>> Brent Yacobucci: Good afternoon and welcome to the Library of Congress. Thank you for joining us today at the Thomas Jefferson Building and thank you for those of you joining us on Zoom. I'm Brent Yacobucci, acting director of the Kluge Center. Before we begin today's program, please take a moment to silence your cellphones and other electronic devices, and I'd just like to let you all know that this even is being recorded for placement both on the Kluge Center website as well as our YouTube channel. At the end of the event, if you are in the room, please take a moment to fill out a survey questionnaire at the back of the room near where you entered. And if you're on Zoom, you'll see a short survey at the end of the program when the event ends. Please, you know, whatever the medium, please take a moment. We definitely use that feedback. We appreciate it, and we use it to improve the and maintain the quality of our programs. The Kluge Center was founded in 2000 thanks to a generous donation from philanthropist John W. Kluge. We bring together scholars from around the world to Capitol Hill for a period of residence to make use of the Library's vast collections and to interact with policymakers and with the public like today. We also administer the Kluge Prize for Achievement in the Study of Humanities, which will be awarded this summer. Today, Dr. Steve Swayne, the Kluge chair in modern culture, will look at three composers, David Diamond, Stephen Sondheim and Robert Schuman through the lens of three objects here in the Library's collections. Steve is the Jacob H. Strauss 1922 professor of music at Dartmouth College. He is also president of the American Musicological Society, an accomplished concert pianist and a truly engaging speaker. Steve. [ Applause ] >> Steve Swayne: Thank you, Brent, for that very generous introduction. And thanks to those of you assembled in this room and those joining us live via Zoom. Shout outs to Donna, Rick, Suzanna and others in that online space right now. And thanks also to those of you who have chosen to listen to this presentation through the access provided by the John W. Kluge Center and the Library of Congress. Let me further extend my thanks to the staff of the Kluge Center for making my time here unimaginably productive. Dan Turello, Mike Stratmoen, Andrew Breiner and David Konteh get special thanks as does John Haskell who now retired for all of their extraordinary efforts to make me feel welcomed and at home here. Thanks also to Angela Curtis, Janna Deitz, Travis Hensley and Brent Yacobucci for smiling at me, providing tools for me to use in my research. Brent, I didn't bring my blocks here, but they're in my office. And helping me to get back into my office when I locked myself out. The project that has brought me here to the Library of Congress this time has be percolating for years now. Even so, I felt that it might be great for me to focus this presentation not simply on that but to look at all the things I worked on at the Library of Congress for the last 20 years. In part as you'll hear when I get to the part about my current project, it would do you a disservice to talk in depth about it, but there's still much for me to discover, assemble and arrange. But having a couple of objects here to show you what my research has looked like, I think will help us to understand the breadth of the collection here, the indefatigable nature of the staff here, the serendipity of discovery and the challenges researchers often encounter. I earned my doctorate at the University of California at Berkeley on the other side of this immense continent. I'm a native Angeleno and spent my first 28 years of life in the greater LA area. Add five years in Seattle and nine in the Bay Area, and you'll easily understand why I consider myself a West Coast kid at heart. This will be important for my research interests. I wrote a dissertation on Stephen Sondheim, which was something of a novelty at the time. Musicology, the study of the creation, dissemination and reception of music and sound was inching its way in the 1990s for validating scholarship on works that had multiple authors as well as traditions that were based in America. I found myself using the tools of my guild that had been honed on renaissance, baroque and classical era European music and applying them to this very modern and very American genre, the American musical. One of those tools that these scholars of earlier music used traces the influence by attempting to establish something of a genealogy of influence upon a composer. Musicologists do this in part by looking at the music that our central protagonists performed or studied and then seeing if there are traces of these works in the music under examination. In my case, I looked at Sondheim's collection of 78 rpm disks from the 1930s, 40s and 50s to explore his musical preferences through the recordings he favored, and this is my first object. My thanks to Mark Eden Horowitz, one of the senior musical specialists here for ferrying this over from the Madison Building past security to this one. So this is a box labeled N through SL of cards on which Sondheim typed the inventory of his 78 records. They were subject to a fire in 1995. I hope that you can see that they're still singed on the top. Nothing was lost of value in that fire. But this box indicates in some ways what his musical tastes were. He owned at least eight copies of Ravel's Concerto in D for the left hand and seven of the trio in A. An extraordinary number of distinct recordings of these two works that shine a spotlight of their importance to him and the importance of Maurice Ravel in his compositional language, something he has always acknowledged. Similarly, his card file, I guess it would be this one, since it's through SL, contains 18 separate cards for recordings of Rachmaninoff's music. Compare this to 10 cards for Beethoven, the same number of cards that recordings of Copland's music