Carl Lindin
We Are Proud to Support Maverick Concerts
Mark Flannery David Gubits Marilyn Janow Dr. Edward Leavit Stephen McGrath
Lawrence Posner Susan Rizwani Angela P. Schapiro David F. Segal
Sondra Siegel Jane Velez Willetta Warberg David Weibe
Table of Contents
Board of Directors............................................................2 2015 Summer Schedule...................................................2 A Message from Our Music Director.................................3 1916 Time Line ...............................................................4 The Future Begins............................................................5 Robert Starer and the Maverick..................................6 – 8 The Hervey White Portrait by Carl Linden.......................9 Hervey White’s Eulogy.................................................. 10 The Maverick Horse...................................................... 11 Maverick Legacy............................................................ 12 The Gift, a poem........................................................... 13 Music Goes Back to Nature.....................................14 – 15 Hervey Announces a New Concert.........................16 – 17 Georges Barrère on Music at the Maverick..............18 – 19 John Cage at the Maverick......................................20 – 21 John Cage...............................................................22 – 23 Leon Barzin Reacalls the Early Years.......................24 – 25 Intimacy: A Livingroom in the Woods........................... 30 Young People's Concerts................................................ 31
Contributors
Writers: Leon Barzin, Georges Barrère, Miriam Berg, Mary Fairchild, Gail Godwin, Alexander Platt, Peter Schickele, Cornelia Rosenblum, Martin Schutze, Adam Tendler, Alan Updegraff, and Hervey White. Editor: David F. Segal Graphic Design & Production: Katie Jellinghaus
Photos & Illustrations
Cover: We are extremely grateful to artist Milton Glaser for his gift of the Maverick centennial poster and permission to reproduce it on the cover. Inside Front Cover: Painting by Carl Lindin of a Maverick audience. Courtesy of Woodstock Artists Association & Museum. This page; Maverick Festival photos courtesy of the Samuel Dorsky Museum at SUNY New Paltz. Top, courtesy Katie Jellinghaus.
We are extremely grateful to artist Milton Glaser for his gift of the Maverick centennial poster and permission to reproduce it on the cover. 1
Board of Directors
CHAIRMAN David F. Segal
VICE-CHAIR David Gubits
TREASURER Lawrence Posner
SECRETARY Dr. Edward Leavitt
BOARD MEMBERS CHAIR EMERITA
Mark Flannery Marilyn Janow Stephen McGrath Susan Rizwani (Former Chair) Angela P. Schapiro Sondra Siegel Jane Velez Willetta Warberg David Wiebe Cornelia Rosenblum
2015 Summer Schedule
SATURDAY, JUNE 27, 8 PM NEXUS, Percussion • Peter Schickele: Percussion Sonata No. 3, “Maverick”1. Ragtime music of George Hamilton Green.
SUNDAY, JUNE 28 , 4 PM • SHANGHAI QUARTET. RAN DANK , Piano. Haydn, Bruch, Robert Schumann. FRIDAY, JULY 3, 7 PM • SIMONE DINNERSTEIN, piano. Bach, Goldberg Variations. Benefit Ticket Prices. Note early start time. SATURDAY, JULY 4, 11 AM Young People’s Concert ELIZABETH MITCHELL & FAMILY. SATURDAY, JULY 4, 6 PM • ADAM TENDLER, piano. John Cage, Henry Cowell. SUNDAY, JULY 5, 4 PM FREDERIC HAND, guitar. PAULA ROBISON, flute. Hand, Four Pieces for Flute and Guitar2 SATURDAY, JULY 11, 8 PM Jazz at the Maverick • PERRY BEEKMAN guitar & vocals. The Harold Arlen Songbook. LOU PAPPAS, bass. PETER TOMLINSON, piano. SUNDAY, JULY 12, 4 PM CYPRESS STRING QUARTET Beethoven, Tsontakis, Dvoˇrák. SATURDAY, JULY 18, 11 AM Young People’s Concert BARI KORAL FAMILY BAND. SATURDAY, JULY 18, 8 PM Jazz at the Maverick ELDAR DJANGIROV TRIO. SUNDAY, JULY 19, 4 PM CASSATT STRING QUARTET Tower, Schickele, Schubert. FRIDAY, JULY 24, 7 PM ACTORS & WRITERS • Short plays. SATURDAY, JULY 25, 8 PM • STEVE GORN, bansuri flute. SAMARTH NAGARKAR, vocals. RAY SPIEGEL, tabla. R. PRABHUDESAI, harmonium. Indian ragas.
Renee Samuels
SUNDAY, JULY 26, 4 PM • LATITUDE 41 Beethoven, Hagen, Mendelssohn. SATURDAY, AUGUST 1, 8 PM Jazz at the Maverick FRED HERSCH, jazz piano. SUNDAY, AUGUST 2, 4 PM ESCHER STRING QUARTET Haydn, Bartók, Schubert.
SATURDAY, AUGUST 8, 11 AM Young Peoples Concert • MIRÓ QUARTET. SATURDAY, AUGUST 8, 6 PM MIRÓ QUARTET Schubert, Beethoven. Note early start time. SUNDAY, AUGUST 9, 4 PM DANISH STRING QUARTET Nielsen, Adès, Shostakovich. SATURDAY, AUGUST 15, 8 PM JAZZ at the MAVERICK JULIAN LAGE, jazz guitar, with friends. SUNDAY, AUGUST 16, 4 PM TRIO SOLISTI Schubert, Rachmaninoff, Brahms. SATURDAY, AUGUST 22, 6 PM CHAMBER ORCHESTRA CONCERT MAVERICK CHAMBER PLAYERS. ALEXANDER PLATT, conductor. MARIA TODARO, soprano. STEPHEN GOSLING, piano. AUREA ENSEMBLE. Britten, Cowell, de Falla, Starer, Copland. Early start time. SUNDAY, AUGUST 23, 4 PM • ARIEL QUARTET with THOMAS STORM, baritone. Beethoven, Stravinsky, Barber, Tchaikovsky FRIDAY, AUGUST 28, 7 PM ACTORS & WRITERS. A reading of Chayevsky's Middle of the Night. SATURDAY, AUGUST 29, 8 PM FREDERIC CHIU & ANDREW RUSSO, duo-pianists. Schubert, Griffes, Prokofiev. SUNDAY, AUGUST 30, 4 PM BORROMEO STRING QUARTET Haydn, Schuller, Beethoven. SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 8 PM HAPPY TRAUM with JOHN SEBASTIAN, BYRON ISAACS, and CINDY CASHDOLLAR SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 4 PM DOVER QUARTET • A CONCERT FOR THE FRIENDS OF MAVERICK. Wolf, Janaˇcek, Schumann. Admission is by contribution only. Donor of $50 receives one ticket; donor of $100 or more receives two. SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 8 PM MARC BLACK & WARREN BERNHARDT. SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 4 PM AMERICAN STRING QUARTET Tsontakis: String Quartet 7.5 “Maverick”3 Beethoven, Mendelssohn.
1. World Premiere. Commissioned by Garry and Diane Kvistad and the Woodstock Chimes Fund for the Centenary of the Maverick Concerts. 2. World Premiere. Commissioned by Maverick Concerts to Celebrate the Centenary and supported by a gift from Willetta Warberg Bar-Illan. 3. World Premiere. Commission is made possible in part through support from the County of Ulster’s Ulster County Cultural Services & Promotion Fund, administered by Arts Mid-Hudson.
2
A Message from Maverick’s Music Director
Alexander Platt
Dear Friends, As music director, it is truly humbling to pen some thoughts regarding the hundredth season of Maverick Concerts. I follow in some formidable footsteps!
last year’s daring exploration of the Spanish repertoire, seem to have become part and parcel of this sacred space. I could go on at length about this centenary season, but suffice it to say that the Maverick celebrates its centennial, as the oldest summer chamber music festival in these United States, by doing what we have always done: by bringing the old and new together. I am thrilled that new and recent works of Frederick Hand, Daron Hagen, Peter Schickele, Robert Starer, Joan Tower, and George Tsontakis will be in sublime conversation with some of the great chamber works of the old masters — but really, would we have had it any other way?
Dion Ogust
I “fell” into this job, most serendipitously, late in the summer of 2002. My brother Russell and I had visited the Maverick on something of a lark. Growing up downstate, we had never heard of the festival — one of the Maverick’s great old bohemian traditions was hiding its lamp under a bushel. Russell had written about this magical place on assignment for The New Yorker and, attracted by its unique, archaic charm, he urged me to join him for a return. I was in a bit of an artistic rut out in Chicago (unbeknownst to me, our founder Hervey White’s original home base), growing weary of a certain orchestra that I would soon be leaving. And little did I know it then, but the Maverick would give me just the magic cure I needed, both personally and professionally. From the very beginning, Maverick’s board of directors was unfailingly generous, allowing me to lead an essentially double existence in both Woodstock and Wisconsin. Serving as music director here gave me an unexpected annual recharging of my artistic batteries, a way to spend my summers as a “maestro,” but not conducting. Instead, I became the “listenerin-chief” and host, in what has turned out to be a completely unique and wonderful arrangement in my life.
