“Born Rome, Italy, 1950” are the very first words of your Bullet Bio, which later on refers to your life there well beyond your experience at St. Stephen’s. Before we dive into the latter, give us a brief time-line of your relationship with the city.

I had four “Rome periods” from birth to age 27. 

“Rome I”: I was born there because my art-historian father was then a fellow at the American Academy, writing his book on the architecture of Michelangelo. We returned to the San Francisco Bay area before I was 2, so I don’t have memories of that time. Now I wish I could ask my parents to give me more details on life in Rome just 5 years after WWII! 

 

“Rome II”: St. Stephen’s year, 1964-65, returning because my father was writing his book on the architecture of Andrea Palladio. 

“Rome III”: 1967-68: my gap year before college, studying classical guitar with the great maestro Gianluigi Gelmetti.

“Rome IV”: 1971-77: guitar, marriage, children, laying the foundations of my adult life.

Since then, lots of short trips back -- and this time-lapse view of Rome is actually quite reassuring, in that, despite all the tourists and cars, the essential life is still there, pulsating away even in these chaotic times. 

OK, let’s take the plunge! Tell us about your experience as a St. Stephen’s student.

I attended St. Stephen’s for just one year, 1964-65, but what a year it was! It was the year I grew a head –- not only six inches in height, but also an explosion of new gray matter inside my skull: 9th grade! Fresh man! So I was ready for this brand-new school. I remember sitting in the chapel on an early September morning listening to the powerful bass voice of founder-headmaster John Patterson proclaim, “I have one goal, and one goal only, for St. Stephen’s: to be the best school in the world”. My subsequent life of teaching in diverse schools has taught me that, in our sacred profession of education, there are many ways to be good -- but those words sounded splendid reverberating in that cavernous, sunlit room, and it sure was the best for me. Right place, right time!

Over sixty years later, I still remember so many details. The imposing stone villa with a faux-Renaissance tower. The immaculate tended garden with the stately pines on the perimeter. The white rounded stones on all the symmetrically laid-out paths. My teachers: Robert Rourke (Algebra), Emery Basford (English), Tom  Patterson (Religion), and -- most important for me --  Warren Myers (Latin and Greek). I also had two women teachers, whose names I’m sorry I don’t remember, for French and History. I don’t think their gender made the difference, rather my lower investment in the subjects. French was too easy, and I mostly remember writing silly notes to my desk mate; History could have been amazing, but we were tethered to a textbook from which I still remember an especially cringe-worthy sentence: “Then finally, the Renaissance came”.  I didn’t have to take Italian because Edward Steinberg had tutored me back in the U.S. at the beginning of our deep, sixty-year friendship. 

Classes were all lecture- and exam-based, but that suited me then.My pubescent brain was hungry for new connections, and the formulations of Algebra combined with the Latin conjugations and declensions combined to provide them. It was my first go at Latin, and, immediately recognizing how famished I was, Warren Myers stayed after school to teach me Greek as well -- no credit, no extra pay. I even went to his little apartment in Piazza Margana for tutoring on Saturdays, and sometimes we ended up in the Foro Romano deciphering inscriptions. Emery Basford taught us how to read novels without skipping the long descriptive parts, all the while lamenting the ever-shortening length of girls’ skirts and proclaiming that he didn’t want to see bare knees in the front row. The oldest of the school’s founders, he perfectly represented the WASP-y, Episcopalian ethos of the East Coast prep-school tradition.

John Patterson came from the same tradition, so every day started with chapel. We would listen to a Bible passage, sing a hymn, then kneel for the Lord’s Prayer. I balked at kneeling -- my family being what we now call Jew-ish -- so soon he called me into his office to ask me to respect the tradition, and I bowed to it. My most vivid memories of Father Patterson (that’s what everyone called him) are the solemn pronouncements he was always uttering. When some of the older kids were caught drinking wine, he called a special assembly, and recounted their sins in his booming voice, saying their names and that “they stole a bottle of wine (I still remember the downward inflection of ‘stole’ and the dramatic pause that followed), then the boys actually invaded the girls’ dorm and drank it there!”  

 Life beyond academics and chapel?

Although my parents were in Rome that year, housed in the sumptuous garden of the Villa Aurelia at the American Academy, they made the wise decision to have me board, which meant I had the company of three roommates at the rather shabby Hotel Byron, just a few minutes’ walk from the school. Across the street, a bar that served suspiciously rich green pistachio ice cream. Pasta for most dinners, then a hunk of tough bistecca. Whenever I got sick of the food, or lonely, I just took the bus up to my parents’ place. 

We had a sports program of sorts, and were bussed to a nearby stadium to run around. I was on the pitiful basketball team that lost by scores of, like, 86-4, to which I contributed generously whenever the coach let me. I joined the drama club, which  took up my proposal to do G.B. Shaw’s Arms and the Man. Because of the heavy time commitment, I didn’t try out to act, and ended up as the prompter, hiding behind an incredibly dusty velvet curtain in a very downscale theater, and having to sputter my allergic sneezes into my sleeve. But I had a secret crush on the lead actress, so it was worth it! We occasionally had dances in the dorm, and, wow, do I remember my first close dance with my sort-of-girlfriend, to the Beatles’  “Things We Said Today” -- those things stay with you forever -- then bobbing and bouncing around to “A Hard Day’s Night”!

