As I worked at my first term, I swallowed the onrushing information whole and gamely worked in my dorm room at my assignments. Harmony One and Sight Singing (Solfeggio) were the big two, for these classes met twice weekly and had constant assigned material to digest and either drills to master or assignments to work out and turn in. I wrestled with, as Don Davis would have said, 'the box.' There was a piano in the basement of the dormitory, and I was often down there alternating between actually practicing, which was a laborious chore, and improvising, which was, and had always been, a pleasure. It now became something of a guilty pleasure. I began to realize how little I knew, how far behind I was, and how much my creativity lacked in the way of informed currency. The old familiar riffs began to fail to impress me as they tumbled unwittingly from my fingers. The new information whispered in my ears and sought a way out.
One set of lessons remains in my mind after all of these years. I no longer remember the name of the course, but it was taught by an actual Californian named Julian Bonkowski. Perhaps it was something in the LA water, but this man's approach diametrically opposed the rigor of Hollis' Harmony One. He showed up in loose fitting clothes and was constantly scratching his long, unkempt hair. His wit was dry and his lesson plans were plainly mere improvisations.
On one occasion, he asked a piano student to read Bach's 1st Two-part Invention. The young man was a piano major. He turned out to be as bad at sight reading as I was, and he was unable to make it through the first measure.
"Yikes!"
Silence from the purple-faced student at the classroom's spinet.
"Anybody?"
No takers.
"I can't believe that not one single one of you can read this most basic piece."
A hand went up in the back.
"Yes?"
"Professor Bonkowski, can you play it?"
"No. I'm not a piano player. I play the clarinet. That's why I'm asking one of you."
No further ripostes or offers are forthcoming. Bonkowski walks to the window, and looks out at the buildings of Back Bay. Finally, he turns back to the class.
"OK. If you can't read the most fundamental piece in the literature, we'll have to do some listening. We'll have to do some dictation. But for right now, let's talk about some basic compositional gambits."
"You mean like a chess gambit."
"Right. Let's listen to...
Bonkowski started to rifle through a stack of lps in a cloth bag.
"...here. This."
He puts a record on the classroom turntable. The most unearthly music fills the room and we sit listening in silence, from beginning to the end.
"Anybody know this piece?"
No hands go up. At length, someone in the back volunteers a joke.
"Gambit Number One in C?"
"Nope. Let's hear it again."
He puts the record back on, but this time he takes it off after a moment has passed. Then he sits clumsily at the piano, and plays the opening notes, slowly and clearly, over and over. While playing, he says,
"Stravinsky. He lived next door to Schoenberg. They hated each other for years. Here's why. Neoclassicism. The art of the Dance. This is a dance score. A very beautiful, magical score meant to be choreographed. It was written for and choreographed by Balanchine in the forties. It resulted in the formation of the City Ballet. The New York City Ballet. It's subject and title..."
And now, he stops playing the unearthly single line and turns to face the class.
"Orpheus."
He turned back to the piano, and plays the melody one more time.
"Can anyone tell me what this is? This compositional gambit... Anyone?"
No volunteers. We can't tell, perhaps, if it might be a rhetorical question.
"What is the key feature?"
He puts the record on the turntable again. He plays along. After a few minutes, a hand goes up, half mast, fingers drooping.
"You?"
"It's...always repeating. It's...
"...obnoxious!?"
Bonkowski shouts.
"Obnoxious and marvellous. It's called an ostinato. Stravinsky used ostinati all the time. His neighbor, Mr. Dodeca - Caca - Phony, did not believe in repetition. So ostinati are anathema. But I think I lean towards Stravinsky on this. I am enchanted by this ostinato. It haunts me. I wish I could come up with something so delicious. I suggest you all go home and try it yourselves."
In the basement, at the piano, I worked at playing some of my Harmony assignments by way of working on sight reading, finding out what the sonic import of what we were working on was, and procrastinating the work on that impossible Bach Invention. (I was trying to play Number 8, not the much easier Number 1.) In Harmony One, we'd gotten around to the concept of the interval of a fourth (from c to f, for instance) as a dissonance when at the bottom of the triad. This was a place where it was acceptable to double the fifth. Why? The fourth is a bland interval. It is an upside down fifth. It does not seem to be so ugly. Take your fist and play a cluster on the keyboard. Nasty. Dissonant. But play a c below and an f above, and it sounds...okay. OK? Add the other note. (A triad has three.) Play c - f and a on top. Piston says it must resolve downward. Play c - e - g. OK? So fooling around with this regression, turning it inside out and upside down, I began to improvise. Not in the usual way, like Beethoven on a bad day, but in a different way. I was thinking, in the back of my mind, about the ostinato piece. Before very long, I had an ostinato made of rising, improperly resolving chains of triads moving from the 1st inversion to the 3rd. I suppose, to the average reader, the language of music with all its numerical designators, makes no sense. it sounds like math, so people say that composers are good at math. I suck at math, and the numbers of music, while descriptive of abstract relationships, refer to specific things. It does not matter to my tale. As my left hand played my ostinato, my right hand formed a simple descending melody that intersected and altered it. I grabbed for my notebook and in two hours, I had my ostinato piece. I ran up the stairs to my room in a flush of creative excitement. The priest informed me that Mara had been by. I was hit right between the eyes by doubled delight. I had conjured the goddess and she had rewarded me. Terpsichore, beware of the Hunter.
When the next class session came around, Bonkowski seemed to forget all about ostinati. He had another record.
"I want to play something really dumb."
He put the record on and Ravel's "Bolero" sounded from the speakers. There were giggles. This was a piece we knew. We didn't get to the end of the piece. Bonkowski had been looking out the window, tugging at his hair, waving his other hand in mock-conductor style. Now he took the tone arm off.
"OK. Nothing to it. A Sunday afternoon concert classic. The melody repeats in the work some 18 times. We go out humming it. It's seemingly simple, but it's got more craft than you'd think. I'm going to prove it to you. We're going to...write it down."
"Professor...it's already written down."
"Yes. But seriously, you all seem to need ear training. We're going to all get out our pads of music paper, and we're going to take this melody down in dictation. It's a no-brainer. Right?"
Bonkowski did not, as I recall, wait for us to get our notebooks out. He sat at the spinet and pounded out the melody. We sat at our desks and discovered just how complex that melody is. Where is the beat? With his left hand, Bonkowski began to pound on the lid of the spinet, playing hunched over. His playing was impeccable, but very un-pianistic and dry. At the end of the session we had gotten only the first measure down. He wrote the measure on the chalkboard. We walked out in a daze, some of us unconsciously humming that tune.
We worked on transcribing the melody of Ravel's masterpiece for a month of classes. To this day, my respect for that work is profound. To add to the significance of that imperishable pair of lessons, I never lost sight of the importance of repetition to musical form. Even Schoenberg repeats himself. (So must Babbitt, if you care to listen.) And in life's ostinati, I am lulled into complacency, to be shocked forth by events. Bonkowski shocked me into becoming his composition pupil. I failed to take full advantage of his approach. Since he has become famous, (or as famous as a classical composer can), I am happy to add his name to my list of teachers.
