What can be more irksome than the time wasted whilst waiting for the water from the faucet to turn hot?

God, I love reading the Rorem diaries. I’m currently in the middle of the Nantucket Diaries. It’s such a wonderful assemblage of gossipy reflections on all things dear to Rorem—music, art, the French, gays. It’s all that I love in one place. At one moment Rorem reports on trips made, concerts attended, and compositions underway, and then he’ll relay details of a dinner party with famous personages, and then fly into one of his persistent, recurrent diatribes against Carter and Boulez (which I never fail to thoroughly enjoy). He’ll reflect on old days in Paris, on composer colleagues, on the sexual foibles of famous authors, and I love it all. I may have become quite a snob, but it is this stuff that interests me more than anything. I like talk of culture, art, and sex, and Rorem delivers it all.

Wednesday I begin a French 101. According to Rorem, “For an American to learn French after childhood, he has to (1) want to, (2) be unafraid, even hammish, and (3) work very hard at discovering the equivalent of his personal English as rephrased by the French mot juste.” Not sure what he’s getting at with number 3, but I think I can cover the first two.

I was reviewing recent art actions at Sotheby’s. The whole thing is depressing. It’s quickly becoming clear to me that the average person cannot acquire art. There’s something wrong with that. But ok, so maybe Sotheby’s doesn’t give a good very representative picture of the price of art these days. After all, I have absolutely no interest in paying $2 million for a painting by Andy Warhol of Mickey Mouse (even if I had a spare $2 million). Nor do I even like large chunks of contemporary art, and I have no desire for multimedia installations, sculptures, and such. Interesting paintings are mostly my thing. I was at Spot Coffee the other day and saw the upstairs wall covered in new paintings by some local artist—I don’t remember who. It was uninteresting to me—the art--and it was unreasonably priced. I think artists believe that to seem legitimate, to be respected in some way, their art needs to be expensive. And they’re probably right. But it’s irritating and a source of some sadness that art is reserved for the rich and the privileged (privileged because they can afford art).

I’ve been listening to David Diamond’s Eight Symphony, composed in 1960 and dedicated to Aaron Copland. What surprises me is how much I’m beginning to like it. Diamond’s music after the mid-50s turned dramatically chromatic, less accessible, more stark. This began with his 5th symphony, and since there are no recordings of most of his later symphonies, I’m not sure how they compare. Except for the Eight symphony. I was prepared to write it off as Diamond trying to be “with it,” embracing the avant garde after swimming against the tide for so long. But though it is stark and chromatic, and to be sure, more difficult, there is still greatness in it. It has some wonderful moments, and I’m heartened by the belief that talent and heart prevail for Diamond no matter the style. This man had immense talent, and, if one can believe what others have written about his personality, he was as committed and as serious as one can be about composing music—often times too serious about things, which I very much like. What is better than people who are passionate to the extreme about their work? I’m eager to hear the other later symphonies, if only someone would record them.

As I’m nearing the end of the Nantucket Diary of Rorem, I’ve come across a few entries in which Rorem speaks with great respect and fondness for Diamond. Here’s one dated April 15, 1985: “David Diamond’s seventieth birthday concert last night was powerful and moving. It was moving to see friends of forty years mixed with David’s current post-adolescent pupils honestly weeping, not with the frozen pretense we adopt when one we love has just laid an egg. The power rose from the music, four works chosen obviously for their drive and scope rather than for their prettiness and fun. (The concert was short on fun) Whatever David’s notion about himself—I used to annoy him by talking of his Masterpiece Complex—the evening proved him an elder statesman. Something happened. It’s never too late to change your mind.”

Here’s another, dated October 20, 1985: “Evening alone with David Diamond. Moved, not only by the looks of the thirty-pound score of his Ninth Symphony (surely what he intends it to be: a masterpiece, as well as a piece by a master, though such terms are out of sync with our times), but David himself, seventy now, pale, not rich, dedicated to the roots in a way I’m not, speaking with such tenderness of his sister, Sabina, who in her Rochester clinic has assumed a permanent fetal position though her heart is strong and she prevails. We talk as always of the good old days and of the narrowing future. Not a morning goes by that I don’t, while squinting half awake toward the gray light through the curtain or walking past overturned garbage cans in the rain on Amsterdam Avenue, ask myself how this would seem with the stink of a hangover or the authority of ten rye whiskies. All these sober years. Yet I remain as close to a blackout as that bottle across the room. DD’s patience, and my exasperation (I’d roll my eyes & sigh in front of other students), with our mutual pupil, old Gladys Fisher, twenty-five years ago in Buffalo.”