SOUNDING BRASS: Book Excerpt (4 Chapters)

Sounding Brass - a book excerpt

This book excerpt is provided as a teaser to what I’m told is one of the funniest true memoirs of the insanity of Washington ... everyone I know who’s bought a copy — all six of you — have raved about it. I’m providing this excerpt as a bait and switch so you will buy the book and am providing all the links right here:

paperback: https://www.amazon.com/Sounding-Brass-Curious-Musical-Partnership/dp/0990014274/
hardcover: https://www.amazon.com/Sounding-Brass-Curious-Musical-Partnership/dp/1940999332/
kindle: https://www.amazon.com/Sounding-Brass-Curious-Musical-Partnership-ebook/dp/B07HKPC53Y/
Now: I’m not going to release any more chapters so ... have your credit card ready.

Chapter One
An Elevator in Farragut Square

Once upon a time, almost half a century ago, I was a college student in an elevator at an exclusive club in Washington, DC. The elevator was filled with important people — admirals and such — and I was trying to look as inconspicuous as possible, considering I was a long-haired Asian attired in quasi-hippie garb. As the elevator descended, they began discussing the Secretary of the Navy, one J. William Middendorf, the Second.
One of the Very Impressive Persons said, “What do you think of Middendorf’s music?”
Another snickered, “Yeah, yeah, his so-called music.”
“I heard a rumor,” said the first, “that it’s all actually composed by some young oriental guy.”
The fly on the wall suddenly became conscious that he was being stared at. Glared at, even. I had the distinct impression that there was some kind of joke being made, that I was somehow the subject of the joke, and that I was missing the punchline.
Now that all this time has passed, it is probably safe for me to confess that I was in fact the “young oriental guy” in question; that I was responsible, in one way or another, for the entire musical oeuvre of J. William Middendorf, II, which consisted of seven symphonies, an opera, numerous tone poems, and over a hundred military marches.
If you were to put the worst possible inter-pretation of the facts, you might well conclude that this extremely wealthy banker-cum-politician had exploited a young music student, made him churn out reams of music, and passed it off as his own; that said student was the compositional equivalent of a prostitute, selling out his talent for a few shekels. You might expound on the hypocrisy of it all, as J. William Middendorf II gathered ringing endorse-ments from such luminaries as Yehudi Menuhin and Arthur Fiedler, and waved a baton at the Kennedy Center — on one occasion, even, dressed as a bear.
If you had interpreted the facts in this way (as did one Washington reporter, who twisted my tale into an even taller one and published a sort of “exposé” in the paper) you would have missed the real story altogether.
It is indeed true that I wrote the actual notes. It’s true that I churned out so many reams of this music, which was so stylistically antithetical to the kind of music I felt I should be writing, that I burned myself out by the age of about twenty-five and had to embark on a completely different career, as a novelist, and as a result, it was twenty years before the muse of music saw fit to reenter my life.
It’s true that this lifetime’s worth of musical output was presented to the public as being by J. William Middendorf, II, with me being relegated to a footnoted credit as “arranger” once in a while.
Yes, these things are true, but they are not the truth.
As always, the truth is a far more complicated animal.

