William Gudenrath discusses how he met Paul Hollister. Oral history interview with William (Bill) Gudenrath, March 22, 2018, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 04:34.

William Gudenrath: I’ll tell you how I met him, and I’ll start with that, I guess. Let’s see. In 1982, I made—I wrote a letter to the British Museum [London, United Kingdom] asking to see a couple of objects that were in a book called The Golden Age of Venetian Glass. and I wrote a letter to the guy who had written the book, Hugh Tate was his name, turned out to be—he was a legendary curator of decorative arts. And I showed up one afternoon and he showed me, had the two pieces out, and he said—and I’d written him a letter saying I’m a glassblower, I’m not a historian, I’m just fascinated with Venetian glass of the Renaissance. And so we finished those two pieces and then he said, ‘If you wouldn’t mind, I have a couple questions for you.’ So an assistant roughed in two carts filled with objects from about 1500 to about 1700. And we spent the rest of the day, and over many years we became very good friends—Hugh and his wife Audrey, I used to stay with them in London. So after a couple of visits with Hugh, he said, ‘There’s a guy in New York you’d really enjoy meeting. His name is Paul Hollister.’ And he knew that I was a musician as well. I’m a musician, play organ, harpsichord, and piano. And he said, ‘Paul knows a lot about music, you two guys would really enjoy each other.’ So the short—the end of the story is that I called Paul, and we had lunch together, and we had lunch together about every two or three weeks for probably five years. And then he got older, they decided to move to New Hampshire. We went to concerts together. We hung out together a lot. Every year we drive to—I would drive us to Corning to the seminar, the October seminar, and he just became a really good friend. And he was a great character, you’ll hear many—you will have heard many stories about Paul. But one of the things we talked about more than glass, way more, was music, because he had grown up being taken to Carnegie Hall [New York, New York] and Symphony Hall in Boston. And he’d heard all of the great pianists from the late 19th century who died off in the ‘50s and ‘60s and stopped playing then. He’d heard them all, and he could tell you what it was like to be in the hall when Rachmaninoff was playing. One time he was sitting behind Joseph Hoffman, a name that maybe doesn’t mean anything to you, but he was a legendary pianist. And he was sitting behind Hoffman and—not Horowitz, but somebody—and Rachmaninoff was playing and Hoffman leaned over to this other guy and said, ‘Susur technician—sweet technique,’ which means he has a really good technique. Paul had these endless stories about the great musicians and once he—every year, apparently, growing up they went to Europe on one of the great ocean liners; and you will have heard, too, that he was an authority on that. He was one of those intensely curious people with a really good memory who just remembered everything and asked about everything and was just super alert, who’s awesome company. And was great—so anyway, he’d taken these trips to Europe every year, and one time he was on the ship with the great conductor of the Boston Symphony, Koussevitzky. You know, Paul had, like, endless stories and I heard him tell many of them a few times so they’re, you know, stuck in my memory. So one time Koussevitzky was on the ship and he was—I think Paul was in his teens, I’m not quite sure, but he said he was pretty young and pretty shy. It’s hard to believe if you knew him as an adult. And he went straight to Koussevitzky and he said, ‘Maestro, may I ask you a question?’ He said, ‘Yes, young man, you can.’ And Paul was a great raconteur; he could do, he could do accents, and the body language as well as Kevin Spacey if you ever have seen him do that. He was an unbelievable raconteur and a wonderful impersonator. So he said, ‘Maestro Koussevitzky, which is greater, the music of Bach or the music of Beethoven?’ And so he would wind himself up and he would transform himself, and he said, [imitating foreign accent] ‘Well, my son, contrapuntically speaking the music of Bach is superior, but to dramatically speaking, the music of Beethoven is superior. They are both good.’ [laughs]