Maverick celebrates its centennial, as the oldest summer chamber music festival in these United States
Finally, I’m still scratching my head that a middle-class boy from New England could somehow follow in the footsteps of William Kroll, Alexander Semmler, Leon Barzin, and Georges Barrère. But, then again, the Maverick has always been a place built on serendipity. I am truly honored to carry on such a tradition.
That said, it is not serendipity that ultimately keeps the Maverick going, but the expertise and the incredible devotion of a tireless group of volunteer board members and friends. Just as I followed in the footsteps of a great professional, the beloved Vincent Wagner, so has there been an unbroken chain of extraordinary music lovers whose talent, time, and treasure have kept the Maverick humming for a century. It is they who provide a literal and spiritual link to the Maverick’s storied past, and, with your help, the firm foundation of a beautiful future. Here’s to another hundred years of Music in the Woods, nourishing friends old and new with the greatest music we know. Alexander Platt Maverick Concert’s Music Director 3
Jennifer Girard
Our Maverick board has also enabled me to conduct a concert every year at our music chapel, with our expert little chamber orchestra jammed onto its altar. Some wondered, reasonably enough, whether such an undertaking would prove successful, but after that first venture — which included Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll and my own reconstruction of the lost chamber version of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony — the chamber orchestra program became, through the special generosity of a particular pair of donors, an annual event. The artistic highs we’ve achieved at such concerts, from 2007’s landmark premiere of David Del Tredici’s Final Alice (in a Mahler-inspired chamber version) to
It was a leap year, 1916 (MCMXVI), and the Maverick Concert Hall opened for its first-ever concert One million soldiers killed or wounded during the Battle of the Somme. Russian forces defeat troops of the Ottoman Empire in Armenia. German saboteurs blow up munitions depot on Black Tom island in New York Harbor. D.W. Griffith releases Intolerance. Margaret Sanger opens the first U.S. birth control clinic. First forty-hour work week officially begins in the Endicott-Johnson factories of New York’s Southern Tier. The Kingdom of Poland is proclaimed. Jeannette Rankin of Montana becomes the first woman elected to the U.S. House of Representatives.
The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra presents its first concert; Gustav Holst composes The Planets, Opus 32; Carl Nielsen premieres his Symphony No. 4. Other 1916 premieres: Béla Bartók: Suite for Piano; Ernest Bloch: Israel Symphony, String Quartet No. 1; Claude Debussy: Sonata for Flute, Viola, and Harp; Frederick Delius: Cello Sonata; George Enescu: Piano Trio; Alexander Glazunov: Karelian Legend; Paul Hindemith: Cello Concerto in E-flat, Op. 3; Charles Ives: Fourth Symphony; Igor Stravinsky: Burleske for four Pantomimes and Chamber Orchestra; and Heitor Villa-Lobos: Second Cello Sonata.
Pancho Villa attacks New Mexico; President Woodrow Wilson sends 12,000 U.S. troops over the border into Mexico to pursue Pancho Villa.
It’s an election year, and Democratic President Woodrow Wilson defeats Charles E. Hughes. Physicians perform the first successful blood transfusion using stored blood. Court of the United States upholds the national income tax. Paris is bombed by German Zeppelins. Parliament buildings in Ottawa are burned down. Dadaism founded. Emma Goldman is arrested for lecturing on birth control. The Battle of Verdun raged from February to December.
The White Star Liner HMHS Britannic, a floating hospital and sister ship of the RMS Titanic, sinks in the Mediterranean Sea. Grigori Rasputin is assassinated. The British Sopwith Camel aircraft makes its maiden flight. Oxycodone is synthesized in Germany. Summer Olympic Games in Berlin canceled. It was a year of important births: Composers Henri Dutilleux, Alberto Ginastera, Milton Babbitt, Max Reger; musicians Yehudi Menuhin, Robert Shaw, Emil Gilels; authors Horton Foote, Irving Wallace, Harold Robbins; performers Dinah Shore, Harry James, Gregory Peck, Glenn Ford, Olivia de Havilland, Van Johnson, Martha Raye, Kirk Douglas, Betty Grable. Deaths in 1916: authors Henry James and Jack London, playwright Sholem Aleichem, King Otto of Bavaria, and painters Thomas Eakins, Georges Lacombe, and Odilon Redon.
Chicago Cubs play their first game at Wrigley Field. Woodrow Wilson signs a bill incorporating the Boy Scouts of America and signs legislation creating the National Park Service. Cub Scouts founded. Yuan Shikai, the last emperor of China, abdicates the throne. The Irish Republic is proclaimed. United States Marines invade the Dominican Republic. Saturday Evening Post publishes its first Norman Rockwell cover. Louis Brandeis is sworn in as a Justice of the United States Supreme Court. 4
The Future Begins Maverick has a brilliant past, a long history overflowing with beautiful music performed by superb players. But the most extraordinary legacy of Maverick’s forward-looking founders is the unabated creative vitality that is also its future.
In the 2016 season, the Borromeo Quartet will give the world premiere of Russell Platt’s string quartet Mountain Interval,3 which is based on the poetry of Robert Frost. George Tsontakis’s String Quartet 7.5 (Maverick)4 was written, the composer says, for the American String Quartet and “the music series closest to my heart and my home.”
A century of great music in the woods is a remarkable cultural milestone, and Maverick continues to assert a major creative influence in the world of contemporary music. To celebrate Maverick’s centennial, and to herald a future full of Music in the Woods, Maverick has commissioned four new works by four important American composers. All four are dedicated to the Maverick and its 100 years, with three having their world premieres this summer, the fourth in 2016.
1. Peter Schickele’s Percussion Sonata No. 3, “Maverick,” was commissioned by Garry and Diane Kvistad and the Woodstock Chimes Fund. 2. Frederic Hand’s Four Pieces for Flute and Guitar was commissioned with the generous support of Willetta Warberg Bar-Illan.
Peter Schickele has written a new work, Percussion Sonata No. 3, “Maverick”1 for the renowned percussion group NEXUS.
3. Russell Platt’s Mountain Interval was commissioned by Steve McGrath and Janine Shelffo. 4. George Tsontakis’s String Quartet 7.5 (Maverick) was commissioned with support from the County of Ulster’s Ulster County Cultural Services & Promotions Fund, administered by Arts Mid-Hudson.
Virtuoso guitarist Frederic Hand has written Four Pieces for Flute and Guitar2 for himself and flutist Paula Robison.
All four compositions were commissioned for the centenary of the Maverick Concerts.
To The Next 100 Years! Sustainable Architecture and Landscape Design mindful of the genius of place. STEPHEN TILLY, Architect www.stillyarchitect.com
5
Robert Starer and the Maverick
In the early summer of 1976, Robert Starer and I moved to Woodstock, an ideal setting for creating and making music, and here his art flourished for the rest of his life. Even when I met him—he was only forty-eight at the time—his most quoted maxim was from the filmmaker Ingmar Bergman: “The artist must always keep one work between himself and death.”
by Gail Godwin
This advice Robert faithfully followed. I never knew him to have “composer’s block” until 1996, after he had received some scary health news. “Maybe I’ll try my hand at writing a novel,” he said, “until I’m feeling less gloomy.” Six weeks later, he had finished The Music Teacher, a novel about an Austrian-born American man who prepares gifted young students for public performance. The novel was edited by Peter Mayer of Overlook Press and published in 1997. Meanwhile, the composer had gone back to writing music. In his last years, he produced a number of alluring works, everything from “Twilight Fantasies,” an eerie piano solo recorded by Justin Kolb that I love listening to at dusk, and many instrumental and choral works, including a chamber opera based on the life of St. Hilda of Whitby, a patron saint of learning and culture. He even wrote a piece for carillon, because somebody asked him.