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Perhaps I should begin by explaining that this is not Mozart’s Requiem. By this I’m not referring to the popular and entirely unhistorical version of the story found in the movie Amadeus but the real story, which is that the eccentric Count Franz von Walsegg commissioned Mozart to write it. This count was in the habit of paying well known composers to compose works which he would pass off as his own. He paid very well, and numerous composers profited because he used to have quartet evenings on Tuesdays and Thursdays at his house, often featuring newly minted quartets under his name.
Count von Walsegg’s wife was only twenty years old when she died, and the count hired the very best to compose the requiem that would be performed under his name, in her memory.
Mozart of course died before finishing it, and his wife Constanze really needed the money, so she got Mozart’s pupil Süssmayr to finish the piece (a number of other composers had a hand in it as well.) She was therefore able to collect the second half of the fee.
A lot of romantic twaddle has enveloped this story, ending up with the fictionalized demonization of Salieri, who had nothing to do with any of this and was far too famous a composer to be bothered by a pezzonovante like Wölferl.
However in its essence this is sort of the archetype of such stories. The great, impoverished composer, soon to die, starving in a garret, the wealthy count waving his chequebook. Inevitably, our hero’s tragic death follows, perhaps from consumption or suicide.
Bill Middendorf was no Count von Walsegg. But from my teens and well into my late twenties, he did pay me to produce a body of work, not in my own voice (as Mozart would have done) but in the voice of a average composer of the middle romantic period. He did not just write cheques and pass the work off ... it was not that simple. All that I wrote derived in some way from something in his mind ... a vague humming, a dramatic concept, a pretty picture. We agonized for hours in preparation for the creation of this works, with me banging away at the piano until the wee hours. He was passionate. He yearned in the way that true artists yearn. He was generous, not only with money but with gifts of every kind, making it possible for my college years to be spent in great luxury compared to everyone around me, and making it possible for me to work on my own dream projects without starving in a garret — although I did in fact spend some time in the basement of a card-carrying member of the Ku Klux Klan.
In those dozen years, in which I produced, under his name, the entire corpus of work of an imaginary nineteenth-century composer, my patron was an ambassador, a banker, the Secretary of the Navy, a banker again, and Ambassador to the Organization of American States. He played important roles in earth-shaking events such as the Cold War, the Southeast Asian conflict, a major bank takeover, and was one of the people who “knew things” — he warned me of a coup that was about to happen in Thailand which no one in Thailand knew about, for instance, and while working on one of his marches at the Army and Navy Club in Washington, he stopped to console a distraught Oliver North, wringing his hands in the lobby in the throes of Iran-Contra.
While riding the whirlwind of politics, world affairs, and high finance, Bill Middendorf also had to contend with a wild family life which encompassed, within the same household, extremes of the most radical 60s liberalism and the most rigid Christian fundamentalism. Constantly keeping a precarious balance between the warring sensibilities of his family was the icing on his political cake.
He found release as an artist. Specifically, as a composer.
Only, he wasn’t actually a composer. He dreamed a composer’s dreams, but had never been able to learn the techniques for making those dreams real. He was good at so many things, but there was this one thing he really wanted to lick. So methodically, using what he always referred to as “my lower middle class intellect”, he set himself the task of trying to lick it, with the help of an Asian boy who had many issues of his own.
No, he did not exploit me. Rather, we exploited each other, both taking great pains to avoid any appearance of exploitation. We did not produce “great music” together, but we certainly made up for that in quantity ... and it was all viable music that played effectively to the gallery and the groundlings. I tried to give the music intellectual content by sneaking in ironies and jokes, and he tried to coax me into discovering the “big tune” concealed within his humming. It was the union of Mantovani with Schoenberg, and it should have been a marriage made in hell, but somehow, it came off.
I started to write this book because I am afraid that one day someone will take the bones of this story and add to it a different kind of flesh. It could easily be made into a hatchet job, but that would be missing the whole point of it all.
If you delve into it, it becomes something quite profound. It’s a story about the human need to want to break boundaries and exceed limitations. It’s about dreams and aspirations, and in the end we need to ask questions about the very nature of art and about why we as humans need art in our lives.
It is also the story of two people from vastly divergent cultures, two people who both, perhaps, felt alienated from the people and situations that surrounded them, and who came to share a strangely intimate bond.
I loved, and still love, this man as a father figure, a patron, a passionate devotee of the arts, and the person who kept me on my feet during many hard times. I think I’m the only person who can tell this story without grinding any axes.
So let’s begin …

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The Hague, the Netherlands, 1970 …
I was at the Church of St. John and St. Philip on a street called Spuyweg, standing around at the post-morning-service kaffeeklatsch, wolfing down cookies and socializing with churchgoers. I was about 17 years old.
It was a quiet day in the Hague, as most days there are. My father was the Ambassador of Thailand, and I had come home from school in England … home to rest up for a year before going to university.
I heard a voice, and looked up to see a ruddy-faced man with short, graying hair, a very friendly, direct way of talking. “I’m the American Ambassador,” he said. “I hear you’re a genius, and I want you to teach me the piano.”

Chapter Two
A Rembrandt above the Sofa

How a young Thai musician (or, at the stage, wannabe musician) came to be in the same place at the same time as a American millionaire Nixonite, in an Anglican church in the Netherlands, is one of those inexplicable quirks of fate that has a decidedly novelistic ring to it, and yet it happened.
I can’t say much about how J. William Middendorf II came to be standing in that church hall, but I can perhaps explain a little about what I was doing there. I was supposedly having a “gap year” between Eton and university, but it would a gap year that kept getting longer and longer. It was all because of a conflict between words and music.
When I was about four years old, my father was doing something or other at the International Court of Justice in the Hague; previously, from just after birth, I’d been living in Oxford as my father was doing his doctorate; subsequently I lived in Boston, Massachusetts while my father pursued another degree at Harvard; Holland was the third country I lived in before turning seven.
For some reason, it was decided that I should have piano lessons.
It was not a good idea. My teacher wanted me to play scales and silly songs with three notes in them. I wanted to play the things I could hear in my head. My teacher said, “Why don’t you write down one of these little pieces, young man?” I wrote down something with a key signature of six flats. She didn’t believe it was really me, and we had tantrums at each other; she fled the house weeping.
Confession: I didn’t really know what six flats meant, but I thought it was cool-looking.
At seven or so we went back to Thailand where I spent a bizarrely alienated childhood, at first unable to speak any Thai. Music became a secret passion, along with the ancient Greeks. So by the time I arrived at Eton at the age of 13, I was very mixed up indeed.
It was a rule in those days that everyone on arrival had to have a singing audition, and I hit the jackpot; assigned to sing alto in the Brahms Requiem, real music lessons from top teachers, membership in the prestigious Eton College Chapel Choir, trips to Glyndebourne, committee member of the Eton College Musical Society, — music was my salvation at this school which was a strange junction of Dickensian horror and enlightened 1960s liberal education.
By the time I finished at Eton, my Dad had been made ambassador of Thailand to the Netherlands. Since I had lived there as a child, Holland felt very much like home. The language even started coming back to me.
It was assumed by everyone that I would go to Oxford, that music would be at best an avocation, and that if I was too stupid to read law at my father’s old college, English Literature might be an acceptable alternative.
I came “home” to the Netherlands to bone up for an interview at Oxford where everyone assumed I would go in a year or so.
But music continued to speak to me … and to be my inner voice of salvation.…

