The Chutzpah of an Eighteen-year Old

Here I announce without comment that I’m about to teach classes in music appreciation.

Dec. 1, 1945

Hello, youall!

   I was waiting for at least something to happen when I wrote again – so with great efforts, I made something happen.

   So listen:

      First of all – my permanent detail is now working in the Educational Services Office, telling boys to take courses help them fill out blanks & doing a little slow-speed typing. That is not however why the Lieutenant hired me. First of all: On Wednesday evening I teach my first class in Music Appreciation featuring especially Tristan & Ring – Liszt & Wagner) I will enjoy that. The chances are, that I get the course until I leave O.G.U. (The present teacher – a professional – leaves Tuesday.) Also the Lieuy is interested in German –  & I expect to do some work in that. Perhaps I’ll be temporarily assigned to him – but no one knows a thing yet. Of course the Music Job is what I really want & I’m afraid, that a regular musician might take charge. The course is outlined & is just up my alley – I could do it very well. Anyway it’s a nice change.

   Just now I finished developing my first film – can’t tell yet how they came out – but tomorrow I’ll print them. I’m at the Chicago S.M.C. [?] where the man in charge helped me a lot.

   I’ll have to stop now, but more tomorrow –

                        Solong 

                                    Rudy

   Today, seventy years later, I have only a smudgy recollection of my teaching music appreciation—Tristan and the Ring no less!—in my temporary Navy home, just before being shipped off to China. I am actually amazed by the tone of the letter that takes it utterly for granted that I have the ability to take on this pedagogic task, though I had zero experience in teaching anything, not to mention teaching a subject matter I had never studied. Yes, I was what is called a music lover, and a passionate one; yes, besides listening to music and singing in choruses all my life--my main encounters with that art—I did some reading about music while in high school, even dipping into Ernest Newman’s biography of Richard Wagner, though not remotely did I plow through its four volumes.

   I read more as time went on, but never systematically and sat in on a couple of summer session courses at Columbia. But finding the required Music Humanities course beneath my dignity (probably wrongly so), I took the test that let me skip it. I’ve also written some about music, most notably for cd liners, one of which was actually praised in a review of Ellie’s Mozart and Brahms quintets disc. Plus a great many miscellaneous pieces and numerous op eds on various music topics for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. (My favorite: http://www.trumpetmaster.com/vb/f145/sound-american-music-36435.html) For a while I reviewed concerts for Pittsburgh's WQED, one review phoned in from Tel Aviv when I went with the Pittsburgh Symphony to Israel. 

   The biggest thing I have tackled is a major analytic piece on the multiple attractions of music, but it remains uncompleted somewhere in my computer. It is not yet finished, because, eschewing technical language, which both reveals and hides, I find writing about music immensely difficult. I note without elaboration that just our vocabulary is vastly richer about things seen than pertaining to what is heard.

   All my life I have been friends with musicians, hung out with them, and became more formally involved, such as holding various posts at Chamber Music Chicago and serving for a decade or so on the board of the Pittsburgh Symphony. I did not become a professional musician, but I certainly spent a lifetime nibbling at the edges of that world.  It will not surprise the reader that my computer also harbors various sketches toward an essay about what it is to be an amateur.