Len phoned me a few months ago and suggested that we attend this year’s concert, the thirtieth since our valedictory. I hesitated for two reasons. I feared that my memory of excellence would not be supported by reality, and I didn’t relish the role of a graybeard from springs long past, standing and singing “Madame Jeanette” from the audience, should that peculiar tradition still be honored. But sentiment and curiosity prevailed, and we went.
Yes, Heraclitus, you cannot step twice into the same river. The raw material remains—talented kids of all colors, shapes, backgrounds. But the goal has been inverted. Wilhousky tried to mold all this diversity into the uncompromising, single standard of elite culture as expressed in the classical repertory for chorus and orchestra. In the auditorium of Julia Richman High School, before his arrival, we used to form small pickup groups to sing the latest rock-and-roll numbers. But when our sentinels spotted the maestro, they quickly spread the alarm and dead silence descended. Wilhousky claimed that rock-and-roll encouraged poor habits of voice and pitch, and he would expel anyone caught singing the stuff in his bailiwick.
Diversity has now triumphed, and the forbidden fruit of our era has become the entire first part of the program. The concert began with the All-City marching band, complete with drum major, baton twirlers, and flag carriers. Then the All-City jazz ensemble.
A full concert and two hours later, the orchestra and chorus finally received their turn. Not only has the number of ensembles expanded to respect the diversity of tastes and inclinations in our polyglot city, but each group has also retained a distinctive signature. Blacks predominate in the chorus; the string sections of the orchestra are overwhelmingly Asian. The chorus is now led by Edith Del Valle, a tall, stunning woman who heads the vocal department at Fiorello H. La Guardia High School of the Arts. (As a single sign of continuity, Anna Ext still coaches the sopranos, as she did in our day and has for thirty-two years. How can we convey adequate praise to a woman who has devoted so much, for so long, to a voluntary, weekend organization—except to say that our language contains no word more noble than “teacher”?)
The chorus still sings the same basic repertory—Randall Thompson’s “Alleluia,” Wilhousky’s own arrangement of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” some Bach and Beethoven, and an Irving Berlin medley for the season of his centennial.
How good are they, and how good were we? Was Wilhousky’s insistence on full professionalism just a vain conceit? They sing by memory, and therefore (since eyes can be fixed on the conductor), with uncanny precision and unanimity. But I demur for two reasons. First, the sound, though lovely in raw quality, is so emotionless, as though text and style of composition have no influence upon interpretation. Perhaps we sang in the same manner. The soul of these classics may not be accessible before the legal age of drinking, driving, and voting.
But my second reservation troubles me more. The chorus is terribly unbalanced, with 129 women and only 31 men. The tenors are reduced to astringent shouting as the evening wears on. This cannot be by design, and can only mean that the chorus is not attracting anywhere near the requisite number of male applicants. Thirteen of the 31 men hail from the conductor’s own specialty school, La Guardia High. Have they been pressed into desperate service? In our chorus, all sections were balanced. We clamored in our local high schools for the strictly limited right to audition, and fewer than half the applicants succeeded.
I mused upon these inadequacies as the evening wore on (and the tenors tired). The expanded diversity of bands and jazz is both exciting and a proper testimony to cultural pluralism. The relaxed attitude of performers contrasts pleasantly with the rigid formalism and nervousness of our era (I could have died in a spectacular backward plunge off the top riser of Carnegie Hall when I felt the chair’s rearward creep, but didn’t dare stop to fidget and readjust).
But has the evening’s diversity and spontaneous joy pushed aside Wilhousky’s uncompromising excellence? Can the two ideals, each so important in itself, coexist at all? And if not, whatever shall we do to keep alive that harsh vision of the best of the greatest?
But if I felt this single trouble amidst my pleasure, at least I wouldn’t have to worry about “Madame Jeanette” in this new river. Surely, that tradition had evaporated, and I would not have to face brightness and acne from the depths of advancing middle age in the fifteenth row. After all, “Madame Jeanette” is a quiet classical piece for chorus alone—and the chorus no longer holds pride of place among the various ensembles.