occupies. Mark, perhaps you can remember, I have forgotten, how I have found my way to this card catalog. I think you enticed me somehow to know that it was here. But I am sure that I would not have stumbled on it through a research of the Library's collection. It's not a book. Neither is it what we might understand as a manuscript. But I find it representative of the kind of items one can find here at the Library that can unlock our understanding of the ideas and individuals we are here to study. However it is that I found this object, I can attest that it helped me immensely in framing the first chapter of my 2005 book How Sondheim Found his Sound and the use of a record collection to argue for influences upon a composer struck some in my guild, and I don't fully understand why, but struck some in my guild as being revelatory. I can still remember my shock and delight when Alex Ross, music critic for the New Yorker, where is it, wrote an article titled Sondheim's Swedish Fetish. I guess you drop the ET out and then you have that candy that we all love. Alex Ross talks about this and then quoted me in this article after doing a Google search, which I find just incredible. Quoted me about the way that Gosta Nystroem Symphony at del Mare echoed in a specific Sondheim song, actually two, my discussion of Nystroem was driven by his two cards in this particular box. Though there's that one card or two cards, you know, I do stand by my conjectures of too many mornings in Boca Raton, one from follies, one from road show, shares some musical DBA with Nystroem. If you want to see a longer list of composers for whom Schuman, sorry, Sondheim's inventory has more than two cards, you have to buy my book or get it here at the Library of Congress. I didn't check it out. It was too much trouble. I mentioned manuscripts as the kind of artifact one expects to study here at the Library. When it comes to music, there are manuscripts galore, and my second object is a music manuscript. The story of its creation and discovery though, at least for me, is something akin to a murder mystery. So let's start out by introducing this gentleman. There are a couple of composers actually whose last name looks like the one that I was studying, and very often my very first chapter in this book talks about how this particular guy pronounces his name. He pronounces it Schuman, rhymes with Truman, the president, and this is William Schuman, not Robert Schuman, the pianist whom I have played a lot of his music too. So this is William Schuman, president of Juilliard for 16 years and president of Lincoln Center for six. You've not heard his music more than likely. Most of you have not. But he won the first ever Pulitzer Prize in music in 1943. So within the sphere of music, and American music in particular, he's something, someone that a lot of us know. So here's the Library's copy of my second book. I think I have an image of it here. Let's see. Yeah, probably not a very good one. That's the cover. You know, they take the dustcovers off here. Orpheus in Manhattan, William Schuman and the Shaping of America's Musical Life. The spine on this says copy one. So the notion that the Library might have more than one copy of this book means that it's likely only one of a handful of places in the world that have more than one copy. The other two places that I know about are some warehouse for Oxford University Press and my house. So while Schuman's manuscripts are here at the Library of Congress, most of his correspondence is housed at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. And I spent at least 220 days in New York going through is papers there and at other places in the city. In those papers, I found mention of a work that I had never heard before. The name of the work is Celebration Concertante. To make a long story short, the temple markings of the three movements of this work unknown to me were identical to the temple markings of the last three movements of Schuman's second, I'm sorry, seventh symphony. In order to confirm my hunch that these were the same pieces, I needed to come down here to look at the manuscript. And indeed, when I saw it, it revealed the evidence that there was a first movement that was appended to it. The first page of the second movement originally had the page number one on it that was then crossed out and repaginated to fit within the second symphony. So one mystery solved, the Concerto, I'm sorry, the Celebration Concertante became part of the seventh symphony. But another mystery attended that first movement. I had found in the Julliard archives a scrap of music paper on which was the opening melodic gesture of that movement. Again, without getting into too much detail, it was clear to me and to others with whom Schuman shared this melody that it used 12-tone techniques in some way. Which no previous commentator on Schuman's music had noticed before. Some of you may not understand when I say 12-tone music exactly what I mean, but please understand that this was one of the cutting edge techniques in music in the 1950s for some. Now I knew from my correspondence that I reviewed, the correspondence at NYPL, that Schuman was interested in 12-tone techniques and serialism around this time. After all, he had asked the publisher of the music of Anton von Webern to send him all of Webern's compositions. Now there was this melody. What else might there be out there? I soon found out here at the Library. I had been paging boxes, and this is going to be awfully hard to see, but I'll tell you what this is in a second. I had been paging boxes of music manuscripts of Schuman that had been partially cataloged and processed but that had not yet been incorporated into the finding aid for Schuman's manuscripts here. In fact, as I look at my biography in my book, I have like William Schuman an A, which is everything that had been cataloged, and then William Schuman Z, things that had not yet been fully cataloged. So, here I'm paging