Aah, the music! I was already a fairly proficient guitarist; an article in the European edition of Newsweek on the opening of St. Stephen’s, featured a photo of me playing the mandolin at a festive school event. Besides the Beatles, I drank in pop ululations from radios in bars and cars: Pino Donaggio’s “Io che non vivo”, Gianni Morandi’s “In ginocchio da te”, and the great Petula Clark world hit, “Ciao, ciao”, the Italian version of “Downtown”. I bought some 45s of Roman stornelli,  My favorite was “La societa’ dei magnaccioni”. I really learned romanaccio through those songs, and I daresay I still sound pretty authentic when I sing them!

Your connection with the school, and with Rome, didn’t end in 1965. What kept it alive subsequently? 

Rome sunk her sweet hooks into me that year. I returned with my family to Cambridge, where my father taught at Harvard, but after two years he convinced the headmaster of my high school to let me graduate a year early so I could return to Rome to continue my study of the classical languages with Warren Myers. So in September 1967, a month shy of my 17th birthday, I got on a Yugoslav freighter bound for Tangiers, Valencia and Genoa, along with nine or ten other passengers, with just a guitar and a funky duffel bag. Back in Rome, I settled into a tiny, damp apartment in Trastevere, and quickly exchanged classical languages for the classical guitar, hoping Myers wouldn’t be offended. I kept in contact with St. Stephens, though, through a good friend who was a senior in the class of 1968, which would have been my class, as well as through Edward Steinberg, who had joined the faculty the previous year. 

I returned to Cambridge in the fall of 1968, but after a year and a half of Harvard, Rome called me back. I was now with Helena, my wife-to-be from Prague, whom I had met in Boston in 1970. Harvard at the end of the ‘60s was torn apart by political turmoil, the courses had lost their relevance to me, and I wanted to resume studying with my guitar teacher. When I came down from Prague in April, 1971, I didn’t let him know in advance, so he couldn’t reject me when I appeared on his doorstep with my guitar case.  

Future St. Stephen’s headmaster Phil Allen and Edward Steinberg offered us a position as “dorm parents” at their brand-new Forum School, so we lived there for a while. We dived into the Rome arts scene; Helena composed avant-garde dance performances and I formed a world music/jazz group, Suonosfera. In the 1970’s Rome was just buzzing with musical ferment. I renewed my connection to the school through my musical mentor Richard Trythall.

My connection didn’t end even when we left Rome in 1977. I wound up teaching in the IB program at the International School of Prague for 27 years. During that time I frequently led student trips to Rome, and we often stayed at the school, sometimes even in sleeping bags on the gym floor. So it’s been a long relationship, sustained mainly through my close friendships with the school legends I’ve mentioned. 

Warren Myers was the most significant figure in your SSS experience. How did you come to have such a privileged relationship with him? Memories of him as a person? 

Classes were small. I stood out because by then I already had a passion for languages, first French (a private tutor came to our Cambridge house when I was 11-12), then Latin and Italian. He took to me because I took to Latin, and shortly into the semester he encouraged me to join the Greek class, which had only two other students, and I ate that up as well. It’s too bad that education has moved away from the Classics; they are such great brain food.  Myers was so immersed in them that he insisted he believed in the Greek gods as real living presences, and was offended when I asked him if he was kidding. Then there was his great admiration of the Italian respect for food. He would wax eloquent on the subject of fragole con panna, which he pronounced with a heavy American accent. This must have been his dream job, translating Homer with an eager student in a ground floor apartment on Piazza Margana, accompanied by the trickle of the fountain in the courtyard, with the Foro Romano just a short walk away. He was such a classic bachelor prep school teacher in his tweed jackets with elbow patches, smoking a pipe throughout lessons, in school as well as in his apartment.

Yet, in the end, you "quickly exchanged classical languages for the classical guitar". 

That was the key fork in the road – music one way, languages the other. The life energy had just shifted to music, and serendipity wafted in through an acquaintance and took me to my guitar teacher, Gianluigi Gelmetti. I wish I could thank Warren in person once again. I didn’t return to him, but his work with me was done; all those conjugations and translations were the scaffolding of my new mind!

Richard Trythall taught continuously at the school from 1966 to 2022, far longer than anyone else. When and how did you meet him? How was he your "mentor"? Memories that characterize him and your relationship?

During ’64-65, Dick was a Fellow at the American Academy, where my father was a senior figure. I heard him play a recital there, and still remember the command, the energy, the expression emanating from his imposing figure. With his tremendous height, he not so much loomed over as beamed down at us generously, constantly amused. He was a world-class pianist and a wonderful composer. He wrote a piece for a dancer friend of ours, Irina Harris-Robertiello, that required a magnetic tape of Jerry Lee Lewis’s “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” to be cut into pieces, and then arranged into a sparkling, fragmented structure. Nowadays this is easy to do digitally, but he had to actually cut the tape into pieces by hand and laboriously put them together in a way that created the new sounds. 

