Posts Tagged ‘high school’

School Days

Saturday, May 22nd, 2021

They are tearing down my high school–Upper Arlington High School–over the summer, so I went back last month, and I took Noah, one day shy of turning 11, with me, to a walk-through day sponsored by the alumni association. It was the first time I had been back to most of the facility since I graduated, although I had been to the music area and the auditorium a couple times, mostly associated with the 2008 premiere of the piece I wrote for the band to commemorate the career of my high school band director, John Blevins.

I was surprised how much was the same. The building had not undergone any major renovations since before my time there, and even some of the fixtures were memorable. The light was the same—too little. The halls were surprisingly at once bigger or smaller than I remembered, and some doors seemed to be labelled with their original markings from the 1950s. It was a good day to be there, as the building was still very much in use, the final packing up for the summer still to come. In fact, there were signs asking us to stay out of classrooms. When I came to the band room, though, I couldn’t help myself, and Noah was shocked when I stepped over the caution tape to walk through the rehearsal space one last time, peeking at the locker that I had shared with Jay Moore during our junior and senior years, and snapping a couple of photos. Crossing lines put in place by authority is not something my son is accustomed to seeing me do, but I assured him that it would be alright, even while also telling him not to get any ideas.

Overall, I had a good four years in high school, from 1990 to 1994. I excelled academically, found my place in several groups of my classmates (band, mostly, but also the honors students, the gifted program, briefly the drama club, and too late the quiz team), and discovered the passion that would lead to my career. I wasn’t bullied, and I don’t think I was a bully, but neither was I a standout in the social world of my high school. My family lived a comfortable life, but I was surrounded by people whose parents were wealthier than us: lots of my friends were given a car when they turned sixteen, but I was given a set of keys to the family car.

What I am amazed by, these years later, is the quality of my teachers, especially after spending more than twenty years trying to be a teacher myself. I wrote once of the importance of every teenager having a role model who isn’t their parents—an uncle, spiritual guide, or teacher—and Upper Arlington High School had an embarrassment of riches among its faculty. If I hadn’t found that person in Mr. Blevins, there were easily three or four other teachers each year who could have been that person, and frequently were for my classmates. Even students who didn’t seem to fit could—and did—find these people. The huge number of clubs and sports coached by teachers meant that there were plenty of chances to interact with them in less-formal ways than in the classroom.

Upper Arlington High School was—and is—a well-funded school, attended by students who had all the advantages that wealth brings, and I’ve truthfully struggled my entire life to reconcile that experience with what I have seen and heard elsewhere, as a teacher, as a college professor, and as I’ve listened to the experiences of others in high school. In a negative sense, I have come to see what I often felt as entitlement, and white privilege, and I am frustrated that we can’t find a way to give what I had—and took for granted—to all kids.

Some things I would have done differently. Coming into high school, I had a pretty good network of friends, and leaving it, I had at least one close friend, but I don’t think I engaged in building relationships as much as I could have, and I didn’t manage to maintain those relationships in any kind of real way after graduation. On graduation day, I went home with my parents, and didn’t have any plans with the people I had just spent four years with. My father told me to go seemy friends, but I didn’t have anywhere to go: all my friendships but one were essentially situational, and when high school ended, they basically did, too. This was in part what I wanted—I was very ready to go on to the next thing and start living my life, and I viewed going away to college and leaving everything I knew mostly behind as a big part of that. It wasn’t until I got onto social media (nearly 15 years later) that I found out what happened to most people. Mistakenly, I had thought that the only important part of high school was high school.

I have also come to realize that for many of my classmates and peers at high schools of all types, the high school experience was not a good one. For a place that should be dedicated to learning and knowledge, too often there is very little of either. There are those who placed their trust one or another teacher, only to have that trust betrayed in often horrifying ways. There are people who were bullied, or ostracized, and they carry the damage with them into their adult lives—adulthood is high school with money, as the saying goes. There were people who simply had to wait and endure that four years in order to be able to go and pursue their visions, goals, and dreams in a way that didn’t fit in with a bell schedule, semesters, homework, and hall passes, and resented it. There were people who injured themselves in lifelong ways, either on the athletic field or otherwise, trying to come up to what was expected of them. As Hesse suggests, education is a way of placing us beneath the wheel; the Bildungsroman is almost always written while wearing rose-colored glasses.

