Stockhausen's Mittwoch, 2012.
Si Newhouse, the longtime owner of The New Yorker and other Condé Nast magazines, has died at the age of eighty-nine. David Remnick, the New Yorker's editor, pays affecting tribute to him on our website. For years, he was to me an unapproachably mysterious character, glimpsed from afar in the cafeteria at 4 Times Square, where Condé Nast moved in 1999. Then, when my book The Rest Is Noise appeared, I got to know him slightly. He read the book and invited me to dinner at the apartment that he shared with his wife, the architectural historian Victoria Newhouse. It was difficult to concentrate on one's meal with masterpieces of twentieth-century art hanging on the walls. Si seemed to respond to one of the governing questions of my book: why, when artistic modernism was so widely celebrated, did twentieth-century musical modernism remain obscure? He took an interest in possible connections between Cage and Pollock, Feldman and Rothko. I had made these arguments before, but never with an actual Pollock looming over me.
He was an undemonstrative, soft-spoken man, who often appeared at Condé Nast wearing a bulky sweatshirt. Conversations with him were intimidating, not so much because he was a man of wealth and power — his rigorously hands-off approach to the stewardship of The New Yorker meant that it made no difference whether one impressed him or not — but because he was so obviously avid to hear about something new and notable. You wanted to satisfy his almost boyish curiosity. In the past decade I often saw him and Victoria at new-music concerts, the more avant-garde the better: the Talea Ensemble, the JACK Quartet, the Austrian Cultural Forum, Miller Theatre, and so on. He was up for almost anything, though he drew the line at Xenakis in rowboats; in that case, Victoria ventured out alone. In the spring of 2012, I told him that I was planning to go that summer to Bochum, to see John Cage's Europeras, and to Birmingham, for Stockhausen's Mittwoch. When I arrived in Bochum, there they were, Si and Victoria: the doubleheader had sounded to them like a fun vacation. He went on attending concerts even when medical challenges made the experience difficult. This was at once heartbreaking and uplifting to see. He was a man of deep culture, even if he hesitated to put his impressions into words. "That was very interesting," he'd say. Likewise, I hesitate to put into words who he was and what he represented. He remained mysterious, yet I regarded him with ever more gratitude and awe. It would have sounded idiotic to express that to him, but I wish I had done so all the same. Deepest condolences to Victoria and the Newhouse family.
