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A
selfish report
(WITH
SOME CASUAL REMARKS BY MR. COGAN)
A certain amount of serendipity seems to belong to everyone,
including you and me. In my case, I tend to realize it when
the situation has already passed. That slowness deprives me,
most of the time, of the luxury of living the present situation
such as it is. For example, when I first set foot in this
country (it was Washington D.C. in August), I decided that
somehow I had taken the wrong plane and I was somehwere in
Africa. How could the air be so hot and humid; how could the
greenness all over the place be so wild and savage? And the
first human being I spoke with in the States, the taxi driver,
could not help me much to solve the riddle as he himself had
just arrived from his motherland, Russia!
(A
casual remark of Mr. Cogan, "You see, almost everybody
here comes from somewhere else" gave me afterwards a
lot of material for thinking about this obvious fact, so obvious
that I have never stopped for a second considering its, let
us say, metaphysical or even cosmological overtones.)
Once
more or less settled in Boston, this kind of only retrospective
serendipity continued. I could never enter the New England
Conservatory building through the address at Huntington Avenue
that appeared stubbornly on all the stationery and documents.
I guess nobody could or evergan. Now I was confronted with Mr. Cogan, who
was not only a stranger but also a mispelling to me! you see,
the thing is that the name is very common in the place where
I come from, and you find it in different versions, like Kogan,
Kohan, Kohen, etc., but never with C!
(Another
casual remark of Mr. Cogan concerning spelling rules, "Well,
usually we write it this way" was very pictorial of his
style which I could perhaps summarize as respect, even interest,
and truly sane curiosity for the manifestations of 'otherness'.
Consider, in this respect, the furies I awakened, involuntarily,
in Mr. X, another teacher at NEC, who would not accept my
total incapability for writing the humble word ‘rhythm’
with all the necessary ‘h’s.)
The
first interview with Mr. Cogan was again a kind of surprise.
I went with a whole bunch of music, MY works, MY pieces, just
to find out that, sure, we could go over the scores at some
other time, but for the moment he was more interested in talking
of this and that, to know about my ideas about music (did
I really have any ideas of my own??) ; to know my tastes and
distastes (did I know those myself??). In a word, he seemed
to be interested in creating a relationship with the person
behind the scores, the being behind the student’s face.
An idea which was to me, at that time, quite new, amusing,
and a little bit uncomfortable, though challenging. That man
was not simply somebody who was going to fill in each semester
the papers for the renewal of my scholarship after casting
a glance of courtesy over my confabulations. That fellow minded
very much his business and it was going to be a commitment
to work with him.
You
probably know Mr. Cogan. He is a tall man, with dark and inquisitive
eyes, a long nose over which sometimes cavalcades a pair of
glasses, and a somewhat unruffled beard turning gray. His
hands are long and bony, and they are always busy at the keyboard,
manipulating books, articles and millions of papers; adjusting
the opaque projector or toying forever with a piece of chalk,
specially when his owner struggles to convey his stream of
thought. His mood is not expansive but warm, full of respect
and somewhat shy, with ocassional outbursts of humour; probably
the only thing that bothers him is injustice or unfairness,
apecially towards his students. I used to feel him, as a kind
of benevolent and at the same time exigent parental figure.
His outlook resembles, in winter, a captain of a fishing boat
in the North Sea with long raincoat, hat and galoshes. In
summer, he becomes more as a New Age Guru with his cotton
neckless shirts and sandals. In middle season, he looks quite
ordinary, and even you can find him sometimes wearing a tie.
When
my six-month old son was starting to chew some solid food,
Mr. Cogan one day produced from his suitcase a kind of plastic
sheet to put under his baby chair, and this time the casual
remark was of the sort, ‘Please allow him to experience
freely.’ I now think that this was very emblematic of
the teaching methods he used with us pupils. For Mr. Cogan,
tradition is not a cage -although you may say for sure that
Cage is a tradition for him-, but a kind of safe net, something
that could provide the nourishment and help to keep the mess
of the experiment within some kind of system of reference.
The rest was up to you: to taste the different textures, temperatures,
colors, smells, and so on; to learn what is good for your
system, and produce with it something organic, that perhaps
could be also suitable for others.
It
is now over three years since I left the States, after having
spent a similar amount of time there. I do not know if I am
now a better composer or musician than I used to be, but I
am sure I am a little better human being than I was six years
ago. I have learned lessons in patience, humility, interest
in science and humankind, faith, and love of diversity; most
of them I owe to my instructor at New England Conservatory
of Boston, Massachusetts. Thanks Bob, and thanks to Chance
that allowed me to meet you in the vastness of space and time.
Javier
Gimenez Noble
1995
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