As my children approach this world—Noah is headed into the minefield of middle school in the fall—I try to see what I want for them. The high school they will attend is most certainly not Upper Arlington in 1994, and I would like to see them aim higher than most of that school’s students who I seem to meet. I realize now that I am a very different person because of the people I was around in high school—the artists, musicians, and honors students. It was nothing in the water—it was constantly being around people whose parents shared the same goals as me. I want my children to be able to assume that they can use their minds to earn a living, to be able to provide a good life for their children, to not be afraid of books or art or people who are different (although there was plenty of that at Upper Arlington, too). I want them to know success, and to know a world where they believe success is possible, and where people are willing to at least give them a chance to succeed.

Twenty-seven years out of high school, I am still thinking about high school. As the physical evidence of the school is being torn down and replaced with something new, what happened to me in those four years—good, bad, indifferent—carries on, more than a look through old yearbooks (I am shocked at how many strangers stare back at me from those pages), or posts on social media, or the reunions that I’ve never been to.

I never wanted to be a nostalgic person, and I detest the kind of nostalgia that sees the past as better. I refuse to engage in golden age thinking (or gold-and-black age thinking, in this case). But the Greek roots of nostalgia refer to pain—pain for one’s home. There is a part of me that does ache for that time—to put on the band uniform, or learn fresh some way that the world works, or for once feel like I am meeting the world’s expectations. I shouldn’t, because that was all an illusion, and it was all designed for someone else. I wouldn’t go back—most days—but walking through that doomed building reminded me of what a time it was, and how it continues to make me who I am today.

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Miller’s Habits: A Reflection

Thursday, August 22nd, 2019
Photo of a list on slightly rumpled white paper, stapled to a bulletin board.

My copy of Ms. Miller’s Habits of Mind, standing watch on my office bulletin board.

 

In the fall 1991, my tenth-grade year, I took an English composition class with Ms. Betsy Miller. Her class was the first class I ever took that only dealt with writing, and she ran it as a writer’s workshop: we kept journals, read, wrote papers, discussed them, edited each other’s work. She was a passionate and dedicated teacher who put in countless hours outside the school day: she joked once that as she lugged a carton full of our work out to the parking lot, Mr. Van Fossen, our geometry teacher, would walk by empty-handed and jingle his keys at her.

Ms. Miller was in her mid-30s when I knew her, and was one of those “cool” teachers: stylishly-dressed, with a house in Columbus’ Victorian Village, and progressive in her outlook—just try to call her Miss Miller or Mrs. Miller!  Her approach was frank, direct, and honest. She was able to set us at ease with her and with each other, which was crucial, because we would be sharing our writing with our classmates as we edited each other’s work, and discussed it in class. I hope that students come to college having had teachers like her and find more like her once they are there.

One day, as a journal prompt, Ms. Miller handed out a list of Habits of Mind. I love lists, and taped my copy into my journal, and wrote about it, not just in class that day, but off and on throughout the semester. At the end of the term, when composition turned into British Literature, which I took from a different teacher, I carefully removed my copy of Habits of Mind from my journal and put it in the back page of my planner, and from there to my bedroom wall. When I went to college, I left it at my parents’ house, but I kept thinking about it. It had made its mark on me.

The years passed. At some point after the dawn of social media, I reconnected with Ms. Miller—now married to one of her colleagues (although she kept her maiden name), and retired from teaching. I mentioned Habits of Mind, and how I would like to share it with my students, thinking she could just email me the file. Instead, a few days later, an envelope arrived with a hard copy, printed in early-90s Macintosh type. I was immediately transported back to her classroom in the south wing of my high school. It is stapled to my bulletin board in my office as I type these words.

I still think Habits of Mind is a pretty good list of the things a college-educated person should do. I often tell my students that their goal should be to get an education, not just a degree, and to me, an education means this set of behaviors: thoughtfulness, curiosity, self-discipline are the virtues that are behind this list, but the list itself is a set of tools that a person will need to navigate whatever future might be ahead. After a certain number of years, the facts we learn and teach in a course will be out of date: practices change, skills become obsolete, technology moves forward, and older research is supplanted by new. But these two dozen habits are timeless, and making them habits makes us permanently interesting and forever prepared to make our contribution.

