Interview Transcript
Lynne was 8 years old when her father, Vincent C. Talley, wrote his letter to Leonard Bernstein from Scotia, New York. I got in touch with Lynne via the University at which she’s a Professor, and we agreed to speak in January 2025. We talked about her memories of going with her parents to Tanglewood as a child, and why concert hall etiquette mattered to her father. I later spoke to her brother, Chuck, who is reading the letter on this recording.
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January 14, 1961
Dear Mr. Bernstein,
Last week, while attending a hockey game at RPI, we became aware of the Young People’s Concert, which will be presented on February 17. We purchased our tickets and have made plans to bring our two children, ages 6 and 8.
We have enjoyed a number of your television programmes and have also taken our children to attend a number of Saturday morning rehearsals at Tanglewood over the past four years.
My purpose in writing is to ask your consideration of an idea which comes to us from one of the Children’s plays, which has been arranged through the Schenectady branch of AAUW in which my wife has been quite active. Before the play began, the director explained good audience manners to the children who, in this case, ranged from 3rd to 5th grade. It occurs to me that in a program of the nature of your Young People’s Concert, such a short explanation of concert audience manners might also be apropos – it would (I know from experience) be a delightful way to learn proper conduct, and, coming from a person of recognised authority, leave a lasting impression.
This type of programming may already be in your thinking. If not, I submit it for your consideration. In any event, we look forward to a delightful Saturday morning in February.
Best regards,
Vincent C Talley
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That whole side of the family is from southeastern Ohio – from Zanesville, Ohio. So it’s kind of … it was a sort of industrial place, in the middle of lots of farmlands and so forth. But he was actually raised in Charleston, West Virginia, which is also kind of off the grid here, nationally, but it’s the capital of West Virginia.
And his parents went to college in the 20s – so they were well educated for the times. My grandfather, Chester Talley, Chet Talley, went to Ohio University, and he was an electrical engineer, and he worked for the power company. So they were basically electrifying that part of the US. And he was a man… a really high up manager by the time he retired – in West Virginia. So Dad grew up in Charleston, West Virginia, and it was the capital city, but it’s a fairly compact city.
They call it wild, wonderful West Virginia. It’s … it’s coal mining country, which it’s Appalachians, so it’s mountainous, but they’re not big mountains. They’re sort of funny rolling mountains that have lots of deep rivers through them. And so Charleston is on a large river that runs through West Virginia up to Ohio. So it’s a capital city. It had all the things that it would have. It has a big, beautiful capital building and everything. But my grandfather was able to walk to work – it’s small enough – and come home for lunch, and work out at the wye first thing in the morning every day. And the high school is around the corner. They were avid golfers and bowlers at bowling team, golfing team, ran the local knitting club. So…
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My grandmother was also from Zanesville. I don’t think either of them really had any music interests, but my father played in the high school orchestra and band. He played violin and French horn. And his most favourite picture that’s, you know, still there, is a full colour portrait of him in his band uniform with his French horn – in high school.
And then he went to Ohio, then … he was in World War two and came back and went to Ohio University in engineering, electrical engineering … same as his dad. But then he went to work for General Electric, so he went corporate. So he also got his Master’s degree at University of Michigan, Ann Arbour. So he ventured a little further, even from sort of the West Virginia, southeastern Ohio.
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It was definitely a suburb – Scotia of Schenectady, New York – which is where the big GE facility was for years. So if you know somebody was born in Schenectady, their dad probably worked for GE. So it was a top engineering job – it’d be like working for Qualcomm or Google or something now. And the suburbs were springing up. They weren’t building these little McMansions at that point; it was a small Cape Cod house. And the street was full of them – all cookie cutters, all of each other – and it was nice.
It was planted in the neighbourhood was planted in an old apple orchard. That’s why it’s called Orchard Drive. So we had totally mature apple trees on the lot, and then a little … beautiful little stream and woods in the back. And then the original farmhouse was on the other side. And the main road was named after the family at the farmhouse. They’d been there for probably, you know, 200 years. And then suddenly these suburbs spring up. Yeah, so I think the plot … it was a circle. It was a dead-end circle, but it had probably about 50 houses on it, and everybody’s parents … fathers – all fathers worked, and mothers didn’t – worked in something like this, some kind of technical or educated kind of side of things.
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Their very, very best friends, actually, thinking about music – and still all the way until they all, you know, passed away here in their ’90s – Dave Jacobs; he was an engineer at GE too. He moved over to ESSO, Exxon. He was a really good violinist and an amazing singer and a really good actor. So he liked to do sort of community theatre, played in the local orchestra and everything. And he and his wife were my parents’ best friends. So there was music there, too.