Three photos on this spread, courtesy, Gail Godwin
When I consulted the 2001 edition of Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians I was astonished by the quantity and variety of music that Robert composed from 1996 until his death in 2001. It included his gorgeous third string quartet, commissioned by the Miami String Quartet and premiered at the Maverick in July of 1996. But here is that story in his own words, copied from notes he wrote for a brief talk to the Maverick audience before this premiere: “The Maverick concert series has had a large impact on my life. Their concerts take place in the summer, on Sunday afternoons, and are devoted to chamber music: string quartets, trios, and an occasional brass and wind group or instrumental soloist. When Leo Bernache was director of the Maverick Concerts, my Piano Quartet was performed there with Julius Hegyi and musicians from Williams College. Since Vincent Wagner took over the direction, a work of mine has been presented almost every year. “Evanescence” was played by the Annapolis Brass Quintet; “The Gong of Time” was sung by Ars Choralis, a Woodstock chorus under Barbara Pickhardt; violinist Jaime Laredo and cellist Sharon Robinson played my “Elegy for a Woman Who Died Too Young;” the Mannes Trio did my Piano Trio; Charles Libove and Nina Lugovoy, two Woodstock musicians, performed my “Duo for Violin and Piano;” and the flutist Paula
“I used to try to be original. Now I try to be clear and essential.” — Robert Starer, 2001
6
TOBY HEILBRUNN
RESIDENTIAL & COMMERCIAL LICENSED REALESTATE SALESPERSON
5 Tinker Street, Woodstock, NY 12498 www.winmorrisonrealty.com www.peaceofmindwoodstock.com
Toby@hvc.rr.com Cell:845-853-5351 Home:845-679-5438 Fax:845-679-2006
Former Maverick Music Director Vincent Wagner
Robison premiered my “Yizkor” with harpsichordist Kenneth Cooper. My most rewarding local experience began in 1994, when the Miami String Quartet played my 1947 string quartet at one of these concerts. It had then been my only string quartet. I liked the group so much that I broke my string quartet silence of almost half a century and wrote my second quartet for them in 1995. That concert went over so well that they and Vincent Wagner made me write my third quartet.
“The next time you listen to a piece of chamber music, spend a little time listening for the elements that make up the work.”
Before each of these concerts the composer is asked to say a few words about the piece the audience is going to hear, and I have always done that with pleasure. We read in music history books about Haydn’s stay at the court of Count Esterhazy and his writing a new work for momentous occasions. I feel I have a somewhat similar relationship at the Maverick Concerts—and that is why I am so glad I have made Woodstock my home.” Robert Starer loved the setting of the Maverick Concerts because of the proximity it offered the audience to the musicians in the open hall—and because of its proximity to nature in all its moods. When he addressed the Maverick audience before Paula Robison premiered his “Yizkor,” he told one of his favorite Maverick stories. Here again, from Robert’s notes, in his own words: "When Maverick Concerts asked me to write a work for Paula Robison in celebration of the 75th anniversary of the concert series, I decided to write “Yizkor”—Hebrew for “in memory of”—to honor Naomi Robison, 7
works for them. Both pieces would be for their farewell performances. Martha, then seventy-seven, would be dancing her last recital, and she wanted him to write a work for her inspired by Hieronymus Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights.” It would be called “Holy Jungle.” As with their previous collaborations, including “Phaedra,” they talked on the phone, sent notes back and forth, and consulted and elaborated on their ancient sources. Working with Martha, Robert said, was like playing a highly enjoyable game with another artist. William Steinberg wanted a Starer piece for full orchestra and singers for his farewell concert with the Pittsburgh Symphony. Robert had the idea of a music-maker looking back on his life, and asked me to write the text for “Journals of a Songmaker.” It was the first of our ten collaborations.
Paula’s mother, a resident of Woodstock like myself and an active sponsor of these concerts. I vividly remembered a dramatic moment at an earlier concert of Paula’s at the Maverick, when her terminally ill mother had been brought from the hospital to hear her. It was a rainy, stormy afternoon and at one point lightning struck so near that Paula, quite startled, stopped playing. She looked at her mother questioningly and Naomi said loudly and forcefully, “Play on, Paula.”
Walter G arshagen
Milken Family Foundation
After Paula premiered “Yizkor” in 1990, she asked Robert to add another movement. The piece became “Yizkor and Anima Aeterna,” which she premiered at the Above: Paula Robison and Kate Laredo. Above Left: Naomi 1991 Spoleto Festival in Charleston, Robison at a stormy Robert Starer Maverick concert. S.C. In 1999, Vincent Wagner asked Robert to write another work for Paula Robison, and he wrote Robert never tired of “Music for a Summer Afternoon,” which premiered at Maverick. “being asked,” and Vincent Wagner, serving as director “Think of all the music we wouldn’t have,” Robert often remarked, of the Maverick, became “if someone hadn’t asked the composer to write it.” The first one of Robert’s most ardent summer we were together, Martha Graham and William Steinberg, “askers” in the final years of conductor of the Pittsburgh Symphony, both asked Robert to write both their lives.
VA S S A R & N E W Y O R K S TA G E A N D F I L M P R E S E N T
POWERHOUSE THEATER J U N E - A U G U S T / O N T H E VA S S A R C A M P U S H T T P : // P O W E R H O U S E .VA S S A R . E D U / 8 4 5 - 4 3 7- 5 9 0 7
8
Angela Schapiro Carl Lindin portrait of Hervey White, restored by Michael Densen
Dion Ogust
The Hervey White Portrait by Carl Lindin In 1905, three years after being banished from Ralph Whitehead’s Byrdcliffe (along with painter Carl Linden), Hervey White founded the Maverick Colony. In it Hervey welcomed artists of many backgrounds and ideologies. Eleven years later, Hervey and his fellow artists and supporters built the Maverick Concert Hall for the entire community to share the beauties of music. When it opened, its white walls were covered by a one man show of the art of Colony resident Carl Eric Linden (1869-1942). Carl was born in Sweden and came to America in 1887 to study at the Chicago Art Institute. He returned to Europe for study in Paris from 1893-1896 before coming to Woodstock to become a vital part of the Maverick Art Colony and Woodstock. Recovering from his ouster from Byrdcliffe, Carl was thrilled to join Hervey’s new colony in 1905. In 1919 he was among the artists who founded the Woodstock Artists Association. At the initial concert, the Lindin exhibition was noted in the 1916 New York Times as part of the remarkable birth of the Maverick Concert Hall. In gratitude for his warm welcome at the Maverick, Carl painted the iconic portrait of Hervey that graces the Hall today. After 100 years of listening to our beautiful music in the Hall, the portrait was restored by Woodstock artist Mike Densen. 9
A Eulogy for Hervey White
There is in the grief of us all who have known Hervey, a warm radiance of exaltation at the contemplation of the deep unity and purity of his life. We are, however, too close to his sudden passing to order and clarify the immense riches within that beautiful simplicity. It will take time to measure the full significance of what he was and what he did and means for our community. We can now, in our sorrow, feel only the irreparable loss. But we shall come to feel that Hervey’s greatest achievement is this: where others who were endowed with all the resources of wealth and position, failed in similar projects, Hervey alone succeeded by the sheer unaided force of his vision, integrity and love of his fellows. He alone has furnished the final proof that the spirit is mightier than all the material forces. His example, when understood, will, as it should, encourage our youth in keeping true to their deepest impulses of integrity and creative freedom. We stand, following in our mind’s eye this man, young and completely himself to the last, this unbranded wanderer, having done his fruitful work, as he goes on his way, with his eyes lifted to the splendors of his
by Professor Martin Schütze from Hervey White’s funeral, October 23, 1944. Printed by Retort Press, Bearsville, New York
Arnold Blanch, Portrait of Hervey White, oil on canvas, circa 1930. Courtesy Woodstock Historical Society
poem: “Goodbye ... Good night,” and his heart listening to the “smiling whisper” of the “guardian.” Our hearts will erect to him a monument “more enduring than bronze” and, let us hope, our hands will follow our hearts in giving to that monument a tangible body.
Hervey White, courtesy Samuel Dorsky Museum at SUNY New Paltz
Professor Schütze, a published poet, born in Germany, was associated with the Maverick Art Colony at its inception and was married to photographer Eva Watson-Schütze.
“Hervey alone succeeded by the sheer unaided force of his vision, integrity and love of his fellows.”
Portrait of Hervey White (19208) by Alfeo Faggi. Bronze. Woodstock Artists Association & Museum, gift of John Faggi
10
The Maverick Horse By Cornelia Rosenblum The name “Maverick” came to be used over the years for the collaborative colony for artists that Hervey White established on the outskirts of Woodstock. In Colorado in the 1890s, while visiting his sister, Hervey had been told of a white stallion living in freedom in the wild known locally as the “Maverick Horse.” In 1911 the Maverick Horse appeared as the hero of a poem Hervey wrote, “The Adventures of a Young Maverick.” It was a fitting symbol for everything that Hervey held dear—freedom and spirit and individuality.
Hannah Small, who lived at the Maverick during the carving, remembers: “Everyone on the Maverick was watching. They were fascinated. We loved everything that Flannagan did and we were terribly excited about it. I remember seeing him working; John Flannagan and young Linda Sweeney he was working frantically and he was doing the whole thing with an ax. It was the fastest work I’d ever seen. When it was finished he went off and had another drink.”
