ARTHUR BERGER
367
and Edgard Varese. They took me to see most of these composers and
the contacts bore some special fruits. For I was able
to
write about
them, since to pay my tuition I had obtained a position doing music
criticism for the
Daily Mirror,
a really scandalmongering Hearst
tabloid. Why the paper wanted serious music criticism, I don't know,
except that I had a cousin who had a job there, a distant cousin . . ..
Coppock:
As a music reviewer?
Berger:
As a book reviewer. He became interested in music and wanted
to do music criticism himself, so he got me in to ghostwrite for him,
and then he let me start using my name occasionally. I would go
downtown
to
concerts at the New School where Henry Cowell was
holding forth to ten or fifteen people. I would report such an
occasion in the
Mirror,
and Ives, Cowell, Copland, Riegger, and
Ruggles all started reading my reviews in it. When the old
World
died, its music critic got a job doing rewrite work on the
Mirror,
and
he soon pointed out to the authorities, "Look at this fellow you've
got here. Rubinstein, Horowitz, Hofmann play to sold-out houses at
Carnegie Hall, and they also advertise, and he goes down to the New
School to these affairs for ten or fifteen people." So I was soon fired.
Few people had heard in those days of the composers Cowell
presented. Once 1 was no longer on the
Mirror,
the only place you
could read about them was in
Modern Music,
or in Paul Rosenfeld's
book or his
New Republic
columns.
Coppock:
And it was a regular crew of people at the New School?
Berger:
Cowell , it was just Cowell. He would occasionally have visitors
for a term (I recall the ethnomusicologist, Hornbostel), but mostly he
would have people in
to
participate in his sessions by playing and
discussing their music. He would have Copland, for example, and
the young people Copland brought together under the rubric of the
Young Composers Group.
Coppock:
Didn't you belong to that?
Berger:
1 belonged to it, but you see I had stopped writing music right
after NYU. But 1 became a member of the group anyway. 1 was
supposed to fill the role of Jean Cocteau, or Paul Collaer-the
person who would do the propagandizing for them. It was modelled
after the French "Six," which had always had a critic, a pamphleteer
associated with it. Copland would have us meet composers. After a
concert we would go out to a restaurant like Child's with such
people as Virgil Thomson, Antheil, or Varese.
Coppock:
Who was in the group?
Berger:
Jerome Moross, Bernard Herrmann, Henry Brant, Elie Sieg–
meister, Lehman Engel, someone by the name of Irwin Heilner.
