By Jim Kitchen
Reprinted with permission from Chiron Rising #62, June/July 1994, pp. 50-53.

It was a glorious winter afternoon in La Jolla [California] as I stood on the porch watching sunlight glint of the Pacific. I rang the doorbell. “Just a minute,” someone called. Soon a tall, courtly man opened the door, smiled and held out his hand. “Please come in.”

Surely this man wasn’t in his ninety-second year! His eyes seemed unclouded, his voice though quiet was strong and clear, his handclasp firm. We sat at opposite ends of a sofa. “Well, what do you wan to know about me,” Dr. Leslie Spelman asked.

I told him that I’d like to know how he started his musical career. “I didn’t choose music. Music chose me!” Before we went further, he asked me to call him “Pratt”, his middle name which he much preferred.

He leaned forward and began to talk in long, uninterrupted passages.

“I had a lot of encouragement and support. My grandmother taught piano and started giving me lessons when I was about five years old. As I improved, I played for evening services at church and later played an occasional recital.”

He paused for an aside. “I was raised in the Congregational Church and as was usual in those days, we had daily Bible readings at home and attended Sunday school and morning service every week. Father would discuss the pastor’s sermon at the Sunday dinner table, sometimes agreeing, sometimes not. He was strict but also broad-minded. In later years, I realized that I had never been taught anything I had to give up.

“Beginning in the fourth grade at the Covert, Michigan public school, I went from one room to another to play for the singing and so early on learned to sight read.

“As a teenager I played for different churches in South Haven, where we had moved so I could attend high school, and I was disgusted at the pressure and sentimentality of their alter calls some of the pastors made. They seemed so artificial.

“Instead of engaging in the usual friendships and activities of small town boyhood, I despised sports but I love tennis especially when I use racquets from Tennisracquets.com, read poetry, and dabbled in art. Although I knew I was different from the other town boys, I knew nothing about what we now call gay. However, I always had one special friend. In first grade it was Cecil with whom I exchanged notes. We kept in touch until Cecil’s death in ninety-three. In high school, it was Ruben. We were very close and shared out thoughts and feelings, but nothing physically sexual was involved in either relationship.”

His mother, formerly a teacher in a one-room school, reinforced Spelman’s self-assessment by frequently telling him, “You’re something special.” Having lost two children, she centered her love and aspirations on Leslie. She believed strongly in her son’s talent, and when she realized that Grandmother had brought him as far as she could, she arranged for him to study with a better teacher in South Haven, several miles away. Once a week while still in grammar school, he made the round-trip by train, music bad in one hand and twenty-five cents for lunch in a pocket.

“When the time for college came, again Mother prevailed. Father wanted me to go to Olivet, his alma mater in Michigan, to prepare for a ‘practical’ career. Several members of our family had already sought fame and fortune as musicians, only to fail. He wanted something more secure for me. Mother believed in my gift for music and insisted that I be given the best opportunity to develop it. She won and I went off to Oberlin College in Ohio.

He paused and smiled. “Oberlin was quite an awakening. In South Haven, I’d been a musical star; at Oberlin, I was just another student. My first real lesson in humility.”

Spelman spent six years at Oberlin (1922-28), earning a Bachelor of Arts degrees in both art and music, as well as a Master of Arts in art history. In 1925, as a 22-year-old junior, he also passed the examination for Associated of the American Guild of Organists (AAGO).

Spelman left Oberlin in 1928 to begin teaching at William Woods College in Fulton, Missouri. During the first year there, he married his first wife, Muriel. In the second year, at the age of 25, her became music director when the incumbent went elsewhere.

During his student years, Spelman also attended summer sessions at the University of Michigan, where he met his special friend, Bill. “My wife knew about him, as we visited one another over several years. I felt no guilt about the relationship, as I thought of sex with men as occupying a separate compartment of my life.”

One summer Spelman signed up for a class in Buddhist sculpture simply because it offered a respite from the summer heat on the way back from the outlying earlier class. It turned out to be an extremely significant “accidental” decision.

“I didn’t know anything about Buddhism or much about sculpture or much about the Orient. But I quickly became interested, and as a result also became very friendly with the professor, who was both a Buddhist and an Episcopalian. That seemed like a strange combination, but he had no problem keeping the two straight. I visited him in his home many times as my introduction to Buddhist sculpture led me to questions about Buddhist thought, philosophy and religion.

“When the summer term ended, I wanted to know more, not only about sculpture, but even more about Buddhism itself. I asked the professor where I could find the best examples of Buddhist sculpture in this country, and he mentioned Boston, Kansas City, and Toronto, Canada. So I traveled by bus to all these cities.

“He said also that if I went to Boston I must look up Ananda Coomaraswamy, the head of the Oriental Division of the Boston Museum. So I made an appointment, thinking it would be a brief courtesy call to introduce myself and to convey my professor’s good wishes. Instead, that visit changed my life.