John Flannagan, a brilliantly talented, iconoclastic (and penniless) sculptor, came to join the artists who spent summers in the Maverick. In the summer of 1924 Hervey White commissioned Flannagan to carve the Maverick Horse. Believing that all useful work was of value, and the work of an artist no more to be rewarded than any other,
The heroic sculpture standing eighteen feet high marked the entrance of the road to the concert hall (and the now-vanished theatre) for thirty-six years. For a while the sculpture had a little roof over it as protection from the elements but it began to weather alarmingly, and artist Emmet Edwards, a painter who knew Flannagan well, moved it into his nearby studio to protect it.
Simon Russell
It remained there, hidden from view, for twenty years. In 1979 through the generosity and cooperation of Edwards, the horse was moved on large wooden skids from Edwards’ studio to the stage of the Maverick Concert Hall. Woodstock sculptor Maury Colow undertook to stabilize the sculpture and mount it on a stone base. It is most appropriate that this mysterious and magical sculpture presides over the last and most enduring expression of Hervey White’s original Maverick.
Bassist Dave Holland
he paid the prevailing wage of fifty cents an hour. Using an ax as the major tool, Flannagan carved the entire monumental piece from the trunk of a chestnut tree in only a few days. The sculpture depicts the horse emerging from the outstretched hands of a man, who appears in turn to be emerging from the earth.
ELENA ZANG GALLERY CONTEMPORARY FINE ART PAINTING • POTTERY • PHOTOGRAPHY SCULPTURE GARDEN 3671 RTE. 212 SHADY(WOODSTOCK) NY 12409
ELENAZANG.COM • 845-679-5432 • EZANG@HVC.RR.COM
4 MILES WEST OF THE VILLAGE GREEN • OPEN DAILY 11-5
11
The Maverick Legacy The Maverick is thriving today, thanks to the love of its friends. Many of these have honored Maverick’s long history with gifts from their own estates. A gift from you to the future of Maverick comes with a promise from us, that we will continue to honor your love for the best music in the world. Your appreciation will live on, into our second century and beyond. You can contribute to that heritage with a gift to the Maverick in the form of a legacy bequest, which will both honor the past and ensure the future. A gift to the Maverick as part of your estate planning serves a twofold purpose: It endows an ongoing legacy of music that will move and inspire audiences in the generations that follow. And it will help preserve our unique and historic building and surrounding forest for the future. Senior board Member David Gubits can answer any questions you may have, and assist in all matters of gifting. David can be reached at dbg@jacobowitz.com or 845-764-4285.
Dion Ogust
“For I realize that what has been, will ever be, that a gift given cannot be taken away.” —Hervey White
12
The Gift Sitting in my wooded valley of the years I see the procession of all youth in a vision; I see it dappled with shifting sunlight and cloud shadows; the gloom of winter-rains shrouds it some-times, the moonlight lends her bloom, the darkness, mystery—But ever I feel the throb of its intensity. Through ambition, through wearied waiting, through passion, A subtlety as of fragrance comes to me, And in this I live, in this I aspire, in this I am wholly content. For there is a gift of youth to age that passes all gifts. In unconscious selfishness the great gift is proffered. It warms the heart, it soothes the soul, it obliterates all regrets for life’s failures. It is none the less fragrant and significant; it is none the less satisfying. It is more. —Hervey White
NOW AVAILABLE AT THESE LOCATIONS
• H. Houst & Son, 4 Mill Hill Road • Pondicherry, 12 Tinker Street Metes & Bounds • Westwood 24 Mill Hill Road Artists • Woodstock Assoc. & Museum 28 Tinker Street
woodstockguide.com
DION OGUST photography
845-679-4135
dionphoto.com
13
SUNDAY, JULY 30, 1916
Allan Updegraff
© The New York Times
Music Goes Back To Nature
Up in a wild bit of Catskill woodland, Hervey White, once novelist and poet, and now also musical director, architect, and high financier, is presiding over the testing out of a musical enterprise that he has been some ten years preparing. There have been three tests of it now, on the last three Sundays: the first was more than satisfactory, and each successive test registered, approximately, a 20 percent improvement on the preceding one. From all the nearby Catskill summering places, and from some at a considerable distance, people are coming to the music chapel that Mr. White has built on his farm in the Woodstock Valley to hear the eminent musicians Mr. White has gathered play the best chamber music, which he selects himself.
musicians in a rustic music chapel among tall trees at the foot of a hill. “I had expected to erect my music chapel within five years, and you see that it is just completed. For one thing, I demanded such high qualifications in my musicians that I had a great deal of trouble in keeping them quiet and contented. The better a musician is, the more readily he becomes enraged. First violins are especially prone to demand anything from a new and rare variety of teapot to the immediate discharge of all the rest of the orchestra. At times my departing artists were so much upset that they even forgot to pay their rent—a minor matter, but troublesome. “Now shall we walk over to the chapel where they make divine music, as is fitting, on Sunday afternoons?”
On the day when Mr. White was interviewed for the purposes of the present story, the owner-builder-director was very busy.
The building appeared suddenly; in spite of its bulk it was so hidden by great trees that there was no visible sign of its presence until the road opened at its big front porch. Except for the curious arrow-shaped inlay of some fifty six-paned windows in the front gable and the prolongation of the roof along one side to form a huge porch, it resembled nothing so much as a sizeable new barn. It was sided horizontally with rough pine boards, whose unpainted, knotty surfaces the weather was already turning a dark tan. Mr. White led the way across the spacious front platform, beneath the bracing-beams of unbarked logs that will support a porch roof as soon as succeeding high finance permits at one of the four big pointed-topped doorways.
Some learned members of the Woodstock artist’s colony speak of him as “The American Tolstoy.” They are deceived by the fact that he wears a Russian blouse, flappy cotton trousers, much hair and beard, and lives a contemplative bachelor existence in a cabin of his own building. As a matter of fact, he is much more nearly akin to our own Henry David Thoreau. Take three parts of Thoreau, including Thoreau’s poetical gift and ability to live on nothing a year, add a passion for the world’s best chamber music, a gift in the direction of arts and crafts architecture, an inability to be worried, and a quiet sense of humor, and you have an approximation of Hervey White of Woodstock. “When I invested in this farm, ten years ago,” said Mr. White, dashing a few drops of honest sweat from his brow, “I did it with the idea of gathering some good musicians during the summer months and giving chamber music in a rustic music chapel among tall trees at the foot of a hill. Chamber music, by its nature, is degraded except when it is given by selected
From either end supporting log frameworks sprang, with a Gothic suggestion, to the high, curved, unpainted pine roof. Green light from the woods outside winked everywhere through the chinks of the single-thickness walls. “Whitewash, thin whitewash, over the 14
Banking that makes a difference. When you bank with Ulster Savings you are enabling US to help our community.
Locations throughout the Hudson Valley 866-440-0391 • www.ulstersavings.com
Konrad Cramer
Investment, Tax, Payroll and Insurance products and services available through Ulster Insurance Services, Inc., and Ulster Financial Group, Inc., subsidiaries of Ulster Savings Bank, are NOT FDIC INSURED.
dark yellow pine board, made that color,” explained the architectowner, indicating the peculiar mottled old-ivory tinting of the panels. The panels were especially designed to exhibit our chief local product—pictures. You know we have a valuable assortment of artists of all descriptions around here, especially in the Summer; and the arts ought to fraternize more than they have been in the habit of doing.
“See what has been done in only ten years by one man, without any money, and with no special aptitudes to speak of?”
“Last Sunday nearly 400 people, including several farm-wives and two millionaires, heard Beethoven, Arensky, Debussy, and Chopin played as the composers—and God, too, I think—intended they should be played. you blame me if I begin to puff out my chest and dream great dreams?”
Samuel Dorskey Museum at SUNY New Paltz
“Sometimes when I get my pipe going good,” said Hervey White, sitting down on one of the long rough pine benches with amazingly comfortable backs that served for orchestra seats, “I imagine this building as the first of a number of buildings that shall serve as a sort of Summer home for all the arts—especially the arts of music, dancing, drama, painting, sculpture, and metal working. Such arts might be better practiced and enjoyed here among these woods, at least during the Summer months, than in the cities; and it is in the Summer that most people have most time to give to the arts. See what has been done in only ten years by one man, without any money, and with no special aptitudes to speak of.
Herminie Kleinert
15
On the afternoon of the ninth of July, in the Maverick Hall, on a side road between the villages of Woodstock and West Hurley, will begin a series of entertainments unique among the musical events of our country.
Hervey White Announces a New Concert Series
These concerts will be devoted to that highest class of all music, known as chamber music, and will be given by a small group of musicians elected especially for that purpose... a string quartet and a pianist, with occasional singers to assist them, and possibly, though rarely, an artist, or group of artists, from without.
From A Promotional Booklet, Circa 1913.
