Behind the Iron Curtain with John Cage, Part 1

In the spring of 1988 I took my family to Italy for two months, having been invited by the American Academy in Rome to be a resident there. It was a luxury gig—we were given a spacious apartment on the top floor of an ancient residence across the street from the Academy’s grounds. From our perch on a high hill above the Trastevere district, we could see the city stretch out for miles. Other than give a single talk to the fellows and occasionally attend Sunday dinners, I had no responsibilities and could take full advantage of learning that marvelous city.

One day toward the end of the stay I received an old-fashioned yellow paper telegram inviting me to attend a festival of contemporary music in Leningrad (aka Saint Petersburg). The telegram was alarmingly scarce with details. It only gave me the dates I was expected to attend (the following week, in fact) and the address of the Soviet Aeroflot office in Rome where I was to pick up my ticket.

When I showed up at the Aeroflot office I was told that I needed a visa and directed to the Soviet Consulate, located elsewhere in the city in an old Roman palazzo behind a high stucco wall. For four days in a row I took the telegram and my passport and bussed across the city only to find the Consulate closed for one or another enigmatic reason. Finally, on the day before I was supposed to leave for Russia, I managed to arrive and find it open open for business.

When I got inside the Consulate I found the place full of people milling around, each with that anxious and disturbed look that is common in crowded locations where the wheels of bureaucratic transactions slowly grind away. It was 4:30 in the afternoon, and signs everywhere on the premises announced emphatically that the building would close at 5 PM. I had a feeling this was not going work for me and that hearing my music played behind the proverbial Iron Curtain was, at least this time around, a non-starter.

But at the very last moment my number came up and I was ushered into a cavernous room with nothing in it but a monstrous oak desk behind which sat a bored little Russian man, straight out of Gogol.

To Rome, the world’s capitol of svelte fashion where no self-respecting man would think of leaving the house looking anything but sleekly and elegantly attired, this fellow had managed to bring the drabbest, most ill fitting brown suit ever sewn in Vladivostok. Slinking back in his chair, he positively disappeared into the suit. He kept staring at the clock and nervously fingering a cigarette lighter while I stood at attention in front of the desk.

He spoke Italian and Russian. I spoke neither. I handed him my telegram and said “Visa, per favore.” He squinted at me, stretched out a hand and said “Photo…geeef me photo.”

My heart sunk. It had never occurred to me to come prepared with a photo, but in fact the request made perfect sense. Now the trip to Leningrad was surely a pipe dream, this time scuttled by my own lack of foresight. I told him I had no photo. He shrugged indifferently. We both looked at the clock. It was 4:50 on a Friday afternoon. There was no way I could get one in time.

Then suddenly I realized that a week before I taken Sam, then two years old, into one of those little passport photo booths, and we’d had a hilarious time taking goofy pictures of ourselves, each making a Three Stooges kind of face and mugging before the camera.

I fumbled in my bag and pulled out the thin strip of passport photos. In one I was stretching my lips diagonally, exposing my teeth like a dray horse. In another my tongue was sticking out and my eyeballs popping while Sam looked up at me laughing. And so on.

My chance to be in attendance as a representative of American music at this important international festival, to hear “Harmonielehre” played for the first time in Russia, and to be an honored guest along with John Cage, Luigi Nono and many others, hinged on an embarrassing, idiotic mug shot of myself with my face twisted into a stupid grin worthy of a five year-old truant.

I sheepishly handed the strip of photos of myself to the little, wizened Russian, figuring “what the hell…. I tried!”

The faintest hint of a smile passed across his lips as he examined it. He pulled out of a drawer an enormous pair of scissors, clipped the least ridiculous of the photos to size, pasted it onto a document, looked again at the clock, nodded without saying a word, and within the next sixteen hours I was on my way to Moscow, and then to Leningrad. My visa said “John Adams, composer, United States of America, VIP,” and it was accompanied by a mug shot that would have made Moe or Curly—or John Cage, for that matter—delighted.