John Colman (1913–1995): a remarkable life, and a wonderful interview

I had never heard of John Colman until almost exactly 10 years ago, when I began working with Ann Hutchinson Guest on what would turn out to be one of her last projects, the notation and subsequent reconstruction of 10 of Sigurd Leeder’s dance studies. Musically, it was about as messy a project as you can get, considering that there were only 10 exercises. She had been to the Leeder archive in Switzerland, and come back with CDs of their musical archive, transcribed from cassette tapes, with track lists. The project started with me and Suzanne Knosp, Professor of Dance and the Music Director for Dance at the University of Arizona, going through all the CDs (we took half each) to make sense of the track listings which were incomplete. Ann, meanwhile, was trying to remember which music went with which study, in cases where the original track listings weren’t helpful. Then there were some other pieces of music, handwritten scores that went with the studies she wanted to reconstruct, but there was no recording. Ann needed someone to record these, and piece them together with some of the tracks from the collection of archived material. Although the eventual output was only ten tracks, it took a lot of really frustrating work. Things were unnamed, or misnamed, or not as Ann remembered them, or didn’t exist at all, and had to be reconstructed. I remember being at her flat one morning when she showed me an exercise that she wanted me to create some music for. She was 96 at the time, with the energy and drive of someone 60 years younger. As we got to the end of the exercise, she said, gesturing as if to a point in a time just beyond the current count, “There’s a forward roll there, but I won’t do it,” in a voice that suggested that if she weren’t eager to get on with our work, and it weren’t for the armchair in the way, she might well have given the forward roll a go. 

One of the pieces that I had to record for her had so many huge chords, leaps and stretches, I simply couldn’t make it  sound like something that you could do movement to. In the end, I cheated, and multitracked each hand separately, using both hands for each. I wondered aloud, next time I saw her, whether perhaps the piece had been intended for two pianists, and the score she had was just a blueprint from which they could work out who did what when the time came. She seemed doubtful. She said she thought the piece was by John Colman, a name I didn’t know at all, and having worked in so many dance institutions where people were called upon to make up pieces of music for exercises, I didn’t think any more about it, or of him. Some time later, I found a video of John Colman teaching a Dalcroze class, and improvising at the piano, and realized that I had been wrong about the two-pianist theory: that’s just how John Colman played, with big, expansive chords, and inner voices that are probably OK if you’re making them up as you go along, but trying to play them from notation is another matter. 

 By strange coincidence, almost exactly 30 years since Colman died on 5^th March 1995 (I’m posting this somewhat later), I read an interview with him in the journal of the International Guild of Musicians in Dance (IGMD), that was conducted just four months before his death. It makes for fascinating reading, in several respects. First of all, there’s the extraordinary story of his journey to Geneva to study with Dalcroze. This trip, and the course of study, was generously funded by a friend who had come into  some money. On the journey there, the friend was accidentally killed by someone cleaning their gun in the train carriage, and Colman was left in Geneva with no money. 

He went to Paris to see if he could get any money from the Singer sewing machine heiress and benefactor to the arts, Winaretta Singer, aka the Princesse de Polignac. (Colman refers to her as  Bertha Singer, but this might have been a mishearing on the interviewer’s/transcriber’s part). No such luck: all she did was to ask a singing teacher if he couldn’t get some of his pupils to hire Colman as an accompanist for 20 francs an hour. It was reading this chance remark in Colman’s interview that put me on to one of the most interesting books I’ve read on music, Sylvia Kahan’s biography of Winaretta Singer, Music’s Modern Muse.

But back to Colman. Having given up hope of getting anything from the Princesse de Polignac, he happened to meet Kurt Jooss, whose company happened to need a pianist, since they were on the point of going to Dartington, and their own pianist didn’t want to go with them (the feeling appears to have been mutual). And so he ended up playing for Jooss, accompanying The Green Table with its composer, Fritz Cohén. I was particularly interested by this detail, since, as well as being one of the pianists (with David Johnson)  for that ballet when I was at the Ballett der Deutschen Oper Berlin in the 1990s, I also worked with Jooss’s daughter, Anna Markard for nearly 10 years afterwards, inputting the score that is in the Routledge book of The Green Table. 

