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In seventh grade I hadn't yet written any music to completion. At the same age Mozart had been an international superstar for years. But that year (1955) I started to write a piano sonata. A friend at school named Bob Moreen, who was then in eighth grade, had a reputation as a good pianist, so I approached him and asked him if he'd like to play my piece when I finished it. He seemed excited and said he'd love to. However, I soon abandoned the project, and it never came up again. Years later Bob went to University of Illinois as a piano major. We remained friends there, though we ran in different circles. His specialty was playing show music. Today he is a cabaret performer in the Chicago area.
Poem of the Wind
May 10, 1959
Several more failed projects followed. Most of them I remember only vaguely. The earliest work for which I still have the music is a short solo piano piece called Poem of the Wind. The manuscript bears the mysterious marking ``Prelude #1, Op. 10,'' but at barely two minutes this vaguely polytonal exhalation is the first piece of any significance that I finished. I have no idea what I was counting as the previous nine opuses. None of it exists today.
At New Trier I discovered that if I wrote a piece of music and got the parts copied, I could probably at least get a reading of it. In summer of 1959 I wrote a piece for small jazz ensemble called Bughouse Square, named for a well-known public gathering place in Chicago where beatniks would get up on soapboxes and orate or read poetry. It was intended as a modern dance, targeted for the annual school show, Lagniappe 1960, but was rejected. It was considered too hard, and although I tried to make it jazzy, it didn't quite succeed.
Early in 1960 I wrote another piano work, Fantasy on a Theme, with the right hand written in the key of C (no sharps or flats), and the left hand in the key of B (five sharps). This I performed myself at a senior music club concert.
Later that year I arranged Fantasy on a Theme for concert band, and went to a great deal of trouble to get the parts copied---at least a month of grueling hard work. Mr. Mages gave it a reading with the Honor Band, but it was too hard, too sparsely instrumented, and didn't work as a band piece. The session was disappointing, but at least I got to hear it once. Sort of. Some of the students had an insurmountable problem playing in five sharps. (Seven when transposed for B-flat instruments!)
Later I wrote a thunderous solo piano piece with the embarrassingly pretentious title The Arrival of Death! It was certainly the best piece I'd written to date. When I brought it in to be evaluated by Dr. Reisberg, he promptly lost the only copy. He was sooo embarrassed and apologetic. Maybe the title was prophetic of the composition's early demise.
String Quartet
1960
During spring vacation of 1960 I completed an entire orchestra piece called Heute, German for ``today,'' and subtitled ``A Dance,'' although it was more dirge-like than dance-like. An ambitious movement of a string quartet followed, which experimented with odd time signatures, like 5/12, on the theory that a ``twelfth note'' is one twelfth of a whole note, or third of a quarter note triplet.
In fall 1960, I completed two movements and started a third of Symphony for Band, inspired by music of Vincent Persichetti. This piece turned out much better than the Fantasy, and Mr. Mages was openly complimentary about it. We rehearsed and performed it with the summer band the summer after I graduated, with Mr. Mages conducting.
Hoedown
December 19, 1960
In December of my senior year I completed my most successful high school piece, a work for theater orchestra called Hoedown. Despite its syncopated themes in 5/4 and 7/4 meters, it was supposed to sound reminiscent of a barn dance. The rhythm of the 5/4 vamp at the beginning was copped straight from Dave Brubeck.
We performed Hoedown on the annual big student show Lagniappe 1961, with choreography, which I never got to see because I was busy playing in the orchestra pit. We recorded the whole show afterward, but the record has been lost.
Another student beat me out in the audition to conduct the Lagniappe orchestra, even though he had far less conducting experience (but was a fine musician), so I played trombone. But I got to stand up in the orchestra pit each night following my piece and take a bow as a bright white spotlight shone on me. People had to pay to get into that show. It ran four nights to a packed house. Unfortunately, Dad had a job he couldn't afford to turn down, so never got to see it. I was disappointed, but understood well by then the nature of the business my father was in. He never turned down any job if he was available. My mother missed this one, too, because of a health care emergency with my elderly great-uncle, who was living with us at the time.
That spring I wrote a piece for percussion ensemble called Refraction that Dr. Reisberg gave a read-through with a student group he conducted. I played the piano part. It wasn't good enough for them to do a performance, something I had hoped for.
I do have photographs of me conducting the band at our final outdoor concert in the Wilmette Bowl, where I received a student-voted award for being outstanding band member. During my junior and senior years I had served as the band's drum major at football games and parades. The primary benefit from that gig was not having to play my trombone while trying to march around in the freezing cold outdoors. I always felt like an idiot prancing around by myself out there in a uniform.
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The summer after I graduated from New Trier I received an unsolicited full scholarship to play in a summer music program at Northwestern. The band was conducted by Paul Paynter, director of the Northwestern band. The orchestra was led by Jacob Avshalomov, a man with a history of conducting youth orchestras and training groups, and a composer of some note. Each group played a concert at the end of the clinic. The orchestra played a fine reading of Mussorgsky's Night on Bald Mountain. These were the best ensembles I'd played in at the time.
Study in Violet
July 21, 1961
That July I wrote a virtuosic piece for solo flute and chamber orchestra called Study in Violet, inspired by the Poem for Flute and Orchestra by American composer Charles Griffes. My girl friend, a talented flutist, said she would perform it. She went on to become first flutist in the Northwestern University orchestra, where her father taught theology, and to be a professional musician and teacher. Our relationship ended shortly after I went to college, so my piece never got played or even read, even though I had a flute and piano reduction of it, and the accompaniment was not particularly difficult.
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