SUMMARY
- Early: Importance of a few years of childhood piano instruction; good music teachers in public school; school band starting in fifth grade (trombone) and continuing (adding baritone horn) through high school; football band and symphonic band in college
- After college: lapse in organized music-making until my mid-thirties; then return to wind ensemble, continuing to present in various ways; early 1990s – with no previous organized singing joined church choir, led children’s music, joined faculty-staff choir, started performing in choruses of Portland Opera and Portland State University Opera; joined Portland Lutheran Choral; switched to Portland Bach Cantata Choir
- What musical “input” was part of my life, especially early on?
- EARLY
Where do we acquire our music – our knowledge of the music others have made and our own ability to make music? I’ll answer the second question first, and I’ll limit my discussion to learning to make music by some sort of systematic, conscious training and effort. Sometime in early childhood, perhaps at kindergarten age, I sang for a while – maybe a year – in the children’s choir of church. I think I remember learning the first verse of the French Christmas carol “Il est né, le divin enfant”. In elementary school we were taught music by the redoubtable principal and fourth-grade teacher, a substantial woman who could lift a naughty little boy out of his desk hair by the collar with one hand. (But I was never in her fourth-grade.) Playing the piano, much like Clarabelle Cow in the Disney cartoons, she taught us the standard patriotic and (pseudo-?) folk songs (those before folk became Folk) and some ditties that had us attempting harmony. One began “The violin ringing like lovely singing”, and then another group of voices would chime in with “The clarinet goes doodle-doodle-doodle det”. I remember all the parts. I am thankful to her for the vocal repertory she gave us and the cultural content of it.
As I recall, that music-making does not include instruction in notation. When I was in maybe first grade, I began piano lessons. They lasted only a few years, but I am eternally grateful to Mrs. Kinney for teaching me notation, and that, since it was piano after all, I learned both treble and bass clefs. My chief music books were the John W. Schaum series. I remember from them playing the duet “The Lion”, sometimes with my sister (when we were not fighting). From Schaum or some other books I remember exercise songs like “Spring Has Sprung, the Grass Had Riz”, and super-simplified versions of the classics, with kiddy lyrics like (to the tune of Lohengrin) “Here comes the bride, all starry-eyed”. I do not remember whether Mrs. Kinney organized recitals by her pupils, but my mother, not herself musical, managed to put together, maybe for a few years, maybe just during the summer, recitals in our home by – I guess – neighborhood kids who were learning music. We were called “The Ivory Ticklers”, and I helped her type up our programs.
I did not continue to play the piano much, and certainly never well, but those few years of keyboard instruction made the rest so much easier. The public schools of our little town, despite the strained finances of an area dependent on logging, offered a music program far better than today’s children get in Portland’s public schools. I started trombone in fifth grade, on a used Olds Ambassador that cost $49.50. Thanks to Mrs. Kinney I didn’t have to learn notation from scratch, and I already read bass clef. Since I could read treble clef as well, I could help my buddies who were learning trumpet. I thus acquired trumpet fingering and thus played trumpet, if primitively, in the trumpet key, one whole pitch lower than the standard piano key. But I also played my trombone from treble-clef scores, often piano scores, so I could play it to someone’s piano accompaniment.
My sixth-grade music teacher, Emmabelle Davis, was wonderful. We continued to learn and sing, now from music books with melody notes, the nation’s core songs and, probably, a range of others. Every week there was a contest where Mrs. Davis would post on her felt board, unidentified, a few measures of some song, with some sort of prize -perhaps just recognition – for whoever first identified it. Mrs. Davis also ran us through many of the classics of the Broadway stage. ••examples And every year she led us through a public performance of a stage musical, apparently always one she had composed. My year is was “The Secret of Sequoia Inn”, and I played – Oh, my prophetic soul! – Professor Epstein, teacher of natural science at Sarah Bright’s Seminary for girls.
After a few years – I think it was in early junior high – my band teacher encouraged me to switch from (now bass) trombone to baritone horn. (Both those instruments were school-provided ones, so the old Olds Ambassador went into semi-retirement.) The baritone horn is the plebeian, marching-band, usually three-valve poor cousin of the more elegant, concert-stage, usually four-valve euphonium. Both come in two (main) clef-flavors, though the horn itself is the same. ••
I decided to become a bass-clef baritone horn player, perhaps because I could then continue to play trombone parts on the new horn. But that meant switching from trumpet fingering (and using treble-clef parts) to reading from bass-clef parts written in C. ••example No longer would a play ••note with ••valves. I did the heavy work of that shift on a long family car trip from southern Oregon to the north Oregon coast, for hours tapping out familiar tunes in my new fingering and, I think, seeing the notes in my head, perhaps now as bass clef, now as treble clef.
