memoirs, 1933–77 ❧ 19
performing, but also for the privileges of access to its libraries and, above all,
because it offered me a community to which I could attach myself in a way that
I found neither possible nor desirable in New York. The fi nancial advantages
were minimal and played almost no role in my making of a living, but I had
complete freedom to come and go, to be absent for concerts, to choose the
area and the amount of my work, and to accept or reject students as I saw fi t.
Such freedoms aroused in me a certain feeling of noblesse oblige, and I not only
worked very hard but reserved my privilege of rejecting unwanted students
only for the most hopeless cases.
For much of what I then wanted to teach, the ground was not yet ready, and
my only really successful course was one in the music of Bach, which I contin-
ued until 1954, when the pressure of concerts obliged me to give up course
teaching for the next twenty years. Harpsichord teaching was slow to develop,
but by the end of the forties my regularly scheduled teaching day in New
Haven—“Black Friday,” as it came to be known among my pupils—embraced
a couple of two-hour lecture courses and half a dozen harpsichord lessons. I
took great pleasure in the frequentation of faculty colleagues in fi elds other
than music and from undergraduates I was then separated from by a differ-
ence in age that seems minimal when now they could all be my grandchildren.
The Bennington Festivals of 1940 and 1941 brought me in contact with
some of the leading modern dancers as then represented by Martha Graham,
Doris Humphrey, Hanya Holm, and their troupes, just at the moment when
my somewhat specialized hand-to-mouth existence as a harpsichordist was leav-
ing me increasingly in need of stimulation from outside sources. Most actors
have tendencies to artifi ciality and exaggeration, as well as pretentiousness in
playing their roles in real life, but dancers are seldom pretentious, because the
physical realities of their profession oblige them to make a clear distinction
between what they can execute and what they cannot. Their daily encounters
with the inexorable forces of gravity reduce them to a refreshing humility and
simplicity—that is, except when they write program notes! I think I have never
seen a scenario or a program annotation for a dance performance that was not
stuffed with obfuscations that are surely as incomprehensible to their creators
as to their readers. They outdo anything that ever even the most word-happy
musicians and painters have been able to devise.
In 1940 I fell under the spell of Martha Graham, although previously I had
been repelled by all her performances that I had seen. Coming into closer
contact, I learned to appreciate the intensity of feeling, the unremitting search
in uncharted directions, and the magic which she could infuse into the best
members of her troupe. Heard viva voce, her most obscure utterances had an
air of clarity and utter simplicity. I never gained from her an impression of
great musicality, and I have sometimes been tempted to feel that she was at her
best in those performances in which music least got in her way. But I admired
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rick simeone
(Rick Simeone)
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