klickitat band camp

CDs were only recently being sold commercially in stores. I had been kicked out of popular culture be necessity because the composition department was pretty snooty about anything but forging a new modern way, which pretty much ruled out everything in my head and on the radio. As a junior, I became immersed in atonal music. In studying the music of, for example, Schoenberg, and my heros, Prokoviev and Stravinsky, I learned that almost anything went, er, goes, so to speak. Music, as I was taught, was an art form, and the only thing worse than failing to write at all if you had any sort of talent was writing in the style of someone already famous.

This literally sucked for me because emulating others was my forte. I struggled to find my own voice, and I eventually found it - in the music of Merry Melodies. I was impressed with the neo-classical aspects of Prokofiev and the power of Elliott Carter and Edgar Varese, so I embarked to create pieces that, for lack of a better description, found their origins in cartoon music, but clearly had awesome power behind them in the right places. I enjoyed atonal sonorities, but not simply for the sake of them being atonal. I had to "like" the dissonances at the time and in context, and it took me much longer to grow fond of Schoenberg and other 12-tone composers who seemed much more random than, say, Stravinsky.

Another defining issue for me in 1986 (other than closely aligning myself with cartoon music) was the obvious realization that many of the piano performance majors in my class and ahead of me, as well as the piano professors, were virtuousos like I never would or could be. I could name-drop with pianists from well-known orchestras and the likes of winners of the Van Cliburn and Tchaikovsky piano competitions, whom I knew, took lessons from, and tried to write music for (or at least pieces which would impress them). But the point is that these were true geniuses in the real sense of the word like I never could be.

They had photographic memories, huge hands, perfect pitch, and before flying off to play Rachmoninoff's Piano Concerto No. 2 or Prokofiev's Piano Concerto No. 3 with the New York Philharmonic, they would take 30 minutes and whoop me at Pac Man, something like 80,000 to 450,000, with a whole slew of fruit lined up at the bottom of the screen. I had no chance. There were a half-dozen or so pianists like this I hung around with, each geniuses in their own right, and it took some hard swallowing to appreciate that no matter how hard I practiced, I could never be as refined. No way.

But this did make me work harder than I ever thought was possible at being my best, both in composing and in practicing the piano, and none of these piano geniuses wrote a lick of music, where I wrote every day and couldn't help it. During college, I tried to work on average of 6 to 11 hours per day either rehearsing or writing, and I did very little partying on purpose, despite later learning from an episode of The Simpsons that I was at the party capital of the US! I was rehearsing and writing in the same halls as world class musicians, and anything less than trying my best would have been simply foolish. In that vein, I wrote all of the music for my senior recital in six months, and I learned several Chopin Etudes and pieces by Liszt. I had little business seriously trying to play much of what I did, but it taught me a valuable lesson -- that hard work will pay off.

By the end of 1986, I was beginning to compile a stack of original compositions that would take me through my senior recital in December 1987. Here is how I would describe them: Bix Beiderbecke gets the crap beat out of him by Sergio Prokofiev. If none of that rings a bell, consider that Bix Beiderbecke's music was used for the earliest Merry Melodies Looney Tunes Cartoons by Warner Brothers. Prokofiev wrote Peter and the Wolf, but the music I'm talking about is either Prokofiev's Piano Sonata No. 6, or Piano Concerto No. 3. After the whooping, Arnold Schoenberg struts by and kicks dust up in the face of both of them, but Sergio is too tired to get up and do anything about it. Bix is out like a light.