Ms. Miller certainly made hers.

 

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A View of Twenty Views, part 4

Thursday, February 9th, 2017

In February, I will be travelling to Atlanta, where I will give the premiere performance of the complete Twenty Views of the Trombone at Eyedrum Art and Music Gallery, at the invitation of Olivia Kieffer.  This is the third in a series of posts about that piece and how it has come to be what it is.

Read the first post, on the history of this piece’s composition so far, here.

Read the second post, specific comments on the first seven movements, here.

Read the third post, specific comments on the eighth through the fourteenth movements, here.

I performed Twenty Views of the Trombone in October 2013 on a concert of the Cleveland Composers Guild.  At that time, it was still a work in progress, with only eight or nine pieces complete, but you can listen to that performance here.

The premiere performance will be Friday, February 17 at 8pm at Eyedrum.  Admission is $7 at the door.

I will be tweeting using the handle @MattSComposer before, during, and after this process.  Join the conversation with #twentyviews–the final post in this series will be a Q&A, so send me your questions about the piece, or composing, or life in general, and I’ll do my best to answer them.

Twenty short pieces is a lot to keep track of, even for the person who is writing and performing them.  I’m not completely sure how to keep the audience on track–perhaps they should open their phones to this blog during the performance!

At any rate, here are my thoughts on the last six pieces, in the order in which I am currently planning to play them at the premiere.

15. What They Might Think It’s Like

Another of the group of pieces written in 2016 to bring Twenty Views of the Trombone to completion.  This is the only political piece in the group, and I have generally not been a political composer.  The revelations of warrantless wire-tapping and domestic surveillance by the United States government, however, are concerning and troubling to me, and this piece imagines snips of phone conversation that might be misconstrued or misunderstood as they are picked up by massively parallel copies of speech recognition software in a government computing center.

16. What It Might Have Been Like (II)

Another of the 2016 crop of pieces–a bumper crop, if there is one, since completing the piece for the upcoming premiere required writing as many pieces as I had already composed.  In 2007, after applying to full-time college teaching jobs across the United States and in Canada, I accepted a position as Assistant Professor of Music and Director of Bands at Oklahoma Panhandle State University.  It was as far off as it sounds, but my wife and I learned to love the people there, if not always the place itself, and we look back on it as a wonderful adventure in our lives.  It was also where we found our family, since both of our children were born there (although, not to us–adoption is a wonderful thing).  In 2012, we moved back to Ohio, again after an intense job search on my part.

In Oklahoma, the wind never stops, and in the Panhandle, it seems particularly strong all the time.  The first really windy night, Becky and I lay in bed in our apartment wondering if the roof of the building would be torn off, but we soon came to realize that it was nothing special.  We could have stayed in the Panhandle–our chief unhappiness was the distance from our families (a two-day drive).  “What It Might Have Been Like (II)” imagines a counterfactual in which we stayed there.

17.  What It Could Be Like (III)

This piece, also from 2016, wraps up the “life after death” group of pieces, which considered first oblivion, and then Heaven.  This final piece imagines Hell.  Gary Larson’s The Far Side gave two images of musical hell:  Charlie Parker trapped in a soundproof room with easy listening music, and a conductor being led by the Devil to his room, filled with banjo players.  I truthfully find it harder to imagine Hell than it is to imagine Heaven.  I can imagine unpleasantness and pain, but to imagine them going on for eternity is another thing.  All of our metaphors likely fail.  So, perhaps this: just as the music seems to get good, it is interrupted, and the interruption, becomes the final word.

18.  What It’s Like at the End

Another piece from 2016, in fact, the last piece to be composed.  In a way, this is a slower, more reluctant answer to the assignment that inspired “What It’s Like” in the first place–a one-minute composition that describes the experience of playing trombone.  Have I answered this question completely in Twenty Views of the Trombone?  I have left something crucial out, perhaps, and that is the resting.  Trombone players are great at counting rests, which is probably why we’re called upon to do it all the time.  As I’ve been preparing to play this entire piece, it is not lost on me that playing a forty-minute composition with no long rests is a very rare experience for a trombonist–I am pleasantly relieved that my chops seem to be up to the task.  Last night (February 5) I played through the complete piece for the first time, and it is a testament to the great teachers I have had over the years that I didn’t come out particularly fatigued at the end–not ready to do it all again, perhaps, but not completely exhausted, either.  I can thank Tony Chipurn and Joseph Duchi for their guidance in this area–I’ve been fortunate to have had two great teachers with different approaches.

