Maverick Maestro

Maurice Peress

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781315478951
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Maurice Peress leads an unusual American musical life. Born to a Baghdadian father and Polish mother, his first music was Arabic and Yiddish songs. He grew up in New York's Washington Heights, became a busy dance band and symphonic trumpeter, and was drafted towards the end of the Korean conflict, landing him in a newly integrated Negro Regimental Band. In this memoir, he shares what he learned from an enormous range of American works and musicians. In his first book, Peress explored America's music and its African American roots. A musical mission emerges, a lifelong commitment to "give concerts that reconstruct delicious mixed marriages of music, black and white, Jazz and classical, folk and concert, Native American and European; works that bring people together, that urge us to love one another."

1
Beginnings

How to portray the events of my formative years? They can be trotted out in neat linear fashion, but in fact they overlap in complex ways. What remains is brain-like, a glob of experiences that cannot simply be peeled away layer by layer, but is ever expanding and contracting, exuding ideas and talents and contradictions that have carried me through life, that carry me still.

There are my immigrant parents from long-separated Judaic worlds making a new life in America. There is music, deeply held in my dad’s heart and passed on to me. And my happy time of discovery in the 1930s with radio, science, music, and sports. And the family store, our face before the world, until it all was interrupted by war and the Holocaust that swallowed up my mother’s family and dislodged my dad’s. There was above all a sense of justice unfulfilled, and a mission emerged: find a way to use music to serve the greater good.

My split world was in evidence from the very beginning, in my naming. Both my grandfathers were named after the Old Testament patriarch Moses—Dad’s dad was Moshi and Mom’s dad, Moshe. Moshi died just before my birth. And in the ancient tradition of so many cultures for perpetuating a grand old name through the generations, Dad wanted his firstborn to be named Moshi Heskel-Ezra Peress, a patronymic embracing four generations. There was a time when names were strung out even longer. The sons and grandsons of our “Ur” ancestor, a man named Joseph Horesh—possibly Hirsch, who left Vienna for Baghdad ca. 1710, a name that still appeared on the Turkish tax list of 1892—dropped all but their given names, one of them being the first Peres, a biblical name from Genesis 38:27.

Mother objected. Following her Ashkenazi tradition she believed it would be bad luck to name me Moshi while her father lived. And the standoff continued until my eighth day of life, March 26, 1930, when the mohel, the ritual circumciser, suggested a compromise Hebrew name, Menasha. They had already agreed that my American name would be Maurice. One of several explanations to myself for my father’s distancing himself from me is the disappointment and shame he must have felt not being able to honor his late father through his firstborn son. As my psychiatrist later pointed out, we cannot compare Moses with Menasha, a minor member of one of the twelve tribes.

We leap ahead four decades to start our story on September 8, 1971, the musical high point of my life, conducting the world premiere of Leonard Bernstein’s Mass for the inauguration of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC.

In the Opera House center box sits my wife, Gloria Vando; Rose Kennedy; and the composer. I am in the pit.

With one stroke of his guitar, Allen Titus, the Celebrant, wipes away the cacophonous Kyries pouring out of speakers from the four corners of the Opera House. “Sing God a simple song,” he implores. The orchestra enters—a whisper. We are aloft, releasing the essence imprisoned in cold printed notes, alive in a universe of sound. I keep the whole quivering mass flowing together, responding instantly to any slight discoordination, pressing into or stretching climaxes, lingering on edges of calm … as if guiding my child safely and gratifyingly through the waved sea for the first time. I am also instinctively aware of the audience: the absolute silence and shallow breathing when they are locked onto the lifeline of drama and sound, urging us on, or, God forbid, when they are restless and we have to win them back.

