Aspen Summer Music

During my senior year of high school, our school band filled a school bus and headed to Grand Junction, in western Colorado, for a band tournament. Professional judges graded us based on a piece of music we had rehearsed, then gave us a musical score that was unknown to us, and we had to play it sight unseen. Basalt High School was a very small school. Although they had been consolidated with Carbondale, the two schools had just separated. In my senior class, seven students had started together in kindergarten. One student joined in first grade, and I joined in my junior year while the school was consolidated.

By the time we got to the band tournament, there were a grand total of 51 students in grades nine through 12. Of those 51, two of us had any musical training … me on the clarinet, and my freshman brother on tuba, French horn, and sometimes trumpet. There were perhaps fifteen of us in the school band. Our prepared piece was probably out of tune and pretty elementary. Whatever it was, it was forgettable. For our cold reading, the only thing the band teacher could convey was the basic four/four rhythm. She stood like a metronome in front of us, her baton repetitiously slicing the air in front of her. Most of us got the first note. By the end of the first line of music, my brother and I were the only two still playing. He did mostly oompah’s, and I occasionally had bit of melody, but just as often I would be playing accompaniment to the oompahs. We played to the bitter end, and on the last upbeat, the two of us ended together. It took the teacher a few beats to realize that we’d reached the end of the song. Needless to say, we did not get a good overall score. The only good thing … it has provided many laughs over the years.

I did study clarinet from the age of ten, which translates to about five years of lessons. My teacher, Mr. Pastorini was clarinetist with the Denver symphony. He didn’t have to teach me to read music, since I’d taken piano lessons at some point, but at least he trained me so that I was good enough to make it into the Colorado High School All-Star Band, even if I was about 12^th chair among the second clarinets. I was a long way from being good, with my primary weakness being an inability to translate notes into rhythm. But I enjoyed good music, so I didn’t hesitate when I was offered a summer job working at the Aspen Music Festival soon after graduating from high school.

Aspen was just a little bit different from the modern day elite resort. Today, you walk down pedestrian malls and hear musical prodigies playing on the street corners or entertaining diners in restaurants so that they musicians could earn a meal to supplement their scholarships. Today, the music festival takes place in a permanent tent-like structure held taughtly in place with high-tension cables, and a state-of-the-art chamber music performing center stands next door. When an artist such as YoYo Ma is performing, overflow audiences sit on the lawn outside, enjoying the late afternoon sunshine. But in the early ‘60s, the streets were unpaved for the most part, the town was a mixture of emerging modern architecture and 19^th Century Sears Roebuck Victorian, and every summer, basque sheepherders moved their flocks through town. Half the town could care less that there was a world-class music festival, an institute for the study of physics, or a center for humanistic studies that brought in business and industry leaders from around America.  

At the music festival campus, it turned out I was hired to fill a position that had previously belonged to Billy Marolt, who was on the U.S. Olympic ski team, so I assume he was either training at the development camp in Colorado Springs, or skiing in South America during their winter season, which fell in the summer months. The point is, he was an athlete. Aside from being able to tolerate the music, athleticism was pretty much a prerequisite for the job of stagehand. The other stagehand, M.J. Elisha later became the ski coach at the University of Colorado.

Why did we have to be athletic? Our first task was to erect a customized circus-sized big top tent that fit over the amphitheater. The large music tent was one of the hallmarks of the Aspen Music Festival, but it had to be maintained. We had to tighten ropes as needed, raise or lower the side flaps to create ventilation, and we had to shinny up the side ropes and scamper over the canvas roof with a needle and thread and patches in order to seal leaks. When a small tear appeared in the canvas, we would don a large palm-sized thimble, stitch the damaged area of canvas, then glue a canvas patch over the stitches.

Other duties included keeping the backstage area tidy, setting up the stage for rehearsals, escorting the musicians onto the stage, moving large instruments such as pianos and harps for rehearsals and during concerts (and all over the town of Aspen, if the principal musicians needed a piano to rehearse in their homes), and generally providing support for all of the back-stage activities. During concerts, we were occasionally needed in the front of the house, where several hundred concert goers sat on wooden benches. If the wind came up, the canvas could balloon and lift the tree-sized poles that provided the basic framework for the tent, or tent flaps would need raising or lowering to keep the tent from being too stuffy or too breezy. And occasionally we were needed on stage during a concert for non-musical duties.

