Sigma Alpha Iota

'variety and vitality' people who haven't forgiven us. The fact is that today musicals, as I prefer to call them in order to avoid any discussions of pretentiousness or coyness categorizing them, especially the musicals that originate off-Broadway and in regional theaters, have as much variety and vitality as straight plays do. This is both a happy fact and a sad one — happy because they do have such variety and vitality and sad because they've taken over the commercial theater like kudzu. Nowadays, few plays make enough money to sustain the playwrights who write them. Robert Anderson, one of the playwrights who was able to sustain himself during a long career (although he had to resort to screenwriting every now and then) purportedly said that in the theater you can make a killing, but you can't make a living. Today, that is true only of people who write musicals. The era of the blockbuster Neil Simon hit is over, with rare exceptions like War Horse — which is more like a musical than a play, anyway. I've never visited the MacDowell Colony before, and seeing it now, that is something I regret. But I do have a tenuous connection to it, or at least to its founder. When I was eleven years old, I was enrolled at New York Military Academy, not because I wanted an Army career but because that's where baffled children of recently divorced upper middle class parents were sent while the parents tried to straighten out their lives. To my surprise, and perhaps to yours, I enjoyed the school very much, not least because in the assembly hall was the second largest pipe organ in New York State, surpassed only by the one at Radio City Music Hall, but still bigger than the one at the Roxy. It wasn't the instrument that got me (I don't much like the sound of the organ), it was the four different manuals and the dazzling colored tabs for the stops — dozens of them to press in myriad combinations. And then there were the pedals, on which you could dance and make different sounds, even though my legs could barely touch them. Anyway, the first piece I learned was MacDowell's most famous melody, "To a Wild Rose," which I loved not because it was so beautiful but because it was easy to play, being very slow and consisting mostly of sustained chords, which allowed me to experiment with every stop I could get to, often from bar to bar, creating a crazy quilt of varying timbres and dynamics. This began my interest in MacDowell's music and later, when I took piano lessons, I worked my way up to, but not through, the Piano Sonatas – they were really difficult, and I couldn't find any recordings to guide me. I did find a recording of the 2nd Piano Concerto, however – in my teens, I collected classical 78s, the rarer the better, and the Piano Concerto was rare indeed. I think I paid at least five times the retail price for it, but I liked the music, because it reminded me of Rachmaninoff, whose music I adored. I think MacDowell did, too. One final observation: As most of you probably know, there is a cycle of rotation among three primary disciplines involved in the awarding of the MacDowell Medal: one year a writer, the next a composer, the next a visual artist, and so forth, the rhythm occasionally interrupted by a filmmaker or a choreographer. A new category was introduced in 2003, when Merce Cunningham received the Medal for Interdisciplinary Art, because his work I take genuine pride in being the first to represent the former runt of the arts: musical comedy. Stephen Sondheim comprised both musical and visual ideas in collaboration with other artists. Well, perhaps this Medal should be for Interdisciplinary Art too, then, because I do not write alone, I'm a collaborator. Collaboration is the lifeblood of musicals – the collaboration between the songwriters, if there are more than one, and the librettists, if there are more than one. Traditionally, this has been less important to opera, where music is the driving force and the libretto is subordinate to it. In the kind of musicals which Oscar pioneered and which have been the standard ever since, no matter how experimental some of them have become, the reverse is the case: the libretto is the engine and the songs arise from it and are enhanced, or sometimes made to look foolish, by it. Interdisciplinary or no, this Medal is for Musical Theater. I'd like to accept it on behalf of Oscar and all his descendants who made the category possible— including, I have to say, myself. Thank you. recipients of the Edward MacDowell Medal 2013 2012 2011 2010 2009 2008 2007 2006 2005 2004 Steven Sondheim Nan Goldin Edward Albee Sonny Rollins Kiki Smith Thom Mayne Les Blank Alice Munro Steve Reich Nam June Paik Lyricist Photographer Playwright Composer Visual Artist Architect Filmmaker Writer Composer Visual Artist Interdisciplinary 2003 Merce Cunningham Artist 2002 Robert Frank Visual Artist 2001 Philip Roth Writer 2000 Lou Harrison Composer 1999 Ellsworth Kelly Visual Artist 1998 I. M. Pei Architect 1997 Chuck Jones Filmmaker 1996 Joan Didion Writer 1995 George Crumb Composer 1994 Jasper Johns Visual Artist 1993 Harry Callahan Photographer 1992 Richard Wilbur Writer 1991 David Diamond* Composer 1990 Louise Bourgeois Visual Artist 1989 Stan Brakhage Filmmaker 1988 William Styron Writer 1987 Leonard Bernstein Composer 1986 Lee Friedlander Photographer 1985 Robert Motherwell Visual Artist 1984 Mary McCarthy Writer 1983 Elliott Carter Composer 1982 Isamu Noguchi Visual Artist 1981 John Updike Writer 1980 Samuel Barber Composer 1979 John Cheever Writer 1978 Richard Diebenkorn Visual Artist 1977 Virgil Thomson Composer 1976 Lillian Hellman Writer 1975 Willem de Kooning Visual Artist 1974 Walter Piston Composer 1973 Norman Mailer Writer 1972 Georgia O'Keeffe Visual Artist 1971 William Schuman* Composer 1970 Eudora Welty Writer 1969 Louise Nevelson Visual Artist 1968 Roger Sessions Composer 1967 Marianne Moore Writer 1966 Edward Hopper Visual Artist 1965 Edgard Varese Composer 1964 Edmund Wilson Writer 1963 Alexander Calder Visual Artist 1962 Robert Frost Writer 1961 Aaron Copland Composer 1960 Thornton Wilder Writer * SAI National Arts Associate sai-national.org Fall 2013 PAN PIPES 11

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