these things that I know they're in that Z category, and then to my surprise, a box was delivered that I had not known about before. I could not have paged this box. I did not know of its existence. It was delivered to me by accident. I asked the staff how many more boxes like this are there here? And I was told why don't you come downstairs and look. Now I don't know if that was against Library protocol or not. Fortunately, I don't remember the names of the persons who helped me out back then, so nobody can get into trouble today. Okay. But I was taken downstairs, which is where they were at the time, and I saw three such boxes that I did not know existed and yet contained Schuman manuscripts. And in one of those boxes was this manuscript, hard to read at the top there, but what this folder contains is an 85-bar composition tentatively titled Variations on a 12-note Theme. Not only was there this worked out composition that was based on serialism, but also in the box was Schuman's worksheet of the 48 different permutations of the 12-tone theme, the standard kind of manuscript one might expect to find from someone composing a 12-tone work. And this is a magnification of those first two staves where he identifies the prime inversion, the retrograde and the retrograde inversion. He did that 12 times, 48 altogether. And the piece of resistance in all this sketch work is that the 12-tone theme of the first movement of the seventh symphony is one of these 48 permutations. So to those who denied that Schuman had ever dabbled in serial composition, I had them dead to rights. In this case then, sleuthing and serendipity combined to open up a world of new understanding not only of Schuman's compositional interests but also on the American musical landscape of the 1950s, a time when other American composers were also trying their hand at writing 12-tone music. This was a time in music history where there was a lot of pressure on composers to fall in line with the most modern techniques of the age. One colleague of mine, as I was talking about the pressure on Schuman and others, attempted to dismiss this pressure as being soft in nature. Meaning that no one out there had the power to force these composers to write these works. And I'm thinking back to my undergraduate days in the 1970s, there was pressure to write in certain styles. But these are big composers. No one had to force Copland to write a 12-tone piece, which in fact he ended up doing more than once. My response to this colleague was that this is akin to distinguishing hard water from soft. Hard pressure from soft pressure. Where in either case, one still gets wet. However soft the pressure, Schuman and others succumbed. Now, if you want to know more about my discoveries about the seventh symphony, let me point you to a talk I gave here 12 years ago under the joint sponsorship of the American Musicological Society and the Library of Congress. I wish to thank both organizations again for giving me that platform to share what I had discovered and why these discoveries are important in telling the story of Schuman in particular and music in the 20th century more broadly. Now, time to turn to the third of the three objects that I wish to share with you. But before I do, I should tell you how I came to work on the life and music of American composer David Diamond. Prior to beginning my work in 2005 on the Schuman book, I took it upon myself to listen to as much mid-20th century American music as I could find. Most of the composers' names would be unfamiliar to most of you. I can readily think of Korca [phonetic], Koze [phonetic] and Kubik in the K's alone. Any of you know all three of those? Yeah. I wanted to reassure myself that I would not rue a decision to spend years' work on Schuman's music if there happened to be another composer out there that I loved more. As it turned out, there were three composers who stood out from me back then. Schuman, thankfully, was one. Another was Peter Mennin, and the third was Diamond. So three years after the publication of the Schuman book, and those of you who aren't in academia may not know that there's always pressure after you publish something, what's the next thing you're publishing. They never let you rest. They're ruthless. Three years after the publication of the Schuman book, there was a question, so what are you working on now? So I reached out to a colleague at the New York Public Library to ask what he knew about scholarship on Diamond, who for your information was born in 1915 and died in 2005. He told me that to his knowledge the executor of Diamond's estate had chosen someone to write the Diamond book. Case closed as far as I was concerned. Then it suddenly reopened. In 2016 I received an email from Gerard Schwarz, then conductor of the Seattle Symphony. I had sent Gerry my Schuman book in 2011, and he wrote back at the time to thank me for it and to say that he loved it. Gerry and the Seattle Symphony had recorded cycles of the symphonies of both Schuman and also of Diamond. So he is steeped in their music and the larger American musical repertoire. So here is Gerry writing to me in 2016 to tell me that he was conducting both Schuman and Diamond with the Julliard Orchestra and went on to ask me, have I ever considered working on a book on Diamond? More than this, Gerry said that based on the Schuman book, I was the right person to do the Diamond book. And when a conductor of that stature says something like this, one sits up and takes notice. Gerry also copied someone on his email to me. That person, Samuel Elliott, is the executor of Diamond's estate. So to make yet another long story short, here I am, six years later, the Kluge chair in modern culture working my way through the 279 boxes of materials that comprised the David Diamond papers here at the Library. Diamond didn't give the Library just his papers though, not just his music, manuscripts, photographs and memorabilia. He also gave the