372
PARTISAN REVIEW
Soon I decided, why not go to Harvard while I'm here? I had a
little extra money from the
Transcript,
so I registered in a course
with Hugo Leichtentritt, who had come straight from a milieu that
enabled him to pass on to me the speculative notions of Hugo
Riemann in theory and the contributions of Guido Adler
to
the new
field of musicology. Since I was the only student in the Longy
Professional School, I had
to
be prepared for every meeting with the
faculty, and I presently decided that with Harvard and the newspaper
work it was too much. So I asked Longy to reduce my load .
It
was
pretty presumptuous after they had helped me obtain the
Transcript
job. As I look back, I'm not at all surprised that Chardon angrily
declared , "No, all or nothing." At the time, however, I was indig–
nant, and I abruptly left and was awarded a fellowship in musicol–
ogy at Harvard for the following academic year.
Coppock:
What made you decide to study with Nadia Boulanger?
Berger:
In 1937 I received the Paine traveling fellowship from Harvard,
and a tradition of going to study with Boulanger under it had
already been established. Also, my closeness
to
Copland must have
had something to do with it.
Coppock:
You still weren't writing music?
Berger:
No, in the two years I was abroad I didn 't write. But I was doing
analysis and I was getting more and more interes ted in Stravinsky.
And I knew that Boulanger was very close to Stravinsky. In my
dissertation, I was going to defend Stravinsky's as the "proper"
direction, you see, as opposed to Schoenberg's.
Coppock:
How did she work, how did she teach you?
Berger:
She did a good deal by innuendo, by the way she illustrated the
music. She was an extraordinary score reader.
If
I illustrated a chord,
she would insist I be aware of its precise inflection-the inversion,
doubling, registration-and not be satisfied with the generic cate–
gory to which it could be referred. Her concern with precise local
detail went along with her ability to connect the important bass
notes to reveal what she call ed the "grand line" -an underpinning
that, in quite a different way, served the purpose of a Schenker
structure. She would compare a fin e piece of music to one of those
sets of Chinese boxes that fit so well into one another, and yet are
individually perfect and beautiful and lend themselves to separate
scrutiny. The allegro of Mozart's
Dissonance
Quartet, for exampl e–
if you played the accompanying instruments alone in the statement
of the first theme you would have a thoroughl y rewarding piece.
Her methodology and h er terminology were those of tradition al
theory. She did not look favorably upon the deviant analyti cal
