Recent Pasts 20/21 Words Series - George Perle, Page 8

BORISKIN	I just thought to add (when Jon mentioned George's pieces that have been withheld or not shared with the public) one of my first experiences working with you, George. Actually, the first recording I ever made was a disc of your solo piano music. And so I was busily occupied trying to put together a varied and wide-ranging program and a number of pieces had already been recorded (some of my favorite pieces, darn it, had already been recorded), and I had to look elsewhere. I was pouring through various catalogues of yours and I saw a couple of pieces I had never seen in libraries, and I wasn't aware they were published or anything like that. This included one that was rather provocatively called Suite in C. You can't get anything more traditional than a Suite in C, which we right away think of as C major, but of course we know is not the case. And the first time I asked you about it you said, “Oh, that's nothing at all, I wrote that a few years ago. You don't want to look at that.” I guess I didn't give up and I asked you a few more times. Finally you relented. It was a piece you wrote around 1970 – just around this time, I guess, that you were working with Paul. You took it off of one of your shelves and gave it to me and how excited I was to see this piece that nobody had ever seen of George Perle's. This is now 1985, mind you, so this had been sitting around for some 15 years. Finally, George said, “Well, why don't you take it home and see if you can make anything out of it.” And I looked at it and it was wonderful. I couldn't have imagined why this was kept on the shelf. I went back when we started to work together, and I played the first movement, which was this very little charming march – all of 40 seconds – which presumably you hadn't heard in about a decade or so. And when I finished (rather nervously) George thought for a moment and said, “Well that's not bad, is it? What do the other movements sound like?” So I went ahead and played the second and third and fourth and fifth movements and he said the same thing, “That's not bad. I guess… I guess that's OK to play.” And so it took 15 years for you to let the piece go, so sometimes it pays to wait, I should think. The piece is on the record, and it's one of the most delightful.
PERLE	(to his wife, pianist Shirley Rhoads) Shall I tell them your story?
RHOADS	If you want.
PERLE	One day my wife came to me and she said, “I found this in an old cardboard box. It looks nice.” I looked at it and I said, “That's not bad.” This was a really old piece, and whereas when I wrote it I had to go on to something else, I was long past that point when Shirley brought me that piece (by this time that piece was 40 years old). I sent it to my publisher and Shirley gave the world premiere forty years after this composition.
RHOADS	…and Michael recorded it.
BORISKIN	I want to add something which I found fascinating in terms of how it reflects on the changing styles of performance. We've been talking about composition, but composers need performers (as we performers desperately need composers) and I've never forgotten what happened when I went ahead and learned this piece. It's a small three-movement piece – fast, slow, fast – and the middle movement, the slow movement, is very beautiful, and kind of simple and straightforward. And George marked it, when he wrote it in 1937 or something like that, “Without any rubato” – absolutely to be played straight. Rubato, rhythmic freedom, flexibility – no, it should be very, very straight.
PERLE	This is what Boulez says for his piece, too. He has the metronome numbers and they are to be strictly adhered to.
BORISKIN	Yes, strictly. And so I, being the humble servant of the composer, tried to do my best to play it that way. I played it for George, and I remember he said, “Oh, but you are playing it too strictly.” He says, “When I wrote this (40 years earlier, by that time almost 50 years earlier) the style of playing, the style of performance was very, very free and much more than it is now with contemporary performers.” And so you said that you felt you had to constrain the performer to play very strictly, but now we've sort of gone in the other extreme and so in a sense you don't need that direction any more. If anything, you need to loosen up and play with more freedom. I never forgot that. I found it such an interesting commentary on composers' markings and how performers relate to the markings and what that means from a historical perspective. It's something that we don't think about and we don't take into consideration enough when we are dealing with really older composers, from 100 and 200 years ago. Well, when Chopin made this marking on the page, what was the norm? We are constantly tussling with certain quirks in Schumann's writing all the time, and we try to do exactly what he wrote, but what he wrote was wrong because it was a convention that was understood by performers and it's a convention that's long lost. So, I throw that out from the performer's perspective of how the composer and the performer relate to each other in different eras.
PERLE	Have we any other problems to solve? (laughter)
MAGNUSSEN	I wanted to ask you about the prizes that you've won and what effect they've had on your career. You had the Pulitzer in 1986, you had two Guggenheims and then one MacArthur Fellowship…
BORISKIN	…and the MacArthur and the Pulitzer were in the same year, no less. So that was a good year.
MAGNUSSEN	I'm just curious how you view prizes…
PERLE	You want to know if it spoiled me? (laughter)
MAGNUSSEN	Well, how did it affect you– creatively and otherwise?
PERLE	It affected me very nicely, creatively. I got other people to copy my music, to take out the parts, and stuff like that.
MAGNUSSEN	And prior to that?
PERLE	I hired a secretary to help me straighten out my files.
BORISKIN	You don't share Charles Ives' view, when he got the Pulitzer – some forty years before you did – that prizes are for children.
PERLE	Well, if he's talking about what a Pulitzer Prize paid in those days… Now they pay better.
BORISKIN	But it buys less….
MAGNUSSEN	Are there any other questions? Well – I would like to thank you all for coming and thank you George Perle and Michael Boriskin.