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[0:00] Paul Lazarus: Hi, this is Paul Lazarus. In the 1980s, I produced and hosted a radio series called Anything Goes, a celebration of the American musical theater. Now the Broadway Podcast Network is bringing back these shows. This is the first of a three-part series examining the extraordinary music of composer Stanley Silverman. This program originally aired in 1980 and featured songs from notable Silverman shows like Elephant Steps, Dr. Salovey's Magic Theatre, and Hotel for Criminals.

[0:37] ♪ Musical number: "You're on the Radio" — performed by Stanley Silverman ♪

[2:44] Paul Lazarus: Good afternoon and welcome to Anything Goes. This is Paul Lazarus. The song you just heard, "You're on the Radio," is from an opera entitled Elephant Steps by Richard Foreman and my guest today on Anything Goes, composer Stanley Silverman. Today we'll concentrate on early pieces, specifically three collaborations with writer-director Richard Foreman: Elephant Steps, Dr. C'est La Vie's Magic Theater, and Hotel for Criminals. Join us for the next hour and a half as Anything Goes examines the extraordinary work of composer Stanley Silverman.

[3:21] Paul Lazarus: I guess what I'm looking for is to figure out what makes someone like you become a composer.

[3:26] Stanley Silverman: Well, I think I was born in the Bronx, in the northern Bronx, which was an interesting area because a lot of the either Social Democrats or Mensheviks or Trotskyists settled there, and it was a very interesting area also because I think it has the first amalgamated housing. It was a big kind of union Russian-Jewish climate there. Now, there was no music in my family. Nobody played anything. I think my mother played a little piano. I remember a player piano when I was very young in the house, but that was converted into my father's desk before I was about five. So I would say that the sense of being a musician was never really laid on my head except for maybe the general atmosphere. I can remember certain things, which is that my mother used to take me to shows and plays and various world's fairs and things that would...

[4:26] Stanley Silverman: To musicals?

[4:27] Paul Lazarus: Yeah, to musicals. Early Kurt Weill musicals, I'd be about five or six, and I think I was taken to One Touch of Venus. And also I do remember the Porgy and Bess revival. I was about four. I didn't see it, but that had set off during the 40s, during the war, the big, as I can read about it now, the big Gershwin revival because that particular piece, as everyone knows, was condemned fairly universally when it was first produced in the mid-30s, but made a spectacular comeback in the early 40s and got a lot of airplay on the radio. So Porgy and Bess was all over my childhood. Then I would say that my mother was a foreign film buff, and in the Bronx was this foreign film theater called the Ascot, and she used to take me to see at times the then new Eisenstein films like the latter part of Ivan, and she took me to all of those.

So I remember also as a child just blurry images of these crazed Russians and Teutons racing across various battlefields to Prokofiev's music. There is nothing in my music that doesn't deal with that right now, so I would have to say that that was fairly much the forceful introduction to music in my life because, as I say, I still find that in my music now.

[6:17] Stanley Silverman: I pick a little up and I lay a little down and I get along somehow. I get along somehow, yes, I get along somehow.

[6:34] Paul Lazarus: You don't play piano, you play guitar, isn't that correct?

[6:37] Stanley Silverman: I can't play piano up to the point that it's almost a neurotic symptom. I don't know why. I probably have tried and struggled at a piano maybe longer than some of the pianists, but I just can't play. I was a guitarist. A classical guitarist as well. Yes.

[6:54] Paul Lazarus: Did you perform a lot with classical guitar or was just really for yourself?

[6:59] Stanley Silverman: I performed a lot largely because of, I couldn't understand, but some fluke. I think it may have to do with the fact that I was studying music actively at the same time I was studying the guitar, but independently. So I was always able to read on the guitar. It was like my keyboard harmony instrument. It would be the thing I'd struggle through Bach chorales and I learned the clefs, all the clefs, the vocal clefs as well. So I could always read very well on the guitar, which meant that in the late 50s, early 60s, when the then avant-garde and new music arrived from Europe on the shores, and also the American music that was very complex and post-serial, post-twelve tone, I got very much involved in that and was the guitar player that played all the Boulez, the Schoenberg, Webern pieces, Cagale, many cases, premieres of these works, or in the cases of the older masters, like Schoenberg, participated in first regional performances of these works that had been written in the 20s that they just couldn't put on because they didn't have a guitar player that could play it.

And that's actually how I made my career in music and everything that I've done now, all my contacts with conductors, with recording companies, publishers, all the people I seem to know now, I really can trace back to the days when I was touring with Boulez and Arthur Weisberg playing in California and the Monday evening concerts with the various, as I say, Schoenberg pieces.

[8:46] Paul Lazarus: What were your early compositions like?

[8:46] Stanley Silverman: I didn't compose at first. Let's go back for a second because there is something that I suppose comes to mind, because I never really had a formal musical family training and did have this, as I say, year and a half, two years of guitar lessons. I have to say that as a child, my parents and my father especially, every Saturday would take me to a live stage show to see the big bands and the big entertainers at the Capitol, the Paramount, the Roxy. I remember even seeing the Boston Symphony once during a war relief, playing all Soviet composers, Kuzovitsky and then followed by some pop singer, Dick Hames kind of thing. So I used to see these things. I was enamored. I loved them, plus seeing the movies.