19.  How I Remember What It Was Like

The other piece composed in the summer of 2013 for a first performance with the Cleveland Composers Guild in September of that year.  Over the last few years, I have been writing pieces that give into a sense of nostalgia that I have felt increasingly.  Both “How I Remember What It Was Like” and my 2015 orchestra composition …into the suggestive waters…  explore this aspect of my inner life–something I outwardly denied myself for a long time. Both pieces reflect on my childhood and teenaged years growing up in Columbus, Ohio, and both are centered on a motive derived from one of the Remington Warm-Up Studies for trombone.  “How I Remember What It Was Like” recalls my experiences in high school band, when playing the trombone slowly changed from something I did to something at the center of my college and career plans.  This piece also contains quotations from my high school fight song, “Stand Up and Cheer,” (borrowed from Ohio University) and “Simple Gifts,” a tune which kept appearing through high school, first in Copland’s Variations on a Shaker Melody (in both band and orchestra versions), then in John Zdechlik’s Chorale and Shaker Dance, then, in youth orchestra my senior year, in Copland’s full Appalachian Spring.

20.  What It’s Really Like

The last piece in the cycle is from 2009, and was first performed that year on a faculty recital at Oklahoma Panhandle State University, and then formally premiered at an Oklahoma Composers Association Salon Concert in Norman, Oklahoma.  Once I realized that there was going to be a Twenty Views of the Trombone, and that it would grow and develop over a period of years, adding pieces as they were needed, I decided that the best way to tie the entire group together would be with a closing piece that echoed the opening piece, “What It’s Like.”  So, every performance since 2009 has begun with “What It’s Like,” and ended with “What It’s Really Like,” and any partial performances should do the same.  In fact, all of “What It’s Like” is contained within “What It’s Really Like,” making the first movement a synecdoche of the last movement.  Both, in their ways, are synecdoches of the entire work, and of the experience of playing trombone, and perhaps, of the experience of listening to trombone music.  “What It’s Really Like,” then, amplifies “What It’s Like” by extending phrases, by repeating some ideas, and by inserting additional developmental material.  The piece ends where it began, and the composer ends where he began–a man who loves to play the trombone, and wants everyone to know What It’s Really Like.

 

This is the third of a short series of posts about Twenty Views of the Trombone.  The first post gave an overview of the history of the composition of the piece.  The second post describes the first seven movements in detail, the third describes the eighth through fourteenth pieces, and the last will answer questions about the piece, received from facebook and Twitter.

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On Cool

Saturday, May 30th, 2015

Have I really not posted since February?  Apparently so, and it’s been a busy couple of months.

I’ve just finished reading Cool: How the Brain’s Hidden Quest for Cool Drives Our Economy and Shapes Our World by Steven Quartz and Anette Asp.  Not the best book I’ve ever read–frankly, it’s a little bit scattered and tries to cover too much ground as it looks at “cool” from both the neurological/psychological and sociological/economic aspects.  It’s almost two books jammed into one cover.  Chapters 5 through 8, which deal primarily with the appearance of “cool” in the late-modern consumer culture are what intrigue me the most, though.  I’m fascinated by Quartz and Asp’s suggestion that the very notion of “cool” seems to have changed in the 1990s, and having just finished W. Joseph Campbell’s 1995: The Year the Future Began, I’m inclined to see this shift as partly the result of the mass use of the Internet as a commercial and social force.  According to Quartz and Asp, the shift from what they term “rebel cool” to “DotCool” is a shift from a reaction to a hierarchical society to a broader participation in a pluralistic society.