I didn’t start studying with him until the middle of my Rome IV period. I had received a commission to re-orchestrate a harmonica concerto from the world’s greatest classical harmonica player, John Sebastian -- father of the Lovin’ Spoonful frontman -- who was then living in Rome. I had absolutely no idea how to do it, and had to give it up.  So I realized I needed some serious remedial composition lessons. I was in a state of rebellion against classical music, but Dick was the perfect person to bring me back in. I would go to his apartment on Via Quattro Novembre, where we explored harmony and orchestration together. He had me study scores of Debussy and Mahler. Despite their romanticism, he took a very intellectual approach to harmony (“Try all the alternatives and choose the one that is most coherent with itself.), while I was more “all-over-the-place, whatever sounds good.” He was the Classical, I the Romantic, but he would dispute this dichotomy as long as he lived! We disagreed about a lot of things in music -- I loved the new, more accessible Minimalist composers, he thought them boring -- but I was always in awe of his command of musical materials; he knew all the masterpieces practically by heart. I never felt his equal, though he was always unfailingly kind about my efforts, and way later, when I started putting out videos of my guitar playing on YouTube, he was often one of the first to comment, nicely, of course. During “Rome IV” he asked me over to St. Stephens several times to help with productions, play the organ for his Jesus Christ musical, and teach guitar to students.

 Dick’s path to teaching in high school was probably very similar to mine. Both of us found ourselves in a city we loved (Dick-Rome, me-Prague), and were looking for a way to support ourselves so we could stay. For me, the teaching ended up taking up most of my energy and time for the next decades, and I drifted away from my “serious” composing activities.  

So let’s hear more about your musical life, backing up a bit. You got off to a precocious start as a musician: listening to recordings of Seeger, Hinton, and Ives when you were 3, playing the piano at 4; then guitar at 8, fiddle, banjo, and mandolin by the time you were just 11, when you started soaking up the urban folk revival in coffeehouses around Boston. You must have been born into a music-rich environment.  

My parents had lots of artist/composer/writer friends in the two college towns where I grew up: Berkeley, California and Cambridge, Massachusetts. The atmosphere in those two places in the ’50s and ‘60’s was so inspiring.  My first piano teacher was a good friend of my mother’s who lived up the street in Berkeley. My mother had been a modern dancer before she got polio –- was even in the Martha Graham Company -- and had played piano as a child. My art-historian father was more academic, but art was still his religion. These days I’m thinking a lot about those early 1950s records that inspired me. On my own child’s record player, I listened to all the folk singers on the Folkways label: Pete Seeger, Burl Ives, Leadbelly, Cisco Houston, Woody Guthrie. We moved to Cambridge in 1961, when I was eleven, right at the start of the “urban folk revival” so beautifully captured in the recent film about Bob Dylan, A Complete Unknown. My father took me to a concert of Pete Seeger with his brother Mike and his old-time string band, the New Lost City Ramblers, and that sound just reached right into my heart. I spent every afternoon hour I could in a used-instrument shop near Harvard Square called “New Scene Folklore”, playing all their instruments. The owner sure was a patient man!  

Tell us about your high-school band, the Ragpickers, and your other early professional experiences.

The year before St. Stephen’s, I enrolled at a small, progressive high school in Boston, the Commonwealth School, which then had an eighth grade. Between classes – and sometimes during, when I managed to skip -- I would sit on the steps with other guitar players, jamming and playing blues, folk, ragtime, country songs. I was the youngest, still with a high voice, but I played all the instruments better than the older guys, and we jelled into a group we called the Commonwealth Ragpickers. Our model was the Jim Kweskin Jug Band -- “jug band music” being a mix of ragtime, blues, and 1930s show tunes done in the funkiest way possible -- featuring a washtub bass as the low instrument (made from an actual steel washtub, a broomstick, and a length of rope), a kazoo, and two guitars, with me playing mandolin and banjo. The mecca of folk music was Club 47 in Harvard Square, where Joan Baez started out. They liked our energy and hired us to play some nights. We shared the stage with artists who were pretty big in the ‘60s: Tim Hardin, Taj Mahal, Tom Paxton, Phil Ochs. One afternoon I went into the club just to get a soda, my ever-present mandolin hanging from my shoulder, and there was a guy with long, messy hair playing boogie-woogie on the piano. I recognized him; it was Bob Dylan. “Hey kid,” he said, “come on over and play with me”. To my everlasting regret, I declined. I didn’t normally get stage fright, but I felt intimidated, since he was already really well-known. There was even an article about me in a music magazine a few years ago with the title “The Man Who Refused to Play with Bob Dylan”! The Ragpickers were the crucible of my music from then on; everything comes from that wildness, that joy and humor, mixed with deep respect for the musical traditions of so many American sub-groups.  

Later on, while at Harvard, I played in two different bands that were recording in CBS studios in New York: Appaloosa, a “folk-baroque” combination of original folk with violin and cello, and the Peter Ivers Band. I don’t want to pretend that I had a major role in either, but to record in the legendary 30th Street CBS studio was amazing. The producers of those sessions included Al Kooper, who played organ with Bob Dylan for a while, and John Hammond, the legendary A&R man who discovered Billie Holliday and Benny Goodman, both portrayed in the Dylan film. During a break in the Appaloosa session, Kooper took us downstairs to another studio to sit in the sound booth and watch Simon and Garfunkel record “Cecelia”. This was at the end of 1969, but thanks to that great St. Stephen’s year of ’64-65, all my roads now led to Rome, taking me away from that folkie-rockie scene and back to my classical guitar teacher. No regrets! 

You studied at Bennington College in Vermont with Bill Dixon, a seminal figure in free jazz; in Rome with Gianluigi Gelmetti, who later became an internationally acclaimed orchestra conductor; and at the Conservatory of L’Aquila with Domenico Guaccero, one of Italy’s most prominent avant-garde composers of the second half of the 20th century. Major takeaways and memories?