I applauded warmly after the finale, pleasure only slightly tinged with a conceptual sort of sadness, and then turned to leave. But Edith Del Valle strode out from the wings and, with a presence fully equal to Wilhousky’s, stepped onto the podium—to conduct “Madame Jeanette.” Old members scurried to the front. Len and I looked at each other and, without exchanging a word, rose in unison.
No tears. We are both still terrified of Wilhousky’s wrath, and his ghost surely stood on that stage, watching carefully for any sign of inattention or departure from pitch. This time, the chorus sang exquisitely, for “Madame Jeanette” succeeds by precision or fails by overinvolvement. The imbalance of sections does not affect such a quiet song, while its honest, but simple, sentimentality can be encompassed by the high-school soul.
Edith Del Valle, the black woman from La Guardia High, blended with her absolute opposite, the silver-haired Slavic aristocrat, Peter J. Wilhousky. The discipline and precision of her chorus—their species of excellence—had triumphed to convert the potentially maudlin into thoughtful dignity for tradition’s sake. It was a pleasure to make music with her. If youth and age can produce such harmony, there must be hope for pluralism and excellence—but only if we can recover, and fully embrace, Wilhousky’s dictum: No compromises.
I learned something else at this final celebration of continuity, something every bit as important to me, if only parochially: I can still hit that low D-flat. Father Lachaise may be beckoning, but “Madame Jeanette” and I are still hanging tough and young in our separate ways.
Postscript
This essay, which first appeared in the New York Times Magazine, unleashed a flood of reminiscence by correspondence, mostly from former chorus members and others who knew Peter Wilhousky. I was regaled with many sweet memories, particularly of our custom in jamming subway cars after leaving the rehearsals en masse and singing (generally to the keen surprise and enjoyment of passengers) until the accumulating departures of homebound choristers reduced our ranks to less than four-part harmony. But one theme, in its several guises, pervaded all the letters and reinforced the serious, and decidedly nonsentimental, raison d’être of this essay—Wilhousky’s commitment to excellence and its impact upon us. One woman wrote from a generation before mine:
Mr. Wilhousky was my music teacher and mentor 55 years ago when I was a student at New Utrecht High in Brooklyn. We had an outstanding choir that won every competition in my four years at the school. How we adored and esteemed this wonderful man who by the way we were sure was a prince: so handsome and aristocratic. He was then, as well as you say later, a stickler for seriousness, discipline, and dedication to our work. He encouraged those of us with some talent to continue our studies and many of us did.
Another who sang in the chorus five years before me said:
What memories you stirred for me, and brought forth some tears too. Only another choir member could share how special those rehearsals and concerts were. Just to be chosen to audition was an honor…. Madame Jeanette is turning around in my head now. I recall teaching the bass part to my kid brother so that we could sing. I’ve taught it to my husband and kids too. I was in awe of Peter J. Wilhousky. Discipline was never a problem in this group. How we loved to sing!
And from ten years after my watch:
Today I am a professional singer in Philadelphia, having sung with umpteen college groups, choruses, community theaters, opera workshops, etc., but nothing will ever match that full-bodied enthusiastic blend of
voices I remember now so well. My children poked gentle fun at me today as I waxed enthusiastic over your story and they listened to INXS on their Walkmans as I hummed Madame Jeanette over and over again.
And finally, from a Wilhousky counterpart in Portland, Oregon: “The taste of excellence is the hook. The kids never forget—as you obviously have not.”
This accumulated weight of testimony made me reassess the tone of the essay itself. I now think that I was a bit too ecumenically forgiving of the chorus’s present insufficiencies. We probably were very good (if not quite so subtle and professional as clouds of memory suggest); in any case, the ideal of uncompromising excellence certainly pervaded our concepts and did pass down into our subsequent lives. I don’t see how the present chorus can be engendering such an attitude with an appeal so feeble that male singers must be dredged up rather than turned away after dreaming, scheming, and begging for a chance (as we did). This is simply too great a loss for any gain in diversity or relaxation. Islands of excellence are too rare and precious in our world of mediocrity; any erosion and foundering is tragic.
