Sunday, April 13, 1986
Written by Suzanne Claire
A Masonic Temple in Orange County (Santa Ana, Tustin or Orange)
As we approach the end of the twentieth century, we experience the passing of the last of a generation of artists, architects, writers and musicians who contributed so much to our culture. Their lives spanned and reflected the tremendous changes that accompanied the turn of the nineteenth century into the modern, high-tech society of the 1980’s. My father lived through and experienced events most of us have only touched through the presence of newsreels and books, so I believe it is fitting that, in sharing this brief remembrance of him with you, I respect its historic context.
He was born in nineteen-four in Naugurani, Bessarabia. This province on the Russian-Romanian border changed hands many times before becoming a part of the Soviet Union. At the turn of the century, it was a part of Imperial Russia. My grandfather served in the Czar’s army. Before ten years had passed into the new century, Russia was at war with Japan, and Russian students were organizing the first revolts that foreshadowed the Russian Revolution. Like the Czar, my grandfather had cousins in England, but my grandfather also had the good sense to make arrangements to get his family out of the old country. Their destination was to be Canada.
In 1912, my grandfather attempted to book passage on the Titanic, but the liner was full. I am happy to be reporting they took the next ship.
My father studied violin from the time he was six, first in Winnipeg, Manitoba and later in New York. New York was bustling with energy in the 1920’s. My dad saw Babe Ruth play. He attended the premier of the first talking picture, The Jazz Singer. When Isadora Duncan’s brother, Raymond, who walked around town in Greek robes and sandals, decided to organize a cultural group to live and perform in Athens, my father was one of those he hoped to take with him. My father had other plans.
He organized and directed orchestras all over the world. Places he lived and performed included the West Indies, Puerto Rico, and pre-World War II Germany. During this decade, the 1930’s, he directed a symphony in Florida and, back in Canada, gave a command performance for the Prince of Wales. This particular Prince of Wales is known to most of us as the uncrowned King Edward of England, who abdicated to marry the woman he loved. Some others among us have been dismayed to learn that the Prince also pursued a friendship with Adolph Hitler. This is a less romantic, but certainly more sober view of the focus and personalities who shaped that decade.
While the world was preparing for another war, my father continued to give concerts. In the northern Minnesota border town of International Falls, he organized the “Border Symphony”, and was delighted to receive national press coverage when they gave their first concert. At this time, he built a remarkable class of students in Canada and Northern Minnesota. There was Louie Grauler, who served for many years as concertmaster of the Tokyo Symphony. Another student, whose name I don’t know, became concertmaster of the Toronto Symphony. The current director of the string department at England’s prestigious Royal Academy of Music, David Martin, was another of my father’s students from this talented group. Other students went on to organize classes in the school system of this country, state-by-state building programs of music education for Baby Boom children whose parents appreciated the cultural benefits of the aesthetic disciplines. A later student from the 1940’s, Vincent Pulicicchio, has recently toured California and made seventeen overseas tours (including one behind the Iron Curtain), with a delectable, Minnesota-based young people’s chamber orchestra. This little group especially charmed my father, who had watched with dismay the gradual erosion of music education in California’s public schools.
My father’s favorite student, however, was the young head of the music department at a small Midwestern college. With degrees in music, art, and education, she performed as a violinist and soprano soloist all over the state of Minnesota, where cold winter, sometimes 40 below zero, made many musical engagements and daring adventures through the snow. My father married her in Fort Francis, Ontario in 1941, one of his wisest decisions ever, as he acquired his greatest musical supporter as well as a devoted lifelong companion. My mother’s late sister, Eleanor Parsons, was a brilliant concert pianist whose students have performed and taught all over the Midwest. The three of them, my parents and my aunt, made music together, sharing an aesthic philosophy that is at the very center of my family’s belief system.
American citizenship and marriage were soon followed by my father’s introduction to the Masons by his great friend, Judge J. Hadler of International Falls. The friendships and affiliations of those Midwestern towns have been cherished and lifelong. And, as we later traveled around as a family, the Masonic links to communities in half a dozen states have not only been warmly appreciated, but a key to assimilation in a society far different from those of troubled Eastern Europe or the rootlessness of ocean liners.
It was in the 1940’s that my parents came to California. My father was dean of a music academy in Los Angeles that attracted a gifted international faculty and often glittered around the edge with Hollywood personalities and European-born performing artists who found steady work in the studios. The woodwind department was proud of young George Weidler, who instructed and performed as his wife pursued the singing career with the big bands elsewhere in the city. I’m sorry to say they did not stay together. She got her big break on the road with Les Brown and changed her name to Doris Day. There is always more room in the popular press for popular music, but there was as much excitement going on at the classical academy as ever there was on the bandstand or in the studio.
My father was especially proud of his affiliation with the American composer, Charles Wakefield Cadman, who was a good friend as well as head of the composition department at the academy. Years later, when we were living in Denver, I was thrilled to open a required text for my Colorado history class and find mention of Mr. Cadman as a world-class, Colorado-born composer. I proudly announced to my class that he’d once worked for my father and had been a family friend, but no one believed me. I’m sure they’d never have believed that Rita Hayworth once practiced her dance steps there with her father, but oh yes she did. What impresses me most about that decade in Los Angeles history, however, came about as a result of tragedy in Europe. Refugees from the insanity of the second World War joined earlier immigrants to bring more music, painting, literature, sculpture and creative film-making into the city than had ever been there before. This is fresh in my mind because, with the help of my father, I was able to write a great deal about that time last year. I can barely sum up in a few sentences what it was like to be in L.A. then—and I experienced quite a lot of it firsthand myself in the next decade, the 1950’s—but I must tell you that the acquired cultural resources of the city were a rich and intoxicating mixture of some of the most colorfully interesting personalities of the century. While the Lachmanns and Wurlitzers safely transported rare musical instruments from Europe into the safety of university collections, the arts were enriched by the diverse talents of people with names like Brecht and Mann, Stravinsky and Schoenberg, W.H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, and Aldous Huxley joined up with the Quakers to arrange safe passage and sponsorship for families left behind in Europe.
