Music school & exile from pop culture (1983-1985)
After graduating from high school, I moved into an apartment with a good friend, Terry O'Neal. He was a super funny guy, intelligent, and a gifted athlete, especially on golf and shooting hoops. We planned loosely to move to Arizona together in the fall. I wanted to go to music school, and he wanted to walk on the ASU golf team. He could have. He was hit by a car and died after a few days in the hospital in a coma in May 1983.
Bless my Mom and Dad. They generously bought me a '78 Scirroco, and I loaded it up with the only things that mattered and left with $500, another gift from mom and dad. I remember driving through the Sierra Nevadas and into north central Nevada with the sun setting, lighting a fire in the big sky. I slept in a gas station in Tonopah, never paid a speeding ticket for going 80 something, and I arrived in Phoenix late afternoon the next day. This was May 1983. I had neither planned on getting into Arizona State University, nor ever bothered to check on the requirements for its school of music. My parents were always worried about me, but I have no idea why. I just showed up the very next day on campus and started walking around.
The surprising thing, coming from Oregon, was that the entire greater Phoenix area was all literally built in the middle of a desert. The university was in Tempe, but the school of music was on the very edge of a roughly one square mile campus. This becomes relevant later. It was adjacent to Frank Lloyd Wright's Gammage Hall Auditorium, which was designed to resemble a woman's reproductive organs with the two complimentary meandering walkways up to the second balcony level said to be fellopian tubes. From a bird's eye view, it did resemble that. The school of music was 100 yards away in a perfectly shaped pink building that was a dead ringer for a gigantic birthday cake, only without candles on top. At the time, I never realized how bizarre it looked. Rehearsing in a perfectly round building took some getting used to.
The administration said I had to audition before a panel of piano professors and play pieces from each of the major eras, Baroque, Classical, Romantic, and Modern. I tried to polish up some Beethoven, Bach, Brahms, and Bartok over the next 24 hours, but the problem is that they were never polished to begin with. It must have been apparent during the audition that I was ill-prepared because instead of finishing the pieces, I stopped and volunteered that I had a pseudo-classical piece I had written, actually.
My hobby at age 18 and 19 had been designing my own manuscript paper and writing little classical movements in simple sonata form ala Franz Joseph Haydn, another bit I had in common from my friendship with Nick Drapela. Both Nick and I teamed up and decided to take the minority view - we liked Haydn's music better than Mozart. By this time, like Nick, I could also play Van Halen's Eruption note-for-note because Nick had shown me some of the transitional parts that stumped me, my black Ibanez Artist had a fast neck before it was stolen, and I practiced being able to quickly detune the low E string down an octave and back up before the regeneration of the delay frothed over, but the topic never came up before the panel. I pulled out a little eight page Presto movement that races around in D and played it. I had it hand-written note-for-note, but the copy was all on pink manuscript. I hate pink, and I have no idea why I copied it on that.
The panel seemed to like it, and they let me in the piano and music theory and composition program after Professor of Piano Walter Cosand commented, "You like Haydn, don't you?!" A year later they gave me an award and scholarship for outstanding composer of the year. They would later regret all of these decisions after printing the programs announcing the premiere or my new piece, concerto for still wind, five blades of grass, and a #6.5 mouthpiece in intertia. More on that later.
Emulating the writing styles of great composers was rewarded in composition classes, but it was considered derivative drivel in actual composition among the professors. This was told to me by numerous professors, including Rayna Barroll and Donald Lepresti, which seemed somewhat puzzling because if I subtracted what I knew, the only thing left was atonal music, and that was ugly. "Exactly," they said. A fork in the road developed, did I have to write music with no key center? Eeeek! At first I would have rather set out on a death walk, but at the time I also liked George Winston, if you can believe it. Louder Eeeek!
After a year or two of resistance, atonal music won me over. I fell in love with the music of Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Berg, Webern, Ligetti, Elliot Carter, Bartok, and my favorite, Prokoviev. Despite writing pretty much through-composed atonal chamber pieces -- stacks of it -- I secretly resolved, however, to keep my musical feet firmly on the tonal ground, even if it meant walking in an infinite number of directions all at once. I suppose I have been doing the same ever since. Write something soulful, then something out of a horror movie, something early Americana, then something violent, something in C, and then something pounding with clusters and no key center. Learn the rules and then throw them out the window.
All of this is developed more in the next few posts. Take a listen to Andante, Feroce [mp3] to understand my atonal addiction.