So we usually went places with them when we were kids. So a big, big pilgrimage every summer – usually twice – was over to Tanglewood, which is in Western Mass., and it was perfect because … they were all on the budget-conscious side, so Tanglewood is a big open shed. And that’s where Bernstein was … they were often in there conducting.
I do remember him. I remember a concert and hearing [him] conduct there. I’m sure. Now it suddenly came back. Our mothers would make picnics … picnic baskets – ‘cause you wouldn’t go buy food on the way anywhere – and put out blankets. We always had the same picnic bags, and we’d sit on the lawn and you could hear the music from the back. So you tried to jockey for a good spot on the lawn. And then as … when we got older, they finally broke down and bought seats inside the shed.
But we were little, and the Jacobs had … had four kids our age, and we had two, and there was a lot of running around. So my favourite thing was that they had built this amazing hedge maze off to the side of this big lawn. So there’s the big shed where the orchestra plays down below, and then seats going way up. It’s probably way smaller than I remember. And then a lawn, and then off to the right was this maze. And so my parents and their parents could sit there and … and listen to the music, and we would just run and do the maze, and then come back and get our picnic food, and maybe hear the music, but maybe not. It was so important to them to introduce us to this.
It was just the environment that classical music was part of our lives. And when we moved to Philadelphia – Dad was transferred – then we had season tickets all the time to the Young People’s Family Concerts at the Philadelphia Orchestra with … Eugene Ormandy was the conductor there. And then my parents had tickets to the regular concerts, and Robin Hood Dell in the summer, where the Philadelphia Orchestra played outside.
Philadelphia has a really mature kind of classical music … sort of whole environment. Really it feels like it’s been there forever, and it will go forever. And you’ve got all these European teachers, and really aspirational kids, you know, who go to Juilliard and things like this. So there is an environment, a classic… yeah, and they were somewhat immersed in that, but they didn’t have real friends in it.
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I mean, their values were very solid. He was frugal. He was very proud of being a really good engineer. I don’t know if that would say being a value, but the value was in his work mostly. And the music was a really important outlet for him. And it was his only outlet.
He didn’t … now that I’m thinking about it, I realise this: he’s not a reader. He wasn’t propped with a book all the time. He was propped with his work. You know, there’d be … there were no computers and laptops. There would be stacks of papers. And the pads of paper that he worked on were kind of like a graph paper. It’s a writing paper, but it’s also got vertical columns that are kind of light on it, and that’s … and sort of narrow ruled. Just nonstop, you know, working out whatever he was working on.
And I think … we all were shocked – he most of all – when he went for his diagnosis – what was his psychologic…? What was going on? What was wrong? – in his 80s, and found out he was ADH… ADD. And that made sense finally. He was a … he was frustrated. I would say he was a very, very frustrated person. I think he did not want to be an engineer. He wanted to be a scientist or musician.
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I think he always had a real deep lack of self confid… always trying to do things right, and maybe it was a struggle to do things right all the time. So it was really important to him to have rules. I’m going to say a little bit on the spectrum here. So, you know, you don’t naturally know what the social rules are. So you learn them really, really well. And then it really bothers you when other people don’t follow them.
He …he was the kind of guy you could get irritated. And so you don’t talk during a performance. You don’t get your little candies out and start, you know, unwrapping them like … You learn when to clap, so you do it at the right time. That’s important in classical music. It’s mostly the, you know, showing up on time, getting in your seat … Same thing in church. We were in church every Sunday. You just you do it all according to, you know, what you’re supposed to do.
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We watched TV a lot. We never had any limits on TV … Unlike my husband’s family, it was like, ‘Urgh! we don’t have a TV!’ So then they’d go over and lap it up at their friends’ houses. But my parents, you know, they’d always have the guide. You’d get it out of the newspaper – you didn’t want to spend extra money getting the TV Guide sent to your house. So you’d get it from the daily newspaper, and then you’d carefully mark, you know, he’d always carefully annotate things, and maybe write them down on one of his pads of paper. And so I don’t think we missed a single one of the Young People’s Concerts. And so I definitely remember watching all of those. I also remember a lot of Mickey Mouse Club.
But I remember really listening to those Bernstein concerts on TV. I loved them. So I’m so glad that they … that they cued those up so that we could watch them. Um, or if there was another performance, sometimes there were operas or something, we’d watch those. Yeah, they really watched for the classical music stuff on TV. I think they felt like that was a reason for having a TV. It wasn’t for entertainment, any other type of enter… It was another way to enjoy music.
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He’s the only conductor I ever heard of when I was a kid, so I suspect that in my father’s world, he was the main one. And it may … we were living in upstate New York, and Tanglewood was there. Bernstein was in New York. So he was the New York conductor. When we moved to Philadelphia, then it was Eugene Normandy was our world. So I think it’s like having the home football game team you know – this is the home orchestra! And I always have had a sense of that.