Library some of his recordings of his music and performance. And the Library already had some of his own recordings of concerts of David Diamond's music that have taken place in the Library's Coolidge Auditorium. Some of these recordings have come to my attention from going through the correspondence where there are references to the pieces and performances. It's rather freaky, you read what these other people are saying and it's like I had no idea that this piece was commercially recorded and then you go online and there it is. But some of these are not commercially recorded. These are private recordings of performances, and some of them are here at the Library of Congress. As far, though, as sound goes, or as far as objects go, sorry, as far as objects go, sound is unusual. It is not physical in the same sense that a four by six card or a music manuscript is physical. It does, however, have physical properties in as much as it creates vibrations within physical space. Much like my talking is doing now. Moreover, since the late 1800s, we have developed technologies to capture those vibration invisible to human eyesight and place them in media that allows us to revisit the creation of those vibrations in the first place. Now it would take an entirely different talk to try and outline how recorded sound has affected the research of musicologists. Obviously, my first object is its own instantiation of recorded sound. In this case, an inventory that can evoke the sounds but cannot be translated back into sound by themselves. So if I tell you concerto in D for the left hand, you have to know what that sounds like in order to imagine what it is. The card itself cannot be played. Recording media, however, does precisely that. It allows us to hear with different degrees of fidelity sounds that were created and some removed from the present both in time and place. So my third object that I wish to show you is this lacquer disk. At first glance, it looks similar to a long playing record that those of us older than 40 held as commonplace in our worlds. And right there, it is worth stopping to think of how different musical media has changed since the advent of cassette tapes and the 8-track systems in the 1960s, compact disks in, oops, sorry about that. We'll have to go through that slide again. Compact disks in the 1980s and streaming audio in the 2000s. I'm curious that there are a lot of young people over here. How many of you own an LP? Yeah, a few of you. Some of you don't. How many of you stream music? Yeah, yeah, all right. Vinyl may be making a comeback, but it will never ever again be what it was in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. But that's somewhat of a declaration. Why I wanted to share with you this particular disk, which for your information does not contain any music of David Diamond on it, is because of what's happening on this disk. I don't know if you can kind of tell that this disk is breaking down. In the industry, this is called exuding. It's one of the reasons why lacquer disks are supposed to be stored in cool environments, as lacquer begins to become unstable when it is exposed to higher temperatures. Those of us who had 78s and were foolish enough to store them in our attics know this only too well. Time alone though will also degrade lacquer. And after the exuding reaches a certain point, the sonic information captured on a lacquered disk becomes unrecoverable. At least five of the recordings in the Diamond collection consist of lacquered disks. And in order for me to hear these pieces and performances, I have asked my colleagues in the Recorded Sound Research Center to enlist their colleagues at the Library's Culpeper facility to prioritize and digitize these artifacts, less they be forever lost to the ravages of time. I'm happy to say that nearly all of the artifacts we've identified together have been transferred to digital media where one hopes they will be able to be enjoyed for decades to come. I will admit, though, that there is the human research problem one encounters when working with sound. And that is the element of time. In order to study these recordings, I must take time away from my work with the correspondence and the diaries and the notebooks and the manuscripts. I am hopeful that before I leave here next month I will have the opportunity to carve out some time to listen to all of these recordings. And then if need be, request digital copies for research purposes. Let me say a little bit more about my current project and then conclude with some thoughts about be the Kluge chair in modern culture. For me, the distinction between archival work and writing up the results of that work mirror the efforts of the miner and the refiner. At present I find myself in the shafts of the Diamond mine, unearthing various nuggets, some well known to those who know about Diamond, others long forgotten and others unexpected. One of my favorite discoveries thus far is a May 18th, 1998 letter to Diamond from someone named Terrence McGinn, which begins, and I quote, I am writing to you because of an email I received from Marty Ross telling me about a veal cutlet Milanese that you used to prepare for James Dean. The letter goes on to indicate that McGinn would call Diamond, a fellow Rochester, New York, native and ask not only about the recipe but about Diamond's contacts with James Dean. And for those of you too young to know who James Dean is, he was Leonardo DiCaprio before Leonardo DiCaprio was Leonardo DiCaprio, all right. I also stumbled across Greta Garbo, Marlon Brando, Stella Adler, Stanley Kubrick and others from Broadway and Hollywood as they pop up in this collection. There's also an eight-page handwritten letter from Allen Ginsberg along with hints that Diamond and Jack Kerouac may have been more than simple acquaintances. Diamond was also part of the February House crowd in Brooklyn, a group that included Carson McCullers, W. H. Auden, Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears, Klaus