The programmes will be announced abroad in advance and patrons will do well to watch for them in The Kingston Daily Freeman and other local papers, or on the bulletin boards of club houses or hotels. Those who are seriously interested in music will desire to attend regularly each concert if they live within motoring or driving distance, or, more fortunately, near enough to walk. For the personnel of the quartet is unusual, and has only been secured through influential friends to the Maverick scheme. The first violin of the quartet is Mr. Edward Kreiner, formerly member of the famous Marteau Quartet of Berlin, which is known throughout continental Europe and one of the three great organizations of that character. Mr. Engelbert Roentgen, lately solo ’cellist for the Imperial Court Opera, in Vienna, is an artist of the very highest rank. Hardly had he been a week in America, when he was secured as solo ’cellist for the New York Symphony Orchestra for the coming season. He is, also, distinguished as a composer, and some of his compositions will be given on the Maverick this summer, in advance of their rendition next winter in New York. Mr. Leon Barzin, first viola of the Metropolitan Opera House Orchestra, and conductor of the Maverick Festival Orchestra, it is hoped will be a member of the Quartet. The fourth member is still undetermined, and will be announced at the earliest possible date. And the pianist is well worthy of the group ... Mr. Charles Cooper, an American originally from California, immediately from Germany and France, is spoken of by the Flonzaley Quartet and the late Mr. de Coppet as one of the most comprehensive and brilliant artists of this country. Critics of The Boston Transcript, New York Herald, New York Tribune, New York Sun, and other metropolitan papers have been pleased to give long praise to his recitals, and we are fortunate to have his enthusiasm for our plans.
" These concerts will be devoted to that highest class of all music, known as chamber music, and will be given by a small group of musicians elected especially for that purpose..."
In addition to the program of music, which will begin promptly at four every Sunday afternoon, there will be, on the walls of the concert hall, an exhibition of paintings by well known artists, and for this you will do well to come early. The initial exhibition will be from the work of Carl Lindin, now a resident of Woodstock and long an exhibitor in the picture galleries of Europe, especially in Stockholm, Munich, Paris and London; and in America, in all the principal cities.
16
After the concert, tea may be ordered by those who wish refreshment before departing... served on the rustic tables in the woods by ladies who wish to aid in the payment of the hall. Let it be distinctly understood that these gatherings are to keep the nature of Sunday formality; that while they will be social as well as artistic, they will not, in any way, seem objectionable to those of strict Sunday observance, and will be in strong serious contrast to the Festival which will take place in the middle of the week and will be given over to the carnival spirit. These concerts and the classes that grow out of them, for it is the intention of the artists to take pupils, will give a great impulse for good music in our schools and churches. Music is almost akin to religion, the highest, the most divine of all the arts.
Music is almost akin to religion, the highest, the most divine of all the arts.
A LOT OF GOOD THINGS UNDER ONE ROOF
On fair days, the concerts may be given in the stone quarry stadium, of which the hall is an annex, below. The hall, itself, is a creation of the woods, a suggestion of rising trees and roofing branches. It is a beautiful place to hear music, but if some lovers of nature prefer to listen in the open, they can easily sit outside the spacious doors, or steal away into remote, secluded quiet. A good road is being built to the immediate entrance of the hall, so that on rainy days there will not be any discomfort.
845.679.2115
The price of reserved seats will be held at a dollar, and at fifty cents. These may be best ordered in advance, either singly, or for the season, but they can, also, be purchased at the entrance gate. The price of admission is twenty five cents; this especially for the nearby residents and students who are planning to be present at every concert. These admission ticket holders will hear as well as any, and it is urged that they will bring canvas artist-stools or cushions or shawls, which can be spread on benches, steps or floor. Let it be remembered that the enterprise, the hall and its accommodations are new; that it is difficult to foresee the size of the audience: that there will necessarily be changes and adaptations; but that the management will be open to improvement and suggestion.
hhoust.com
Congratulations! Here’s to another 100 years.
As one hears the rehearsals of the musicians, and thinks back to the success of the Festival last year, he is overcome with the enthusiasm of the possibilities of this truly ideal musical and plastic art enterprise. He sees the artistic advantages that may accrue from co-ordination, till our organization may become a beacon light of beauty. Let us now see to it that the pioneers get the encouragement they deserve. The gate receipts are shared on a co-operative basis. Show your appreciation by purchasing the reserved seats in advance. Address inquires and make all checks to: Hervey White, Woodstock, N.Y.
17
Music at Maverick
The Maverick suburb has the great distinction of sheltering a very active music colony during the sultry (when not rainy) summer months. For more than twelve years these rusticating musicians have given Sunday afternoon programs of high order and variety. The difficulties of presenting modern works do not scare them, and they enthusiastically spend their vacation time rehearsing to prepare first performances of new compositions as well as very polished executions of standard classic ones.
By Georges Barrère
From The Hue and Cry 1926
Though not regular Woodstockers, their names are well known all over the city, from the garage to the post office, including State Police. Among the pioneers who have established these concerts is Pierre Henrotte, violinist, concertmaster of the Metropolitan Opera House. Pierre organized the very first program and is still in charge of making programs, arranging rehearsals, and pleasing every one. In spite of this hard task, Pierre’s smile is one of our Maverick treasures.
Outsiders are often welcomed at the Maverick Concerts, either personally or as members of a regular Chamber Music Group.
I shall mention the great fortune that fell upon my semi-bald head, three years ago when I was admitted in the Coenaculum (excuse my French) and I certainly thank my older colleagues in Maverick History to let me play with them once in a while for their select audiences. I feel like I am coming just in time to harvest the fruit of their labors of former years. Outsiders are often welcomed at the Maverick Concerts, either personally or as members of a regular chamber music group. Among works played for the first time here this season were the solid, though not extremely original Quartet in D major by Respighi, and a Quartet by Langley, assisting viola-player. Langley is an excellent musician, a member of the N.Y. Philharmonic who knows all about modern and ultramodern. But, liking them or not, he has chosen the very classical verbiage for his own expression. The result was a composition curiously “past-iched” from Haydn. To the informed music-lover it is amazing that a living composer could have the courage to write music as if he was dead 117 years ago.
Georges Barrère, early Maverick music director, was first chair flutist with the New York Symphony, which later became the New York Philharmonic, from 1905-1944.
The real attraction of the afternoon was the first performance of Howard Hanson’s Quartet in one movement was a real attraction this summer. Hanson is the very able and active director of the Eastman School of Music. He already figures, as many others, among the best American composers. They are getting so numerous among the best that we will soon have to take notice and call it the American School. (So far this title has been denied them by the self-conservative European Schools.) I wish I had an opportunity to hear Hanson’s Quartet again. The work is built with such wealth of striking rhythms and solid thematic developments 18
spend your Sunday afternoon, if not in this comfortable pavilion? There, a very good-natured audience is willing to make up for the unconventionality of our dominical musical feasts. Dear audiences, keep up your faith in the Maverick musicians! Don’t shoot them: They are doing their best! Bring your friends, all of them — musicians love full houses. Hervey, too. They will appreciate your cooperation and be very grateful — all of them, including your most respectful flute player and self horn-blower… Willy Pogany
Georges Barrère was music director of the Maverick and was flutist with the New York Symphony Orchestra from 1905 and continued after the merger with the New York Philharmonic through 1944. that a second audition would certainly be even more enjoyable. I hope the Maverick players will take it up again, though it is a hard work to rehearse, I know.
Homespun Salutes Maverick Concerts!
We also performed Paul Hindemith’s Kanonisches Sonatine for violin and flute. I think it was the first time the German composer’s name appeared on these programs. Hindemith belongs to the ultramodern bunch, who enjoy themselves in atonal music. To hear such work unprepared is quite dangerous: But if you only adapt yourself to the completely different idiom, you will promptly seize the humor as well as the completely well-balanced conception of this very short and tiny work. In a word: Hindemith and his atonal friends write music as if they were going to be born 117 years hence.
We are in our 47 46th year of producing music instruction on DVDs, CDs, Books and Digital Downloads featuring more than 200 world-class performer/instructors. —Happy and Jane Traum
®
woodstock, ny • www.homespun.com
nothing is more inspiring than enjoying beauty in art as well as in nature.