---

I looked for a place where I could continue to listen to that inner voice, and it was only natural to make for the nearest Anglican church. I knocked on the door, and the vicar, one John Lewis, invited me to audition for the choirmaster, one Chris Farr. Since I was, not to put too fine a point on it, at a somewhat higher level of professional training than anyone else in that choir, Chris Farr took me right away and Sundays became my refuge from an increasing reluctance to go to Oxford.
A strange place to end up for a young Thai Buddhist child (and while there’s a significant Christian minority in Thailand, few are Anglicans.) But this, indeed, is how I ended up being addressed by no less a figure than the American ambassador, and how I ended up making the 15 minute walk from my father’s house on Laan Copes van Cattenburch to No. 4, Tobias Asserlaan, the residence of the U.S. Ambassador.
I found this picture on the internet. I may be wrong but I don’t remember a metal fence. I recall being able to walk straight up to the house from the street, without any security of any kind, unthinkable, perhaps, for such a residence today. I wonder whether this house is still the ambassadorial residence.
Ambassador Middendorf came to the door him-self, and led me, past a sweeping staircase with a curve in it, to an impressive living room. Above the sofa hung a real Rembrandt.
My memory isn’t what it used to me but I seem to remember an inner living room as well, just as hugely proportioned and the whole furnished in a style I think of as “traditional” American. But it was the real Rembrandt that dominated. That, and the grand piano.
My entire image of what the American political élite must be like had been based on seeing pictures of the Kennedys, but nothing could be more different. There was an assortment of kids: the oldest was the dreamy-eyed Frances, the youngest an adorable five-year-old named Ralph, who I believe would one day rechristen himself Roxy.
They ran around underfoot, they quarreled, they were down-to-earth; it was a family I could envy because my father’s ambassadorial residence was quite different in tone; it was formal, with a large staff of servants and a complex hierarchy. The mistress of the household was a prim, trim lady named Isabelle who was clearly in charge. She eyed me a bit oddly as I entered the living room, but soon, I think, dismissed the piano lessons as some husbandly eccentricity, and I was left alone with the ambassador, under the glowering gaze of the Rembrandt.
To be honest, I don’t recall which Rembrandt it was, but later I heard that he had three, which were from time to time on loan to the Metropolitan or the Rijksmuseum.
“So, Somtow,” he said, “the piano. Let’s start.”
Like any good teacher, I started with C major scales.
Getting the thumb over to finish the scale proved a bit awkward. “I think maybe it’s beyond my lower middle class mind,” he said — a phrase he used often, and which I can never hear so see in print without having his voice attached to it.
Amazingly, it took around five hours to master the C major scale. And Bill was determined. He was persistent. He wouldn’t take “no” from his body, trying over and over to get that thumb over.
When it came to doing it with his left hand, he was a lot happier playing the scale in the reverse direction. By dinnertime, he was happily using both hands in inverse motion, and wondering when he’d get to play an actual melody.
At length he said, “Boy, I’m famished,” and he led me to the kitchen (this was a vast kitchen unlike any I had ever seen), where he rooted around and finally produced, triumphantly, two cans of corned beef hash.
We spent the next hour on the sofa, eating corned beef hash out of tin cans, under the watchful eye of a real Rembrandt … a surreal tableau that has haunted me all my life.
He showed me a picture of a stained glass window he had made for the English church where I had met him. A lovely pastoral scene with a lamb at its center. I was impressed. “You actually made this yourself?”
“Well, I drew it, and had someone do it up in stained glass,” he said.
Words which, I was later to learn, summarized his entire world-view when it came to the creative process.
After dinner, he played the C major scale for two more hours. Backwards and forwards and with a childlike excitement and a solemn concentration that I found fascinating. I had never seen someone this old be so engrossed in the details of so seemingly-simple a thing.
It was really late (to my mind) and I had become really tired, but Bill Middendorf seemed to just be getting his second wind. He now tried playing the scale in a new way; rather than crossing his thumb, he turned his entire hand over and played the last three notes with the backs of his fingers in one smooth motion. We had a huge laugh over this.
I imagined myself dining out for years to come on the story of my day of teaching the C major scale to an American diplomat.
You can therefore imagine my surprise when the last thing he said to me, as I left the house that evening, was “Same time tomorrow?”
He then gave me a traveller’s cheque for $20, which was the first professional fee I had ever received in my life.
In 1970, $20 was a lot of money.
For a 17-year-old, anyway.

