I first met Harold in ’99, in Syracuse. He was up to score Syracuse Stage’s production of Macbeth, and we had him come to our composition seminar. I didn’t know him from Adam, but I immediately knew that I’d just met a real composer. He left me with a pile of scores and CD’s, all of which I got to know well over the next few months. When we met again, in New York, it was for a performance of a piece of mine with his and Sarah Laimon’s fabulous group, Sequitur. And that was it, we were buddies. I don’t know why Harold decided he liked me the way he did, but it was clear to me then, standing out on 67th after the concert trying to get cabs and goofing around, riffing, free-associating in a sometimes hallucinatory way that was unique to him, that for him our friendship had begun during those two or three days in Syracuse. Just like that we were pals.
We worked together a lot, trading gigs with Sequitur, with various groups in Syracuse, with my group in New York, had Sequitur do an upstate tour with a stop at Eastman, everything was fun and always musically exciting. On a week-to-week basis, though, we were the loonies who lunched. Trading favorite spots in Manhattan (occasionally even luring him north of 57th street), we’d sit for hours talking crap. Harold was hilarious, one of the funniest people I’ve had the good fortune to know, but even more than that he was a raconteur. The stories would come, as fluid and dizzying and unpredictable as his music, and half the time I wasn’t sure whether he was telling the truth or elaborately world-building, right there in real time. I didn’t care, because the yarns were so good, so improbable yet weirdly believable, and the telling so vastly entertaining. I listened, rapt, wondering if I had anything to offer that was even half as compelling. I could crack him up, though, and that was always hugely satisfying, kind of like making a 3-pointer in front of Michael Jordan.
We also talked shop, of course, and this too was a kick. Harold knew of a lot of music and both engaged with and talked about it passionately, imaginatively, free of canonical shibboleths. We would free-range from Donatoni to Brahms to Dutilleux to Anna Weesner, and it always felt fresh, unbound, like I was hearing through new ears. Harold could also expound on the current compositional scene, to a degree that I am frankly not capable, and this I found fascinating, if often baffling. With no one else could I sit for an hour teasing out the various implications of this or that academic hire or major commission. Something about his investment in it, and his way of casting everything in human terms, made it tolerable and even (at times) emotionally resonant. I don’t know how he was able to pull this off, but I think it stems from the fact that everything in Harold, the jokes, the wordplay, the musical insights and the investment in professional tomfoolery, was entirely genuine, that the persona was Harold, and that this somewhat mysterious trickster was in fact an open book.
All of this goes double for the music. Wildly imaginative, formally audacious (bravely so, enough to be on occasion utterly perplexing), plugged into every contemporary current and yet expressively and gesturally unique, it was, it is a singular refraction of the cultural present through one, unmatched creative mind. The weakest pieces are gorgeous, while the strongest (in this list I’d include Sindbad; the Piano Quartet; Brion; and the little-heard song cycle Exiles) are breathtaking. Don’t take my word for it, though, ask any of the innumerable performers who love playing this music. Their verdict has a clarion quality to it: this was a composer worth embracing, taking to heart, worth the investment of time and mental energy the music required.
We had him as composer in residence at our festival, Weekend of Chamber Music, just after the first of the major strokes that revealed the slow, blood-borne process that was already taking him from us. He performed Sindbad from his wheelchair, and he slayed, brought the house down. He was making progress at that point, determined to walk again unaided within a period of weeks. Sadly that was not to be, of course, as one reversal after another gradually laid bare the ineluctable trajectory that had been set before him. What always floored me, though, every time we spoke or saw each other, was that he was still unmistakably Harold. Even in those times when his speech was slightly slurred or sluggish, the wit, the big, open heart, the delight in the absurd and the sheer joy of living were there in abundance. And when none of that was the case, when he felt broken and flabbergasted at what was happening to him, he opened his heart again and showed us his exhaustion, his grief. All too seldom do adults give each other the gift of their tears, but with Harold that was possible too, running the same emotional super-highway as the jokes, the stories, the music. Of course I thought I’d have more time with him, of course I was wrong, as we generally are in these situations. I still have his last two voicemails on my phone and I don’t know when, if ever, I’ll delete them. They’re just too funny.