All of Bernstein’s finales are bigger-than-life love-ins, paeans to brotherhood, to the possibility of a better world to come. As the last amen of the chorale “Bless This House and All Who Gather Here,” and Lenny’s voice, a benediction, “Go in Peace,” fade away, a rainbow of choristers and clarinetists, drummers and dancers, floods the stage; the audience, sharing the grief of a cast now in tears, is on their feet. This congregation, this mass of people, finds itself waking up in the House of John F. Kennedy. In seconds I am onstage for bows. Lenny by my side whispers, “You can throw out your CV.” And yes, a wider if curvy career road did lie before me, but I am mostly joyous with the accomplishment of bringing off a work so huge and complex … and filled with wonder about the affect of Mass. Did Bernstein’s message, our message, reach into the audience? Will the critics love us? Will this House sing forever? (See photographs 1 and 2.)

Music started with my dad, Heskel-Ezra Moshi Peress, born in Baghdad (date unknown, ca. 1902) into a large family of traders that can be traced back to the seventeenth century. “What did Grandpa Moshi do?” I asked. “He went to the souk every morning and bought and sold, mostly tobacco.” After graduation from Alliance Israelite, one of several schools established by French intellectuals throughout the Middle East to educate Jewish men and women in the modern ways of Europe—the Babylonian Rabbinate were not happy—my dad-to-be had learned fluent French, Arabic, and Hebrew, and could scribe a formal letter in Victorian English. I have his English copybook, written in flowery script with a dip pen point and ink. In addition to proverbs and lists of a vocabulary useful in commerce, the copybook contains sample letters, among them a formal invitation: “Dear Captain read [sic], Will you favour Mrs. Knight and myself with your company at dinner on Monday next at six o’clock. We expect General Rawley and his wife, and think you may like to make their acquaintance. Believe me … yours truly.”

Dad found work as a clerk under the British, who ruled this slice of the former Ottoman Empire through their Mesopotamian Mandate, a prize of World War I. The “land between the rivers” now became Iraq. Dad drove a car throughout the countryside inspecting farms and writing reports on their condition. He must have been aware of the roiling tensions between the British and the Hashemite Muslims. Dad did tell me that once the new Arab ruler, King Faisal, took charge, non-Muslim clerks were slowly being let go, so it was just a matter of time before he might be as well.

By all reports he was happy in Iraq. He learned to play oud—the same soft-strumming l’ud, or lute, that the returning Crusaders brought back to Spain and France in the fifteenth century—and sang Arabic songs with unusual feeling and passion that placed him at the center of family parties, challys, like the ones I grew up with. He was often joined by his brother Sassoon on k’noon, a zither, and his father, Moshi, on dumbek, an hourglass drum. With his buddies (contacts with women outside the immediate family were not allowed) he swam the Tigris after flood season and picnicked on the newly verdant islands as they resurfaced. His prospects were few. He could follow the traditional family ways and wait his turn for an arranged marriage, with an accompanying dowry sufficient to support a business; or he could be brave and make a new life … in America. He quietly applied for a visa just as the US Immigration Act of 1924 affixed a limit of one hundred visas per year for Iraqi citizens. He waited patiently, and in the summer of 1926, visa in hand, he told his family of his plans. There was much wailing and weeping, and promises were made—he would of course return for a proper marriage. By car and train and ferry he traveled through Aleppo, Alexandria, Bari, and to Cherbourg, where H. M. Peress, second-class passenger #259, boarded the USS Leviathan on August 10, 1926, and six days later landed at New York’s Pier 86, at the foot of West 46th Street.

Dad found work behind the counter in linen shops owned by fellow Arabic-speakers. In 1927 he was selling hosiery in the Bronx when in walked Elka (Elsie) Frimit Tiger to buy a pair of silk hose. Elsie at age twenty-three was a tall, slender, full-figured beauty. (See photograph 3.) She spoke Yiddish and broken English. Elsie and her sister Lena had emigrated from a town near Warsaw four years earlier and lived in a walkup apartment on nearby Hoe Avenue. They traveled each morning by the “elevated” to a sweatshop not far from Astor Place, where they worked as by-the-piece sewers of men’s ties. Their weekly letters back to Poland always included a two-dollar bill.