Chapter Three
An Epiphany on a Loaf

I was, you understand, in a gap year. I had all the time in the world. Bill Middendorf, on the other hand, had an ambassadorial career plus some huge business dealings. Not to mention a gaggle of kids and a deeply religious wife — just how religious I was gradually to discover.
How he could pursue the grueling schedule of being a diplomat and devote hours each day to a few scales was a mystery to me at first, but it soon became just the way things were.
My gap year was about to become much longer than a year, and much more devoid of academics, because I went up to Oxford for the interview, and was an ignominious failure.
I was already in deep trouble because in the entrance exam, I had committed the unforgivable offence of lampooning Tennyson. You see, there was this poem we had to analyze, and I didn’t like it. Indeed, I thought it quite appropriate to say so.
It was only almost half a century later that I learned from my brilliant teacher at Eton, Michael Meredith (who was still there when I visited the school in the early years of the 21st century) what pandemonium my exam answers had caused, and that the choice of text had actually been a trick, as it was a poem Tennyson himself had rejected and withdrawn. Apparently I was the only one taking the exam who had had the chutzpah to see through the ruse. Apparently, irate phone calls had gone back and forth and my housemaster, the infamous “Dippy” Simpson, who had made my life miserable for years, basically told them they shouldn’t take me because I was an arrogant little prick.
They weren’t predisposed to like me, but I was innocent of all this as I rode up to Oxford in the train in the company of no less a figure than Mom Rajawongse Sukhumbhand Paribatra, a distant cousin of mine and direct descendant of King Rama IV.
He has been telling this story at parties for decades, and basically it goes like this: “They asked Somtow why he wanted to go Oxford, and he answered, ‘Well, actually, I was hoping to go to Cambridge.’ So they kicked him out and I got in.”
He also got to be the governor of Bangkok and was implicated in a number of corruption scandals, but I happen to think he was innocent of everything except failing to keep an eye on his underlings. But that’s for another book.
The bottom line is that I was no longer going to Oxford, and would be forced to apply again in a year — doubling the length of my gap year. My family were not at all happy to discover that I wanted to go to Cambridge — and — the horror — to do music there — and that I intended to compete in the annual choral scholarship tests.
“They will never admit an Asian as a choral scholar,” my father told me. “It is simply beyond the realm of possibility.” I don’t like being told something is impossible merely because of my ethnicity, so I became even more determined, signing up for special music coaching, taking a job playing the piano for a ballet teacher every weekend for 25 guilders a pop, and going to a weekly madrigal sight-reading party hosted in the town of Maasluis by the late David Bolton, who was later to become a fine harpsichord maker.
Still hoping that I’d come to my senses, reapply to Oxford and do something sensible like a law degree, they decided to humour me for a while.
I found myself with almost two years to kill, and a lot of time for music.
Music and Middendorf.

---

After the third or fourth C major scale marathon (we never quite managed another key, nor indeed, a minor scale) a few weeks later I found myself under the Rembrandt again.
But before we could start this time, Bill Mid-dendorf said, “Let’s take a break. You must help me bake some bread. I’m taking breadmaking and music at the same time.” We did not have the word multitasking in the 1970.
And we retired once more to the cavernous kitchen where a dapper man with a French name, Pierre, and the accent to go with it, was rolling dough. Soon we were all standing around rolling dough and it was quite exciting for a very insulated boy who had never spent much time in kitchens.
Presently we were told that a loaf was done and it was ceremoniously brought out and displayed. “Yours, Mr. Ambassador,” said Pierre.
The bread was sliced and we each prepared to chow down, with as much solemnity as if it had been the Holy Eucharist. But Bill said, with great sadness, “I added too much salt.” His ruefulness imbued the over-salted bread with a curious sense of tragedy. And soon the ambassador had gone back to the living room.
The bread was indeed, extremely salty, but as the beneficiary of a classical education, I knew that the ancient Romans used to dip their bread in salt, so rather than wrinkling my nose I was rather enjoying it, fantasizing about being in a scene from Ben Hur. Miklos Rozsa’s heavenly Love Theme was ringing in my consciousness when I started to notice an odd kind of counterpoint.
A melody was coming from the living room — and it was in C major — but it wasn’t the same old scale. It was being repeated over and over, each time with greater assuredness.
The final three notes, the dotted rhythm returning back up to the tonic, would later turn out to be a major feature of the Middendorf melodic style.
Bill Middendorf was picking this melody out with one finger, over and over, with a great sense of excitement.
“It’s something I can kind of hear in my mind,” he said. “Something I heard once, a long time ago, only not exactly … it’s like I added an extra something to it. Boy!”
Another element of the Middendorf com-positional process was presenting itself, though I didn’t realize it at the time, because of course if you take away the middle bar of the three bars, you get the opening of Schubert’s C major symphony. And later, many would say, “Middendorf doesn’t so much compose themes as he misremembers them.”
“You know, that’s very pretty, I said,” and I sat down myself and began improvising great cascading arpeggios and big chords around this melody.
Bill Middendorf’s hefty frame shook with glee. “That’s it!” he said. “That’s just what I meant to say.”
I played around with the theme a bit, but it didn’t actually go anywhere. “I think it needs a middle bit, sort of a touch of evil,” he said. “Can you play something like that?”
I did, blending the original Middendorf melody with a touch of Parsifal — the chromatic notes of the wizard Klingsor. “Yes, yes!” he said excitedly.
I said, “I guess we go back to the calm beginning after that. And we have your basic ABA structure.”
“I don’t know what that means,” he said, “but this is what might lower middle class mind hears — the wind on the Zuider Zee. A raging storm. Then the water grows calm.”
All this from three bars played with one finger!
“Write it up,” he said. “Come back tomorrow.”