Finally, for I really do not wish to end a sweet story on a sour note, may I report Julius La Rosa’s version of his incident with Wilhousky. He writes in a letter of November 17, 1988, that the chorus was rehearsing “Begin the Beguine” (during his tenure in the late 1940s). Wilhousky wanted the men to sing with a cello-like tone. La Rosa writes:
I swear to you, I can still see him holding an imaginary cello, his left hand on the neck, fingers pressing down on the strings and vibrating to achieve the desired tremolo. But we weren’t getting it so he told us to stand up, individually, and sing the phrase. My turn. I sang it. He asked me to do it again, then exclaimed, “That’s it!” And all I remember after that was walking back to the subway with Jeanette feeling seven feet tall.
La Rosa was also gracious enough to add: “And yes, though time does distort the memory, I wouldn’t be surprised if I was flat the day he, Mr. Wilhousky, singled me out. I was terrified—and probably didn’t take a good deep breath!!” (Actually, I don’t doubt for a moment that both La Rosa’s version and what I heard ten years later from Wilhousky are entirely accurate. We scarcely need Rashomon to teach us that rich events are remembered for different parts and different emphases—so that equally accurate, but partial versions yield almost contradictory impressions.)
And if La Rosa’s reference to Jeanette (not Madame) puzzled you, let me close with his ultimate touché from earlier in his letter:
All-City Chorus was an enchantment…. And lucky, too, I was ’cause I could walk from the subway along Third Avenue with Jeanette—Yes! Jeanette Caponegro, second alto—while you were stuck with Len!
14 | Red Wings in the Sunset
TEDDY ROOSEVELT borrowed an African proverb to construct his motto: Speak softly, but carry a big stick. In 1912, a critic turned Roosevelt’s phrase against him, castigating the old Roughrider for trying to demolish an opponent by rhetoric alone: “Ridicule is a powerful weapon and the temptation to use it unsparingly is a strong one…. Even if we don’t agree with him [Roosevelt’s opponent], it is not necessary either to cut him into little pieces or to break every bone in his body with the ‘big stick.’”
This criticism appeared in the midst of Roosevelt’s presidential campaign (when he split the Republican party by trying to wrest the nomination from William Howard Taft, then formed his own Progressive, or Bull Moose, party to contest the election, thereby scattering the Republican vote and bringing victory to Democrat Woodrow Wilson). Surely, therefore, the statement must record one of Roosevelt’s innumerable squabbles during a tough political year. It does not. Francis H. Allen published these words in an ornithological journal, The Auk. He was writing about flamingos.
When, as a cynical and posturing teenager, I visited Mount Rushmore, I gazed with some approval at the giant busts of Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln, and then asked as so many others have—what in hell is Teddy Roosevelt doing up there? Never again shall I question his inclusion, for I have just discovered something sufficiently remarkable to warrant a sixty-foot stone likeness all by itself. In 1911, an ex-president of the United States, after seven exhausting years in office, and in the throes of preparing his political comeback, found time to write and publish a technical scientific article, more than one hundred pages long: “Revealing and Concealing Coloration in Birds and Mammals.”
Roosevelt wrote his article to demolish a theory proposed by the artist-naturalist Abbott H. Thayer (and defended by Mr. Allen, who castigated Roosevelt for bringing the rough language of politics into a scientific debate). In 1896 Thayer, as I shall document in a moment, correctly elucidated the important principle of countershading (a common adaptation that confers near invisibility upon predators or prey). But he then followed a common path to perdition by slowly extending his valid theory to a doctrine of exclusivity. By 1909, Thayer was claiming that all animal colors, from the peacock’s tail to the baboon’s rump, worked primarily for concealment. As a backbreaking straw that sealed his fate and inspired Roosevelt’s wrath, Thayer actually argued that natural selection made flamingos red, all the better to mimic the sunset. In the book that will stand forever as a monument to folly, to cockeyed genius, and to inspiration gone askew, Thayer stated in 1909 (in Concealing-Coloration in the Animal Kingdom, written largely by his son Gerald H. Thayer and published by Macmillan):
These traditionally “showy” birds are, at their most critical moments, perfectly “obliterated” by their coloration. Conspicuous in most cases, when looked at from above, as man is apt to see them, they are wonderfully fitted for “vanishment” against the flushed, rich-colored skies of early morning and evening.