Whether we truly live in a pluralistic society, of course, is up for debate, but it is undeniable that even if, as Adorno claimed, mass culture is merely the illusion of choice, Americans have exponentially more choices at their fingertips today than twenty years ago.  I love Quartz and Asp’s way of showing how “rebel cool” sold itself out and became the commodity of mass consumer culture, the vehicle through which we are expected to encounter products.  The promise of mass individuality has always seemed phony to me–how can I be an individual by doing the same thing as everyone else?  Quartz and Asp also call out “alternative” music in a delightful way that echoes my feelings on it since I first heard the term.  I’ll be introducing the students in my Popular Music courses to many of the ideas Quartz and Asp touch on, primarily because so many of their examples are musical, and, of course, popular music has been one of the wellsprings of cool over the last sixty years.  (There is room here for more thought–Quartz and Asp suggest that cool has at least some of its roots in the rebellious artistic movements of the 20s–Schoenberg, Picasso, and the like, but I wonder what impact “oppositional subcultures” had on popular music before the “rebel cool” ethos embraced jazz and rock.)

I’ve never really thought of myself as “cool,” and this certainly stems from my experiences in elementary and middle school.  Quartz and Asp suggest that the American high school experience has morphed from the hierarchic structure explored in, perhaps, The Breakfast Club, to a more pluralistic approach in which cliques of students no longer aim at “status” or “popularity.”  I can’t speak to whether this is true–I confess to having a somewhat deficient “radar” for this sort of thing.  As far as I can tell, “cool” began very early–perhaps in around second grade, if not before.  I would say that my elementary and middle school environments were, for the most part, quite hierarchic and status driven, with all sorts of the symbols and signals that Quartz and Asp describe.  For the most part, I lacked these signals and symbols.  My family lived comfortably, but for whatever reason, I was content to let my parents choose my clothing well into high school, and I for the most part respected their rule that toys stayed at home.  These, in my experience, were the primary status symbols of my growing up in the 1980s.  My brother and I were dressed nicely, but never with the latest fashions, for the most part.  There were no alligators on our shirts, to borrow Quartz and Asp’s favorite image.  In my elementary school, for boys, the most important status symbols were Transformers toys, and while my brother and I had our fair share of these, they largely stayed at home.  Yes, the point of bringing Optimus Prime was so that you could play with him at recess, but I realize now that my peers and I were already dragged into the consumer culture in which it isn’t enough merely to own a thing, but it is also necessary to display it prominently.  I was not without friends, in elementary school, certainly far from it, but I remember struggling to keep at least one friend in competition with another boy who always seemed to have something interesting to bring to recess.

And this, I suppose, is “cool” at its most insidious–that it drives nine-year-olds to obsess over colored pieces of plastic and metal.

Middle school was extremely status-driven and hierarchic, with clothes finally displacing toys, I suppose, along with the divide between students who were adept at sailing the seas of hormones (Charlie Reed) and those who were (ahem) not.  I remember thinking for a long time that it seemed like some cruel game that someone had set up, with rules that were rigidly, firmly in place, until they were changed, but no rule book in sight, along with few referees (or at least not enough to prevent a fair amount of misery).

Years later, as a teacher, I would become familiar with the fact that school cohorts seem to alternate in terms of behavior, with one class being “fun” and the one following it being more “difficult.”  My personal theory is that once a class develops a personality, teachers react.  A good class has relaxed, looser discipline by the end of the year because they are less challenging to their teachers.  The next class comes in, and teachers begin with the looser discipline from the beginning of the year, but because they haven’t laid the groundwork of behavioral expectations, the new class takes advantage.  They become unruly, and the teacher tightens up by the end of the year, and then begins the next year in the “tight” disciplinary mode, and the two-year cycle begins again.  The effects of this are amplified as, year after year, the students move on to new teachers who have always taught the class preceding them.

I was the student who kept my nose to the grindstone and did my work.  I had friends, again, and a run-in or two with bullies, but that was always more verbal than anything else, because I was on the tall side of average.  Any bullies I encountered soon got bored with me, because I stayed calm and didn’t let them under my skin, although one guy made a good portion of my sixth-grade year miserable just by his relentless presence.  I realize now that he probably had very little waiting for him at home and really just needed friends much more than I did.  I was certainly not “cool,” and for most of middle school, I could have told you who the “cool” kids were.  On our class trip to Washington, DC in eighth-grade, we were placed into small groups for reflection and writing, and somehow my room of four “not-cool” guys was grouped with a room of four “cool” girls.  I still wonder if it was some kind of social experiment our teachers were having.  (For the record, I may not have been “cool,” but that was a great trip).