Of the three, only Gianluigi Gelmetti had a deep, lasting influence on me. It was really a guru-disciple relationship, though he was only five years older than me, which means that when I started with him he was only 22. He had been a child prodigy on the guitar, but had switched to conducting by the time I met him. This made him exceptionally well-rounded for a teacher of classical guitar, which is really the “poor relative” of classical instruments, without any literature by great composers (all the Bach works being transcriptions of lute or violin pieces). So he had learned the technical approaches of great violinists and pianists, and transferred them to guitar. He made me stop playing all my former styles and sit for hours a day, for two months, just playing open strings. He demanded total loyalty; when he went for six months to Vienna to study conducting, he insisted that I trail along. And one summer, he was shocked when I told him I was going to take a vacation trip with Helena back to Czechoslovakia to see family and friends. He said, “Vacations are for insurance brokers; musicians don’t take vacations”, and told me I should think about whether I wanted to go, and come back the following day with my decision, without my guitar. When I told him I had decided to stay in Rome, he looked relieved, and said that if I had gone to Prague, he would have dropped me as his student.

He gave me such a deep, basic, relaxed technical base that I can warm up for a concert in ten minutes, even if I haven’t practiced for weeks. But after a couple of years, I began to chafe under his tyranny, and when I decided to quit, I think he was a bit relieved as well, because I was taking a lot of his time. 

“In the 1970s, Rome was buzzing with musical ferment.” In addition to you and Trythall, many other American musicians, such as Alvin Curran, William Hellermann, and James Dashow, were active there. You played with a number of well-known Italian musicians, as well as with Frederic Rzewski (one of America’s most prominent pianist-composers) and Steve Lacy (a world-class soprano saxophonist), both of whom had strong ties to Italy and lived for a time in Rome. Lots to tell about!

It was an amazing time. American expats like Curran and Rzewski had founded Musica Elettronica Viva, which is now considered one of the pioneering creative ventures in electronic music history. During Rome III, I saw them playing in the crypt of St. Paul’s Within the Walls, the Anglican church on Via Nazionale. Their performance of live electronic music was “in your face”, and quite the opposite of theatrical: four grubby guys, hunched over machines and wires, their long hair covering the keyboards and knobs, no acknowledgement of an audience. The music developed very slowly, and had no melody, harmony, or recognizable rhythmic patterns; it was all just sounds rumbling in your stomach and piercing your ears, but somehow we listeners all had the feeling that something very important, very primeval, and very honest, was going on. By the ‘70’s, they had drifted apart, but Alvin stayed, doing really interesting solo performances using voice, synthesizers, and nature sounds. The L’Attico art gallery brought in the big names of the New York minimalist music scene. I remember seeing Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, and Lamonte Young there, all in one week.  In 1972 Rzewski took me into his group, and we traveled to Berlin for a festival, playing with all those stars of minimal music. Steve Lacy is another chapter. He was really “big league” in the jazz world, having played with Thelonius Monk, and was established in Paris. Alvin asked me to join him, Steve, and singer Maria Monti on a mini-tour in Tuscany, and we recorded an album called Bestiario, which has just been re-issued after 50 years! At that time all of these things, like the Testaccio school, just seemed like business as usual; I had no idea how important they would become. 

The Scuola Popolare di Musica di Testaccio is still thriving in 2025. How did you get involved in the founding? Vivid memories of those early days?

A very exciting time! I had co-founded Suonosfera, whose aim was to make jazz-like, improvised music, but substituting Italian and other world folk-music elements for the African-American elements from which jazz grew. Early in 1975, we were invited to a now-historic first meeting in Testaccio -- in a huge, moldy circus tent on the grounds of the old slaughterhouse -- to talk about starting a totally new kind of music school, in direct contrast to established, academic institutions like the Accademia di Santa Cecilia. It was very left-wing political; I remember having to sit through the pompous rants of one of the founders at every meeting. The school was really “popolare”: totally free and open to everyone. One of our crazy ideas was the “orchestra aperta”, where anyone who had an instrument, whether they knew how to play it or not, was to bring it into the tent, and we took weekly turns leading it. I still cringe when I think of my efforts to make music with over fifty people of all ages with dented brass instruments, likely found in an uncle’s attic, that neither they nor I could even identify, mandolins missing strings, even pots and pans. Luckily, the style of “free jazz” -- everyone making lots of loud noise, all together -- was not only cool at the time, but was politically perfectly symbolic. I just checked out the SPMT website, and there are great photos of the orchestra aperta and many motley parades, which convey perfectly the spirit of those days. 

In the freezing rooms of the old slaughterhouse we taught instrument lessons; I had probably 15 guitarists who wanted to learn jazz, so I taught them some scales and showed them how to use a couple of simple Miles Davis pieces for improvisation.  On the website there is a photo of the original lesson schedule, and my name is there!  I thought this whole thing was just an idealistic shot in the dark, and I had no idea that it had lasted, but during a Rome visit in 2005 we were staying in a Testaccio apartment, so I thought I would take a walk to the old site, just to see if anything was left, and I was blown away: a modern building, with an auditorium and classrooms, a front desk with a pamphlet on the history of the school , and my name was in there, too! As with so many other Rome IV experiences, it didn’t seem like anything special at the time. Indeed, back then I was really self-critical about it all, feeling inadequate -- there’s a term for this: “impostor syndrome” --  but now it seems that every time I revisit Rome, I find some relic that shows that my musical life then made a difference to somebody, sometimes to many, as with the re-issued Bestiario album, which I had totally forgotten about.  

