ARTHUR BERGER
371
relief while living there, so I had to rent a furnished room in the West
Seventies.
Coppock:
This was in 1933?
Berger:
Yes. While I was on relief, waiting for a specified length of time
to pass in order
to
qualify for the WPA, Miss Lawton told me, "You
know , something else has come up that might be more interesting to
you. The Longy Music School in Cambridge wants to start a division
called the Professional School , modelled after the Juilliard Graduate
School, and they have a fellowship in music they 'd like to give
to
start it out. Would you be interested in that? " I was, and I went up
and had ear-training exams, and such. The person running the
school was a cellist from the Boston Symphony named Yves Char–
don. When it seemed I had qualified, I asked him what the terms of
the fellowship were, and he informed me it paid my full tuition. I
hadn't thought much about this aspect, and had assumed I'd be
provided with my means of support. When I inquired into how I was
expected to live, I was told he would help me "find something." So
he gave me a letter to Moses Smith, music critic of the
Boston
Evening Transcript .
The
Boston Evening Transcript
was a great paper, though quite
conservative, even more conservative than the two Republican
papers I later worked for: the
New York Sun
and the
Herald
Tribune.
T.S. Eliot wrote a poem about it that starts:
"The readers of the
Boston Evening Transcript
Sway in the wind like a field of ripe corn."
It
was a paper with tiny print like the
Times
of London , and
very sedate and unprepossessing, but businesslike in appearance.
It
was read by the best New England families. The
Transcript
was a
marvelous paper to work for. I cou ld be as serious and technical as I
wanted to be without anyone objecting. Copy did not go to an editor
or rewrite desk , but went directly
to
the composing room.
Coppock:
What did you study at Longy?
Berger:
Well , I had piano. I had Walter Piston for counterpoint and
harmony. I was doing individual research with one of the faculty on
Tudor choral music. And I had solfege, which I had to relearn, since
I had had the movable DO and now had to use the fixed
DO.
The
teacher would playa whole piece, a sonata allegro, and I would have
to tell her afterwards all the keys it had touched.
It
was not just
ordinary ear-training, and she would look as if she were ready to slap
me on the wrist if I answered incorrectly.