---

And I did, with about 3 pages of hand-written piano music under my arm. I sat down and played it. Bill Middendorf was transfixed. To me, it may have been a few meandering chord progressions and a few technical tricks woven together into a pseudo-romantic display, but in his eyes I could see the play of light on the Zuider Zee, the wind billowing, every-thing he had talked about the previous night.
Johnny — that is to say, J. William John Middendorf, IV, had wandered into the room. “This is what your Dad wrote,” I said to him.
With the deflationary disdain that only a twelve-year-old can muster, he said, “Nuh uh. You did.”
The bubble burst … but not for long.
Bill said, “I want a march … and to close, a waltz. I’m going to call in Waltz of the Windmills.”
And he began to hammer out another brief melodic fragment. I started to play things on the piano, pausing at every “That’s it!” to make a quick note in my manuscript book. By about 2 am, the Waltz of the Windmills had come rolling off the assembly line, but the ambassador had graduated from bashing it out with one finger to humming.
Humming made it a lot simpler for me to improvise something, as well. Humming is inherently more vague than hitting precise notes and as the evening wore on, my interpretation of Bill Middendorf’s source material became somewhat looser.
After less than a week, we had a three movement sonata, and I had uttered some “famous last words” which unknowingly mapped out about a fifteen years of my future. I said, “You know, I could try orchestrating this.”

Chapter Four
A Sonata with a Minister

He had had Artur Rubinstein to an impressive dinner; Rubinstein had, much to Bill’s annoyance, refused to play afterwards. saying that his contract only allowed him to use a Steinway. By now it was clear that J. William Middendorf, II, would never become another Artur Rubinstein.
Still, becoming a composer was a pretty decent consolation prize, especially with someone else doing the heavy lifting.
And shortly thereafter, there was another posh dinner at the ambassador’s residence. I was not invited to the dinner, but I was the designated postcoenal entertainment.
The entertainment consisted of me, playing Middendorf’s Sonata No. 1 — The Holland Sonata on the piano. It began with a brief pre-concert lecture in which Bill described with incredible vividness the beautiful scenes of Holland that the music evoked for him: the tulip fields, the storm on the Zuider Zee, the dance of the wooden clogs — it sounded like the ultimate tourist guide to the Netherlands. Then I played.
Now, this sonata was by no stretch of the imagination a masterpiece. It had some nice tunes, tenuously strung together (sometimes with the musical equivalent of chicken wire) and I also have to admit that I didn’t stick to the written notes. That’s because I’m not really a pianist, and sometimes I just like to go off script a bit.
But the audience was enthralled. After all, here was a distinguished diplomat putting into music his love for the country to which he had been posted. As the person who actually put this to paper, I was all too aware of the trite bits and a few ironic bits —
Among the guests there was one who was being deferred to by all. This was, I learned, Dr. Joseph Luns, who had by then been the Dutch Foreign Minister for about eighteen years, under seven or eight prime ministers. He was just about as famous a Dutchman as you could get in 1971, and he had an urbane wit quite different from the aw-shucks aura that Bill Middendorf projected.
Though in a sense, I was the star attraction of the evening, I was just a teenage kid with long hair. None of the distinguished guests talked to me except to — a little patronisingly perhaps — compliment my interpretation of this fabulous sonata. Only Dr. Luns paid me any attention. In a quiet moment, he asked me directly, “The ambassador really composed this all by himself?”
“Well … maybe … I helped a little.”
Dr. Luns gave a wry smile, but Bill rescued me from my quandary about how much I should reveal about this … let’s call it unorthodox, for now … compositional process. With great enthusiasm, the ambassador said, “Why, the boy’s a genius. He’s helped me a lot. He arranged the whole thing.”
Thus it was that I acquired an “official” status in the musical canon of J. William Middendorf, the Second. I was the arranger.

