MacARTHUR GRANTS SPUR RESPONSES

“It will be easier to tell you what I won’t do with it (the money),” said Leo Steinberg, 66, of New York, who won a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship for art criticism and history earlier this week. “I will not break my habit of living without a TV set and tuxedo.”

Steinberg, who quite contentedly commutes by train to the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, where he is Benjamin Franklin Professor of the history of art, added: “I relish that hour and a half on Amtrak without telephone interruption. I have time to think. It’s like taking a cruise.”

Among the elite cluster of 25 MacArthur winners, including scientists, historians and a civil rights activists, announced Monday are seven in the arts: three are composers; two are poets; one is a photographic historian, and there is art historian Steinberg.

The process of selecting the nation’s so-called “genius” winners--those who will receive tax-free, no-strings-attached grants over the next five years, ranging from $164,000 to $300,000 in a graduated calculation based on the recipient’s age--takes place in strictest privacy. As one grantee noted, no one applies for a MacArthur Fellowship. And no photographs accompanied Monday’s announcement.

The grants, which began five years ago, are intended to recognize past achievement and spur future creativity.

“I haven’t made any final plans yet,” noted Steinberg, author of several books on art, including his latest, “The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion.”The foundation noted that he “consistently challenges conventional interpretations” of Western art.

“But I will certainly use that MacArthur grant to make my life even more private than it has been in the past,” Steinberg said. “Writing and scholarly work are very lonely and you have to protect that loneliness.”

Born in Moscow, he emigrated with his family to Germany in 1923, then fled to England a decade later after Hitler came to power. He took his diploma in fine arts from the Slade School of Art in London in 1940 and got his doctorate in 1960 from New York University.

Like Steinberg, several of the MacArthur winners sought to protect their privacy even further by declining to be interviewed.

While last year’s arts grantees included two choreographers, this year’s winners in music composition, include a Pulitzer Prize winner and the composer-in-residence for the San Francisco Symphony. They are:

--Milton B. Babbitt, 70, of Princeton, N.J., who, the foundation said, has “played a key role in fusing the major 20th-Century musical traditions of Schoenberg and Stravinsky. Among his important theoretical contributions has been to extend Schoenberg’s 12-tone concept beyond the organization of pitch relationships to the rhythmic relationships of music.” Babbitt has taught at Princeton since 1938.

--George Perle, 71, of New York City, this year’s winner of the Pulitzer Prize in music for his Wind Quintet No. 4, and a Grammy nominee who lost out to Andrew Lloyd Webber for his “Requiem.” “By extrapolating basic tonal elements in the work of Berg, Bartok, Stravinsky and other major 20th-Century composers,” the foundation said, Perle has “created a unique harmonic language that altered contemporary music development.”

--Charles Wuorinen, 48, of San Francisco and New York, founder of the Group for Contemporary Music, “a guiding force” of the American Composers Orchestra who has “helped focus attention on important new music.” He is a professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey. As a Rockefeller Fellow at Bell Laboratories, he “used the latest electronic technology to explore the basic building blocks of music.”

Reached at his apartment in New York, Wuorinen laughingly called that description “a little bit romanticized.” He said that at Bell he used computers with a colleague to investigate the ideas of Benoit Mandelbrout, an IBM research mathematician.

“He developed ideas that were very interesting and original and provocative. Descriptions of natural processes and shapes, such as snowflakes, clouds in the sky, the way trees branch, the way rivers run,” and he paused, “the way the stock market fluctuates.”

Wuorinen is of Finnish descent. His father, John, was a professor of history at Columbia University. “He ran away from the Russians in 1916, came here speaking no English, and,” he said, laughing, “was probably an illegal alien.” During World War II, Wuorinen said, his father was chief of the Scandinavian division of the Office of Strategic Services.

Wuorinen, who will receive $236,000 over the next five years, said that “of course I was surprised, since the deliberations are carried out very quietly. I will use it in a way to assure longer-range financial stability.”

Wuorinen’s work “The Golden Dance,” a 21-minute piece in two parts, will open the San Francisco Symphony’s season in September.

“We all know each other,” Wuorinen noted of the three MacArthur winners in music. “And Babbitt and I are old friends. We’ve known each other for decades.”

George Perle believes that the $300,000 he gets over the next five years will make up for the money he “lost over many years. In order to compose I have had to take many leaves of absence without salary.”

To write his two-volume work on “The Operas of Alban Berg,” Perle said, he had to take trips to Vienna “on my own resources.”

Perle, who is married to pianist Shirley Rhoads, allowed: “We might take a vacation in Bermuda.”

Like the other winners, Perle, who was in Maryland judging a piano competition, was notified on July 10. However, when the call came in, he was not at home. He got the news from his telephone-answering machine.

The MacArthur arts winners who asked not to be disturbed are:

--Richard M.A. Benson, 42, photographer and photographic historian from Newport, R.I., who is a specialist in the preservation and application of older technologies, “a master of the lost arts” of palladium printing and platinum printing, according to the foundation, .

--Daryl Hine, 50, a poet from Evanston, Ill., editor of Poetry magazine from 1968-78 who, the foundation noted, “published some of the most critically acclaimed American poetry of the decade.” Author of six books of his own poetry, including “The Devil’s Picture Book” and “Academic Festival Overtures,” Hine, who has translated Theocritus and the Homeric Hymns, is described as “one of the few American poets who earns his income from writing.”

--Jay Wright, 51, a poet and literary thinker from Piermont, N.H., whose work “explores the rituals and myths of diverse cul1tures.” Wright, who is black and a native of New Mexico, “fuses in his poetry the histories and cosmologies of Africa and Mexico” drawing on “antecedents from medieval and Renaissance studies, philosophy, anthropology, music, religion . . ., “ the foundation noted.

While Wright celebrated at home playing some jazz on his bass, his wife Lois spoke for him in a telephone interview. She also read a sample of his work from his 105-page, book-length poem, “The Double Invention of Komo” (U.of Texas Press, 1980):

This is the language of gold, silver, and wood ,

Stone, herringbone, and sand.

Walk in the light of copper.

By an egg’s radiance I arrange my soul’s baggage.

“It won’t change our life,” she said of the grant, “except that it will free us of all financial worries for at least five years. He won’t have to teach for a while. He’ll be doing his work, his writing.”