The Music Thief

I used to go to the Lincoln Center Library at the Juilliard School when I was an abstract artist  in Lower Manhattan through the 1980’s. I would hang out there listening to recordings of opera or find the scores for arias I wanted to learn. I had an undergraduate degree in music, but my schooling was so inferior that I could barely read notation. I didn’t play an instrument. I had planned to study opera on a graduate level, but found the make-up courses would have amounted to another four-years of study at another school. 

Having no money for further study, I was hired by the state of Pennsylvania in 1969 to work as a music therapist. Over the course of six years, I worked in three state facilities, eventually becoming Director of music Therapy at the last. I had no degrees in psychology or education; I couldn’t get a job again without being certified. I couldn’t get certified without those degrees. I quit anyway, at the urging of my friends, who knew I belonged in the arts.

I applied for art school, after taking a summer of basic classes in drawing and painting. I was shocked to be invited to join an experimental Masters Degree program. The fact that I hadn’t been “corrupted” by studying representational art worked on my behalf. I spent two years making abstract art in a studio, secretly sneaking off to take undergrad courses. Once again, I graduated with an empty degree. But by now I was thirty. It was the abstract art world or nothing. 

With the  $7,000 my mother left me when she died, I moved to New York in the winter of 1977. Spending a third of that as “key” money to rent a loft, I spent a lot more on wood, tools, electrical supplies and books to teach myself how to build a living space put of a warehouse. I was in Tribeca, with little art training and no job skills, spending my days struggling at something I didn’t really want to do. I felt like a fraud. My neighbors drove me crazy with their parties and their loud, drecky music. I needed visits to Lincoln Center to stay sane.

At that time, if you wanted sheet music for an aria or a song from a Broadway musical, you had to go to a music store, hoping they might have what you wanted or you could go to the Lincoln Center library, find the score and copy the piece you needed on the coin-operated Xerox machine in the hallway. There was always a long line of musicians and students with bad haircuts who couldn’t afford to buy a whole score when they just needed to learn one piece from it. 

A sign hung on the wall over the Xerox machine flatly stating that it was illegal to reproduce a copy-written work. We were all committing a crime; we were music thieves. We didn’t look at each other; we knew that, at any minute, a person in charge could bust us, shut off the machine and send us back to our cold apartments and lofts, without our music. But that never happened. Whoever was in charge was probably a musician or, at least, a music lover who did not want to be responsible for some young Leontyne Price, Thomas Hampson or Renee Fleming who was standing in line, patiently waiting to copy an aria and using their lunch money to feed the Xerox machine, to go home without their song.

There were other young artists I always saw on my way across Lincoln Square. Little girls, their hair pulled tightly into buns, poured out of subways and cabs, the ones under eight with their mothers, on their way to ballet class. Boys and girls older than eight were eligible to audition for the School of American Ballet. The ballet students were always identifiable because their bodies and their carriage had already begun to change as kids. Balanchine was still ballet master and choreographer back then and his ideal dancer had long feet and neck with a small head. Dancers were not just skinny; they were elongated and bony.

With my last $3,000, I bought a Celtic harp. I had no idea how to play a harp. My harp moved with me to three lofts and two apartments over a period of five years, before someone told me I needed to study with a harp teacher if I really wanted to learn to play harp. 

Like the poor music students at Lincoln Center Library, whom I could identify by their intensity and bad hair, or the ballet students, with their whippet-like bodies and graceful limbs, I looked like a harper. I studied weekly for several years, paying for my rent, food and harp lessons by becoming a sign painter in a downtown sign shop. I quit living in illegal lofts and stopped stealing copy-written arias out of opera scores. I didn’t need to any more. I was beginning to write my own songs and instrumentals, gradually performing in clubs. “Water seeks its own level,” I told myself. I was no longer a music thief.

But I had no idea how many times the tides would rise and fall during my life, washing me up on shores of places I had never imagined I would get to explore.