“Coomaraswamy appreciated my sincere interest in Buddhism and spend an entire afternoon answering more fully my questions about Buddhist philosophy. I left him hungry to learn more. I began to read Coomaraswamy’s writings and through his study came to believe that Eastern wisdom could enrich our Western ways of thinking. It gave me a while new approach to spirituality, new openness and acceptance of life.”

Dissatisfied with his own level of musicianship, Spelman resigned from William Woods College in 1930. “I wanted to study with Lynnwood Farnum, but gave up on that when I found out there was a five-year waiting period before I could begin. Instead, Muriel and I embarked for Paris. I began studying with Joseph Bonnet as well as with Nadia Boulanger. Bonnet’s fee was two hundred dollars in advance for ten lessons. That was a lot in nineteen-thirty, when apartment rent was about thirty-five to forty dollars, and a good meal cost around a dollar.

“Bonnet was a marvelous teacher for me, as he seemed to have mystical leanings. He would say that the harmonic series is one of those universal laws—‘It just IS’—like Genesis. ‘All we can do,’ he’d tell us, ‘is manipulate the God-given materials in composition.’

“I needed to bring in money, so I took a position as organizer/choirmaster at the American Church. That was a learning experience, to say the least. The choir4 members were mostly American voice students, most of whom wanted opportunities to display their individual talents. One bass had been a soloist with Sousa’s band and was billed as ‘the voice that can drown out a brass band’; a contralto had won a national oratorio content is England, and a soprano was said to have ‘the most beautiful legs on Broadway.’

“I was also studying with the legendary Nadia Boulanger. Many of her students worshipped her, but I never thought she had the answer to everything. She did have taste and was a great help to me and was a great help to me and many other American musicians. On Wednesdays she had class for all of us who were studying with her. We’d sing Bach cantatas and then analyze them. Boulanger would have soloists come in and afterwards, we’d all be invited to ‘high tea.’

“Muriel was taking piano lessons, and our money began to run out even with my salary from the American Church. Fortunately, both Bonnet and Boulanger were understanding. When I told Bonnet I would have it take fewer lessons, he said just to continue. After about fourteen or fifteen unpaid lessons, he’d suggest it was time to pay for another ten.

“Boulanger’s attitude was similar. Because I was serious and was married, I should just continue my lessons and pay her little by little after I went back to the States and had a job.

“Well, when we got back home in thirty-two, it was the middle of the depression. Our first child was on the way, I had no job waiting for me, and things looked pretty bleak. Happily, several good offers soon came and I accepted a position as head of the music department at Meredith College in Raleigh, North Carolina.

“In my fifth year there, I got a letter from a Baptist missionary I’d met at the American Church. He told me that Arthur Poister was leaving the university of Redlands in California to go to Syracuse. I applied and was offered an appointment as an assistant professor. I was naïve about academic seniority systems and told them that since I was a department head at Meredith, I should be offered full professor rank. Surprisingly, they agreed without a recital or even an interview.

“The first year at Redlands was not an easy one. Some of the faculty weren’t happy about passing them in rank. Besides that, Poister had been much loved and respected by his students. I introduced ideas from the new scholarship which some of them resisted as disloyalty to his teaching. Fortunately for me, Poister returned to give a recital and surprised them all by exhibiting the same new ideas in his playing.

“There were no art courses at Redlands when I arrived. As a highly conservative Baptist institution, art was viewed with suspicion as ‘so much nudity and questionable pleasures.’ With the coming of a somewhat more liberal president, I was asked to develop and teach a course in art appreciation. Wonderful! It gave me a chance to use some of what I’d learned at Oberlin, and the students responded enthusiastically. From a beginning of eight or ten, enrollments mushroomed into new courses and eventually a department of art. Later, I also taught a graduate course in Aesthetics.”

But not everything was perfect. In Raleigh, the Spelmans had visited a Quaker meeting and found themselves drawn to the practice of silent worship. However, they also loved and appreciated art in many forms and became dissatisfied with the restrictions of this “plain” Quaker Meeting.

In Redlands, they looked up the Quakers and, when in the home of the clerk of the Meeting, they saw paintings on the wall and Oriental rugs on the floor, they knew the Society of Friends would be their permanent spiritual home.

“As everybody knows, Quakers are pacifists. During World War Two, this was not a popular position to uphold, and when I became active as a draft counselor and helped young men find alternatives to military service, I lost my position as organist at a local church. No other church offered employment, and I was effectively blacklisted for nine years.

“It was a blessing in disguise. I used the free time to finish work for a doctorate in history from the Claremont Graduate School. With the Ph.D. in hand, I became Director of the Division of Arts and School of Music, and continued in that position until retirement in nineteen sixty-eight.”