There’s a big takeaway here. I was very unfriendly to myself during this period: I thought I was a terrible guitarist, a fraud to play jazz, and just a bad, inexperienced teacher. Indeed, all through Rome IV I felt I was just messing around, not getting to the work I should be doing, which was studying to be a great classical composer. I wish I could have a talk with my 25-year-old self!  I’d say: “Appreciate whatever you’re doing now; even if it isn’t perfect, you are probably enriching the life of someone you don’t even know; and, while you’re at it, look around at the beautiful life in this amazing city, and delight in every moment!”

The Testaccio school was one of your first endeavors as a teacher. You write of education as a “sacred profession”, so you must consider teaching a calling. When did you first start thinking that way? What are its implications for you, and how have they concretely affected your teaching? 

I’ve been teaching now for over 60 years, counting the guitar lessons I gave my younger sister when I was 14. However, although I was constantly teaching – in grade schools, high schools, university, private lessons -- up until about age 40, I was still living the misguided idea that teaching was my “day job”, and the real stuff was the concerts and composing. Strange, since I was spending, with the commutes, at least 10 hours a day teaching throughout every school year! I ended up teaching at the International School of Prague for 27 years. At the beginning, under the Communist regime, the school was connected with the U.S. Embassy, grades K-8, and I basically just played and sang and had good times with the kids. Then the school exploded after the Velvet Revolution (from 60 students before 1989 to 850 in 2012, when I left), and my teaching just grew with the school and the ages I taught, and when we developed our IB music program, so many of my musical lives came together: the big questions of culture and music history, the minutiae of music theory, the creativity of composition, the skills of learning an instrument or voice. My music room at ISP was a haven for the misfits, long-haired, rude metal guitarists who would mumble, “Wanna hear what I wrote last night?”, and I would pace up and down listening to their incredibly dense, polyphonic, screaming recordings. My best advice was usually “keep doing it exactly like this!” I told over-achievers to work less. I served tea in TOK. I introduced students to meditation. I most loved working with a drama-teacher colleague to create original productions where we coached the students in writing the music and the play from scratch to performance. The culmination of my teaching life, however,  has been the course I developed and have been teaching for the last ten years at NYU Prague: “Prague Music Field Study”. I tell my students at the beginning of the semester that this is the course I have lived my whole life to teach. We explore the relationship of the music to the wider culture and history. It’s like a semester-long composition, starting with laying out the structure by selecting five concerts that reflect the diverse genres that Prague has to offer: jazz, folk, opera, avant-garde, symphonic, etc. I always start with a performance of my quartet in a nearby, intimate jazz club, preceded by a guest appearance in class where my longtime musical partner, pianist Martin Kratochvil, and I play some of the pieces, talk about the composition/improvisation process, and go deep into why we human beings make music. And with this last question – what is it about music that makes it so unique and powerful force in our lives – I come to the most important “goal” of the class, and indeed of all my teaching: to help each student find what most moves them, what their life experience has equipped and inspired them to give of their skills and energy to the world in a way only they can do. I often repeat for them these words of Martha Graham: 

“There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and since there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. If you block it, it will never exist through any other medium; it will be lost -- the world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is, nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.”

One way that I know that teaching is sacred work is my revulsion to grading. Every time I am forced to assign a number or other grade to a student’s work, ranking them in some hierarchy that is absolutely irrelevant to their learning, I feel like I am being forced to bow down to a foreign god imposed by a cruel conqueror. I have had to give grades or numbers for decades to keep my job, but it causes me real pain, because grades are such a distortion of the meaning of education: ushering out of each student their unique gifts, passions, and skills.  

 You’ve taught music theory and performance at both the college and high-school level, as well as a number of  number of other high-school subjects, e.g. TOK, French, Humanities. Do you find that the subject matter affects the way you teach?  

I would love to say that the subject matter does not affect the way I teach, but I do see a difference between courses that address the building of skills -- music theory, ear-training and aural comprehension, playing an instrument or singing in choir, learning a language -- and those that more holistically address the big questions of how cultures develop, how we can become aware of our assumptions and worldviews (TOK at its best), and how each one of us can “become ourselves”. I’m better at the latter, not so good at the skill-building because I’m not a good drill sergeant, and, frankly, I’m not as interested in that role.  

You write about “working with a drama-teacher colleague to create original productions where we coached the students in writing the music and the play from scratch to performance.” Sounds exciting; more, please!

I remember most vividly the teaching adventures that called for several of my abilities, values, and unique personal experiences to combine in a new way. One of these was a course we called “Physical and Vocal Performance”, an arts elective for grades 9-12 at the International School of Prague. The drama teacher, Joel Sugerman, and I were close friends who shared a love of folk music, improvisation, and avant-garde theater. My Chorus class one semester, around 2003, had only 3 students, and it met at the same time as the Drama class next door, which had around 12. Joel and I got the idea to combine the two classes, giving the singers lots of new ways to explore movement and the actors new experiences with their voices. 

In my favorite warm-up, which we called “buzzing”, the whole class would lie on their backs in a relaxed position, fanned out in a circle with their heads in the middle, and start with attention on  breath at the belly, then going to a hiss, then into a drone with “mm” sounds.  The instruction was to vary the pitch of the note with their attention focused inward, finding out which pitch made the body resonate most deeply. Gradually, as they changed pitches and got to vowel sounds, we would have them open up their attention to the sounds and vibrations of the whole group, and notice, when they changed a pitch or vowel sound, how the whole group sound changed. So we would get these amazing harmonies, constantly shifting, which you could never plan, write or repeat. And this is so important, because planning, writing and repeating experiences take them out of the present moment, and they lose their shine, their depth, their fuzziness.  