For good measure and compensation, all Classical names have already been printed on the programs of this current season: Beethoven, Brahms, Mozart, Schubert, Handel, Mendelssohn, Leclair, Haydn. Also names which will soon be classic: Saint-Saëns, Franck, Debussy, Dvoˇrák. If the Maverick musicians deserve credit for their work (and I am personally convinced of it), they all are very grateful to their faithful audiences, which gather regularly every Sunday afternoon, rain or shine. By fair weather, nothing is more inspiring than enjoying beauty in art as well as in nature. When it is raining, where else could you
WEDNESDAY, JULY 29
SATURDAY AUGUST 1
8pm - Voices of Distinction: 10am - Latte Lecture Jack DeJohnette, full orchestra & choristers Meet Composer Carlisle Floyd discussing his opera Of Mice & Men THURSDAY, JULY 30 10am - Magic, Music, & Ventriloquism 4pm - Shape Note workshop 11am - Down to the Roots 5pm - Souvenir - A play in “tribute” to Music of the First Americans Florence Foster Jenkins 11am - Ben Franklin & the Armonica 8pm - A Little Night Music - by Stephen 12:30pm - Cambridge Chamber Sondheim with Ron Raines & Susan Powell Singers 2pm - The Medium 4pm - Do Not Go Gentle FRIDAY, JULY 31 The Last Days of Dylan & Caitlin - World 10am - Latte Lecture premier workshop performance of an opera Between Composers & Critics 10am - Magic, Music, & Ventriloquism by Robert Manno 6pm - Open Forum on Do Not Go Steve Charney & his dummy Harry Gentle 11am - Ben Franklin & the Armonica 8pm - Of Mice & Men Amazing glass musical instrument Opera by Carlisle Floyd 1pm - Shape Note Workshop 2pm - A Little Night Music SUNDAY, AUGUST 2 3pm - Masterclass 10am - Latte Lecture 4:30pm - The Diva & the Fiddler Playwright Stephen Temperley the world’s only voice/violin duet 1pm- Good News - Here Comes Gospel 6pm - The Medium 2:15pm - Souvenir Gian Carlo Menotti - Opera a play by Stephen Temperley 8pm - American Classics: 5pm - Barbershop Harmony Von Stade & Flanigan joined by composers. Voices of Gotham (845)586-3588 for details visit - PhoeniciaVoiceFest.org
Rediscovering little known 20th century artists September 12 - October 31, 2015 Reception Saturday, Sept. 12, 3 to 5 p.m. Gallery Hours: Monday-Saturday, 9AM-3PM
woodstockschoolofart.org 19
“I have nothing to say and I am saying it and that is poetry as I need it.”
James Klosty
—John Cage, “Lecture on Nothing,” The Artists’ Club, New York City, 1950
John Cage and Merce Cunningham in Westbeth, 1972.
John Cage and the Maverick by Miriam Berg One evening in August 1952, the Maverick Concert Hall was the scene of a revolutionary moment in musical history. Here in the woods, the young pianist David Tudor performed the premiere of John Cage’s most famous—and most infamous—work, 4’33” (Four Minutes and Thirty-Three Seconds). Although the work has often been called the “silent” piece, Cage wanted to show that a lack of notes was not the same thing as silence. The pianist read the score, turned the pages, pressed the foot pedals, consulted his stopwatch, and closed and opened the piano lid after and before each movement, but he never touched a single key.
most of the audience.” One audience member, a local artist, stood up and declared, “Good people of Woodstock, let’s drive these people out of town.” Iliana Semmler, daughter of Maverick’s music director at the time, Alexander Semmler, writes: “I don’t remember ever seeing my father as angry as he was when Cage ‘played’ that ‘sonata,’ 4’33”. My father told Cage that he had not composed any music as we know it. I remember Cage’s response: ‘I believe I heard a little rain on the roof during the second movement.’” Cage was not untroubled by the uproar. As he said, “I like all comments, favorable or unfavorable.” Later in his life, when asked what his favorite piece was, Cage would always answer, “One I haven’t written yet.” But he also calls 4’33” his most important piece. “No day goes by without my making use of that piece in my life and work…. I always think of it before I write the next piece.”
From the First Tacet Edition: a typewritten score. 4’33”, John Cage.
THE AUDIENCE REACTION Maverick audiences at the time were made up of musicians and artists from New York City, including members of the New York Philharmonic, as well as many local artists and other music lovers. As Tudor sat there at the piano, listeners heard the wind in the trees, the rain on the roof, and the questioning murmurs of audience members. The piece was the focus of tremendous controversy. Composer Earle Brown wrote that 4’33” had “infuriated
ZEN Cage’s unperturbed serenity came in part from his studies of Eastern philosophies, particularly Zen. Cage studied with Shunryu Suzuki, the Zen Monk and teacher at Columbia in the late forties and early fifties. Zen taught Cage to strive for abandonment of the will, and to reject the duality of likes and dislikes, beauty and non-beauty. Excellence was to be found in a clear mind. Suzuki often began his lectures with ten minutes of silence. 20
Zen also taught Cage to give up organization, and he incorporated that into his major musical innovation, known as aleatory or chance music, wherein the composer withdraws control over what sounds are created. Sometimes the performers choose various aspects of the music, and Cage also found ways to create works where neither composer nor performer has any control over the sounds. For instance, several of Cage’s works are scored for radios, to be tuned to specific frequencies and played at specific times during the piece. What those radios play—and what the audience will hear— will depend on the radio stations (or lack thereof) that can be received on those frequencies from that particular concert stage.
John Cage came to the avant-garde scene already remarkably free-spirited. In college, he could not understand the value of having every student read the same book. How much better it would be, he thought, if one hundred students read one hundred different books and then shared what they had learned. In one course, instead of completing the assigned reading, Cage went to the library and arbitrarily decided to read the first book he could find by an author whose name began with the letter “Z.” When he got a high mark on the next exam, despite ignoring the assignments, he decided the system was broken, and that college had nothing to teach him. WOODSTOCK In 1950, Hollywood actor Burgess Meredith approached artist Alexander Calder about creating a short film on Calder’s work. Calder insisted that John Cage provide the music. Cage’s twenty-minute composition was in three sections. The first and third were composed for Cage’s invention, the prepared piano—a regular piano with small objects inserted among the strings to change the sound. The middle movement was written for another of Cage’s favorite media: recording tape. Cage recorded the sounds of Calder at work in his studio, and then spliced the tape to create a mosaic of the ambient sounds.
Cage visits ninety-two-year-old Suzuki in 1962
In the process of composing his musical works, Cage used various methods to make choices that did not involve his own volition. He posed questions about musical variables—pitch, duration, structure—and then threw coins to determine hexagrams from the ancient Chinese oracular text, the I Ching. One of his compositions places notes wherever there is an imperfection in the sheet of paper. In 4’33”, he determined the duration of the three movements (0:30, 2:23, and 0:40) by writing numbers on a deck of tarot cards and then dealing them out.
21
This short film score won a prize at the first Art Film Festival in Woodstock in September 1951, and Cage and David Tudor made their first trip to the town to receive the award. Cage knew of Woodstock, since that was the home of one of his great mentors, Henry Cowell. Cage was undoubtedly impressed by the vibrant art scene that was thriving in this tiny hamlet, and he decided that Woodstock, and in particular the Maverick Concert Hall, would be the venue for the premiere of his new work, 4’33”.
performance introduced Boulez’s important work to the American avant-garde, and began a long friendship and collaboration between John Cage and David Tudor. BLACK MOUNTAIN In the summer of 1952, composer Lou Harrison invited Cage, dancer Merce Cunningham (Cage’s life partner), and Tudor to North Carolina to be part of the avant-garde arts community at Black Mountain College, near Asheville, an experimental college that operated from 1933 to 1956. The list of teachers and alumni reads like a Who’s Who of the American avant-garde: artists Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Buckminster Fuller, Walter Gropius, Robert Motherwell, and Robert Rauschenberg; composers and performers John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Lou Harrison, Roger Sessions, and David Tudor; and writers Robert Creeley, Charles Olson, Francine du Plessix Gray, M.C. Richards, and Arthur Penn. In the summer of 1952, Cage and others took over the college’s main dining room and put on a performance that lasted forty-five minutes. Cage stood on a stepladder and read one of his lectures on composition; Merce Cunningham danced around the stage and into the audience; Robert Rauschenberg’s monochromatic white paintings hung at various angles from the ceiling, while the painter played scratchy records on an old Victrola. M.C. Richards and Charles Olson read their poems, also standing on ladders.
John Cage and David Tudor
DAVID TUDOR John Cage had met David Tudor in early 1950, and was astounded by the young pianist’s abilities. Cage turned pages for Tudor at the American premiere of Pierre Boulez’s Second Sonata—a piece that had been turned down as too difficult by other performers. This
For John Cage, it represented the highest form of art—unpredictable and ever-changing. Cage was also deeply moved by the white paintings of Rauschenberg. They were made of nothing but white house paint applied with rollers, but they were different in every light, and people saw in them what they wanted to see.
MHV has been serving the Hudson Valley since 1963 For over 50 years, MHV has helped members achieve their goals with innovative financial solutions and services. Goals that are as a simple as saving time with the latest online and mobile banking technology, to making the dream of home ownership a reality with an affordable mortgage.