Meine, Paul and Jane Bowles and Gypsy Rose Lee. I was not expecting any of this. And then there are Diamond's contacts, obviously, interactions with musicians. I had already encountered Diamond in my work on William Schuman, and it was a delight to see the original letter from the 1980s. I had seen the carbon copy in the Schuman correspondence in which Schuman recalled Diamond's profanity laced response to Schuman about the publication of Diamond's music in the 1940s. I was expecting in this collection to run into Copland and Bernstein, and I have. I was not expecting to meet bandleader Artie Shaw. Neither would I have imagined that it was Shaw who introduced Diamond to Kubrick. There are also the luminous letters from Diamond's students here. And I would note that Diamond himself must have been a prolific writer of postcards and letters, nearly all of which are in private hands. In my research project, I have no intention nor capacity to track all of these down, although in some cases, as in the papers of Bernstein, Copland and Schuman and others, I have some of Diamond's outgoing correspondence in those collections and a shout out to Laura Shissel [phonetic] who is helping me find the outgoing correspondence from Diamond to Ned Rorem. Here is a photograph of a stack of letters from composer Francis Thorne to Diamond. Thorne made his money on Wall Street through his father's brokerage firm in the 1940s. In the 1950s, he sold his interests and became a jazz pianist. He was good enough that Duke Ellington asked Thorne to do some arranging for him. Then Thorne decided he wanted to be composer of classical music. He tried to study with Italian composer Luigi Dallapiccola in Florence in 1959, arriving in Florence unaware that Dallapiccola had an assignment in New York City and wasn't there. But Diamond was living in Florence at the time. And Thorne studied with Diamond for two years there. He would also later go on to become, Thorne would, one of the founders of the American Composer's Orchestra. Again, for those of us within American music, these are important things. I show you this image to give you some idea of what I've been doing here. These letters are written on onion skin-like stationery, meaning that they are very thin. Moreover, Thorne typically wrote on both sides of the piece of paper. So this stack represents 280 separate images that I have captured using my document camera. Thorne's entire correspondence with Diamond, along with is wife Ann's correspondence, Francis's wife Anne, comprises more than 1,300 items in the collection. As of today, I have over 30,000 distinct images of the correspondence alone, and I'm at box 68 out of 75 in the correspondence. Did I tell you that the collection is 279 boxes? Fortunately for me, not all the boxes required this much intervention. But when I leave here, I will need to sort out which of these images are most helpful in telling the stories about Diamond that the different communities who I write for will want to know about. Inevitably, there will be holes in the stories that I tell in no small part because Diamond, like any other subject, was a complicated individual. But there are also literal holes in this story that I'll need to work around. There was a fire that damaged some of this correspondence. I have to find out the story about the fire. What I currently know is that Diamond asked the painter Willem de Kooning to store his papers when Diamond left for Italy in 1951 and that there was a fire where these papers were stored. The exact nature of the fire I have yet to reconstruct, but I imagine it will be found somewhere in the diaries that Diamond kept from 1937 to 2001. And right there, if you think of 300 entries per year, that's a lot of images as well. It's odd in a way to drop de Kooning's name in at the end like this. I could also mention E. E. Cummings who was a friend of Diamonds. How these gentlemen will fit into the stories I tell is impossible for me to know at this time. But one thing I do recognize and understand, just as Diamond was shaped by the people and places he encountered, so have I been. And my work has and will continue to show signs of the places and people I have met over the years. And here is where I wish to close with some reflections on what it means to me to be the John W. Kluge chair in modern culture. The website states that the chair in modern culture focuses on modern arts and media and their impact on societal development using the Library's immense music, film, architecture, literature, multimedia and folklore connections. I asked myself, how will my work on David Diamond chart the impact of his life and work on societal development? I did not yet mention, although I hinted at this, that Diamond was openly gay. When he left Rochester in 1934 to study in New York, he found others who shared his openness about being attracted to men. At a time when other gay musicians worked assiduously to hide their homosexuality, I believe that Diamond's journey will provide an alternative narrative to how the world was construed by many in the 1930s and beyond. Diamond also was involved with various synagogues and temples in providing music for Jewish services. By no means was he the only Jewish composer active in the 20th century. In fact, both Sondheim and Schuman were Jewish. But Diamond was open and active in this area in ways that make him stand out. My initial pass through his correspondence also inclines me to believe that there are connections that tie together his openness about his sexuality and his participation in Jewish life. I find the awareness and acceptance of Diamond's sexuality among his family and friends as revealed in the correspondence to be worthy of expiration including and especially those who share Diamond's Jewish faith. I find that absolutely remarkable, and I'm trying to grasp this more. The fact that Diamond absented himself from American for nearly two