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(Note: I have also written about Professor Cutler in 'Alma Mater.')
The other day I was sitting out under the linden tree before dinner here at The Boston Home when a fellow resident began backing up his wheelchair perilously close to mine. I was able to warn him of my presence there in time. As I regarded him, I recalled that he had attended Bucknell. And that led me to remember the incident with the Bucknell Fight Song.
I asked him whether he recalled that venerable song. He wasn't sure whether he did or not. I sang a few bars for him (I never knew the words, only its instrumental form) and he said it sounded vaguely familiar (I knew his memory had been failing him lately.) So then I asked if he would like to hear the story of Lehigh and that fight song? He had nothing better to do; so he tilted back and I began my tale.
"The Bucknell Fight Song incident involved Elkus. So it's about Elkus that I will speak.
"Jonathan Elkus was one of two music professors who were at Lehigh when I was a student there during 1961-65. The other music professor was Robert Cutler. Cutler conducted the Glee Club, while Elkus directed the Band. (I was a member of the Glee Club and most decidedly not the Band. So all comments about the Band below are the result of hearsay and observation from without.)
"(I know, I am already introducing another person into this mix. But I do so for a reason. Oh yes, I was fond of Robert Cutler - everyone was. But I raise his name here for purposes of contrast, in order to more clearly set off in relief the person who was Jonathan Elkus.)
"There were clear differences between these two men. Elkus was young (he was 30 when I started there), while Cutler was older (47.) Cutler was balding, while Elkus had a close-cropped crew cut. Elkus liked his bourbon and smoked unfiltered Luckies; whereas Cutler neither smoked nor drank. (This made for a difference on trips: the Band buses were the scene of much libation; while the Glee Club bus was a model of sobriety.)
"The two men were opposites in temperament as well. While Cutler was affable, humorous, and sweet (like a favorite uncle), Elkus was prickly, moody, and high-strung (like a brilliant-if-acerbic brother-in-law.) Elkus could (and sometimes did) cut one with a single curt word; but Cutler could never do that. (Elkus had arranged Charles Ives's 'A Son of a Gambolier', in which at one point the ratchet plays a crucial role: this seemed to exemplify his personality.) Their cars matched their temperaments: Elkus zipped around in a fast little Volvo P1800 sports car; while Cutler drove a large sedate Pontiac sedan. I might mention that Elkus rented an apartment in town; while Cutler lived in a pentagonal house in the woods on the other side of the mountain.
"Elkus the young hot-blood lived dangerously at times. There were at least two stories about him wracking up vehicles, and both ended ironically. Once, while riding his motorcycle, he slipped on some gravel and wiped out, fracturing some ribs. That evening in the hospital they had spare ribs for dinner. Another time, a student was taking Elkus for a ride in his new sports car and rolled the car. That day the hospital menu featured apple turnovers.
"Elkus actually wrote a piece for our Glee Club. Called 'The Dorados', it was infused with the harmonies - indeed, the very flavor - of Mexico. I think it was the most wonderful piece we ever sang. (Now, over 40 years later, I can still trace most of its nuances in my mind.) And I think Elkus was the only one to advise our Glee Club, in reference to a perilously high passage, 'If your voices crack, let them!'
"I write about these two men, Cutler and Elkus, because in truth they were the only professors who I knew outside of class at Lehigh. (I may have been a Math major, but my true interests - my love - were clearly in Music.) Those relationships went beyond acquaintance: both men inspired affection amongst the students. In particular, both men were kind to me and I've never forgotten it.
"Cutler: I had signed up to take a bus trip to New York City one Saturday when I was a freshman. We would walk around, take in a dirty movie, and drink whisky on the ride home. Somehow, I missed the bus. I was walking forlornly around the campus when Professor Cutler spied me. I told him of my plight. He said, 'Let's go to the grocery store: we'll get the ingredients for your favorite meal (baked chicken wings) and I'll fix it for you.' So I dined with him at his house tete-a-tete; and that was by far a better experience than the bus ride would have been!
"Elkus: When as a senior I lamented to him the lack of a music composition course at Lehigh, he told me that he would teach me himself (he even called it 'Music 1xx' and got me credit.) So I ventured over to his house every Monday evening for lessons. (I recall our very first session: I had a Kyrie for chorus, soloists, and orchestra which I had written during the summer. Elkus listened to it, made a few suggestions, then added bluntly, 'Why don't you get the hell out of the church, Ted!')(I never set another religious text.) Afterwards, we would repair to the kitchen, where we had a bit of bourbon and a cigarette. (Elkus would sit there impassively, the cigarette suspended elegantly in the air between his fingers.)
"Cutler and Elkus both made excellent music with their respective ensembles, but their conducting styles were very different. Cutler used the writhing of his whole body to mold sounds from the Glee Club. In particular, his hands seemed like they were moving in some thick viscous fluid (he once mentioned mercury to me.) Elkus, by contrast, used a long baton and stood ramrod straight (there was something of a colonial governor about him as he wore a white uniform with epaulets and braid.) In his case, every minute movement was of significance (a cue was the merest flick of the baton; a passage well-played received a barely-perceived nod of the head and a hint of the knowing smile of the connoisseur.)
"The two men did share at least one trait: they were both bachelors. (I heard that Elkus had been married; but, just before I arrived at Lehigh, his wife had run off with the drum major. This story was so preposterous that I thought it just might have been true. But I never dared ask him about it.) They both also had a sense of humor, though very different ones. Cutler's was gentle, wherein he poked fun at one; while Elkus's was dry, sharp as a rapier, - sardonic. It's that sort of humor on Elkus's part that figured in the incident with the Bucknell Fight Song.