---

The real purpose of the posh dinner became apparent a few days later, when Bill reminded me that I’d said something about orchestrating the sonata. “It could be more than a sonata … it could be a symphony,” I said, with just one more movement.
“Yes, opening with a march!” he said excitedly. “My favorite composer is John Phillip Sousa.”
He described to me how a march could go. First, trumpet calls in the distance. Then a brilliant, bright military bang-up with clashing cymbals. Then a hymn. Pious, reverent, the deep protestant roots of Dutch culture. Then a dark moment. The Nazi invasion of Holland. Then a battle scene, and finally, a triumphant return of the hymn with bells pealing … the return of Queen Wilhelmina from exile and the rebuilding of the nation.
It was a stunning scenario. “Of course,” Bill said, “It’ll need a few themes. Can you do up something?”
He began humming the march to me. Yes, it sounded like Sousa, a lot like Sousa, but with a few missing or added notes. His excitement was infectious and soon I was banging out this march on the piano.
“The Queen is going to be tickled pink,” he said.
That was when I realized that the sumptuous dinner and the conversation with Dr. Joseph Luns hadn’t just been some kind of social pleasantry.
It had been an audition. Bill Middendorf’s music was being vetted by important members of the Dutch government, because it was about to have a very high-profile debut, and they had to be absolutely certain that the music would pass muster.
The “Holland Symphony” — improvised by a schoolboy on the piano from five-finger exercises and humming — was about to be presented to Queen Juliana of the Netherlands.

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What, exactly, is an arranger? It’s a credit you often see on Hollywood motion pictures, school editions of classical music, or song books. An arranger takes a piece of music, and basically turns it into another piece of music.
Mostly commonly, arrangers take a written piece such as something originally composed for piano, and turns it into an orchestral score. Or, in film scoring, takes music that has been fully sketched out by the main composer as to the harmonies, the melodic lines, and fleshes it out with instruments. The point of arrangement, is that what the arranger produces is recognizably the same piece as the original, generally with the same inner melodies and harmonies. In classical arranging, the result is unmistakably the same piece of music as the original.
Or, the arranger’s job could move in a more creative direction — he could take a melody and redress it in different harmonies and colors completely, but the melody would still be clearly the original melody. This usually happens when the source material is folkloric, like a traditional dance tune, or perhaps doesn’t even come with harmonies at all.
The further away you get from this, the closer you move toward the realm of actually composing. Vaughan Williams’s Greensleeves Fantasy is clearly a piece of music composed by Vaughan Williams, even though the traditional melody sounds all the way through it. At the most extreme end you’d have something like Mahler’s First Symphony, in which Frère Jacques is used in its entirety, yet this not an arrangement at all — it’s an ironic reference.
Had I in fact “arranged” the Holland Symphony, or had I simply “composed” the entire thing? This is by no means an easy question to answer, and for the entirety of my involvement in the creation of the Middendorf oeuvre, it would be a question fraught with emotional baggage. I would be tormented by this question for the next dozen years.
The identity crisis was not yet to be precipitated, however. We were still a long way from there.

