Profiles by Peter Goodman

Great Neck's Own

MORTON GOULD (1913-1996). Gould was a true Long Islander, commuting to Manhattan by train just like everybody else. Born in Richmond Hill, a suburban section of Queens surrounded by farmland and served by the LIRR (as a child, he used to watch the trains chug past the end of his block), he was a piano prodigy whose first music, a waltz, was published when he was 6. Prodded by his salesman father, Gould was soon giving recitals on radio and in hotels and department stores. He dropped out of high school in 1929 and supported his family playing in vaudeville houses before getting a job at Radio City Music Hall, and then landing his own radio show. Self-effacing but with a wicked sense of humor, he was a radio star during the 1930s and 1940s (his most famous piece, ``Pavanne,'' was written for the radio), made dozens of mood-music and easy-listening records, but also wrote symphonies, concertos and ballets. Gould moved to Great Neck in 1952, raising four children there. In the late 1980s, he was president of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers. He received the Kennedy Center Honors in 1994, and won the Pulitzer Prize for ``Stringmusic,'' composed for cellist-conductor Mstislav Rostropovich and the National Symphony in 1995.

A Wartime Sojourn In Amityville

BENJAMIN BRITTEN (1913-1976). From 1939, when the pacifist British composer and his lover, the tenor Peter Pears, fled the war in Europe, until 1942, when they returned to embattled England, they spent much of their time in Amityville and on the East End. In fact, Britten played in string quartets with Albert Einstein, who summered on the North Fork. Britten had been befriended by William Mayer, an Amityville psychiatrist, who introduced him to David Rothman, a Southold merchant and music-lover. Rothman arranged conducting and performing jobs for Britten and Pears in Riverhead, Southold and elsewhere so they could earn some money. Britten composed several pieces while in Amityville, including ``Les Illuminations,'' ``Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo'' and ``Scottish Ballad,'' for two pianos and orchestra.

Sergei On The Sound

SERGEI RACHMANINOFF (1873-1943). Although he was born in Russia, lived in Switzerland and ultimately moved to New York, this great composer and piano virtuoso spent the summers of 1940 and 1941 on an estate at the tip of Centerport called Orchard Point. Its trees and fields reminded him of home. Rachmaninoff socialized with nearby Russian friends, including the choreographer Michael Fokine and the writer Michael Chekhov (nephew of the great Russian playwright), traveling across Long Island Sound to Connecticut at the wheel of his own cabin cruiser to visit the writer. Neighbors would moor their boats below his house at night to listen to him play. Rachmaninoff wrote his last completed composition, the ``Symphonic Dances,'' there the first summer, and did some revisions of other work the next summer, before moving to California for the last year of his life. The 44-room mansion burned to the ground in 1960.

Satchmo Slept Here

LOUIS ARMSTRONG (1900-1971). He was, very possibly, the most famous musician in the world throughout the 1930s and early 1940s. And for much of that time, the world at large was where jazz great Louis Armstrong hung his hat: Home for Armstrong was a hotel room or a flat. Or a room in the house of a black family while touring the South during the reign of Jim Crow.

His life changed, in more ways than one, when, in October of 1942, he married the love of his life, an ex-chorus girl named Lucille Wilson. Within a matter of months, she bought a house in Corona that she decorated herself. According to Gary Giddins' biography, ``Satchmo,'' Armstrong was so taken aback at first by this gesture that, when a cab first brought him to the house, he told the driver to wait outside in case he decided to leave. After seeing what Lucille had done with the place, he changed his mind and invited the driver in for dinner.

Armstrong's wealth and fame would continue to grow in the next couple of decades. Yet though he could easily have afforded a large mansion farther east, he considered this working-class Queens suburban community his true home and sanctuary. Even Lucille tried to convince him to move to larger digs in later years. But Armstrong liked living near Shea Stadium and loved the kids (``My little ice cream eaters,'' he called them) who came by to sit with him on the front porch. Wasn't he worried about crime? No, he would reply. The neighbors looked after the place when he would leave for one of his frequent out-of-town concert tours.

The house is now administered by Queens College. The school has begun a $2.8-million project to convert the house, at 34-56 107th St., to a museum.

-- Gene Seymour

A March King's Home `Near Paradise'

JOHN PHILIP SOUSA (1854-1932). Sousa had long been the March King by 1914, when he bought a house in what is now Sands Point. (He called it Wildbanks, and lived there till his death, in 1932.) Born in Washington, D.C., of a Portuguese father and Bavarian mother, Sousa had spent most of his famous career there or in Philadelphia, but settled in on the Port Washington peninsula, at least partly because he liked the hunting and shooting in the neighborhood. ``I have to live somewhere, and the North Shore is so near Paradise that I have no idea of ever renting or selling my place,'' he once wrote to an importunate salesman.

A Real Yankee First

MICAH HAWKINS (1777-1825). Born in Head of the Harbor, Hawkins moved to New York in 1798. He was your ordinary early American jack-of-all-trades: A carriage-maker, grocer and innkeeper, he played flute, piano and violin in several musical societies, compiled tunes and arrangements, and wrote the lyrics to one of the very first ``minstrel'' songs. The pinnacle of Hawkins' career, however, came with six performances of his ``The Saw-Mill, or a Yankee Trick,'' at the Chatham Garden Theater in New York in 1824-25; it was the first opera by an American composer on an American theme

Hampton, Sweet Hampton

JOHN HOWARD PAYNE (1791-1852). Virtually unknown today, Payne, who spent part of his childhood in East Hampton, was one of the most celebrated American playwrights and literary figures of the early 19th Century. He published his own little magazine of theater criticism at the age of 14 and was a stage star at 15. Moving to England during the War of 1812, he roomed there with fellow American Washington Irving, was a friend of Charles Dickens and became renowned in the London theater. But Payne's greatest contribution came in 1823, when he wrote the libretto to an English operetta, ``Clari, or the Maid of Milan.'' One number became an immediate, show-stopping hit as ``Home, Sweet Home''; the song probably was based on Payne's experiences as a child on the East End.