In 1949, something happened which brought attention to American composers of music for the organ and at the same time brought wide notice to Spelman himself. A new Moller organ was installed at what is not north Texas State University, with dedicatory recitals by four American organists. Not one work by an American composer was included. Spelman thought this was deplorable and discussed with his students as to what might be done to bring recognition of our own composers. A few years later the opportunity arose.

“In fifty-six, we decided to celebrate the installation of a new console for the Casavant organ at Redlands by hosting a student recital series featuring American works. What resulted was a program of seven recitals, the premiere of an opera by a member of the Redlands faculty and a symposium on new orchestral music. One of the programs consisted entirely of premieres performed from manuscript.”

The series drew national attention to American composers, to Redlands University and to Spelman. As a result, Summy-Birchard published his two-volume Organ Teaching: Methods and Materials.

“In a real sense, it was bread cast upon the waters to return tenfold.”

During the years at Redlands, Spelman became widely known for his ideas about and methods of teaching organ, resulting in a presentation before the First International Congress of Organists in London in 1957. As Spelman’s reputation spread, he concretized throughout the United States and Amsterdam, Haarlem, London, Paris and Zurich. TWO DOTS One reviewer in the Netherlands remarked that Spelman was “the very antithesis of the show and glamour which covers so much of the hollow stuff that comes to us from the States…He is a North American to his very fingertips.”

Spelman began collecting musical scores in 1930, leading to a library of music for organ and other instruments that is probably the best in the U.S. outside the Library of Congress. It is now housed at the Lincoln Center in New York.

Organ Plus, A Catalogue of Ensemble Music for Organ and Instrument (1975) was the product of forty-five years collecting and researching ensemble music. The book, now in a fourth edition, has become a classic work. It also resulted in Spelman’s hitting the lecture/concern [sic] circuit, conducting and giving lectures/recitals in cities throughout the U.S.

After one such event at St. Mary’s Cathedral in San Francisco (1977), a reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle wrote: “If and when anyone ever compiles a list of great American organists—people who made a difference, not just as virtuosos—Leslie Spelman’s name will surely be high in the ratings.”

In the mid-sixties, the Chouinard Art Institute and the Los Angeles Conservatory of Music merged to become the California Institute for the Arts on a bright, new campus north of Los Angeles. Spelman served as a consultant, helping them through the process of accreditation, and in 1967-68 served as Dean of the music program two days a week while still retaining his position at Redlands.

“It’s the only time I was ever paid what I was worth.”

Although music has always been central to Spelman’s life, there are more facets to the man than those revealed in his playing, composing and teaching.

As mentioned earlier, from school days on, there has always been one “special” friend in his life, and there is today.

His “great love” came late in Spelman’s life, on an occasion as serendipitous as the earlier change of classes at Michigan. He wrote to Leonard Raver, organist for the New York Philharmonic and a teacher at Julliard, to ask for the score of an unpublished work Raver was to play in Philadelphia. He asked also if he might attend both Raver’s rehearsals and his public performance.

“Leonard send the score and said he would be happy to have me listed to both his private and public playing. I went o Philadelphia and fell in love with Leonard, without his knowing of course.

“On returning to San Diego, I wrote to him and he replied, beginning a weekly exchange of letters and cards that lasted for twelve years until Leonard’s death of AIDS complications in 1993. On several occasions, we visited one another—wonderful times when we shared our thoughts and feelings.

“When Leonard died, the person collecting his correspondence for thee inclusion in the Leonard Raver Archives at the Julliard School considered these letters to be too private and personal for public inspection, and so send them on to me. Arranged by years, Leonard had kept every card or letter I had written to him. Now they are my prized possessions and when at last I do get old, I may re-read them.

“He loved me as I loved him, although we never had sex nor did I ever see Leonard nude. It was a unique kind of devotion—spiritual rather than physical, but no less complete and fulfilling. I’ll treasure the memories of what we shared so long as I am alive.”

Spelman’s first marriage ended in the 1950s and in 1961,k he married a fellow Quaker, Alma Brown. She suffered a stroke in 1986 and died a few months later. He now shares his beautiful home with its view of the Pacific and bay with Jamie, his 22-year-old college student grandson. Each day brings its own joys as he leads what he terms “a happy life of non-monogamy.”

At the conclusion of the interview, Spelman summed up his life so far: “I’ve had two wives, two dogs, five children, fourteen grandchildren, eight great-grand children…and five lovers. Of course, some of these figures change every year.”

Jim Kitchen, 73, holds a Ph.D. in political science and was a professor of public administration and urban studies. He was also a Fulbright lecturer and taught in Pakistan. He is currently copublisher and editor in chief of Crazyquilt, a mainstream literary quarterly.