On Tuesday, the New York Observer ran a beautiful portrait of Lee Hoiby, an 84-year-old composer who is experiencing an unexpected renaissance. The reporter interviewed Hoiby in his home in an undisclosed location in the Catskills, and came away with an awed impression of backwoods isolation that should sound pretty familiar to residents of Delaware and Ulster counties:
The composer Lee Hoiby lives deep in the Catskills, up a series of curving two-lane highways and a 20-minute drive past the end of cell-phone reception. A small, utilitarian metal bridge over a stream leads into his gravel driveway, which winds a hundred feet or so up a hill, branching left toward the big red house and right toward the garage. Atop that structure are the rooms where Mr. Hoiby works and sleeps. He can sit at his desk and through the large windows look down the hill, past the stream and out to the road.
His existence up here is far from bourgeois bohemian country living. The main house, which has the kitchen and dining room and is where Mr. Hoiby's partner, Mark Shulgasser, sleeps, is charming—the view from the dining room is of a man-made pond and an idyllic waterfall at the edge of the property—but not quite cozy. It's drafty and raw, with a backwoods feel. Though Mr. Shulgasser claims that the area, with a recent influx of gay residents, is becoming "Fairy Lane," there's an obscure sense of hardship, a note of isolation.