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Meanwhile, my musical existence was being greatly enhanced by this new association. As a person with a special relationship with the U.S. Ambassador, I came to the attention of many Americans including, for instance, the very dedicated music teacher at the local American school in the Hague, one Rita Liebermann-Ranucci. I had first met her at one of those madrigal evenings run by David Bolton in Maasluis. She was a competent alto but a really proficient sight-reader, making her absolutely invaluable to the group.
She introduced me to the institution of school music making, American-style, which was quite different from music-making at Eton.
At Eton there was a certain ambition involved in music-making. The school orchestra, which was far to advanced for me to get into, played real symphonies and concertos and accompanied a huge oratorio every few months. Even the “second” orchestra, in which I had been vouchsafed the opportunity to play percussion, played real music — one of my most treasured memories is playing the tam-tam in the Mussorgsky-Ravel Great Gate of Kiev. When I asked if I could get a copy of the music, my conductor said, “You don’t need it. Just give that thing a hefty thwack at the beginning of every bar until it ends.”
In the American School of the Hague, there was music-making as well, but it was a lot more egalitarian. Rita knew how to play pretty much every instrument, and the kids rotated from violin to clarinet without much ado. The repertoire consisted of such immortal classics as Lightly Row.
Still, I wasn’t a whole lot older than them, and it was fun to hang out. One time, I was called in to be the only cellist in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony — not the whole thing, just “the” tune. I do not know and did not ever played the cello, but she showed me the principles in five minutes, and I found that I could more or less guess where the fingers should go for such a simple tune. Afterwards, she berated me for using vibrato. “You can’t have one person resonating while the rest of the orchestra is just scratching and squeaking,” she said, laughing.
The end result of this was that I ended up knowing a few young musicians (and would-be musicians) — they had parents and friends as well, and soon there was a very uneven chamber orchestra on call, and they would soon have their debut … in the living room of J. William Middendorf, II.
For, while I was working on orchestrating the grand Holland Symphony, (or Symphonie Hollandaise as one of my friends jokingly called it) the music lessons continued.
The hymn that formed so crucial a part of the symphony now resurfaced again. The reason it existed at all was that I had been trying to explain four-part harmony to Bill and I had run through a few Bach chorales — which soon ended up as an interesting Lutheran pastiche — the hymn of the pious Dutch according to symphony’s programme notes.
While “arranging” the hymn, I would frequently show Bill how this melody could actually be played in all sorts of different styles — and he had the idea that all these versions to be assembled into a sort of —
“Theme and Variations?” I suggested.
“Yes! That’s it!”
Before the ink was dry on the symphony, there was already a second opus, a Concerto for Strings which had a classical first movement in the galant style — at its best, it was almost as brilliant as Salieri on an off day — and then this astonishing “Theme and Variations” which begins with classical music and ends up with a few minutes of pseudo-Mahler, even echoing a climax from the slow finale of the Ninth Symphony (though normalizing the one aberrant note in the Mahler melody, the one note that actually makes it so special).
And in short order I had to conduct a hodgepodge group of students, parents and their friends in a house concert chez Middendorf. Each was receiving the princely sum of $20 (paid, as usual, via travellers’ cheques) — and for high school students this was definitely a small fortune.
The concert featured works by Bill Middendorf and, to quote Peter Schickele, “I couldn’t help slipping in a little something of my own.”
The little something of my own was an intermezzo from an opera about Michelangelo that I was composing on the side. It was not tuneful. Indeed it was decidedly avant-garde, and the audience at the dinner concert barely tolerated it. But after the Mahlerian climax of the string concerto, an ancient viola player who had joined the orchestra murmured, “Maar dat was heel mooi” — “but that was really beautiful.”
The thing is that the opera I was writing was in what I felt was my true voice. Looking at the score now, it’s a bit of a kitchen sink and it began in the world of Schönberg and ended in the world of Penderecki, must as my own exposure to con-temporary music had expanded during the time I was composing it. Like a sponge, I was sucking in everything I listened to, and wringing it back out again.
With the Middendorf scores, I was not writing in my own voice. I was trying to get into the thought process of a middle aged white American who adored romanticism.
This is why when young Johnny Middendorf accused me of composing this music myself, an accusation all the members of the family would make at one point or another, my feelings were ambivalent.
I had to tell myself that this was not my music. My music was something quite different — “lofty”, I supposed, “elevated” and decidedly not “romantic.”
And yet, the Holland Symphony was the first time I was able to compose for orchestra … and actually have it played back by real human beings. Each time I was to create one of these romantic concoctions, I was receiving valuable lessons at a time when no software existed for instant playback, when the only way to learn if something “worked” was to just write it and have it played.

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A curious interlude amid all this occurred one afternoon when I was at the Middendorf house. I was sitting around in the back somewhere and Bill Middendorf came to get me. “There’s a bunch of hippies in the living room,” he said, “it’s a rock group or something.”
His daughter Frances was in the hall and rolled her eyes when she heard this. As I passed by she said softly, “It’s the Grateful Dead, Somtow!”
Bill was performing the ambassadorial function of welcoming visiting celebrities from the homeland, but American culture of the 1970s was not his thing.
He could tell a Rembrandt from a Hals just by winking at it, but he didn’t have a clue who Jerry Garcia was. I, who was awestruck, said nothing.
After they left, Frances Middendorf did say a thing or two about how incredible they were, these icons of the counterculture, but her father wasn’t buying it. “They’ve got long hair,” he snorted. “They’re hippies.”
Frances rolled her eyes again (she had a very fetching way of doing so) and said, “But Somtow has long hair.”
“Yes,” he said, “but it’s different. His genius justifies his long hair.”