But this class did develop into a production. Joel had long wanted to adapt the Odyssey as a drama, and we decided that this class would be a perfect incubator for the project. He chose a few episodes, such as the Sirens and the Cyclops, and read the Homeric lines to the class. Then all of us would improvise. Imagine the fun of improvising the Sirens; of being one of my three chorus members who had to sing music so beautiful it would make the sailors jump into the sea and be smashed to death, or Odysseus, twisting and turning to escape the rope that bound him. The show took place in our theater, but totally in the round, stage in the middle, and on surrounding balconies. It began with me and the four musicians, off on the side, pouring water slowly from different kinds of glasses and bowls, with sensitive microphones right there to pick up the trickles and flows of the ocean. That’s where just about the whole epic takes place, so we kept returning to the water sounds. On one side of the balcony, Penelope sat in a soft spotlight, weaving. On the stage, the lights went up on a few 10th-graders lying center-stage playing slain warriors. The dialogue was a bit pointillistic, not narrative; it came from the improvisations students had done in the class, extensively revised by Joel. Lots of visual effects -- the boys really went to town with Odysseus sticking his spear in the Cyclops’s eye -- and movement, but no “dance” as such.

 What a far cry from the Broadway musicals I had been doing for a few years with the students! Broadway in the 1950s and ‘60s produced masterpieces like Fiddler on the Roof, The Sound of Music, and The King and I, and we would make our own versions, but the storylines and ethos belong to another era. So I tried later ones like The Fantasticks and Godspell, hich were a little closer to the teenage worlds I was in, but the original works we did were so much more meaningful to them, as well as unrepeatable, because the content came from the specific abilities and backgrounds of each group of students. 

“Interdisciplinary” work in the arts really works only when it comes organically, from a connection between the teachers predating the collaboration. I’d never had the kind of experience I had with Joel; the fruit came naturally from the seeds of our friendship and shared convictions.

You now live in the village of Nova Oleska –- in “Czech Switzerland”, halfway between Prague and Dresden -- where you moved  in 2012. Tell us about Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic, where you’ve lived for most of your life. Why did you decide to settle there rather than stay in California? As an American married to a Czech, fluent in the language, and fully integrated both socially and professionally, you have been well placed to observe the differences in life under the old Communist regime and the society that emerged after the Velvet Revolution.  

I sometimes say, only half joking, that my fate was joined with the Czechs because I share my birthday, October 28, with the Czechoslovak Republic born after WWI. My father took the family to Prague in 1965, on our way back to Cambridge, because he had been so inspired by the architecture he had seen there as a teenager, between the wars. Even with its gray streets and inscrutable people, the country somehow just got under my skin. Helena, my Czech future wife, had left the country after the Soviet invasion in 1968 and ended up in the Boston area, where we met in June 1970; we have lived together ever since. In the ‘70s, she was among the few people free to travel to the West, because she was married to me. We brought lots of stuff back, not so much material things as ideas, experiences, and an optimistic view of life, which the Soviets had crushed with the invasion of1968 and the subsequent “normalization”.  Our Rome years came to an end in 1977, when we moved to California, where in 1983 I finished my Ph.D. work in Music at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and Helena got her B.A. in Dance.  We had two small children by then, and we wanted them to learn Czech and get a sense of the other half of their heritage, so we were lucky to get a fellowship from the IREX (International Research and Exchanges Board) to spend a year in Prague, where my project was to interview and study contemporary Czech composers, and Helena’s was to work with modern dancers in the Charles University Company, whose leaders were hungry for contact with modern dance from the West. This led to a revealing episode.

During Rome IV, Helena and I had worked closely with Alice Condodina, a former lead dancer in the José Limón Company, who was Helena’s teacher and whose modern technique classes I accompanied on piano and guitar. She later got a great position at the same university in Santa Barbara, where she founded a professional company, Repertory-West, for which I composed a couple of pieces. So we hatched up a scheme to bring the company to Prague for some workshops and a performance. It had to be done unofficially (i.e., illegally), because the Communist authorities would never approve such a public appearance by a modern American company, so we smuggled in the eight or nine dancers with tourist visas, housed them with family and friends, and they did two days of workshops in a smelly, windowless  gym in a student dorm. In one of the latter, Alice was trying to get the Czech students to loosen up –- to be more confident and expressive -- so she told them to imitate her, and, throwing up her arms, ran toward them and cried out, “I am Alice!”, after which they all got in a line, threw up their arms, and shouted, “I am Alice!” This celebration of self was so unfamiliar that none of them shouted their own name, as Alice had intended. During the workshops, we spread the word that the company would be doing a performance in a small theater outside the city center. We had, of course, prepared for this under the radar for months. One aspect of the preparation was that the theater was in the midst of refurbishing its bathrooms, but couldn’t find a truck to pick up the three urinals that were waiting in a factory in Brno, 200 miles away, so I went and got them in our little car. On the evening of the performance the theater was absolutely packed. Word had gotten around, and it was a miracle that the secret police didn’t intervene. In one of the pieces I composed music for, “Wildsongs”, I made lots of unconventional sounds at the piano, starting with a loud scream into the strings with the damper pedal up, so the scream changes into 230 strings vibrating. During intermission, I was standing at a urinal next to one of the spectators, doing what men do at urinals, and he turned to me and simply said, “Thank you.” That was one of the greatest moments I have ever had in appreciating what my music could do for people. In any case, the day after the performance we got the company on a train bound for Paris. 

