ARTHUR BERGER
377
something to do with the results, even though these are no longer
systematic. No one is going to put me in jail for breaking rules I have
imposed upon myself. Their aim is not to be heard as such, but to
stimulate creativity.
For
Ideas of Order
I assembled a large number of interval
permutations that comprised the stock from which I drew. One
otherwise perceptive critic objected that I had not exhausted the
supply in my piece. But for me it was enough that they were on my
desk. I saw no reason to let the audience in on the act. Those were
diatonic intervals, quite unlike the highly disjunct and chromatic
intervals I now use. But the point is, I proceeded then as I would
now-I did not feel obliged either to exhaust the stock, or
to
show
how one interval was permuted into the other.
Coppock:
There are a lot of your piano pieces that aren.'t available, a
lot of piano pieces from the middle forties ...
Berger:
Well , a few are published by firms that have folded, and others,
I guess I withdrew. I have a Capriccio ... and a Fantasy, which has
more of
Entertainment Piece
in it than any other work. This is rather
corny stuff. I tend to be embarrassed by it now. When I wrote this
music, the cliches from pop music were meant as allusion, as parody,
but nowadays , they are taken literally, played for laughs-loud
laughs ha-ha-ha-whereas at most we anticipated a knowing smile.
Coppock:
How long did you run the
Musical Mercury?
Berger:
For about three years, until I went to Europe on my Harvard
fellowship in 1937. Jerome Moross and Bernard Herrmann promptly
tired, of it when they realized that work was involved, and that
magazines did not get out by themselves. This was just as
~ell,
since
it would have been difficult for me to collaborate with them from
Cambridge. I guess I never took the magazine too seriously.
It
was
just something in which I could print term papers I wrote at
Harvard. When I was more strongly oriented in the direction of
musicology, the articles were mainly musicological. But some of the
finest fruits the magazine bore were the articles that came later, when
I became involved in D.W. Prall's aesthetics. I not only wrote essays
on aesthetic subjects myself, but I succeeded in obtaining contribu–
tions from such literary luminaries as Delmore Schwaru and Paul
Goodman. There was, perhaps, another fine fruit, more difficult to
ascertain. I think it was at Brandeis, when he was my student, that
Ben Boretz began to entertain the hope of founding
Perspectives–
and this could have been precipitated by his learning of my own past
editing experience in
my
student days.
