half of the 20th century. Remembered, oh yes, remembered – and then completely forgotten. The “old man” is gone, gone on his way.
Well, I aim to change that.
It is because of him that I have become a true musician. I listen and listen. And it’s NOT about money – it’s about SPIRIT!
You know, I’m just like my Dad, just like him! I frown, I’m never quite good enough, or wealthy enough – but gradually it goes away, the frown goes away.
Yes, Daddy IS music, through and through. It’s not “goodbye Daddy” – it’s HELLO, Daddy, hello hello HELLO –
HELLO!!!
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ADDENDUM – WW1
“Sounds unpatriotic but I don’t think I could kill any man no matter how sinful his country.“
This is his diary of World War 1; Daddy wrote in it just about every day. I’ve thrown in some of it, starting in 1919, when he eventually returned to America and led a parade tour through various cities.
Tuesday January 14 – 1919
A big day for Chaumont, for at 10:00 o’clock Marshal Pétain decorated the AEF officers with the decoration of Commander of the Legion of Honor… General Pershing was also present and battalions of French and American soldiers passed in review at the finale to the accompaniment of a poor French band, but after the ceremony our own band gave a fine concert of an hour in length…
Friday January 17th 1919
…While at the grocery shop in the evening such a pretty little girl of four sang for us, Madeline, Marseilles, and other “chansons populaires.” She had everybody in convulsions and was as full of confidence as the most professional opera star.
Friday Jan. 31 – 1919
…Near one YMCA Hut we played at night to an audience consisting principally of officers. There is a large prisoners’ camp of Germans and they assisted us in building and fixing scenery etc… They were all very happy and cordial to the Americans. It was funny to watch a German truck filled with Germans and Americans.
Tuesday February 11
Busy day. At night I had a dance job for enlisted men at the YMCA, the riotous kind! Good sized orchestra. Piano was too high so I had to transpose everything. Worn out when I got back to barracks…
Wednesday February 13
Prince of Wales was to have been here today for some decoration but General Pershing’s aide-de-camp (Col. Boyd) died suddenly in Paris and all ceremonies have been called off.
February 16th 1919
The Prince of Wales here this morning for guard and he seemed to be very much impressed, especially by one drum major, and he seemed to like the other band as well. Orchestra played this afternoon and night for him, at Pershing’s Chateau. Boys told me later he shook hands with them all… he is fond of ragtime and jazz and is a regular fellow.
Monday Feb. 17 – 1919
Rehearsal in afternoon for this evening’s show after which I had to arrange a song for the evening, “Dimples.” In the evening was the big time, for at 9:00 PM there was a special performance for the Prince of Wales and General Pershing. Generals galore! The Prince sang, whistled, smoked black cigars and enjoyed the show immensely as well as General P. The Prince said it was the best army show he has ever seen. He has certainly captivated the heart of the AEF and I meant to say he is the most democratic army officer I have ever come in contact with.
Sat. Feb. 22 – 1919
On the way back to the barracks two of the trucks collided and all of us were hurt… My face caught the edge of the bell and I got a bad cut, but they bandaged it beautifully for me at the infirm army…
Tuesday Mar. 11
Up at 6 to get ready, clean up etc. by the big inspection of the entire post by General Pershing, which took place at 8:00 AM…
Played in the band on my much polished sax and was in three different moving pictures… At night I played in the YMCA auditorium for enlisted men’s dance over which there was a fuss as the YMCA woman in charge stopped the French girls from dancing with them. Ross, the Drum Major, gave YMCA a piece of his mind.
Thurs. Mar. 20
…Pershing’s Chateau, a beautiful place in such a fine estate. We played for an afternoon reception to the King and Queen of Belgium, at which time many were decorated including Lieutenant Volz, the entertainment officer… then played for the King’s dinner.
Heard lots of rumors about this band leaving for concerts in the States…
Fri. Mar. 21 – 1919
King and Queen of Belgium present at Guard Mount this AM. I am arranging some new music for the special show which rehearsed in the afternoon for this evening, a special performance for the King and Queen at night…
Saturday Apr. 5th
Going home!
Just as Gen. Pershing was making his wonderful address the crowd around us was madly cheering with the band as they came in the gate. When they saw me they gave one wild cheer and rushing from the ranks and circled me with handshakes and congratulations.
Saturday April 19 – 1919
The good old Van Steuben arrived in New York Harbor in the morning and we disembarked about noon. After many photographs and moving pictures the entire band of 125 men was taken to the Hotel Pennsylvania so as to be near our special train…
The cars of our train are all Pullmans and given to us by the New York Central. Captain Fisher [he is also a conductor] and I have the drawing room “Orlando” and with us is Captain Holliday, our spiritual officer, and George Cruz, a lawyer…
April 22 – 1919
Pittsburgh, PA. In the morning we had a parade and after a concert in the afternoon we had a swim in the big town Natatorium. In Pittsburgh the Chamber of Commerce gave me a room to rent in and dress and they also placed at my disposal a fine Locomobile car with flying flags. I am sure the citizens thought I was old Black Jack Pershing himself!
