In 1958 I was awarded a Martha Baird Rockefeller grant to take advantage of Sir Clifford Curzon's offer to teach me in London for six months. I subsequently made my debut in five European capitals. At one point during my stay in London I decided to audition for the BBC. In those days, you were ushered into a rather small studio with a Steinway that seemed to occupy the entire area. I remember seeing a large window to my right covered with a closed venetian blind. As the recording engineer explained to me, an adjudicating committee sat at the other side of that window, their intention being to listen to who was playing without being influenced by seeing certain familiar performers whose reputations might influence their decision. To my surprise, he added that Artur Rubinstein and William Kapell failed the audition. To this day, I don't know why I passed the audition. I did not perform my best. I believe my inclusion of the Barber Sonata and Ben Weber's Fantasia Variations interested the committee more than standard repertoire. Another Rockefeller grant made it possible for me to return to London the following year to perform on the BBC. They chose the following pieces from my repertoire list: J. S. Bach's Fantasia in C minor, Beethoven's Sonata, Op, 101, and Ben Weber's Fantasia (Variations).

I began to compose seriously in my late 20s. It was a time when atonality was in great favor. Since I could not identify with atonal music then, or even today, I decided to study with one of America's foremost composers, Ben Weber, a component of the style. I thought that if I learned to compose atonally, I might learn to identify with the style emotionally. One day he gave me a copy of his Fantasia (Variations) thinking that perhaps I might want to program it on one of my recitals. And indeed I did. While I studied it seriously, more out of devotion to him than because I liked the piece, I at least found smatterings of melodies and harmonies that I could identify with. In the final analysis, the late George Rochberg spoke for me when he wrote in an article "You can't fool the central nervous system. It knows when something is beautiful or not."

One day at a lesson with Ben Weber, he showed me a large orchestral score spread out on an easel. I perused the complex voices with a mixture of awe and confusion. "Can you actually sing these voices," I asked him in great sincerity? "Of course not," he replied: "Well then, how do you know whether it's beautiful or not?" His answer stunned me: "If it's logical, then it's beautiful." His reply confirmed my suspicion that atonal writing, in his case at least, was more intellectual than emotional. I discontinued my lessons with him.

Seymour Bernstein

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