Then my father would take me for my birthday as a child to nightclubs to see people like Louis Armstrong. Then in the summers, we would go to the Catskills where I used to see these live entertainers. I worshipped them, people like Jerry Lewis. So it always, always was on my mind to be in show business.

[10:08] Stanley Silverman: So that was like the first thing. Now the only tool I had really was the guitar. There was a time when I was trying to be a stand-up comic. I mean as a child I would get up and bore relatives and then because my parents... Did you ever do that publicly? Oh sure. My parents were seasoned guests at Brown's Hotel and to humor me they would put me on maybe on a Wednesday when it was quiet and I'd get up in front of these 800 Jews and try and make them laugh and do low-down humor. Then at high school, the high school performing arts, I used to emcee the G.O. shows, which were these afternoon shows, similar to film fame. It's true that Lunchtime Havoc with people pounding was a little... It was correct in that... Well the difference being that we used to have organized lunchtime shows and I used to host them and emcee them and stand up there and do a 20-minute thing where I would attempt to crack up my colleagues in the school.

It never entered my mind to compose except I think the senior show at the high school performing arts. I believe I was a junior but it was a senior show that Michael Kahn was directing and he asked me if I would write the score and I sat down and wrote some very, very bad popular songs. To get into the high school performing arts, I had played a guitar concerto so I think at that point my classical chops were coming up but I never really reconciled classical music with something you would write. I would say that in high school and even as an undergraduate in college, I was very interested in Stravinsky and Prokofiev and Russian music and Rodgers and Hart. Not Rodgers and Hammerstein, I found them soupy, you know, syrupy at that time.

[12:03] ♪ Musical number: "Poor Boy" — performed by Barry Primus, Robert Schley, and Denise de la Pena ♪

[14:25] Stanley Silverman: You heard two songs from Mr. Silverman's score to Dr. Selavy's Magic Theatre. Barry Primus performed I Live By My Wits, and then Poor Boy was sung by Barry Primus, Robert Schley, and Denise de la Pena. Poor Boy with lyrics and music by Mr. Silverman. Now back to a pre-recorded interview with composer Stanley Silverman. So what actually got you into theatre? Well, I think first of all, so much in anybody's career is based on accident. I would say that one thing that was very important in my background was the fact that all, for some reason, during my childhood when my mother would take me to see these films, you have to understand that my favorite films were Eisenstein films and Cocteau films, like Beauty and the Beast.

I mean, as a child, these were my, you know. So again, you can't really put all that together at a time when the society isn't dealing with it, or your peers or even your school is. So let's just hold that on the side for a minute, because the next thing I remember in college when I decided to go on to graduate school, I met Leon Kirchner. I talked to him about going on to Mills College and studying with him, and that I was interested in theatre. He said, well, you should really study Stravinskyist theatre, and then you can do whatever the hell you want. If you want to write Rodgers and Hart shows, fine, but it would be my responsibility to see that you had the most incredibly formal theatre kind of education.

And he said, I mean, this theatre in the Symphony and Three Movements, this theatre in Agon, have you gone to see Balanchine? Have you gone to see any of that work? I mean, this is stuff that has a direct relationship to West Side Story and the kind of pieces that you seem to talk about that you like. So I went out to Mills College, and Millot was there teaching, and I would talk to Millot about Cocteau and about all these wonderful French films that I'd seen. And again, this is hard to believe, but in high school and college, all by myself, I would seek out and go to Bresson films and Hans Richter films, because it was in a way picking out what my mother would instinctively, this kind of Russian Jewish housewife, would just go because she would see either passion or fantasy in these films that she wouldn't see so much in American films of that period.

I got very much interested in theatre and music really through French films throughout the 50s, older films that I saw in the 50s. And when I went to school in California at Berkeley, they would show every week a Bresson film or these kind of things. So I got hooked really through Millot into the kind of theatre that I was interested in, and was, if I can tell you that my favourite play at the time was a thing called The Marriage at the Eiffel Tower, which is absurd. I mean, it was written by Cocteau and had music by Millot and Onaker and all those people, and then began to get a terrifically influenced by what was still then, and I'm afraid has pretty much died out by now, the tremendous influence in California that Stravinsky, Schoenberg and all the immigrants had on the West Coast, including theatre, you know, began to read Werfel, began to ask all kinds of questions about what life must have been like with Brecht in L.A. when he was there, got to meet Schoenberg's widow, got to meet through Kirchner all kinds of characters, you know, Leonard Stein, people that were involved with Schoenberg and Eisler and Charles Lawton, people that would talk about the premiere of Galileo, and this was the world that I wanted to be part of. I had no particular relationship to Broadway, had no feel for Broadway, still have a little trouble with that.