The hosiery Elsie purchased soon started to “run” (as they were designed to), and she returned to complain to the dark man behind the counter. This oft-told tale never followed through on what was done about the torn stockings, but Heskel, by now Americanized to Henry, asked her for a date. “But I only go out with Jewish boys.” Dad was prepared. From under the counter he pulled up a siddur, a Hebrew prayer book—for all I know it was the same one from Baghdad that he kept all his life and passed down to me along with his English copybook—and started to read to her in Hebrew, in an accent strange to Mom’s ears I am sure, but it was Hebrew. “Ah,” said she to herself, “he’s one of those dark Jews” she’d heard about. Mom was a movie buff. Only a year earlier a swarthy Rudolph Valentino set hearts aflutter when he appeared in the Sheik of Araby, and here was one in the flesh! They were married in June 1928, and within two years I was born.

Mother always worked. There were eleven kids in Poland, born a year or two apart as can be expected for a healthy couple that lived by the book, the Torah and Talmud. Grandpa Moshe was a bespoke tailor. The store was also their home. Once weaned and walking, the kids no longer slept with their parents in the one bedroom next to the big coal stove but moved onto one of the cutting tables. They learned to sew before they could read: handmade buttonholes, cuffs and hems, how to set in a sleeve. In America Mother and her sister Lena earned their way sewing on treadle machines.

Dad came from a middle-class Babylonian family, from the land where the Talmud had been written; again there were nine children born a year or two apart. None of Dad’s four sisters went to school. Girls were relegated to the kitchen and to raising children. His mother, Grandmama “Imy” Toba, arrived in America in her seventies and clever as she was, could only read numbers. Once I was born, Dad assumed Mom would stay at home with the baby, a strange creature he watched from afar; nor did he ever touch food except to eat it.

But as I said, Mom always worked. So this culture clash was resolved, for I have early memories of my mom alone in a small girdle and bra shop on Broadway and 171st Street. I must have been five or six. My chin did not reach the edge of the counter, but I could read numbers. I remember a customer coming in for a corset. “I wear a size 38,” she announced. “I have just what you need,” said Mama. “Why don’t you go into the fitting room and undress and I will bring it to you to try on.” I watched as Mother drew out a 34 from the shelf. I was mortified! She ran over to the Singer treadle sewing machine—bought for five dollars secondhand, to be sold decades later as an antique for fifty dollars—ripped open the garment, cut an inset out of pinkish cloth to fit, sewed it into place, and headed for the fitting room as she bit off the hanging ends of thread with her teeth. “Here, try this on.” A pull, a tug, a few more adjustments, adding (again at the trusty Singer) “a piece plush” where it cut, or a longer stocking holder. Within minutes the customer left satisfied. Mama “made the sale.” All’s well.

Two things stand out from that time of innocence: my love of music and of nature. Dad was a man of few words. He worked long hours but on Sunday mornings he made magic happen. In his slippers and robe Dad sat with his oud on a low cassock amid deeply colored flowers and pomegranates woven into our Kashan carpet. He shaved a new tip at the end of his eagle-feather pick and curled it round his dark, hairy hand. Turning one ear to listen, he carefully tuned the single wire-wound bass note and four pairs of gut strings … paused … took an extra deep breath, and began to play and sing. Mysterious-sounding Arabic words I didn’t understand mixed with the oud’s gentle rhythms. Dad was transported outside of himself, as was I, his entire being given to the music, the notes, the sound. We were risen up together, two souls joining. This was my first real music. I learned to sing the Arabic songs “S’heertu” and “Y’dunia e-egaramii” that I have since learned are songs of pain and longing (“I lie awake through the night” and “My world is in pain”). I have no doubt that my becoming a musician—rather than the engineer I went to Brooklyn Tech to become—can be traced back to this closeness with Dad and his music. (See photograph 4.)