Roosevelt responded with characteristic vigor in his 1911 article:
Among all the wild absurdities to which Mr. Thayer has committed himself, probably the wildest is his theory that flamingos are concealingly colored because their foes mistake them for sunsets. He has never studied flamingos in their haunts, he knows nothing personally of their habits or their enemies or their ways of avoiding their enemies…and certainly has never read anything to justify his suppositions; these suppositions represent nothing but pure guesswork, and even to call them guesswork is a little over-conservative, for they come nearer to the obscure mental processes which are responsible for dreams.
Roosevelt’s critique (and many others equally trenchant) sealed poor Thayer’s fate. In 1896, Thayer had begun his campaign with praise, promise, and panache (his outdoor demonstrations of disappearing decoys became legendary). He faced the dawn of World War I in despair and dejection (though the war itself brought limited vindication as our armies, used his valid ideas in theories of camouflage). He lamented to a friend that his avocation (defending his theory of concealing coloration) had sapped his career:
Never…have I felt less a painter…I am like a man to whom is born, willy nilly, a child whose growth demanded his energies, he the while always dreaming that this growing offspring would soon go forth to seek his fortune and leave him to his profession, but the offspring again and again either unfolding some new faculties that must be nurtured and watched, or coming home and bursting into his parent’s studio, bleeding and bruised by an insulted world, continued to need attention so that there was nothing for it but to lay down the brush and take him once more into one’s lap.
I must end this preface to my essay with a confession. I have known about Thayer’s “crazy” flamingo theory all my professional life—and for a particular reason. It is the standard example always used by professors in introductory courses to illustrate illogic and unreason, and dismissed in a sentence with the ultimate weapon of intellectual nastiness—ridicule that forecloses understanding. When I began my research for this essay, I thought that I would write about absurdity, another comment on unthinking adaptationism. But my reading unleashed a cascade of discovery, leading me to Roosevelt and, more importantly, to the real Abbott Thayer, shorn of his symbolic burden. The
flamingo theory is, of course, absurd—that will not change. But how and why did Thayer get there from an excellent start that the standard dismissive anecdote, Thayer’s unfortunate historical legacy, never acknowledges? The full story, if we try to understand Abbott Thayer aright, contains lessons that will more than compensate for laughter lost.
Who was Abbott Handerson Thayer anyway? I had always assumed, from the name alone, that he was an eccentric Yankee who used wealth and social postion to gain a hearing for his absurd ideas. I could find nothing about him in the several scientific books that cite the flamingo story. I was about to give up when I located his name in the Encyclopedia Britannica. I found, to my astonishment, that Abbott Thayer was one of the most famous painters of late nineteenth century America (and an old Yankee to be sure, but not of the wealthy line of Thayers—see the biography by Nelson G. White, Abbott H. Thayer: Painter and Naturalist). He specialized in ethereal women, crowned with suggestions of halos and accompanied by quintessentially innocent children. Art and science are both beset by fleeting tastes that wear poorly—far be it for me to judge. I had begun to uncover a human drama under the old pedagogical caricature.
But let us begin, as they say, at the beginning. Standard accounts of the adaptive value of animal colors use three categories to classify nature’s useful patterns (no one has substantially improved upon the fine classic by Hugh B. Cott, Adaptive Coloration in Animals, 1940). According to Cott, adaptive colors and patterns may serve as (1) concealment (to shield an animal from predators or to hide the predator in nature’s never-ending game); (2) advertisement, to scare potential predators (as in the prominent false eyespots of so many insects), to maintain territory or social position, or to announce sexual receptivity (as in baboon rump patches); and (3) disguise, as animals mimic unpalatable creatures to gain protection, or resemble an inanimate (and inedible) object (numerous leaf and stick insects, or a bittern, motionless and gazing skyward, lost amidst the reeds). Since disguise lies closer to advertisement than to concealment (a disguised animal does not try to look inconspicuous, but merely like something else), we can immediately appreciate Abbott Thayer’s difficulty. He wanted to reduce all three categories to the single purpose of concealment—but fully two-thirds of all color patterns, in conventional accounts, serve the opposite function of increased visibility.