We also had to move a concert grand Steinway piano onto the stage of the Wheeler Opera House. The interior stairs were too tight to get the piano around corners, so we had to go up the fire escape, a narrow flight of steel stairs that clung to external red brick wall and rose from the ground to the third floor of the Victorian-era opera house that had seen entertainers ranging from Oscar Wilde to opera diva Jenny Tourel, and would soon see the likes of John Denver, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, and Cher.

Even before the music students arrived, we hosted the Aspen Design Conference in the amphitheater. I got to hear the likes of Buckminster Fuller and John Cage speak. But it was the music that made that a remarkable summer job.

There is a memorable story for every person I met that summer. The music festival got underway unofficially when the students showed up and started their studies with the early-arriving faculty members. The maestro, Walter Susskind had remarried shortly before arriving in Aspen, and many of the musicians were waiting, curious to see his new bride. When Susskind arrived for his first orchestra rehearsal with a flourish of bravado, he had an aloof supermodel of a woman on his arm. Everyone deferred to her as the maestro’s new wife, casting knowing winks at one another, and for a week she sat in front of the stage through every rehearsal. During the second week, following the first Sunday concert, she disappeared and later that week was replaced by a much plainer and more sociable woman who was indeed his new wife. I think I remember her disappearing after about a week, never to be seen again. I never did get to officially say as much as a “hello” to Susskind, but I was hidden backstage and opening and closing the door for all of his entrances and encores. He always showed up for concerts in a fresh tuxedo and smelling very heavily of cologne and deodorant. By the time he came off stage at the end of the concert, he must have been ten pounds lighter, and his tuxedo was badly in need of a trip to the cleaner. Lady’s man or not, he gained my respect. You have to be in great physical condition to put your whole being into conducting an orchestra … it is far more than just waving a stick and making dramatic motions in front of a few hundred people!

Many musicians came through the backstage area of the amphitheater, and if they were early or if they hung around after rehearsal, sometimes they would chat. That is how I got to know world-class musicians such as harpist Marcella deCray, bassist Steward Sanky, and the delightful Szymon Goldberg and Lillian Fuchs. The most surprising musician, to me, was the British countertenor Alfred Deller. I didn’t really know what a countertenor voice sounded like, but I was told in advance only that it is higher than tenor. So that is what I was expecting when Deller showed up for a rehearsal one morning. As I remember him, he was rather a large man with a goatee, and rather soft-spoken, although he looked a bit gruff. At first, our encounter was all business. He wanted to go through the stage door and onto the stage, where we had a piano set up for the rehearsal. Once the piano was in place, my fellow stagehand MJ Elisha took off for a couple of hours because we had a light schedule. He had taken up skydiving and wanted to get in a quick jump during the lunch hour. So I escorted Deller to the stage, where he met his accompanist, and I excused myself to head backstage. Five minutes later, the piano accompaniment started, and then I heard a soprano voice ring out. Who was that? There had been nobody else in the amphitheater. I hurried back to the stage door and looked out. The soprano voice was coming from Alfred Deller himself. And so, to my amazement, I learned that a countertenor is essentially a soprano voice sung by a man. In this case, a gruff-looking bear of a man.

When the rehearsal was over, it was lunch time. I was sitting on a wooden bench behind the music tent and was busily unpacking my brown paper bag lunch when Deller came wandering out by himself, looking lost.

“How do I get back into town to get some lunch?” he asked.

Someone had screwed up the logistics, and it was close to a mile into the downtown part of Aspen. Deller was, as I said, a large man and I honestly think the mile walk at 8000 feet altitude might have been too much for him. And I couldn’t offer him a ride in the Music Associates pickup truck because I was the only staff member around at the time, with the responsibility of keeping thousands of dollars of musical instruments safe, among other tasks. So I did what I had to. I offered him half my lunch, which he gladly accepted. Just as he sat down on the bench, I spied MJ’s jump plane entering the jump zone, which was over the Aspen golf course, at the time just a local 9-hole glorified meadow. When Deller asked where MJ was, I pointed to the plane.