My high school, in the early 90s, seems to have been entering the “pluralistic” phase Quartz and Asp describe, at least from my perspective.  Perhaps it was simply big enough that status and hierarchy didn’t matter, although the point of outward status symbols is that they allow individuals to determine at a glance the relative status of a stranger, so if there were a status hierarchy in place, I should have felt it more.  There were times that I felt very “in” and others that I felt “out,” in those four years.  I worried tremendously about girls and I did my schoolwork, and yes, there were girls who I felt were “out of my league,” including one who agreed to a date and then blew me off.  There was some status sorting happening, but not as rigidly or as intensely as my wife describes in here high school experience around the same time.  Perhaps she simply worried about it more, having to move to a new school about halfway through high school and having attended many different schools growing up, where I made it through late-elementary, middle and high school with the same students, augmented by new groups every time we moved to a higher school.  Today, I am linked to many of my high school classmates through social media, and they are a fair variety–from our class officers, to the people I was in band with, to people I never really talked to in high school.  On the other hand, I haven’t kept in close touch with anyone, and the best I can hope for is that many of my classmates remember me as the guy who ran for class president twice and lost, but was overall a good guy.

Did I witness this shift from “rebel cool” to “DotCool?”  It seems to ring true.  It would have happened during my high school and college years, and even though I was fourteen in 1990 and twenty-four in 2000, it seemed like I wasn’t the only one changing.  1995 was an epic year–Campbell is right, and I’ve been teaching it that way to my students.  I also teach them that grunge was in many ways the last original form of rock and that everything since has been repetition, which has always seemed to place my own experience too close to the center of things, so it’s nice to receive some support for that view from Quartz and Asp.  My college experience (admittedly as a music major) had relatively little to do with any kind of opposition to conformity, and I watched the shift to pluralism in both my ideals and the larger society.  That isn’t to say it wasn’t without status, but this was somewhat dampened in the world of the music conservatory by the presence of so many people who were focused on the work at hand.  Perhaps in the larger University of Cincinnati, frat boys and sorority girls were much important, but though I saw their sweatshirts (status symbols again), I didn’t give it much thought (but even though I didn’t know one house from another, I’m sure it made a difference to those wrapped up in Greek life).

In graduate school, I felt “cool.”  I taught admiring undergraduates as a teaching assistant, with one class in particular enthralled by my real world experience as a music teacher and even a small clutch of “disciples.”  Not to mention a couple of friendships that have turned out to endure, and several artistic collaborations.  I felt much the same way in Oklahoma at my first teaching job–for a red state, the culture felt very communal, with a large measure of equality between students and professors.  Lakeland is different, but I’m teaching a different kind of student, since my classes are intended for non-majors.  On the whole, I’m not sure my current students feel that I’m “cool,” except in the “DotCool” sense where someone who does interesting and creative work is “cool.”

Some thoughts, anyway.

 

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A student’s question

Tuesday, August 26th, 2014

I’ve been teaching composition to a very talented young man, Cooper Wood for not quite two years now.  This week he discovered Varese, and emailed me with a question:  

I’ve been doing a lot of listening to 20th century composers recently because I want to liberate myself from composing invariably in a tonal idiom. I’ve been listening to Antheil, Cowell, Varesé, and Hovannes [sic]. I love the sound all of them have, but every time I try to compose non tonally I get stuck and fall back on tonalism. When and how did you sort of break free from tonalism and started relying on other parameters of music to compose?

Here’s my response:

Boy, this is a big question.

