By David Gibbons

Gerald Busby, who has called The Chelsea Hotel home for the past 30 years, is a survivor and a living, breathing link to several bygone eras. As a teenager in the 1950s, he played piano in the revival tents of his native East Texas, discovering the emotional power of music. He was a protégé of composer and critic Virgil Thomson, perhaps The Chelsea’s most distinguished and longest-tenured resident. Busby, 71, lived through the AIDS epidemic that killed his partner Sam Byers in 1993, along with so many others. Nowadays, every morning Busby practices reiki, an ancient healing art that helped him regain his health and sanity after seven years at the edge of the abyss. Then he sits down to write his music.

Busby’s best-known pieces—the ones now taught at the conservatories—are the score to Robert Altman’s 1977 film “3 Women” and the music for Paul Taylor’s dance “Runes.” Much of his work is done on commission now, and it most often involves creating song cycles from contemporary poems. “I’ll be visiting a friend and a book of poetry will fall off the shelf and hit me on the head,” he jokes. “So, I set it to music.” For his 70th birthday concert at Carnegie Hall in December 2005, he wrote songs based on a series of ancient Greek love poems. Friendly and unassuming, frank and open, Busby maintains a bounce in his step, a hint of the old Texas twang in his voice and the cheerful, polite manner of a relaxed Southern gentleman.

Tell us about your background.

I went to Yale, where I lived in Branford College under Harkness Tower, which has the carillon. I originally enrolled as a pianist in the music school, which in those days was separate, like a conservatory with its own undergraduate section. I transferred to the college and majored in philosophy. Then I became a traveling salesman. I read Kirkegaard, played the piano and sold textbooks. That’s all I did for eight years. Then I came back [to New York] and met Virgil Thomson. He introduced me to these rich lady friends of his on the East Side. Through them, I started to teach piano. I was teaching Cynthia O’Neill. She was the wife of Patrick O’Neill, who had all those restaurants around Lincoln Center. Leonard Bernstein called me up one morning and said, “Cynthia says you’re a good piano teacher. Would you like to teach my youngest daughter?” I couldn’t believe this was happening. I said, “Well, sure!” Through Cynthia, I also met [Rudolf] Nureyev. Then I met Paul Taylor and got my first commercial commission.

How did you get the Altman commission?

I had a friend who was a movie publicist. He knew Altman’s publicist and sent him my tape. Altman had just finished shooting “3 Women” and he was looking for a composer. He had a studio in Westwood, near UCLA. After the work day, his crew of friends, like Lily Tomlin, Elliot Gould and Peter Boyle, would drop by and he would play music for them. He would go into the corner with a stopwatch and, once the tape was started, time how long it took for the silence to be broken. Even if they stopped to say, “This is wonderful,” they had stopped listening. My piece got the longest period of silence. So, that’s how I got the job. It’s astonishing. How did Altman know I could do anything like that? Because I had never conducted, I had never orchestrated, and I had never written a film score. Altman had that instinct for finding a needle in a haystack. He somehow channeled his energy through me and got me to do exactly what he wanted.

Something beyond the old stopwatch trick.

I don’t know or care what it was; I’m just delighted it happened. I’ve known five bona fide geniuses: Altman, Paul Taylor, Martha Graham, Virgil Thomson and Leonard Bernstein. They had so much power, and they were all kind of sadistic—except for Altman. They had a point at which they would kind of reach over and pinch you just to see you jump.

How did you come to live at The Chelsea?