Specializing in both PERSONAL and BUSINESS Banking
Visit our historic Woodstock branch at 85 Mill Hill Road
John Cage, Merce Cunningham & Robert Rauschenberg
HARVARD The last ingredient in the recipe that became 4’33” took place at Harvard, where Cage went into an anechoic chamber (a soundproof room in which all echoes are eliminated by absorbent walls) in order to hear true silence. Cage later wrote: “I heard
• Checking Accounts • Personal & Auto Loans • Real Estate Loans • Business Solutions
Wapner, Koplovitz & Futerfas, PLLC 800.451.8373 MHVFCU.com
Federally Insured by NCUA
22
Proudly Supporting Maverick Concerts
Woodstock, NY 12498 845.679.7207
wapnerlawfirm.com
Kingston, NY 12401 845.331.0100
two sounds, one high and one low. When I described them to the engineer in charge, he informed me that the high one was my nervous system in operation, the low one my blood in circulation The reason I did not expect to hear those two sounds was that they were set into vibration without any intention on my part…. I found out that silence is not acoustic. It is a change of mind, a turning around. I devoted my music to it. My work became an exploration of non-intention.”
10 Rooms Located In The Heart Of Woodstock Rates from $90-$184 single/double occupancy. Complimentary breakfast, 24 hr. organic coffee & tea bar, wi-fi & individual climate control. Private & shared baths available.
SILENCE Cage was not the first composer to include silence in his work. Others had included periods of silence—even extended periods of silence, but it is qualitatively different from composing an entire work without intentional sound. The influences on Cage’s life and career—the study of Zen, the avant-garde artist community, Rauschenberg’s white paintings, and the anechoic chamber— came together to give John Cage the courage of his convictions.
73 Tinker St. | Woodstock NY | 845-679-9479 www.twingableswoodstockny.com
NUMBER 1 SELLING WOODSTOCK AGENT 2011* Thanks to my clients & friends
Cage wanted to let go of all intention, all preconceived notions of music, and all expectations. He wanted his audience to listen to the sounds in the world and even to the sounds inside their bodies, and to realize that what we hear is what we choose to hear. He sought to show that there is no difference between what we call music and what we hear around us everyday—the sounds of life.
LAURIE YLVISAKER Associate Broker
This pivotal performance at Maverick expanded the boundaries of music forever.
VILLAGE GREEN REALTY 11-13 Mill Hill Road Woodstock, N.Y. 12498 OFFICE: 845-679-2255 EXT. 113 LaurieYlvisaker.com *According to MLS Statistics
Voted Best Appetizer at Taste of Woodstock 2015 and Best Overall Dish in 2014
Serving All Day
OPEN 7 DAYS • 679-8937
118 Tinker Street or: PO Box 219 Woodstock, NY 12498 Phone: (845)679-2488 Fax: (845)679-8074 Jeff@JPSiegel.com JPSIEGEL.com
23
John Cage
I never met John Cage. He died when I was ten years old and still playing out of piano books with cartoons decorating the pages. I have the same relationship with him as I do any nonliving composer—me as servant, scholar, detective, actor, ambassador, and him standing on some distant island like a myth, a legend accessible only through the surviving evidence. At a concert once, a former neighbor of Cage’s brought me a photo she snapped of him, which until then had only existed as a slide. “He was smiling at me,” she said. “And now I’m giving it to you.” Such is my relationship with John Cage.
By Adam Tendler
Cage said it clearly: “Each time the Sonatas and Interludes are being played they sound differently. For one thing, the hardware that I used to put into a piano no longer exists. That was classical hardware and there were sizes of screws that don’t exist anymore, and I think also the metals that used to be used to make screws are not used anymore. Also each piano is different from another. I became very sensitive to that. So instead of being annoyed by all those changes I accepted them; it’s a part of the experience of moving from control to acceptance of what happens, and that also means the acceptance of chance operations—the whole thing of moving from composition as the making of choices to composition as the asking of questions.” I’ve played Sonatas and Interludes for over seven years now and have acquired at least three versions of every material, which I freely exchange depending on the piano. Cage once said he chose his sounds “as one looks for shells on the beach,” and I think a pianist should follow suit. I treat each note like its own individual instrument with its own individual tuning, using Cage’s table of preparations as a guide, which sometimes directs the placement of a material down to the 17th of an inch. It takes me about two hours to get everything right. If this all sounds a bit intuitive, I assure you it is, but keep in mind that at the time of Sonatas and Interludes, John Cage still very much functioned as an intuitively expressive composer, still a romantic, of sorts, looking for interesting sounds that would help to depict a wide range of emotional states and situations.
“Cage once said he chose his sounds “as one looks for shells on the beach,”
Cage worked on Sonatas and Interludes from 1946 to 1948. After its premiere, The New York Times called Cage “one of the country’s finest composers” and the prepared piano “vindicated musically.” Some consider the work a summary of all the compositional techniques Cage invented and used up to that point, and one might argue that its success served as a kind of license to go further, a springboard from which Cage could freely abandon nearly all of those previous methods in search of a higher musical purity: chance. In 1952, four years after Sonatas and Interludes, David Tudor premiered Cage’s 4'33" at the Maverick Concert Hall to an unsuspecting planet still reeling from its impact. The once-radical Sonatas and Interludes suddenly seemed quaint in comparison, and as he aged Cage attributed its popularity and 24
longevity to its “usefulness,” in that people could use it more conveniently in a concert setting than his later pieces. For Cage, a composer who spent his life pioneering new ways to experience, create, and even look at music, it somewhat bothered him that audiences tended to gravitate to his earlier work, Sonatas and Interludes included. “It’s what I was doing ten years ago,” Cage said of the prepared piano in a 1961 interview. “The public is always ten years behind.”
ney and the composer who drew us the map. I want to laugh, and I want to cry. In the final passage, a plateau of silence marked by soft repeated gongs, a plaintive, falling melody, and a stepwise sequence that rises, I can only imagine, “towards that final tranquility,” I return to the Malibu apartment where I first spent my summer with Sonatas and Interludes. I return to Adam Tendler that tiny room in the back of my high school library where I first discovered it on a dusty record and dragged my friends in to listen. I think the same thing now that I thought then. Isn’t it cool?
Indeed, Sonatas and Interludes has become something of a modern classic, but it also remains one of the most uncompromising pieces in the literature. A complete performance takes listeners on a seventy-minute sound odyssey that’s at once thrilling, peaceful, and unsettling. The piece takes its time, has repeats in nearly every movement, and requires listeners to abandon their expectations of what the music should do and forces them to surrender to it on its own terms. (Could we also not say the same of Schubert?) Still, I remember one man in Boston who, as the piece ended, left the performance hall in tears. And I remember the countless people who have told me they have come away from Sonatas and Interludes feeling transformed and, well...surprised that they liked it, that it moved them, that John Cage could compose something they understood on a wordless, visceral, deeply emotional level. The year he completed Sonatas and Interludes.
John Cage could compose something they understood on a wordless, visceral, deeply emotional level.
Cage wrote: “Each one of us must now look to himself. That which formerly held us together and gave meaning to our occupations was our belief in God. When we transferred this belief first to heroes and then to things, we began to walk our separate paths. That island...to which we might have retreated to escape from the impact of the world, lies, as it ever did, within each one of our hearts. Towards the final tranquility, which today we so desperately need, any integrating occupation—music is only one of them—rightly used can serve as a guide.” Like any great work of art, Sonatas and Interludes invites us to go deeper with each visitation. I hear something new each time I perform it and inevitably gain a new insight into how I might go even deeper the next time. It continually humbles me with its technical and expressive challenges, and when the work ends I feel ever more bonded with the audience who shared in the jour-
Paul Bergen
2 0 1 5
25
Léon Barzin Recalls the Early Years
From the very beginning, music at the Maverick was a unique effort of professionals and amateurs. I mean “amateurs” in the finest sense of the word: lovers of the art. Even those participants whose profession was music became amateurs during the summer months, playing and performing music solely for their own pleasure and for the pleasure of others. In the early days of music at the Maverick, the regular season for orchestral musicians was only 32 weeks. That left over four months of the year. It was before the days of air travel and the international music festivals, and there was very little regular summer employment. But in those days, first chair symphonists and established soloists made enough money during the year to take the summer off. Gently encouraged by Hervey White, they began coming to Woodstock. After a summer in Woodstock, they encouraged other musicians to come and spend the lovely summer months. And so the resident colony grew. Since they were artists, they had to go on making music. There was a great deal of informal playing at our house, at Pierre Henrotte’s house and elsewhere (Henrotte was a violinist and concertmaster of Metropolitan Opera, who organized the very first program and was in charge of programs through 1926). We, both the older and younger musicians, played wherever and whenever the spirit moved us. For us it was a very exciting kind of music-making, because the senior musicians were all principals of symphony orchestras or experienced soloists. During the regular season they had very little chance to play chamber music, so they went at it during the summer with particular relish. From the outset the musicians’ experience was enriched by the daily contact and dialogue with painters and sculptors which only a community such as Woodstock could offer, an interplay of the arts which today we are still trying to achieve. Painters would ask us to look at a new work, and we would ask the painters to come and listen to a sonata we were trying out. Until the hall was built we had no place to play for a larger audience. Performers like audiences; they need them. The interplay between the performer and the audience is one of the most exciting aspects of the total experience. The musicians welcomed Hervey’s announcement that what he called his “music chapel” would be built. The wood for the building—oak and pine and even chestnut—was cut and milled locally and dragged to the site by teams, and the young people went to work. Hervey was very warm toward young people and there were always young students about who helped him around the Maverick settlement. I was 16 or 17 and was part of the building crew. None of us knew very much about carpentry. There was one young man, the son of a local farmer, who had become an apprentice carpenter; he came the closest to being a professional. The rest of the work was strictly amateur. But Hervey had a way of getting things done.
