20 ❧ chapter one
her for nearly always refusing to use ready-made musical scores as carpets on
which to dance. Doris Humphrey was far more musical than Martha, I think,
but I never felt for her the deep sympathy that bound me to Martha. I collabo-
rated with her, however, in 1943 in the fi rst performance of her choreography
of the G-major Partita of Bach by playing it on the harpsichord while around
me capered and pranced the members of her troupe. In these years I carried
my experiments with music and movement still further and at Yale produced a
performance entitled “Studies in Rhythm” in collaboration with Paul Draper,
the tap dancer. I wonder now what our performance of a Bach C-minor Fantasy
and of one or two Scarlatti sonatas was really like!
In these years I was also beginning to investigate jazz (as a listener, since I
have no abilities as a jazz player). I had been brought up virtually without con-
tact with so-called popular music, and the few jazz records that my eldest sister
had brought into the house were regarded by my mother and me as speci-
mens of infernal horror. I recently found an indication of my early snobbish-
ness in a scrapbook into which I had pasted a clipping from around 1920. It
announced the imminent demise of jazz, and on it I had scrawled in a child-
ish hand, “Goody, goody, goody!” Unfortunately, the money-earning necessi-
ties of my youth never happened to bring me that priceless experience which
many musicians have acquired by playing in cafés, nightclubs, jazz bands, and
whorehouses. My introduction to some of the best American jazz fi rst came
through European friends, all of whom, if they came to America between 1938
and the late 1940s, I learned to guide around the best spots in Harlem. It even
happened that, in 1943, I became responsible for what I think may have been
the fi rst jazz concert ever offi cially sponsored at Yale University. I frequented
countless nightclubs in New York during those years in which one went to
them predominantly to hear music rather than to get drunk. I was a particular
admirer of the pianist Art Tatum, and delighted in comparing his glittering
fi oriture^7 to comparable manifestations in the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book.^8
But the only one of these jazz musicians with whom I really became friendly
was Billie Holiday. Louise Crane brought her to my apartment one afternoon
and while Billie put away the better part of a bottle of rum, I played Bach for
her. Her face registered everything; no manifestation of the music seemed to
escape her. I am not sure that at the time she knew who Bach was, but I could
have used her like an infi nitely sensitive precision instrument to monitor my
performance of the G-minor English Suite. Through the subtle variations of
expression on her face she showed me with an uncanny infallibility what was
- Embellishment of a melody.
- Manuscript containing around 300 Jacobean keyboard pieces and given to
Cambridge University in 1816 by Viscount Fitzwilliam. A modern edition was
produced in 1894–99 and revised in 1979–80.
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