I had just got back from California, working on “3 Women,” and was here visiting Virgil Thomson one day. I had to move out of my apartment and I told Virgil I’d like to live here. He picked up the phone, called Stanley Bard and said, “Stanley, this is the kind of person you’re supposed to have here.” Those were his exact words, which of course I loved. Stanley showed me a room on the 10th floor. It happened to be right over Virgil’s apartment. I’ve lived [in the hotel] ever since. Stanley, by the way, has been the perfect landlord for people like me, who are kind of disconnected. Stanley has wonderful instincts about who’s in trouble and who needs help. He’s amazing; he’s been almost like a parent in his support. For instance, when the AIDS epidemic came, my partner Sam started dying fairly quickly. He had cryptococcal meningitis, which is one of the worst of the infections that you’re prone to get. He lost his mind and withered away, and I went kind of nuts. I thought I was dying, too, but I wasn’t. I’m one of the very lucky ones. I got behind in rent; I was on welfare because I had lost everything. Without saying it outright—and this was over a period of years—Stanley let me know that if I could get control of things and pay my rent, I could stay. I was really taken care of. Fortunately, I also got help from The Actors Fund, The Estate Project, and from Joseph Dalton and Nurit Tilles. They came and got me back on my feet. I was rehabilitated.

When did things turn around for you?

About seven or eight years ago. There were six or seven years when I was just totally mad and strange and couldn’t work. I was steered to the Samuels Center at Roosevelt Hospital, probably the best HIV clinic in the world. They give all kinds of conventional medicine but also a lot of unconventional treatments, like reiki classes.

How does that work?

It’s an ancient Tibetan healing modality. The Japanese codified it. Reiki is about harnessing energy, concentrating it and making use of it. I went through a five-day initiation process at [the Samuels Center]. Every morning I spend about an hour going through this procedure. You begin with the most primitive—the reptilian—part of your brain, putting your hands on your body. It’s almost like following the chakras down your spinal column. What it does is synchronize or synergize the rhythms of your body, the heartbeat, the aspiration (the breathing), to where everything goes into its calmest, most natural state. In order to arrive at the creative moment, you have to get to zero. As I get older, I’m becoming more and more aware of this. Virgil lived to be 92, and he was not in particularly good shape. He had an enormous stomach and he did everything that’s wrong. But he had this ability of spending no energy in time. By the way, he equated time with energy. He said they’re the same thing. He would spend no time or energy on things over which he had no control. Zero. And wow!

I think maybe most people spend their lives not even arriving at that lesson.

They don’t. And it’s taken me to the age of 70 to realize that was what he was doing. It’s all about learning how to look at something without responding. Whatever we perceive, we immediately have judgments or reactions or memories. When you have these quirky responses, when you’re triggered by everything, you’re burning capital as it were. It’s interesting: The path toward that so-called spiritual place is purely physical. It’s about becoming aware of your body; then if you look at something or perceive something, you’re totally still. The mind stops yammering, all those tapes that play in the mind somehow slow down and finally stop. And then, “Ahh!”

What’s it like to live at The Chelsea Hotel?

It’s a rather insulated atmosphere. Stanley sees to it that nobody bothers you. When you’re in here, you’re kind of in a cocoon.

Isn’t that one of the great things about New York? You can still find these special places where you can be yourself and be left alone.

In the middle of all this chaos! There’s something wonderful about that. I love the fact that I can look out [my window] and see the tip of the Empire State Building. People are noisily walking up and down and honking horns. And I’m in here writing music. Nobody knocks on your door unexpectedly. Nobody disturbs you. I don’t really know much about the people around here except for when there were murders or suicides or the sort of calamities that break down all the partitions that have been established.

Some songwriters can’t stand to listen to something they wrote 10 or 20 years ago. They’re embarrassed by it, or they think it’s rubbish—kids’ stuff.

Well, it’s like an emotional diary. While Sam was dying, I was writing a string quartet. I wasn’t aware of it at the time, but many years after he died, I went back and listened to it, which was excruciating. [The emotions] were all there. To me, my music signals where was I emotionally at the time; that’s the focus—much more than whether it’s a good piece or not.

Where do the melodies, the songs come from?

There’s kind of a repository of emotion. Say I’ll be writing a saxophone piece, and I’ll remember a sound from when I was 15 years old and in the high school band. In my memory, I have sort of a collection, a compendium, of my favorite sounds from childhood, like primal experiences with an instrument. When I’m writing for an instrument, I’ll remember an emotional experience and the sound that went with it. It’s that mnemonic device of emotion, along with the texture or timbre of an instrument.