Barzin was a former music director of the Maverick, musical director of the National Orchestral Association, and the original music director of the New York City Ballet, where he worked with Lincoln Kirstein and George Balanchine. 26
Over the years many talented graduates of the conservatories went to Woodstock in the summer for the unique experience of playing chamber music with outstanding artists before an interested and concerned audience. There were few other such opportunities elsewhere in the country. The situation for musicians during the summer has changed considerably since then, but the idea of the Maverick remains the same. That is why musicians today have such respect for the Maverick concerts. Musicians love the tradition; they are basically idealists, and the Maverick is an idea! It is free of the commercial aspects which surround so many contemporary “festivals.” Experiences comparable to the Maverick are still hard to find. It is lovely to think that the idea initiated sixty years ago has remained the same all this time, and that a concert series designed to fill an immediate need is still filling that need, in a vastly changed world.
Arthur Zaidenberg
We were building to meet an immediate need, not for the architectural or engineering judgment of later generations, so the planks went up on the sides and you could put your hand through the gaps between the rough-hewn boards. The windows went in “by-guess and by-God.” When the green lumber on the roof proved too heavy and it looked as though the life of the building might be brief and dramatic, Hervey drew on his years of study of art in Europe, and rustic adaptations of the flying buttresses of Gothic cathedrals were put up to support the roof the first year. The concerts began. From the very first performance there was a delightful mixture of formality and informality. Nothing in Woodstock can ever be completely formal. Then, as now, people came dressed as they saw fit, by foot, by bicycle, by horse and wagon and by the few automobiles which existed in the village at the time. But once the music started, it was formal. It was always performed on the highest of professional levels, as seriously and with the same dedication it would have received in New York or any other large city. The resident community grew. Eminent musicians such as Georges Barrère, who at first had no intention of settling in Woodstock, came and played—and stayed. Hervey White would build a new house and charge $125 rent for the summer—if the musician could pay. Some musicians bought property. In those days if you wanted land you pointed out where you wanted your property to begin and end. “I want from that tree stump over to the stone wall and back to the little brook.” You didn’t even know or figure out how many acres were involved. I still have the property in Woodstock, and nobody is quite sure where the boundary lines are. It was a very congenial group, no politics and a minimum of jealousy. In fact, it was sometimes difficult to get a particular musician to play, they were all so anxious to defer to each other. “Why don’t you play this week?” Those early years had a great influence on me. In the early 1900s everything musical had to have the European hallmark. Woodstock was a beginning for many young American musicians. I saw how little opportunity was being offered in the general musical field for our own considerable American talents. It stimulated me to start the National Orchestral Association in 1929 as a training ground for young American symphonists.
The situation for musicians during the summer has changed considerably since then, but the idea of the Maverick remains the same.
27
Intimacy: My Maverick by Peter Schickele community is enhanced by the photographs of musicians who were prominent in the history of the hall, and also of the town, that adorn the walls; as it happens, I live on a road named after one of those musicians.
The great exception, in my experience, is the Maverick Concert Hall. It’s funky but handsome, and it opens on a lovely and well-behaved forest. Most importantly, it’s the right size for chamber music.
It may feel like a large living room, but the Maverick presents Shanghai Quartet performances by ensembles that travel the world to great acclaim—ensembles that could and do play large halls but who like the setting and the audience in Woodstock. Where else could a quartet get away with playing the scherzo from one of Bartók’s string quartets as an encore, and have the listeners love it?
Peter Schaaf
Okay, so maybe I’m a bit of a curmudgeon when it comes to outdoor concerts. Unless they consist of good-old band music—music to be accompanied by potato salad and deviled eggs—I get too annoyed by the distractions of the great outdoors to give myself completely to the music. And the big open-ended sheds like the one at Tanglewood aren’t much better.
It’s a great pleasure to have been a part of the Maverick as an audience member, a performer, and a composer. I’ve sung my songs there, I’ve narrated (along with my wife, Susan Sindall) William Walton’s Façade and I’ve heard the Audubon Quartet premiere my String Quartet No. 5 there. Subtitled “A Year in the Country,” and inspired by a year I took off from living primarily in New York City and touring, it was entirely appropriate that the quartet was commissioned by the Maverick and premiered there; the piece, it turned out, was a harbinger of Susan’s and my decision to move to Woodstock full-time.
I had a brother who was a fanatic string quartet player, and I spent my teenage years surrounded by chamber music, sitting a few feet away from the musicians. There’s nothing more exciting or involving. At the Maverick I feel as if I’m in one of those living rooms of my youth, surrounded by good friends and great music.
Burt Weinstein
The Maverick’s sense of intimacy is matched by its sense of tradition. The rough wooden walls and irregular windows reflect the aesthetic of the men who built it almost a century ago, and the carved wooden horse that looks out over the audience and gives the venue its name is inspiring and surely unique. The feeling of
NEXUS Percussion
Peter Schickele's Percussion Sonata No. 3, “Maverick” In honor of the beginning of Maverick Concerts’ 100th consecutive season, celebrates this musical landmark. Commissioned by Garry and Diane Kvistad and the Woodstock Chimes Fund for the Centenary of the Maverick Concerts, this new work will premier June 27 by NEXUS, which was called by the New York Times “The high priests of percussion.”
Dion Ogust
The feeling of community is enhanced by the photographs of musicians who were prominent in the history of the hall
Vincent Wagner (for most of my years here the person who booked groups into the Maverick) and now Alexander Platt have managed, with hard work, a special venue, and years of tradition to combine a world-class stage with a living room in the woods.
28
Elizabeth Mitchell and family
Free Young People’s Concerts
Saturdays 11AM. Admission is free for all young people under 16. These wonderful concerts, long a Maverick tradition, are designed for enjoyment by school-age children. Accompanying adults pay only $5 SATURDAY, JUNE 27, 11 AM NEXUS PERCUSSION Wonderful percussion for young people!
SATURDAY, JULY 18, 11 AM BARI KORAL FAMILY BAND “Koral’s lyrics are kid-friendly (she croons about cars, waves, airplanes, and farms), while her up-tempo rock songs are a huge hit with parents.”
SATURDAY, JULY 4, 11 AM ELIZABETH MITCHELL & FAMILY “Music that resonates in your soul whether you’re a wee little one or a big old grown-up” Grammy-nominated Smithsonian Folkways artist, with folk music for all ages.
SATURDAY, AUGUST 8, 11 AM MIRÓ QUARTET This most wonderful quartet shares their musical magic.
From In an Old Man’s Garden Strength of love comes from the centre, The place whence all love winds blow. Strength of the good accomplished In the old man’s long ago. For his manhood has got him a garden, A garden where children play. And the perfumes that fill his senses Drive all of his sorrows away. Perfumes of young love’s seeding. Perfumes of toil-tilled fields, Perfumes of dusky harvests, Rich with their yearly yields. Harvests of children’s children,
For the gifts to our loved are more sweet Than those that the gods of Heaven Toss at our own poor feet. So the old man sits in his garden, And the sunshine is warm and good. And the flowers nod and beckon, And romp in sweet hardihood. And the old man waits and listens, With happy, tear-dimmed eyes, For the voices of Heaven’s children, Choiring in Paradise. —Hervey White
29
MAVERICK
CONCERTS FESTIVAL
A Century of Music in the Woods Maverick Concerts is made possible in part with funds from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Gov. Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.
Maverick Concerts are supported by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Yamaha is the official piano of Maverick Concerts. The Yamaha C7 grand piano appears through the generosity of Yamaha Artist Services. Maverick Concerts are made possible in part with funds from the County of Ulster’s Ulster County Cultural Services & Promotion Fund, administered by Arts Mid-Hudson.
“If I ever get a place of my own I will call it the Maverick… And it will be like a maverick, [a wild horse] belonging to no one but also to whoever can get it.” —Hervey White
Call 845-679-8217 for concert information or visit Maverick Concerts online at maverickconcerts.org. Email: maverickmuse@aol.com Maverick Concerts Mailing Address: P.O. Box 9 Street Address: 120 Maverick Road Woodstock, N.Y. 12498