Washington Heights in the 1930s: The clops and tinkly rattle of the horse-drawn milk wagon signaled the end of night as it pulled to a stop on the street below. Next I would hear glassy clinks as bottles of milk were placed by the door of our apartment; their thick, waxy paper tops skirted tight by a soldered wire. We were careful to save the cream that floated above the milk for Dad’s coffee. The milkman’s sounds were soon joined by a rolling, roiling racket of steel on steel that arose from the Broadway trolley tracks a half block away, reminding me how the tough boys in the neighborhood could hitch rides on the rounded back of the trolley, hanging on to god-knows-what. I suffered envious disapproval: “Wouldn’t it be grand to hitch, to be brave and reckless like the tough kids?” But already the line was drawn between the “Amsterdams” and the goody-goody kids like me who lived in the tenements west of Broadway.

Our first apartment, on the ground floor of 171st just west of Broadway, had a real icebox—I still call a refrigerator “icebox.” Every few days the iceman “cameth” shouldering a huge sparkling cube on his leather chamois rag and he ice-picked it down to size for the upper cabinet. I’d get a splinter or two to suck on. For the next few days Mother would empty melted water that collected in the under-tray into the sink as the cube got smaller and smaller.

I loved my Mickey Mouse table radio and the bigger boxy one in the living room. On WOR every afternoon at five o’clock, “Uncle Don” told stories and sang songs: “A tree in the woods, and the woods in the ground, and the green grass grew all round and round.” He would announce birthdays. And for children who were good there would be a present hidden behind the radio. On at least one March 18th I peeked in vain behind our radio hoping to find a birthday gift. There were the daily serials on WJZ and WEAF: Jack Armstrong, The Shadow, The Lone Ranger, Flash Gordon—each with musical signatures. On Saturday mornings I listened to Let’s Pretend. Around age twelve I would mail away for tickets on a Monday morning and by Wednesday or Thursday a square beige envelope would arrive with two tickets for the Saturday show. Mail, quick and dependable, was delivered twice a day. We took the A train, transferred to the D, got off at Rockefeller Center station, and climbed tall stairs directly into the glorious art deco NBC building. A half century later I would be working for Duke Ellington in that same building.

On early spring mornings I would quietly slip out of the apartment and walk the empty dawn-lit streets to a nearby miniature park in the middle of Broadway, where a few budding trees and a small plot of grass surrounded a World War I field cannon with big frozen wheels. I brought along some breadcrumbs, and if I got there early enough, I would have an empty bench and a flock of pigeons all to myself. The low-lying sun soon rose over the tenements, taking the chill out of the morning air, letting me know it was time to walk back home for breakfast and school. I started reading books about botany, and a year later at summer camp I immediately joined the Nature Club and sewed a big green felt maple leaf onto my gray sleeveless camp shirt.

In 1936 Mom delivered my brother, Herbert—Hebrew name Herzl, after Theodore Herzl, founder of Zionism. I was getting over scarlet fever and was home in bed when the door flew open and Dad rushed in all excited and ran around the house chanting, “It’s a boy, it’s a boy, it’s a boy.” And again, “It’s a boy, it’s a boy, it’s a boy.” I jumped up, danced around on the bed, and gathered up all my gold and silver metallic toys into a tin pail, little hammers and chisels, and gave them to Dad to “help pay for the baby” before he rushed out.

Window trimming week in the big Peress Shop in Washington Heights: Samples were taken from stock; robes, slips, bras; ironed, and the prices listed on paper sheets saved from empty hosiery boxes. Mr. Krisch, Dad’s longtime artistic window trimmer, would then draw the fancy price tickets with his special engraver’s pen and India ink, soon to be strategically placed in the new window on or near the garmen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue
• Chapter 1 Beginnings
• Chapter 2 A Young Musician
• Chapter 3 On My Own
• Chapter 4 Seize the Day
• Chapter 5 The New York Philharmonic
• Chapter 6 Are You Jewish?
• Chapter 7 A Music Director in Texas I
• Chapter 8 Opera and Music Theater
• Chapter 9 Composers and New Music
• Chapter 10 A Music Director in Texas II
• Chapter 11 Kansas City: The Roads Taken
• Chapter 12 The Academic Life
• Chapter 13 American Music: The Re-Creations
• Chapter 14 On the Road
• Chapter 15 The Road Ahead, The Academic Life II
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author