In my younger years the music program in the public schools of Grants Pass, Oregon, was excellent and enjoyed strong community support, and not just because back then a small town in Southern Oregon needed all the entertainment it could get. Our high school band, when playing as a football band, always played from memory, including some classical pieces done on the field during halftime. The band regularly scored high at state-level competitions, and we played at halftime in a San Francisco Giants game, back when halftime performances were still broadcast, rather than being replaced by commercials and action playbacks and analysis.
In college I continued football band and wind symphony. Neither activity yielded academic credit-hours, and the resultant informality was especially evident in the football band, though many of the musicians were outstanding. In the football band lack of musical polish, especially in marching in formation, was offset by humor that some times – now and then with my help – pushed the boundaries of good taste. The wind symphony was more culturally ambitious, and I remember Aaron Copland appearing with us as a guest conductor, though when – it was on Parents’ Weekend – I encountered him back stage I assumed he was someone’s grandfather.
At Yale I double-majored in English and German. Because of the latter I gained a backdoor experience of music through its connection with literature. Much later, when I was regularly attending a Lutheran church and also singing Bach, I realized that I had encountered key texts, especially of the chorales, in the “Survey of German Literature” course – though the syllabus gave them far less time than they deserved as foundational texts of German and Protestant culture and as the words that millions of people regularly sang in church, whether in German or translation. Advanced courses in Thomas Mann and Music in (or was it “and”?) German Literature led me to Wagner, Schubert, and much else. During this time too I got my first real exposure to Italian opera – as classical music, to be sure, but in the context of an Italian-American family that also regarded it as folk art, in the sense of the art that the people cherished.
2. After college
After college, as I began my career and moved toward being a family man, I mostly dropped music-making: not enough time, not enough network, though I could have found both had I tried harder to do so. My wife did given me an upright piano, and I did resume playing it, with nowhere to go but up. Sometime around my mid-thirties I felt I had to decide whether I was a guy who played a horn, or just a guy who once played one. I found a nearby college wind symphony which rehearsed in the afternoons, necessary for me since we now had children, and which would also lend me a baritone horn. At roughly the same time I was playing trombone, as a sort of faculty mascot, in my own university’s football band, a truly modest organization (no halftime on the field), that soon yielded to a rock group in the stands. By then I was playing regular concerts, some attended even by our still quite young children. I think it was for my fortieth birthday that my wife presented me with my very own baritone, of course a used one, since we were still watching the pennies, buying a house, and saving for kids’ college. Maybe a little before that I joined my university’s brass ensemble, again as a sort of faculty mascot to the much younger people, mostly music majors, who were its chief source of members. That would have been before 1989, since in that year our group was invited by Portland Opera to play in Aïda as the off-stage fanfare banda. We were each paid $75 for that – I donated my honorarium. In a book which I still hope to publish I tell two stories about that Aïda. At the open dress rehearsal, when our banda was told to clear the backstage, I, carrying my horn and wearing street clothes, nearly walked from the wings onto the stage as Aïda and Radames were preparing to starve to death locked in their tomb. At a later performance I was standing, behaving properly, off stage when our live elephant caught her harness on a light tower, panicked, and came onstage before cue and got very close to falling into the orchestra pit before she was brought back under control and exited the stage quite near me.
For several years my wife and I, now with three small daughters, had been looking for a church. When we did find one, I had a momentous revelation – not about religion, but about singing. The melody line in most popular music scores is pitched for sopranos, I guess because with conventional four-part music they would have the melody (though tenors can sing to the same pitch but an octave lower). So trying to sing the melodies of the hymns was painful to my bass voice. Then I thought: If I had my horn I could just play the bass line (though not during church of course). So if I could play the bass line, why couldn’t I just sing the bass line. And so it happened, faster even than overnight. Soon I was in church choir, and soon I was helping with children’s music, though really without a clue how to do kids’ church music. It was a small church, so my mite was welcome.
short descriptions and then links to separate pages with their siblings and media
brass
vocal with performances
Bach book