"Lehigh had what was said to be (at least by propaganda emanating no doubt from Elkus himself) 'The Best Band in the East.' And who is to say it wasn't true (perhaps even by default)? Certainly they had the best esprit de corps, which could be defined as an arrogant certainty that no band could possibly be better.
"Certainly the statement was true of their playing. Every Elkus performance was an exercise in perfection. His renditions were bold, brash, and utterly self-assured. There was no room for error. (It sometimes appeared as if he were presiding over a well-oiled machine.)
"And you could say that statement was true as well when it came to routines on the football field. The other bands would have a series of cute tableax, or pictures, that the band members would assume on the field. But they would get from one tableau to the next by each member walking directly to his next location. The result was a chaotic jumble of people in between pictures. So the spectator would see: Order - Disorder - Order.
"By contrast, the Lehigh Marching Band had what it called 'precision military drills' which the students themselves designed. In these routines, each player was part of a seamless whole, rather than a separate entity. So with the Lehigh Band the spectator would see something like a human kaleidoscope, wherein one series of shapes would be continuously transmuting into another series of shapes. And those shapes, unlike the facile and trivial tableaux of the other bands, were abstract.
"Of course there was the one notorious exception:
"One Saturday afternoon as the band went through its drill, there appeared two squares. These basic geometric shapes went through various transmutations. Suddenly, for just a magical couple of seconds, we saw the number '6' emerge out of one of the squares and a '9' from the other. Then they disappeared again. (And of course this had the advantage, for reasons I'm sure I don't have to go into here, that it made equal sense on both sides of the field.) Subsequently, band members would deny that this was intentional; but that seems unlikely considering the sorts of things one heard them talking about off the field.
"Anyway, the climax of all those virtuoso drills was the famous 'Marching Lehigh.' Here the band marched into the right end zone, where there thus accumulated a chaos of bandsmen. But out of that seething disorder came emerging the foursquare order of the school name: one by one the letters of 'LEHIGH' appeared, moving in the opposite direction, while the band sang (yes, you heard me correctly!) the first two phrases of the Lehigh Victory Song:
'To the Brown and the White, Raise a mighty chorus to the sky!
For the spirit true and the will to do, We're proud of you Lehigh!'
There followed a little trumpet fanfare, and then the band played the rest of the piece.
(It helped to have a school name in which all but one of its letters were rectangular. Can you imagine a 'Marching BUCKNELL'? Neither can I.)
"By the way, there were exactly 97 men [literally: Lehigh was an all-male school when I was there] in the Lehigh Marching Band. I always wondered about this intractable number, which is a prime and thus not divisible at all - an absurd number for drills. But very recently it came to me: there were 96 players in the Band; the 97th was the drum major. And of course '96' is eminently divisible.
"Elkus would not-so-subtlely disparage other bands in making his case for 'The Best Band in the East.' He told, for example, of Hindemith writing his Symphony in Bb for the Yale band, and how that band couldn't handle it. (Of course, in the four years I was at Lehigh I never heard our band play the Hindemith piece either. I think that Elkus would have done better if, at a concert, he had told the audience that little story about Yale, whereupon he would wheel around and have his own band toss the Hindemith off with the greatest ease - something they were perfectly capable of doing.)
"But I wanted to speak about the incident with the Bucknell Fight Song. There was a trumpeter in the band named (if I recall correctly) Charlie (a large fellow with a scraggly beard) who made an arrangement of that fight song. Now you have to realize that this was not exactly a well-known fight song such as that of Notre Dame. In point of fact, it was obscure and known to, and cared about, by no one outside of Bucknell itself.
"Except for the Lehigh Marching Band, that is. Remember what I said about Elkus - that he had a sardonic sense of humor: this infected the band members as well. Anyway, as I was saying, Charlie made an arrangement of the Bucknell Fight Song. And, being a trumpeter, he featured the trumpets prominently. In the first verse, the song was played as a normal arrangement. But then, in the next verse, the lower brass took the tune while the trumpets responded to them in descant. But those trumpets didn't just answer - they wailed, they moaned, they screamed their responses up in perilously high registers. It was exhilarating, it was breathtaking (literally: it took those trumpeters' extra breath to get those notes out), it was brash and bold and shameless!
"And then do you know what the Lehigh Band did? It played this arrangement at a Lehigh-Bucknell football game.
"Yes, you heard me correctly: they played the fight song of the other team at a game! But it played that fight song like that other team had never heard it played before - or even imagined it could be played.
"After the game was over, the Bucknell bandmaster approached Elkus, complimented him on the arrangement, and asked whether he could have a copy? Shaking his head, Elkus answered with one word: 'N-O-O-O.'
"I don't remember the outcome of the game that day (it probably wasn't in our favor: Lehigh had lackluster teams in the years I was there.) But who, really, cared about football? The real action that day, as every Saturday, was in the stands and on the field with the Lehigh University Marching Band!"
I paused finally to see what effect this little tale had on my fellow resident. But he had fallen asleep. It is just as well, I thought; for that story is clearly told at the expense of Bucknell.
As well, it would do little good to point out to him a remarkable coincidence: that, like the Lehigh Marching Band (sans drum major), we have exactly 96 residents here at The Boston Home.
I was a bit irked that he had missed my story. I was half tempted to let him sleep through dinner!
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