1983 was an amazing year. The four of us lived in a one-room apartment in an ugly high-rise, but our jobs were just to do what we loved doing and share it with people in Prague!  It was then that I met my future music partner, pianist Martin Kratochvil, and it was “love at first chord”. After our fellowship year was over, we found a way to stay by starting to work, almost for free, at the International School. Czechs would ask, “Why do you want to be here, when you could be in sunny California?” What we were doing in modern dance and music was not exactly forbidden -– indeed, while the Communists repressed underground rock and punk, jazz was a politically correct expression for them –- but there was nobody else doing it, and we felt needed. 

I remember vividly Vaclav Havel’s inaugural address on January1, 1990, which I watched on TV after spending the night with the joyous crowds on Wenceslas Square. He started by saying “You didn’t elect me to this position so I would lie to you. Czechoslovakia is not flourishing “, and went on to talk about the ravages of Communism, not so much external, but what it had done to peoples’ souls when everyone had to pretend. The change of those first years of the 1990s was dizzying, not just in politics, but everywhere. New businesses opened, new departments in universities, a quarter of the names of streets and squares changed. Helena was by then working for the American Ambassador, Shirley Temple Black, the former movie star, and was in the vortex. I started a music company with Martin; we had a radio show and played all over, though there was less time for music, because the International School was growing by hundreds of students per year. Everything seemed possible – even a playwright-president!--  but not all the change was positive.  Now, some thirty years later, we enjoy the comforts of globalization; living standards are better, yet something authentic has been lost. Because our friends and relatives couldn’t get satisfaction from “careers”, which were vetted and policed by the regime, they used to seek it elsewhere, in hobbies, country cabins, friendships. Nobody wants to return to the Communist past, but those who remember often comment that the stress was different then: harsh, imposed from above, not the overwork and burnout that so many experience now. Prague has become a Disneyland, its children plagued by cellphones just as everywhere else in the world.  

 

A comment recently posted on the NYU-Prague student blog reports that the first words you told a group of students before setting out with them on a 3-day “digital detox” retreat  were  “I’m going to teach you how to eat raisins meditatively”, and that later, “after an amazing Czech dinner, we sat around a campfire and sang popular American songs from the ‘60s”. These things seem to capture so much of you! Tell us more about it, including -- as a special treat for all the readers who were teenagers in the ‘60s -- at least some of the songs you sang.

First, the songs: “Blowing in the Wind”, “Down by the Riverside”, “El Condor Pasa”, “Imagine” (technically not a ‘60s song), “Where Have All the Flowers Gone”, “If I had a Hammer”, “The Sound of Silence”, and “Yesterday”. The power of music, of song, to bring people together and change the world is huge. 

The retreat: we take walks in forests and listen to sparkling streams; I teach them a user-friendly kind of meditation (Insight Meditation inspired by the Buddhist tradition); group singing and other activities bring them together in community; and they give up their smartphones for the three days.

I think that the fraught and fearful nature of the present time calls us teachers to go beyond our “subjects”; to explicitly try to help students respond to the huge challenges of the moment. I’m very explicit with students, not only during the retreat but in my regular courses as well, about how I see our purpose here on earth: first, to explore, delight in, and wonder at  the miracle of life, and second, to do what we can, to support and enrich this life. Inhale, and exhale! Receive, and give!  In class I present this as a mind map, which we add to and embellish throughout the semester, but here, I’ll reduce it to a linear list:

1. Do the “Martha Dance” –- remember her words? -- or, in  Frederick Buechner’s, “Find the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet”.

2. Practice a spiritual discipline.

3. Nurture community: intimate partners, friends, family, village, society.

4. Touch nature every day (nature being any non-human life; petting a dog counts here).

5. Live live! (the second word with long i), especially directed at young people to look up from their smartphones and find live, embodied experiences.

A nice “to-do list” for our lives!

You’ve told us in depth about your musical life in Rome, so let’s conclude this interview with your musical doings in Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic. Tell us more about your fascinating partner, Martin. It was “love at first chord”, and you’re still at it together forty years later. To what do you attribute the longevity of your creative relationship? How has it evolved over the years? Particularly significant moments? 

I had known Martin for many years before we started playing together. In 1971 I came to Prague from Boston to take Helena to Rome, and spent a couple of weeks with her, roaming around the city, getting to know her family, and diving into my Czech conversation book. (By this time I had studied, to some degree, eight foreign languages, one of which was Russian, which helped me to absorb Czech quickly.) We spent evenings with her high-school friends, drinking cheap white wine in their childhood bedrooms, because nobody without a family of their own could get their own apartment. One of these friends took us to Reduta, then Prague’s only real jazz club, to see a fusion jazz/rock band, Jazz Q Praha, led by his friend and classmate in Philosophy at Charles University, Martin Kratochvil. I was skeptical. How could oppressed Czech musicians catch on to jazz-rock, so full of energy and abandon? But from the first notes in that crowded, smokey club, I was transfixed. Martin hammered on electric piano and Minimoog synthesizer, the guitarist wailed blues as if he were from Chicago, and the rhythm section rocked. There was so much free, sparkling energy there, not common in the dour age of “normalization” after the Soviet occupation of 1968. At intermission our friend introduced me to Martin, and we excitedly got into talking about our favorites, mainly guitarist John McLaughlin and pianists Chick Corea and Keith Jarrett. I was amazed that he knew their music better than I did. Martin had great positive energy, one of the few people I met at that time who was not cowed or muffled by the repressive regime. He had spent a couple of years in London during the relatively liberal years before the 1968 invasion, and spoke perfect English with a slight British accent. To this day he is, besides Helena, the only Czech I regularly speak English with. In the following years, every time we visited Prague, I would bring him new fusion jazz albums. and find my way to one of his concerts with Jazz Q, which by then had attained superstar status in the country; they were allowed to play everywhere because they were categorized as “jazz” rather than “rock”, though their huge and raucous audiences were certainly more “rock-ous” than “jazz-ish”. People still remember what a breath of fresh air they were in those gray years.