decades, first with three years in Paris in the 1930s and then later with over 15 years in Italy primarily in the 1950s and 60s forces me to understand precisely, what precisely happened with living abroad that it provided Diamond things that he could not find in the United States. Certainly one thing appears to be the cost of living. There's a slightly chilling letter from Artie Shaw suggesting to Diamond, then living in Florence, that Diamond might want to think about relocating to Spain if economizing was important to him. And what makes it chilling in the 1950s is this is Franco's Spain. Perhaps Spain was a nonstarter for Diamond given that he had already been known to affiliate with leftwing causes and around this time had been summoned to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee. The summons being delivered to him in the pit of the show Candide where he was working as a violinist trying to make a living. I received some of the documents from the National Archives just this Monday. So here's another part of the story I have yet to comprehend in its entirety. For me, the most challenging aspect in telling the story of this man and his music is that in doing so, I implicate myself. I cannot escape the people and places that have influenced me. Like Sondheim and Diamond, I am gay. And yet their approach to being gay differs significantly from mine. Religion holds an important part of my life, but it holds it in a way that differs from the ways that Diamond understood. And where I grew up, the West Coast kid, I don't ever recall meeting someone who was Jewish. My scholarship has led me to work on musicians whose Jewishness informed and informs them in various ways. And I've done a little bit of worker on the composer, musical theater composer William Finn, one more person for whom his Jewish life takes front and center many times. What is this West Coast Black gay kid doing working on Jewish composers? As far as being a musician, I was a middling composer and a fairly good concert pianist. I bring these skills and peccadillos to this project which these skills and peccadillos will act prismatically to refract how I see certain aspects of Diamond's life and music. And I've already indicated the most important, the most obvious distinction. What is it like for me being Black to work on these topics? And what has it been like to be in an environment, this environment? Where for the first time in my life I have come constantly face to face with the disparities that have come to distinguish Black life in America from its White counterpart. I grew up in a middle class section of Northwest Pasadena. It was a ghetto, but we really didn't know it because as my husband mentioned to me just the other day, there are not as many Black people in California as you might imagine. Right now, 9%, Mike, 9%? That's very different. I go to Seattle and it's like I believe at the time 97% White. And now we live in Vermont. I have a very interesting world that I've lived in. And yet for the last three months I have worked at a place where distinction is based on education and class, and let's be honest, race confront us every day. Moreover, in visiting the museums and memorials and battlefields and points of embarkation around the capital, I have had to wrestle with a convoluted place that I and others who trace a good part of our ancestry back to Africa occupy, that convoluted place that I and others occupy. In these and other ways then, I hope that I bring honor to the Kluge Center, which has certainly brought honor to me. I hope that my struggle to understand Diamond's place in the artistic and societal developments of his day coupled with my own struggles to understand my place in those scholarly and societal developments of our day end up providing more illumination than confusion in making sense of the worlds we inhabit. I hope that my previous struggles in working on Sondheim and Schuman demonstrate that there is much to be known and much that we can never know in full. And it is lastly my hope that we all will be open and honest with one another about our struggles to fit in, to do the work we feel compelled to do. And to leave this world a better place than when we entered it. Thank you. [ Applause ] I believe there's a microphone in the hands of Mike Stratmoen. So if you have a question, please flag him down. And please use the microphone. This is for the benefit of the people who are joining us on Zoom and future casts. If the microphone is on. >> The first question is from our online audience member. It's a general question. To what extent does the tactile touch of the music communicate meaning that a digital copy cannot. >> Steve Swayne: So this is broader than just Diamond. I often ask my students, what does it mean to possess knowledge? I don't own this. Right now I'm possessing it. This phone here has knowledge that I can access. I possess the phone. I own the phone. But when I look up Wikipedia and other things, do I own that knowledge in the same kind of way? It's fascinating to me how most of us no longer purchase books, have bookshelves and things like that. There is something about tactility that I think helps us to master the things that we're working on. And so yes, I think it's very important to be able to handle media. It's one of the things frankly that worries me about our move into streamed audio. What is it like to handle the disk, to put it in the player, to read the liner notes, to flip the pages, to take that time? These are effects that help us to ingest the knowledge that we're receiving, both through the audio and through the tactile acts that we're going. I'm somewhat old school in that. I am, you know, as I'm looking at these Diamond recordings, I'm buying them so I can possess them. And I can read the liner notes of not only CDs, but there are some 78s out there that I might be buying. So I'll just say, I highly encourage all of us when at all possible to use tactile, to