Colman went on to study with Hindemith in Berlin at the advice of Jooss—an extraordinary thing to do, considering that Jooss had just brought his company back from Berlin to Dartington, sensing the impending political and human catastrophe. But that’s where Hindemith was at the time, so he went. Later, Colman played for Balanchine, and played duets with him at Balanchine’s apartment. All of these “minor” details drop one after the other from this interview, which is fascinating in another respect: that in 1994 (the date of the interview), Colman sounded really fed up with how the dance world had become, in relation to musicians. 

I strongly recommend reading the whole article. Even though it’s only 30 years old, it feels like another age, not least because the journal has a touch of a Samizdat publication, xeroxed in a backroom at the University, compared to the 21^st century e-journal articles that are covered in hyperlinks, paywalls, citation metrics, recommendations for further reading and so on, and can be read on multiple devices. The OCR is at times terrible, but you can more or less guess what he means in those places. Something that particularly caught my eye was this: 

To give a floor of, give a beat, it’s just not a beat, a beat is so boring by itself. People are so grateful for that beat that they glamorize it and praise it to the skies as though it were important. It’s the most deadly thing if you emphasize it. A beat should be kept in its place like a proper servant. It’s like a butler. He should know his place. And the metric pulse the beat they call it. “I want a beat. The dancers want that beat.” They don’t care if you just banged a drum. Of course you have to have the beat, but not make it an issue. It should be background al the time. It should just be there, hardly audible. The main thing is the melody. Don’t you think?

Maybe this is for another post, but there’s a whole lot to say in conjunction with that about the notion of psychological accent , as opposed to a performed (phenomenal), metrical accent. As Rothstein points out, it was an issue at the end of the 19th century, and here we have Colman complaining about it at the end of the 20th.

Another thing that jumped out at me—because I’ve been there so often myself—was something he said about the feeling of playing a waltz in a hostile environment, for want of a better word. The interviewer had asked him about the differences between playing for ballet and modern dance (which for UK audiences means contemporary). Are there differences? Colman’s answer, echoing across 40 years, still rings familiar: 

 JC: Yes, because you can have old-fashioned style for ballet and it’s perfectly acceptable. I played for a modern dancer once, and she had them doing an absolute waltz step across the diagonal, no difference between that and any ballet class. I played something structured. I loved Strauss and Lanner, and those waltzes. They knew how to write waltzes, my God, and we certainly don’t know how to play them. I played that and she was immediately upset and said, “Oh no, that wouldn’t work here.” It was the ideal music for the waltz step, but she wanted something like the anvil again.

SS: She wanted something darker and percussive.

JC: Yes, so that she pretended that it wasn’t waltz because she didn’t want to be caught dead doing a waltz.

SS: She wanted to pretend that it wasn’t a waltz?

SS: Yes. (laughs) That’s really what she wanted, she was ashamed of that. She said, “Oh no, no, no.” She was sort of embarrassed by it.

But my favourite quote of all is this one, just because it’s so bizarre. The interviewer asks him how much music is enough, or too much (an odd question, but perhaps you had to be there to understand why Spangenberg asked it). Colman replies: 

Well, I think that Martha’s accompanist, who died freezing to death, played too many notes. He was all over the place. God he was wonderful, but she fired him because he wore an earring to class. You know that? She said, “We can’t have you anymore if you wear that earring.” Can you imagine Martha Graham saying that? I think he played on one of her films. He’s extremely elaborate, very florid.

Perhaps I should have titled this post “remembering the pianist Martha fired” since someone who was kicked out of class for wearing an earring, by someone celebrated for pushing boundaries in, I’d always presumed, a liberal direction, deserves remembrance and a peaceful eternity. I’m presuming the pianist wasn’t Louis Horst, but I’d be grateful for any more information on this nearly-forgotten major event of dance history.

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