We’ve never really talked about how I got going in composition. My junior year of high school, I had a free period and didn’t want to take a study hall, so my guidance counselor suggested our school’s gifted and talented program, in which about twenty of us pursued our own interests and passions, with a teacher to facilitate things (and make sure we actually did something). The year before, I had taken a class in computer graphics and sound in which we learned Encore, an early notation program, so I had developed a taste for moving notes around. Based on that, I decided that my “thing” would be composition, and I now had a class period every day to devote to it. I didn’t really know where to start, and I didn’t have very much guidance, which in some ways was a blessing, because I had to figure things out on my own. Up until this point, I loved doing music, was excited about it, and even thought of myself as rather good at it, but I had never thought of making it a profession before, and I wasn’t even taking private trombone lessons. That year, I worked through a part-writing book, practiced a lot of trombone, listened to a ton of music (the public library let you check out four CDs every week, and I had my driver’s license by that point, so I could get there when I wanted to go; they had a great selection of classical music, including a good amount of the cool late-minimalist stuff that was coming out in the 80s and 90s).

There was one other composer in the class, Renee Goubeaux, who was later my first girlfriend, and is now a cellist in the Toledo Symphony Orchestra.  We sort of spurred each other on, sharing stuff with each other and talking about pieces we wanted to write.  I had done a lot of reading, and was starting to put sounds with what I had read.  I tried to write a few pieces–I was interested in writing band music, canons, modal things that incorporated serial transformations.  We performed a couple of pieces as part of the performances that the class would put on.

The next year, my senior year, I did more of the same, culminating with my senior thesis, a concerto for trombone and string orchestra.  I played in the Columbus Symphony Youth Orchestra that year, and auditioned for colleges as a trombone performance and music education major.  I thought that perhaps composition would have some place in what I was doing in college, but I didn’t feel like I had been doing it long enough to make it my main focus.  I did take some private lessons as an undergrad with Wes Flinn, who is now on faculty at the University of Minnesota-Morris, and with Joel Hoffmann, who is still at CCM.  I immensely enjoyed taking orchestration and studying counterpoint in my theory classes, but I still didn’t consider myself a composer.

Despite all the listening I had done, I still didn’t understand that a composer didn’t have to be someone who wrote pretty melodies–I thought there had to be a catchy tune, somehow.  It didn’t seem to occur to me that what I was hearing in, say, Philip Glass, wasn’t about tune at all–it just sounded good.  In those pre-Internet days, scores were hard to come by, and I wouldn’t have necessarily thought to go looking for them, either.  So I spent years thinking of myself as an arranger, or as someone with an interest in composition but not doing much composing.

I’ve also realized that I never really was a “tonal” composer, in that I never took the time to really absorb the language to tonal music and let that be my pure expression.  Perhaps this is my background as a trombonist instead of a pianist, or just listening to years of rock music (my other favorite music), and then being dumped into the world of wind ensemble literature in college (although we played Persichetti in high school, too).  I have a real ear for orchestration and a strong rhythmic understanding of things (we’ve discussed this), but I’m not a tonal harmonic composer in my heart of hearts.

I also am not a part of what used to be called the “avant-garde,” and what these days we refer to as “new complexity.”  I don’t compose tonally, but I don’t compose in such a way as to be deliberately ground-breaking or difficult all the time.  I want to compose music that expresses what I want to express while also being something people want to hear and perform.  Sometimes I’m successful in this, sometimes not.

So–as much as I’ve been exposing you to post-tonal methods, techniques, materials, and repertoire, if you are, in your heart-of-hearts, a “tonal” composer, you need to write that way.  Study the rest, because it may come in handy someday.  What I’ve been trying to get you away from isn’t “tonal” composition, but writing that is merely a copy of historical styles.  There are reasons to write like Chopin or Mozart, but it’s difficult to be taken seriously in 2014 if that’s all you do (in fact, I’ve found it useful to engage in style copies at several different points in my career).

That trombone concerto back in 1994 was an attempt to be tonal.  I didn’t follow the “rules” very well, and as satisfying as it was to write that piece, it wasn’t very successful from a musical standpoint.  The very next piece I wrote, a song cycle, worries much less about keys and more about rhythm and the flow of melody–it was my first vocal piece, setting some of my favorite poems from high school English class.

In some ways, the important thing is to keep writing, keep listening, keep reading.  If I push you on to certain things, it’s because I think it’s my job as your teacher to try to help you get into a college program, and that means we have a hard deadline about twenty-eight months from now.  Your personal style–tonal or not–will develop as long as you keep writing, keep listening, keep reading.

I hope this helps!

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