“Keep an eye on that plane. Just watch,” I said.

And right on cue, MJ jumped from the plane spreadeagled and looking like a very small ant against the blazing blue sky as did a long freefall before finally opening his chute a respectable distance from the ground. That day, I learned what a countertenor was, and shared my lunch with Alfred Deller, who had the surprise of his life watching a man leap out of an airplane in midflight, on purpose.

Probably the most memorable concert of the summer was a birthday celebration. One of the emeritus piano faculty members was Rosina Levine, who was at that time most famous for having been Van Cliburn’s piano instructor. She had an aura of greatness about her. I remember one day we were asked to allow a small elite group to tour the backstage area. The elite group was mostly Gordon Hardy, the dean of the music school, and a young piano prodigy, sixteen year old Andre Watts, who was in part there just to meet Rosina Levine. Andre Watts was there and gone like a shadow, only to emerge as a concert pianist a few years later. Anyway, back to Rosina Levine. Rumor had it that she had been Rachmaninov’s lover decades earlier, which added poignancy to the upcoming concert date for her birthday, which I believe was her 80^th. She was going to play a Rachmaninov piano concerto. We moved a small grand piano into the living room of the ornate Victorian house on Main Street where she was staying for the summer, and once the piano was suitably set up and Kurt Oppens showed up to tune it, we left without hearing a note. Rosina Levine had peeked into the room to say hello, but we mostly dealt with her personal assistant. It had the air of visiting royalty.

On the day of the concert, I still had not heard Rosina Levine play a note. When I saw her backstage, her hands looked arthritic, and I wondered what sort of a disastrous concert was about to unfold. We set up two extra chairs by the concert grand near the front of the stage … one chair for a page turner so she could follow the score, if necessary. The other chair went behind the piano bench so that Rosina’s personal assistant could keep her comfortable, putting a shawl across her shoulder if the afternoon wind and rain cooled things off too much. When it was time for concert, I had the honor of escorting her out onto the stage. Once she stood beside the piano, I quietly retreated backstage and shut the door and prepared to listen.

What I heard left me astounded. If Rosina Levine had any arthritis in her hands, it melted as soon as she sat in front of the orchestra and the audience. To this day, I have never heard Rachmaninov played so memorably. She channeled his genius and delivered it to the audience. I only wish I could have watched from the front of the music tent. She did not play the game of milking curtain calls out of the audience. She did not need to. From where she sat in front of the audience, she could absorb every second of a ten-minute ovation.

Being backstage meant more than just concerts, though. I got to listen in on master classes that music students paid a fortune to attend. Grant Johansson on piano. Zara Nelsova on the cello. Sydney Harth on the violin. Students as young as six years old playing Mozart (Twinkle Twinkle Little Star) and students in their teens preparing to launch careers as performing musicians. It was easy to imagine them chatting backstage with a young stagehand in a few years.

I returned to hear other concerts in later years and found that some of my greatest love for music came from the delight that performers got out of the audience’s response. I went to the free children’s concert in the old Aspen HS gymnasium, and among the featured performers were two girls, Midori and Sarah Chang (I believe at the time about eleven and eight years old, respectively). Another time, after a permanent performance hall had been opened near the site of the old circus tent, I went to an evening of NPR’s “Performance Today,” hosted by my (probably very remotely related) namesake Fred Child. It was the 70^th birthday of that season’s maestro, David Zinman. Two young piano prodigies, Peng Peng Gong and Conrad Tao (one Chinese, the other Chinese American) performed their own composition, a Happy Birthday theme and variations in the style of Mozart and Strauss, on a pair of facing grand pianos. The next day, next door in the new permanent amphitheater structure, I watched a rehearsal with Yoyo Ma performing a new cello concerto with members of the student orchestra. The difference now, though, I was able to sit in the front of the stage and watch the faces of the performers as they explored the nuances of the music and lit up the audience.