On Becoming a Composer

| Dec 3, 2013 |

I have never had a composition lesson in my life. I don’t say this with pride, but rather just as a matter of fact. When I was in college all I wanted to be was a trumpet player. I took all the classes I needed in order to graduate but my heart, mind, and body were always in the practice room or in a rehearsal or concert. My memories of my experiences as an aspiring and enthusiastic trumpet player are strong and vivid, while my memory of my time as a music student having anything to do with intellect or scholarship is distant and vague. But although my life at that time was narrow and perhaps limited, it was also wonderful – I was totally involved in doing what I loved. Every student should be so lucky.

As a trumpet player my sights were set on becoming an orchestral player. I had my heroes, and the most immediate were my main trumpet teachers, Irving Bush, later Tom Stevens, and also the other two members of the Los Angeles Philharmonic trumpet section, Robert Divall and Mario Guarneri. My distant and unreachable heroes were probably the standard heroes of most other young trumpet students of the day – Adolph Herseth of the Chicago Symphony and the soloist Maurice Andre.

But in addition to being involved in orchestral playing I also played in a brass quintet called the Fine Arts Brass Quintet. And it was for this group that I wrote my first piece of music. It was justifiably called Mini-Suite because, even though it had four movements, its total length was less than four minutes. It wasn’t much, but even though I didn’t realize it at the time it was a beginning. Mini-Suite was published by Western International Music, not because it was any sort of stellar work, but simply because the owner of the company, Bill Schmidt, had befriended me (and eventually became a mentor of mine). When the piece was published I had just begun working at my first permanent orchestral job, with the San Antonio Symphony, and I still remember the thrill I had when I received the publication in the mail and saw my name on a piece of published music.

That was around May 1970, and for almost the next twenty years playing always came first and composing was second. I began by writing for brass in smaller combinations, but later began writing for larger combinations of instruments – a brass octet (Music for Brass Octet), several pieces for wind ensemble (Textures, a Flute Concerto), and so forth.

Fast forward to Dec. 4, 1989. I was in Berlin to play several Christmas Oratorios and also a few solo concerts with organ. I stayed with some friends of the organist, and on my one free evening I went across the street to the Deutsche Oper to see if I could get a last minute ticket for a production of Prokofieff’s ballet Romeo and Juliet, one of my favorite pieces. As luck would have it, somebody approached me in front of the theater and offered a ticket at no cost, which I of course gratefully accepted. Although the production was far short of spectacular, that night was an epiphany for me – from that night forward I knew that I would eventually quit playing and become a “real” composer. To me that meant that I would be a composer of works in all or at least most genres, rather than being a composer of just music for brass. The greatness of Prokofieff touched me so much that I adopted the idea that even if I failed as a composer I could still say that I was in the same profession as Prokofieff. It took me another 10 1/2 years before I was able to retire from playing the trumpet in order to have more time to compose, but Dec. 4, 1989 was the evening that radically altered the direction of my life.