city, to study with someone a great deal more pretentious and
more expensive than Mrs. Smith. But then I tried to master
Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1, for which I had developed a somewhat warped passion, and could not. That failure told me that I could not be a musician, although I continued
to study music in col ege.
The problem with that part of my musical education was
that I stopped playing piano, and Bennington, the college I
went to, insisted that one play an instrument. I didn’t like my
piano teacher, and I wasn’t going to play or spend one minute
of one day with him hovering over my shoulder and condemning me with a baronial English that left my prior teachers in my mind as plain-speaking people. I loved the theory classes. Mine was with the composer Vivian fine. The first
assignment, which was lovely, was to write a piece for salt and
pepper shakers. I wrote music away from the piano for the
piano, but after the first piano lesson I never deigned to darken
the piano teacher’s doorway again. At the end of the year, this
strategy of noncompliance turned out to be the equivalent of
not attending physical education in high school: you couldn’t
2
graduate without having done the awful crap. When my
adviser, also a musician but never a teacher of music to me,
asked me why I hadn’t shown up for any of the piano
lessons, I felt awkward and stupid but I gave him an honest
answer: “I don’t like the asshole. ” My adviser smiled with
one of his this-is-too-good-to-be-true looks - he was amused
- and said he’d take care of it. He must have, or I would not
have passed.
My adviser, the composer Louis Callabro, taught me a lot
about music, but there was always a kind of cross-fertilization
- I’d bring the poems, the short stories, every now and then a
novel. Lou was a drunkard, much more his style than being
an alcoholic. I had met him without knowing it on first
ar iving at Bennington. I loved the old music building and
sort of haunted it. He came out of his studio, pissing drunk,
stared at me, and said, “Never sleep with a man if you want
to be his friend. ” I adored the guy. Eventually I’d show him
my music and he’d show me his short stories. It was a new
version of I’l -show-you-mine-if-you-show-me-yours. I later
understood that the all-girl Bennington’s expectation was that
the girl, the woman, any female student, should learn how to
be the mistress of an artist, not the artist herself: this in the
college that was the early home of Martha Graham. The
equality between Lou and myself, our mutual recognition,
was no part of the school’s agenda. This is not to suggest that
Lou did not screw his students: he did; they al did. I always