Our affiliations were most often among the musical people of L.A., and there were so many. There seemed to be a greater appreciation of the fine arts then, and so many of my father’s old friends and acquaintances from Juilliard, as well as such European-based artists as David Oistrakh and Joseph Szigeti, were still performing. Fritz Kreisler was still alive. I learned anecdotes about Vladimir de Pachman and Efram Zimbalist, Senior.
Today when an immigrant gets off the boat, he or she is unlikely to be clutching a violin. Wise young immigrants would be advised to look for a hot meal and a pocket calculator for the classroom. The world situation it so tense right now that some refugees are arriving without even the luxury of a hot meal or a night’s sanctuary. And our immigrant artists are often not European at all. The classical traditions of Germany, Austria, Poland, Russia, France, Italy are now brilliantly performed for us by young artists from China and Japan, Korea and Latin America. We are dazzled by their virtuosity, and think of the waning numbers of young American children in music programs.
Music is a universal language. It transcends the ethnocentric concerns that too often divide us, and it should remind us of the ancient impulse to create a tune from a reed or a simple stringed instrument. My mother’s music sorority uses Pan pipes for its symbol. I am easily moved by a simple drum as I am by the koto, the sitar, or a solitary harmonica calling out through the stillness of a deserted street. My father’s musical tradition, however, was entirely classical: that highly refined European contribution to world culture that can be so intimidating to the untrained ear… an acquired taste that is so worth every moment.
We have always taken pride in being a family of mixed cultural background. We find no cultural conflict as we remember and respect some of the traditions of my father’s Jewish ancestors, people who crossed half of Europe during the Spanish Inquisition and probably most of a Middle Eastern desert before that. How proud I am to be descended from an ancient people who were so respected for their writing. Neither my father’s Jewish background nor my mother’s lifelong membership in the Congregational church has ever caused the slightest philosophic conflict among the three of us. We have always shared the belief that the evolution of such cultural institutions as temple and church is an organizational reflection of higher universal principles that will always be unknown to us in their fathomless complexity. The Zen philosopher, Dr. Suzuki, as well as a number of Vedic scholars, have been fond of the analogy of the finger pointing to the moon. We—and our traditions—are all pointing to the moon, but sometimes we confuse the finger pointing with the moon itself. When we become preoccupied with our more ethnocentric customs, it is far too easy to objectify them and lose contact with some of the finest maps to harmony among diverse peoples on the face of this planet. The Nineteenth Century Hindu visionary, ViveKananda, once said there are as many religions in our world as there are people. I think the hieroglyphic quality of the printed word on a page is such that we each read a somewhat different story, and a wise person will admit that mere words can never offer us a common language.
This brings me back to the strongest force in my father’s life, which was his music. It is our family’s belief that the fine arts represent the highest expression of man’s spirit. Aldous Huxley believed that, of all the fine arts, music comes the closest to expressing the inexpressible. This has been the strongest of all shared traditions among the three of us, and it will remain unbroken by time or personal loss because it represents what we believe is a force stronger than any of us.
This last part will be easiest of all for me to write, but hardest of all for me to read aloud, and I’ve asked Robert and Linda to stand by to help me out if I can’t continue. The last, nearly three years of my father’s life have been blessed by the presence of my little daughter, Felicity Miranda-Brett. She has amused and delighted him, and filled him with wonder. Although my musical tastes are the most eclectic of the family, I’ve been teaching Felicity classical melodies since she was a baby. When she was barely two, she had a chance to attend one of my father’s chamber music groups. When they played her favorite piece, Mozart’s “Eine Kleine Nachtmuzik”, her eyes lit up and she started to sing along with the violins.
This past Friday, when my mother took him to the hospital, my father was joking with the staff and boasting of Felicity’s ability to sing and play Beethoven, Mozart, and Schubert. He probably did not mention that her instrument is neither piano nor violin, but a trombone-kazoo. He would surely want you to know that she plays themes from both the first and second movements of “Eine Kleine Nachtmuzik”, as well as one from “The Magic Flute”. I hope she never loses her love for this music.
I am sad to think that Felicity has lost her direct link to the forces of history and cultural change my father carried with him. His contributions to her have already been great, but when she’s old enough to understand the larger history behind this little sketch of his earlier life, she will be left with newsreels, books and my second-hand knowledge. I hope I can somehow bring alive for her the thrill of watching the old Wiltern Theatre restored for future performing artists in the very, forgotten area where the old music academy stood. I want her to know what it was like to turn off Sunset or San Vicente, to drive down street-lamped roads under smogless skies to the graceful parlors where people played chamber music on week-ends. None of this happened so very long ago, but our society if so completely different now, the pace of our favorite big city will never be so innocently creative again. My parents led a very full life together, and it was once frequently exciting for all of us. I hope I’ve conveyed some of its flavor to all of you. I only wish Felicity could have experienced more of this direct influence. She was the brightest spark in my father’s life, and his last, happiest thoughts were of her.
I have never been in a musical league with my parents, so instead of bringing music with me, I’ve brought these little hieroglyphic pages. They represent the life and times of a colorful, energetic, highly individualistic man who was the strongest personality in my life — and probably the greatest influence.
For my mother and all among you who cared for him:
“If music be the food of love, play on.”