use all five senses in the work that we do. And I don't know how taste will fit into my work on Diamond. Maybe I will find this veal cutlet Milanese recipe. But tactile ways of learning, kinetic ways of learning are very important. Thank you for whoever gave us that question. Are there other questions. There's a person over here, Mike, who's raised their hand. Oh, and there's another microphone on this side. >> Luciana: Hi, thank you very much. I was wondering about the dodecaphony 12-tone practices of Schuman. And you mentioned that there was obviously perhaps a pressure to compose in certain styles. But looking at the exercises course that you showed us today, do you reckon this was a matter of prestige in wanting to composing a prestigious style? Or do you think he just wanted to compose this style for the sake of it? Was there an artistic intent behind it as well as, you know, pressure related reason for it? >> Steve Swayne: So dodecaphony is another way of describing this kind of music. And because of the mask, I may have gotten some of it garbled. So is it simply because of pressure or is it part of the artistic prestige of writing in this style, in this particular point in time? The fact that there is no correspondence about this particular work, and there is no indication in anything that I've seen that Schuman acknowledges his reach into dodecaphony is kind of telling to me that in certain ways, he wanted to keep it hidden. When he, the reason this sketch exists at Julliard is because there were a number of Julliard composers who were invited to compose variations on the theme of the first movement of the seventh symphony for a ballet that I believe it was Jose Limon was going to choreograph. And I think it was William Bergsma, I'd have to go back to the letters, but who says that's a rather tuneful melody that you provided to us. And you can see the wink and the nod that Bergsma realized it was a 12-tone row. But he doesn't say that that's what it is. Schuman didn't say that that's what it is. Meanwhile he's writing to George Rothberg around this time. Rothberg at this time is writing 12-tone music and is basically saying I don't know if I agree wholeheartedly with the aesthetic choices that you're making. But I believe you need those choices for yourself. As it happens to David Diamond, there's a composition Diamond writes in 1956 called Diaphony that was premiered at Julliard. It's not a 12-tone composition, but it is fairly crunchy. And it leans in that direction. Those of you who know Diamond and his music, it's fairly tonal in the 30s and the 40s. And the letter that Schuman writes to Diamond in Florence basically says I think what you've written is a failure. You know, basically, you know, every composer deserves to fail. This is one of the chances you get. And so I think, you know, as I said, it's in 1958 that he requests all the music of Webern. So the Diamond piece is two years earlier. So he is surreptitiously schooling himself on this. And in the 1960s, there is this kind of friendly competition if you will between Schuman and Aaron Copland about who can be more dissonate. Schuman, I'm sorry, Aaron Copland's connotations which help to open Lincoln Center in 1963 unabashedly 12-tone. We don't find anything like that in Schuman. The first movement of the seventh symphony, I don't believe, is constructed along dodecaphonic principles. But if you listen to the eighth symphony or In Praise of Sean, the dissonance quotient goes way up, the ninth symphony is way up there. And so, these are all works of the 1960s. So whether or not he is committed to becoming a serial composer, he is committed to a level of complexity and dissonance that was an unknown to the guy who wrote the New England Tryptic in 1957 or the guy in the 1970s who becomes one of the new romantics. So does that kind of get some of your question? All right. Ask me afterwards too if you have more. There's a question over here. >> Peyton: Hi. I was just interested, I found it, I spent my day, I'll just say that, in the George Crum sketchbooks and his papers. And that's kind of my first time dealing with just a book full of ideas and sketches that are just in notes. So how do you encounter looking at, Schuman, you found that piece of paper that indicated 12-tone practices. How do you go about as it's a unique way as a music researcher to look at just notes and sheet music as part of your, you know, you're also going through letters but you're also finding just notes on staff? How does that factor into your research? >> Steve Swayne: Well thank you. Your name, by the way? Peyton, thank you. And your name? Luciana? Okay, thank you Luciana and Peyton. I made reference in my talk to the tools that we master that were perfected really for folks who worked on early music, 18th century music, and I don't mean to throw my colleagues [inaudible] in this way, but there are those who feel like there are all these things that they had to work on in terms of hand or watermarks or stemma. You know, a stemma is like what part of this is, ends up in the final piece. And here you are doing some of the same work on the 20th century composer George Crum. And so all those tools are things that we continue to use that we owe a world of thanks to our colleagues who worked on renaissance, baroque and classical music. And it's just as complicated with our stuff as it is and was for them. If not, perhaps more complicated because our guys and gals tended to leave more stuff. And I'm frightened, frankly, I mean there are David Diamond sketchbooks. I'm really not intending to look at them with 75 boxes of correspondence and another 13 boxes of diary, I think I have my hands full. But when it comes to seeing how something goes from sketch to completion, unfortunately, I'm going to bring in another composer whom I'm hoping before I leave I can look at some of his papers, Sergei Rachmaninoff whose sketch for the 18th variation from the rhapsody and a theme