Wednesday April 23 – 1919
Arrived in Columbus, Ohio in early morning. A Mr. Charles Janes, President of the Athletic Club, placed a Ford car at my disposal…
The people out here are wonderfully patriotic. This morning as Fisher and I drove in a car preceding the band, men stood with uncovered heads and instead of a victory arch they have huge embankments of flowers at all the main crossings in memory of those who fell in battle. Our concert at night in Memorial Hall was a great success, over 5000 people who were turned away and there must have been that many in the hall. It was about the most enthusiastic audience I have ever seen. We did the Tchaikovsky 1812 overture and as there was a large organ in the hall I played along and it was especially effective for the old Russian National Anthem theme at the close of the work.
Thursday April 24 -1919
Cincinnati.
In the afternoon we opened the baseball season at the large field here and were given seats of honor for the game. However there is a great pro-German population here and we did NOT get an enthusiastic reception such as Columbus says. The chairman of the local Victory Loan was most obnoxious and took out Possell the flutist and Ross the drum major and got them terribly drunk. A parade at night and “tout suite” to the train!
Friday April 25 – 1919
Across the river to Louisville, Kentucky where we were entertained at the Hotel Henry Watterson. If it had not been for the railroad station signs of “Colored mens room” and “Colored womens room” I would have realized that we were further South than New York. It was so windy and chilly here. This town must have been a hotbed for Confederacy in the Civil War judging from the many monuments in the town…
Saturday April 26 -1919
Indianapolis. Captain Fisher and I were entertained royally at the Columbia Club. This was in sharp contrast to Louisville, where we could not be entertained at the club because Fisher is a Jew and they would not invite me without my Superior Officer. Indianapolis is a wonderful city and the position of the Columbia Club is ideal for it overlooks a most wonderful circle larger than our Columbus Circle or anything we have in New York…
They’ve given us a great welcome, about 60 automobiles met on our train and took us sightseeing. I was the guest of General Smith who took me in his Packard to the huge auto race track about four miles out of town. At night I conducted the concert before an audience of over 3000 people. Fisher has given me a good share of the concerts to conduct…
Wed. April 30 – 1919
Such a busy day in Detroit, MI. I conducted two concerts. The first an outdoor concert and I am told we had an audience of nearly 40,000 people. It looked like 100,000 to me. After this we had a panoramic photo made of the entire band. In the afternoon we played at Henry Ford’s Hospital, a wonderful spot which he rents to the US for a dollar a year. Conducted again at night…
May 1 – May Day in Cleveland, OH.
We arrived at the Hotel Statler, Cleveland in the morning. After I cleaned up I started to go to the Armory to arrange for the concerts, as Captain Fisher has left us to go to Washington DC where we shall meet him later. However in leaving the hotel in the AM a pot of flowers was thrown at me from above. The pot just missed me but I was covered with dirt. I was hissed by persons on the streets and one woman stopped me and asked if I knew knew why we fought Germany. “President Wilson had better get back to the US or we will have a red flag on the White House.” In the afternoon things got worse and the town was placed under the protection of the State Militia. Tanks were used in the streets and I actually saw one woman ground to pieces by a tank. In the midst of the rioting I received an order from the Commanding General of the area to give up the concerts and leave town at once which we did under the protection of the Militia, so we got on our train and started east.
Monday May 5 – 1919
Boston.
…After this I rushed back and then started our parade preceded by mounted police instead of my marching band – they provided an open car for me to ride in at the very head of the line. We reached the State House and I was presented to Governor Calvin Coolidge and a State Senator… We played to thousands and thousands at that spot and after some more marching we stopped at the City Hall where I was presented to Mayor James Michael Curley who, among other remarks, made some uncomplimentary ones about Governor Coolidge.
Sunday May 11 – 1919
Working my head off getting a payroll for the men and issuing passes. The payroll is difficult for it involves insurance and allotment. Washington is like an old mausoleum and the War Department clerks are so stupid. Saturday I went to a special meeting in the Congress where they were debating and discussing “Shall the soldier be issued one shirt or two and should he wear one while the other is being washed in an exchange laundry or should he have but one and wash that when he can and thereby making use of the 1/6 of the unconsumed portion of the cooks they ration of soap and then there are the…”
Friday June 15 – 1919
End of Word War 1 Diaries. Glory be to God!
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[Here are a couple of articles, one by Philip James in 1919, and one by D. Royce Boyer, “A Diary Account by Philip James”]
https://www.google.com/books/edition/_/PVBhAAAAIAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&pg=PA440
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3052352
Enjoy!