If one prefers not to copy or plagiarize someone’s else’s concepts or work, still, for the emerged frames of perceptions, which make attempts to freeze the understanding, conclusion or position, one is obliged to learn how to translate the wonders of today into positive realities for tomorrow.
About how easy it was for a young guy like me, just out of design school, to be accepted by so many much more seasoned and knowledgable persons, is still a mystery. Still, there maybe a simple conclusion, namely that the male population and general population after Word War II in Central Europe had shrunk considerably, as so many lost and listed as casualties. All countries, on the right side or not, had to face the tasks of social and cultural rehabilitation. Over night, every person became important. Everyone was needed and everyone was in the act of rebuilding. That is most likely the reason, that for a moment all prejudices were swept aside, allowing for all kinds of new associations and collaborations.
If one showed true interests in any subject, one was immediately invited and included. Looking back, my early professional life in Germany was so much more heady and exciting than my later years in the US. For instance, then it was so much easier to approach and talk to a Sidney Bechet, a luminary jazz clarinetist living in Paris. In return, he liked young people. Parisians adored him and so did visitors like me, who were surprised by the outgoing and inclusive nature of nearly all jazzmen. I loved Bechet’s sound.
With Josephine Baker, it was most likely different. American Blacks felt free in Paris and sought each other out for true support and friendship. Josephine Baker would visit Bechet, hang out for a while and then move on. When I sat at Bechet’s table, during breaks, and she would visit, I was included as if I had known her, as well him, forever. I felt “home.”
My father was a psychiatrist, born in the 19th century and growing up with Freud at a time when the University of Breslau was considered in that subject as a leading research institution. When we were expelled from Silesia, of which Breslau was the seat of the regional government, I always enjoyed his joke that few understood, when he sprung it on them. I guess, psychiatry in Germany, as well as in the rest of the whole world, was still a very unknown discipline. So, when nosy persons would inquire about his profession, he would always claim that after the many years of study at the University of Breslau, he had become a “psychopath.” The response was always a positive surprise, like “Oh my, that sounds like a really interesting career.”
I feel the same way when it comes to the different kinds of music that I enjoy. When asked about my knowledge about music, I would always preface to be a “music idiot.” I can’t read sheet music. I rarely know something about composers, conductors or leading orchestras, especially those that my father praised, and whom, as if by command, I made all efforts to ignore. I learned to enjoy “his” music, namely by Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, much later, when in the US.
My initial start in contemporary classical music is with Orff, Hindemith, Stravinski, Shostakovich, Prokofiev and many others during my design school years in Hamburg, but my real introduction comes through Oliver (Howie) Kline, a colleague at Leverett A. Peters and Associates. He came from a family of opera experts, was a good pianist, understood performance and was full of information about orchestras, conductors, composers and their students and protégés. He was part of a theater group, built his own clavichord and played it during lunch breaks, and where most people garage their cars, there was this exciting music room for two baby grand pianos. At that time, my favorite composers were Charles Ives and Béla Bartók. Bartók’s Mikrokosmos, I always wanted to translate into a dynamic typography course, because of its stages of ever increasing complexities.The Mikrokosmos consists of some hundred and fifty progressive, systemic piano exercises, each growing in complexity – perfect rationales for typographic experimentation within a system of increasing complexities, without adhesion to a specific style.
I believe that one cannot learn much from persons in one’s own discipline…other than maybe envy…or worse, the urge to copy their explorations, which, within my general framework, could be describe as “Internationalism”: not invented, but adopted and misinterpreted in the US for several decades as a style, when in reality it was linked to manifestos of several ideological world views. I always believed in the process of translating, from one artistic mode to another.
Later on, through my mentor, Robert Berkowitz at Acoustic Research in Cambridge, I learned about the work of contemporary American composers, because AR was involved in releasing a series of musical experiments , inclusive of record of the works including Milton Babbitt, Fed Dahl, Edward Dugger, Robert Erickson, Richard Hoffman, Edwin London, George Crumb, Roger Sessions, Charles Wuorinen, Stefan Wolpe, Philip Rhodes, Charles Whittenberg, Arthur Berger, Peter Westergaard and Harvey Sollberger. (I had to look up many of the names in my project notes. There was too much to rely on one’s recall.)
Ives was a tone designer of very complex tonal narratives…my kind of guy. From him I learned the concepts of “simultaneity,” namely the juxtaposition of more than one complete musical texture “occurring at the same time,” rather than in succession, which became the center of my translation lectures on the “Visual Narrative” in SMU’s Graduate Program in Visual Design. Ives’ work had been ignored in America. I was lucky that in the period between 1960 and 1970 several of his compositions were presented for the first time by the Boston Symphony. My colleague, Oliver Kline made me aware of Ives’ work.
I was always surprised, especially by my MIT colleagues, whose work expired strongly to represent Minimalism, that none showed interests in cutting edge contemporary music. The same was true about literature. In all the years, surrounded by well known designers, at SMU/UmassD Howard Windham’s interests in contemporary literature stood out. The MIT people loved opera, but only the Italian pieces, as well as in literature, through which they enjoyed the works by Joseph Conrad, Kipling and the Irish, like Brendan Behan, Seán O‘Casey, Liam O‘Flaherty, Dylan Thomas. They seemed to stay away from Joyce and Beckett.
For whatever reasons, and I am not sure who set this in motion in my mind, that all arts are tied to an epoch, during which significant metaphors are used to produce works in music, visual arts, dance and literature. Persons that want to be known as artists must invest in that total world. I would add to that the visceral modes of expression of the various jazz and blues contributions, but also Cajun music and any vital indigenous folk expression like Hip-hop and Rap.