Paganini, not quite know the date of it. The work is 1934. Has, if you know this work, basically, it's a Paganini theme. [ Singing ] And Rachmaninoff takes that Paganini and turns it upside down in the 18th variation. [ Singing ] The sketch shows that he had it inverted early on. The Paganini is in A minor. The sketch appears to be in D flat major. The key that the variation will end up being in. And that D flat major is a key that Rachmaninoff loved. And so one begins to see in some of these sketches it's like these are early thoughts that Crum had or Rachmaninoff had or, you know, one of the most famous sketch composer studies around Beethoven had. And we get to see how the kernel becomes the ear, if you will, of corn. How all these things come to fruition. But man, it's an, it's slogging through a lot of, to mix metaphors, a lot of chaff to find the wheat there. So Peyton, I wish you all the best success in the work you do on George Crum. We have time for a question or two more. Or I can continue to sing for you. Here we go. You don't want me to continue to sing for you. >> Julia: I do. And that was actually my question, no. So thank you very much. This is fascinating, and I should say I have absolutely no background in music. So my question comes from the perspective of the uninformed. So you talked a little bit about the similarities between these three composers. But I was wondering if you can sketch the broader landscape in which kind of they all existed and the relationship that they had between one another. So how they might be connected. You mentioned this one letter from Schuman, right, to Diamond. But I was just wondering if you could talk kind of in broad strokes and contextualize them and their relationship to one another. >> Steve Swayne: That's a wonderful question. And your name is? >> Julia: Julia. >> Steve Swayne: Julia, thank you for your question. We have this image of artists being lone individuals out there doing their own thing with the bird roosting on their shoulder. The famous painting of Pope Gregory the First, you know, the bird chirping and voila, there's Gregorian chant. We know that that's not typically how artists work. At some level, throughout all of human history it would appear, that artists tend to fall into guilds. Louis Cranach the Younger was working in his father's studio, and there were others who emulated his style when he paints his famous painting of Martin Luther. Same thing with Rembrandt and his studio or the Dutch masters in general. We have instances of composers finishing the works of previous composers, so Mahler finishes an opera that Carl Maria von Weber left unfinished. This is separated now by several decades. But we also have composers working in tandem at the same time enforcing what the rules of the game are as well as shielding themselves from untoward influences. I read recently an article, two articles by a colleague of ours, Alan Atlas, on the music of Ray Vaughan Williams a famous British composer from mostly the first half of the 20th century. And Alan traces how in this one journal modern music, the writers for modern music which would have included Diamond but also Aaron Copland, Paul Bowles and some other people kind of ganged up on Vaughan Williams and said all kinds of nasty things about him. Because Vaughan Williams was writing the kind of music that they thought was [inaudible] old fashioned and epigonal and all these kind of nasty, nasty things. And he wasn't French. They liked French music more. And so I was talking to Alan about this, and I said hey, you're identifying bias. You know, this is bias here, you know, because we were also talking about implicit bias and political correctness and all these kinds of things. And it was like yeah, bias exists for, you know, the time of, you know, human invention. And so here they are trying to find their like, and again, kind of the question that Luciana asked, you know, what does it take for me to stay within this fraternity or this sorority or this guild. Oh, everybody's now writing 12-tone music. I need to write 12-tone music. Oh everybody now is all of a sudden using experimental techniques. I need to start using experimental techniques says George Crum. If you don't know his microcosmos and also another fascinating link to like the arsubtiliar [phonetic], right, the kind of the peace sign, peace, it's like okay, that's from the 14th century. He would not have thought of that necessarily had that not been all those kinds of things. So these are people who are having to find themselves. And then once they fine one another, then they're fending themselves off from, you know, the Robert Schuman, from the Philistines from the gate, which he spends a lot of time talking about these, you know, he pulls together a group he calls the [Inaudible]. You know, or the [Inaudible]. He writes ten dances about them. But the band of the people of David who are going to fight the Goliaths who are just, you know, writing this crappy music. And then identifying the people who are writing great music, which in Schuman's case, Robert Schuman, or Schuman, Copland, he has a famous review of Copland and another famous one about Johannes Brahms. So some of these people have the right idea. But there's all this fence keeping, gate keeping that goes on that composers try to get in with the right person. That's one of the things I see in this Diamond correspondence periodically. Are people writing to him because they really like his music? Or do they write to him because they think he has the leverage to catapult them to the next place they want to go? I've seen some of both in here. So does that, Julia, get to your question? I'm not sure I answered it quite the way you asked it. Okay, thank you. I want to thank you all for coming this afternoon. My understanding is that those of you who brave enough to unmask, you can have drinks and goodies. I'll meet you back there. Thank you, again, for coming. [ Applause ]