[18:29] ♪ Musical number: "Streets of Berlin" — performed by Stanley Silverman ♪

[20:16] Stanley Silverman: Dennis Cooley performing "Streets of Berlin," a song written for the play *Bent*, with lyrics by author Martin Sherman and music by my guest today on *Anything Goes*, composer Stanley Silverman.

[20:42] Stanley Silverman: Does that take us up into theatre, though? Yeah. Well, one of the things is, in California, the Actors Workshop was then run by Jules Irving and Herbert Blau. At the time, I was at Mills College. Ironically, I think I had met them at the Brussels Fair. I had a college jazz band that won a contest, and we were there at the same time they were there, doing *Godot*, *Waiting for Godot*. Believe it or not, I was at the Brussels Fair, but I was very young. But in any event, the issue of theatre, working in theatre, came about specifically because after Mills, when I came back to the East Coast, I was teaching at Tanglewood in the summer, just writing music. I had, as a guitar player, made the plunge into the new music world and began to write, quote, new music.

I was totally involved in this sort of Boulez, Eliot Carter, Milton Babbitt, Kirchner world, loving it, loving the personalities, just thinking it was exactly what I wanted to be. I got to be an assistant to Lucas Voss. Things were quite good, but in 1965, Blau and Irving were appointed the directors of the new Lincoln Center Repertory Theatre. When they came East, it was suggested that since I had some relationship with them from the West, that they needed an East Coast musician to be both the musical director for the theatre and, coincidentally, the union-appointed house contractor for that very theatre, somebody that both the union and the management would agree to. It didn't have to be the same person, but in a way it saved a salary.

[22:18] Stanley Silverman: I want to go to your work now and start off with *Elephant Steps*, which was in 1968. First we should talk about really is your getting to know Richard Foreman, who is really your primary collaborator. How did that come about?

[22:32] Stanley Silverman: Oh, well, again, that's easier than it sounds. My then-wife, Mary, formerly Mary Delson, was a college roommate of Richard's then-wife, Amy Talbott, an actress. I had known Richard ever since we were married. He was, at that time, just breaking away from writing more conventional plays. He had an agent. He was writing Arthur Miller-type dramas and getting them optioned. There'd be noise every once in a while that they'd be produced with mainstream actors and directors. He certainly wasn't directing at that time. We used to see him a lot, and that's how I met him. We're talking about somebody I'd spent maybe 15, 20 social evenings with, but never really talked about working with.

[23:24] Stanley Silverman: How did *Elephant Steps* come about then, which is your first piece together, isn't it?

[23:27] Stanley Silverman: Yeah. Well, it's also really my first, I suppose, theatre piece, opera kind of piece. I was writing music at the Beaumont, incidental music for plays. At that point, my serious composition was my serious composition. I had no theatricality and wasn't about theatre. In fact, I really totally resented at that time that electric circus kind of music theatre that was so prevalent in music, because I was a really purist in terms of what I thought music should be. I hated the idea of slide shows or electronic soup and actors coming out in masks and speaking lines, or rather the musicians talking and redoing these various myths for a percussionist, an oboist, plus electronic tape, with processions and environments.

That stuff I found boring, boring, boring to death. So I would continue to write pieces that would just be played on the new music circuit. But Tanglewood commissioned me to write a music theatre work, and I was a little taken back because I wanted ... I would have preferred to, say, write a work for the orchestra, the Boston Symphony. So I talked to Richard, who was the writer I was friendliest with. He was the one writer I knew. I asked him if he had anything. I knew I didn't want to do an opera, so I didn't want to go to any kind of librettist and write a one-act opera, because I found that stuff very puny. In fact, I made sketches along those lines and threw them out myself, destroyed them. I also made a kind of freeform sketch that was not unlike the thing I described that I disliked, very arty, kind of slideshow sort of thing.

[25:18] Stanley Silverman: So anyhow, Richard wrote something and said, look, if you like it, we can do it. He had just broken from his overtly narrative style and was writing in much leaner, almost Gertrude Stein-like, repetitive cells. It was gorgeous. I mean, I read the thing and I said, well, this is terrific, but it's also very musical. It read like my favorite play, *The Marriage at the Eiffel Tower*, and it seemed like a translation. So I felt like I was almost writing ... I fantasized myself as this kind of French Dada composer. I just thought it was great, and I sat down in four months and just poured it out, just knocked it out, and loved the whole collaboration. Loved his mind and working with him, and his tremendous wit and indeed patience, because I can't say this is true for everyone, but certainly my composing takes many, many more times longer than his writing. So very often we'd get an idea, he would come up with his solution, and about weeks later I'd come back with the musical part of it.

[27:03] ♪ Musical number: "Elephants" — performed by Stanley Silverman ♪

[29:45] Stanley Silverman: You've been listening to a look at Composer Stanley Silverman, part one. *Anything Goes*, Backstage with Broadway's Best, is produced and hosted by Paul Lazarus. For more information, visit anythinggoespl.com. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to rate and follow us. Thanks for listening.