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I was not greeted with equal enthusiasm by the Middendorfs. Isabelle had become increasingly irritated by how much music was consuming Bill’s life. She and her daughter Amy were the evangelicals in the group, and I hoped that by mentioning Jesus from time to time, I’d stay on her good side.
Frances, the oldest, was I think the most like her father; she loved the arts, was flamboyant and decidedly not evangelical. Her relationship with her father was not idyllic but I feel that to some extent it was because she was able to be all the things he longed to be himself. I always had the feeling she was his favorite.
There was another daughter named Martha, who mostly ignored me. I’ve mentioned John, who was twelve, who did have a penchant for telling the truth at the wrong moment. I don’t think he had any feelings about me one way or the other, but he struck me as being rather sensible. Years later, I learned, he climbed mountains, lived in a tent in the wilderness and did other “manly” things — he always struck me as being profoundly grounded. To do that kind of climbing, you have to see things for what they are.
The youngest, Ralph, was sweet and affectionate. Bill once whispered to me, “He likes to be cuddled,” mentioning it as a kind of weakness rather a natural thing in a five year old. He’s called “Roxy Paine” now and he’s an innovative artist. But even at five, he was dreamy, he had a rich inner life.
The invasion of this household by a long-haired Asian teenager was definitely an upheaval, especially since the music sessions were growing longer and longer.
And weirder, too. Lasting well into the wee hours — luckily, the Hague was a perfectly safe place to walk around in in the middle of the night, and lucky, too, that my parents saw nothing bizarre about their teenage son spending so much time tickling the ivories with a grown ambassador.
There were more house concerts as well. There was a piano concerto performed by David Bolton. David improvised his own cadenza, which was as long as the rest of the concerto put together. I think Bill was a big perplexed at the cadenza because he didn’t remember composing it. Later, a recording was made with a different pianist, on the Phillips label, with a much shorter cadenza.
The piano concerto would later be one of the glories of the Middendorf oeuvre. Each year, at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, the music director Peter Le Huray, would play the recording to all the first year musicians. They would be required to guess the composer.
The guesses were always outlandish.
Finally, Le Huray would proffer a clue. “All I can say,” he said, is that there are ‘Thais’ with Cam-bridge.”
I’ve given myself away now, because earlier I told you how my father had absolutely refused to believe that any Asian could ever dream of getting a choral scholarship to Cambridge.
So, off-topic for a moment, I did take a break from the Middendorfian world and, to everyone’s surprise. successfully passed that audition.
Apparently, I did so when I chose an obscure church sonnet by Frescobaldi as my solo piece. At the close of the piece, I did a “goat trill” — an ornament used in music of the late Renaissance-early Baroque that had only just started to be talked about by early music experts. It was, in fact, this goal trill that did the trick.
The aforementioned Peter Le Huray caught me as I was walking back to the temporary lodgings — I think they were in Trinity College. “How did you know?” he said excitedly. “About the trill.”
“Oh, I’ve been following early music a lot lately.”
“Somtow, I see that St. Catharine’s College isn’t on your list,” (one could only select three Cambridge Colleges to apply to, so naturally, believing I was doomed to failure, I had picked King’s, St John’s and Trinity, the three most famous) “but perhaps you wouldn’t mind going to a smaller college? I mean, Cambridge is Cambridge.”
My heart almost stopped beating. “Would I mind?” I stuttered. “And … the academic requirements?”
“Oh, that, he said. Your A level results are fine. Just say yes.”
Knowing one piece of trivia about early baroque music had changed my life. I was about to become the first Asian to break the “yellow ceiling” of the British choral world.…
Back to the Middendorfs.…

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My self confidence had increased tremendously since that short trip to England, though I had only been able to accept the choral scholarship (well, technically it was an ‘exhibition’ not a scholarship) after I promised my parents I wouldn’t actually go for a degree in music. So English Literature it was to be, on a choral scholarship, but I wouldn’t be forced to take a fiendish entrance exam on Shakespeare, Chaucer, or anyone else.
I wrote a “rock” setting of the Anglican mass for John Lewis’s church. Some of the gang that played regularly at the Middendorf house concerts were roped in to play, and my sister Kiki got to sing the Gloria segment.
John Lewis averred that we could get a lot of attention by doing the “rock mass” at the Middendorf home — at a private service. The reverend had recently got religion — it’s difficult to explain since he presumably must have had it in the first place, in order to become a vicar — but he apparently received a second dose from a wave of pentecostals who were becoming more and more influential.
Mrs. Middendorf was one, so we all presumed that she’d be delighted to have such an uplifting event in her home. I undertook to ask Bill’s permission, and he gave it right away.
The Evangelische Omroep or EO, a Dutch Evan-gelical TV station, who were doing a documentary about the American diplomat with Jesus in his heart, offered to film the whole thing. We started rehearsing.
The entire thing was stopped in its tracks when I received a mysterious call from a man who identified himself as Mr. Middendorf’s social secretary. Later I was to learn there were two of them, and they had a sort of good cop-bad cop role to play in managing his schedule.
“The rock mass is off,” he told me.
“Why?” I said.
“I can’t tell you.”
“But the ambassador just gave his permission.”
There was a long silence.
“You have to understand, Somtow,” said the man (whose name I have forgotten, but he was very lean, with a wisp of white hair) “that it’s Mrs. Middendorf who has the final say on these matters.”
I hadn’t noticed this before, so completely consumed had I been in Bill Middendorf’s inner world.
I learned later she had had all she could take of her husband’s music obsession. She had put her foot down. “I’m not having that thing in my house,” she had said.
And the social secretaries knew, it seems, who had the power to make their lives miserable.
However, my disappointment had to be shelved, because we now received word that Queen Juliana of the Netherlands had accepted the dedication of the Holland Symphony. It would be performed in honour of the 25th anniversary of her reign.
“She’s having us to tea,” the ambassador told me. Then, looking me over and noting that I was wearing green velvet bell-bottoms and a scruffy teeshirt, he added, “You do have a suit, don’t you?”