 In 1983, I was no longer playing jazz, rather working on my compositions for dance, using all the materials that were handy: chamber quartets, electronic tapes, prepared piano. Martin had a monthly series at the Malostranska Beseda -- one of the few clubs where underground culture had somehow survived, -- called “The Clinic of Dr. Q”, where he would invite composers and musicians to interview and play recordings of their music. He invited me one Friday, and I played cassettes of a couple of my pieces for modern dance. I had brought along the steel-string guitar I had used on one of the pieces, thinking I would play it. But the whole time I felt the presence of the huge concert grand piano taking up much of the stage, and, without any forethought, said, “Hey, let’s try something!”  Having played only electronic keyboards for years, he reluctantly  sat down at the piano, and I said, “How about a 12-bar blues in G, medium tempo, bebop style -- let’s show the audience that blues is the international language! A-one, a-two, a-three, a-four” – and we off we went. It was really the rhythmic entrainment that made us hit it off so well, from the first bar. We improvised a few choruses of bebop blues, trading solos. Huge applause when it ended, and by then nobody wanted to listen to my cassettes, so I thought of another blues, this time a sung one, “Nobody Loves You When You’re Down and Out”. We didn’t play much more that evening, but just a few days later Martin called to say that he had arranged a 10-day tour for us in Moravia, the eastern part of Czechoslovakia, where they were more welcoming to new music than Bohemia was. You probably understand by now that Martin is extremely enterprising. He had built a state-of-the-art recording studio in his basement -- at a time when private businesses were not allowed -- after figuring out how to smuggle in the tape recorders and microphones from West Germany.  

At the beginning we had the chemistry, but no repertoire in common. Martin came from jazz/rock fusion, I had been playing classical guitar, bossa nova, blues and ragtime. So we brought our worlds together and made a fresh sound. Guitar and piano duo is not common in jazz, but jazz welcomes everything. We naturally fell into a style where we were constantly complementing each other with harmonies and grooving rhythmic accompaniments, but often you couldn’t tell who was soloing and who was accompanying, or even which parts were written and which improvised. We had no trouble getting gigs during the Communist years; after all, I was the only American guitarist in Czechoslovakia, and Martin still had his rock-star status from Jazz Q. We recorded our first album in 1986, in Martin’s studio: Old Acquaintance. On the cover, we are sitting on the high backs of chairs facing each other from the edge; coming out of my mouth is the line of a New York-ish skyline of rectangular skyscrapers, which joins in the middle a pointed line evoking Gothic church steeples and towers. We played in Communist “Houses of Culture”, medieval castles and horse stables, outdoor folk festivals, wannabe jazz clubs, concert halls, libraries, and pubs. There was something about our music, coming from so many folk styles, that appealed to audiences who would not ordinarily listen to jazz, and we were fresh air in the stifling cultural environment of “normalization”.  We got invitations from abroad, playing the Jazz Fabrik in Hamburg, and even the Gasteig Philharmonic Hall in Munich, as part of a festival of Czech jazz. Our repertoire grew, as we continued to record; 15 albums at last count. I had a special guitar made for me with an extra bass string, so we could get the range and rhythmic support usually provided by a bass player. We added a percussionist, an Iraqi-Iranian eye doctor who grew up in Czechoslovakia, now with his son as well. But the core is still the interplay between acoustic guitar and piano. Since then our music has taken us all over, from a freezing lake in Raahe, Finland and an ancient amphitheater in Nicosia, Cyprus to a glassy, sun-filled university art gallery in Lincoln, Nebraska and New York’s Village Gate jazz club. One of many high points was playing -- in 2018, as part of a 50-year commemoration of the Prague Spring -- to a packed audience in the Bohemia House in New York, which included both of my sons and their families, and tens of former students and good friends who came from afar to be with us.  

What has kept us so together these forty years? Musically, it’s being, literally, on the same rhythmic wavelength, and the interplay/counterpoint of two harmonic instruments always supporting each other. But our complementary personalities are also crucial: Martin is a typical alpha male, A-type personality, goal-oriented, not bothered by the self-criticism and perfectionism that haunt me. But this contrast makes us work well together, as it can in a marriage: Martin is often the driving factor in getting the gigs and pushing recordings through, but I’m the softening element, the quality control. Since the beginning, we have closed every concert with “Toledo”, a one-minute theme of Martin’s that celebrates the unity of all people, all religions, in an Arabic/Jewish/European mode, followed by twenty minutes of free improvisations touching on any world music that creeps up at the moment. As I look over, between the piano strings and raised lid, to see Martin’s balding head bobbing up and down as he pounds and caresses the keys, I feel a surge of affection, and gratitude that I have been granted such an enriching musical life with this partner.