Collitch

In September 1961, my folks sent me off to the University of Illinois, where I enrolled with a double major in music composition and music education. Despite being a reasonably confident fellow, I was still only eighteen years old. Suddenly living away from home for the first time was an overwhelming experience. To my relief, I did well as a student. At New Trier I had been an average student academically---in the top half, but not by much. For reasons I did not understand then, nor do I now, New Trier regarded all participation in music activities, even though done on school time, as extracurricular, and did not give grades in these subjects. If they had, I would have graduated from high school as an honor student.

During my first year at U of I we were blessed with the presence of one of the most unusual composers who has ever lived: Harry Partch. Every introductory article I've ever read about him uses the word ``iconoclastic'' somewhere in the first two sentences. Partch invented his own musical system based on the practice of just intonation, yielding scales of 43 pitches to the octave. It was necessary for Partch also to design and build musical instruments to play this music, and to train the musicians to play them.

Partch's theory appeared full-blown in his extraordinary 500-page book Genesis of a Music, of which I read about half.[7] Partch's musical philosophy remained essentially unchanged for the remainder of his life.

[7] Published in 1949 and 1974 by Da Capo Press, 0-306-71597-X. The official Web home page for all things related to Harry Partch is Corporeal Meadows.

Had I known about Partch when I arrived as an ignorant freshman music student, I would have striven to have some sort of association with him. I doubt that he took students or taught classes. He was more of an artist in residence for two or three years, but with a retinue of devoted students following him about.

While in Urbana he wrote and premiered two opera-like musicals. The strangest of these was Water! Water!, written in 1961, and performed in 1962, twice at school, and once in Chicago. It has probably not been performed since. I heard one of the Urbana performances, and the one in Chicago, staged in the Studebaker Theater on Michigan Avenue, a few doors down the street from Orchestra Hall.

The next year Harry Partch moved on, along with his instruments, and a number of his disciples. One of them, Danlee Mitchell, remained Partch's right-hand man until Partch died in 1974, and is still the curator of the instruments and tender of the Partch flame.

Regrettably, I arrived a bit late to become involved in that activity, and it was gone before I was fully aware of its importance. My first experience with music at a university level was to be considerably more mundane and academic.

Gordon Binkerd became my first formal teacher of composition. Binkerd was head of the composition department, a good-natured academician and a reasonably good composer who received his PhD from Harvard. For weeks our lessons consisted of sight-reading on four-hand piano Bach's The Art of Fugue, written in open score on four staves, and in cleffs I had never tried to read. Because I was not a good sight-reader at the piano, it was trailsome work. We also went through the standard harmony text by Walter Piston. Binkerd had studied with Piston at Harvard, where as a doctoral student he had to write a fugue a week. His skill with counterpoint showed in his own music.

In October, Dr. Binkerd let me write some music: a woodwind quintet, and a piece for string quartet and trombone quartet, both notably more accomplished than anything I'd written before.

The quintet, called Introduction and March, was short, possibly the most conservative piece I ever wrote, and simple. It was performed twice.

Eröterungen
January 7, 1962

The choice of instrumentation for the octet was copped from Stravinsky's short work ``In Memoriam Dylan Thomas,'' except Stravinsky's included a tenor voice to sing the Thomas poem ``Do not go gentle into that good night.'' Mine was titled Eröterungen, German for ``discussions,'' a score of about sixty pages. It was never even copied out for the sake of getting a reading, but I'm confident it was my best work to date.

The second semester, for reasons I no longer remember, I quit Binkerd and studied with Robert Kelly, a sweet man and a decent viola player, but in my opinion a third rate composer and a terrible teacher. I didn't enjoy my composition lessons with him, and completed nothing at all the whole semester. But my direction was changing at the time as I began to become engrossed in new music.

In earlier times, persons who entered the university as composition students were assumed to know traditional music theory fairly well, since they were writing music. As noted earlier, I never took Dr. Reisberg's theory course at New Trier, and had never studied harmony either formally or on my own. But composers were no longer writing music rooted in traditional practice.

So I studied the Piston book the first semester, and took an advanced class in music theory the second, with Robert Kelly as instructor. I was able to get ``proficiencies'' for the third and fourth semesters, meaning all I had to do was take and pass an exam, and got credit for taking the classes. This was a big mistake. There were still some substantial holes in my understanding of traditional harmony, to a degree that when I took eighteenth century counterpoint, I had difficulty with it, and didn't enjoy either the course, or the instructor, with whom I did not get along.[8] It was the only music class I ever took that I had a problem with.

[8] Years after I left U of I he became dean of the music school.

In contrast, one subject I understood well without needing a class was orchestration, having written two orchestra pieces and three band pieces to date, and read cover to cover two textbooks on orchestration. To proficiency this course I had to arrange a Bartok piano piece for band. I had it completed in three days, and did a good job of it, so was given credit for the course.

In addition to composition, I studied trombone with Jerry Gross, the current graduate assistant. My sophomore year I progressed to studying trombone with Dr. Robert Gray, a fabulous teacher, fine trombone player, and wonderful man. I studied trombone almost every semester the whole six years I was in Urbana.

One miracle I pulled off was to cajole Claire Richards, the head of the piano faculty, into taking me on as a student despite my ragged and undisciplined skill. Ms. Richards was an advocate and performer of contemporary music, so was considered a good choice of teacher for a composition student, if you could get her. I had the nerve to audition with the solo piano part of Beethoven's Piano Concerto no. 1 in C Major, parts of which I could barely play at all, much less well. I could almost hear Ms. Richards groaning as I bashed through it. She reluctantly agreed to take me on, while warning me that we had much work ahead. But I practiced hard, and to this day credit Claire Richards with teaching me more about piano in three semesters than any other teacher I ever studied with.

The spring semester of 1963 I studied one semester of harpsichord, and then, to my disappointment, Ms. Richards demoted me to studying with a graduate student. She admittedly tried hard, but was not much of a musician, and I didn't like her, so she will remain nameless in this biography. That was the last formal piano study I ever did.

My freshman year I immersed myself in music completely. In addition to my music and academic classes, I played in the band, but reluctantly. By then I had come to think little of band music as a genre. Furthermore, in those days the university had a requirement that incoming male students take two years of ROTC, with the only possibility of getting out of it being participation in the band, a militaristic organization separate from the music school. Dodos were in charge. We had to play in parades on cold, rainy days, and participate in the marching band, which was fun only for the sake of being able to watch football games from the fifty-yard-line at field level. I also made some money on the side working as a parts copyist for the band. I always hated copying music, but it was a necessary part of becoming a composer, and I wanted to learn it well.

Many free concerts were available, played by faculty, students, and sometimes by visitors. I went to everything I could, no matter what it was. The first two years I kept track and tallied up a total of 35 concerts a semester, sometimes three or more in a single week.

One of my roommates the first year was Henry Howey, a talented bass trombone player and outstanding student, who had studied in high school with Ed Kleinhammer of the Chicago Symphony, and played bass trombone in the Chicago Youth Orchestra. Although we didn't see eye-to-eye on all matters, we eventually became good friends. It was Henry who influenced me to take up bass trombone. I bought my first instrument from him, a Reynolds with a distinctive dark, reddish-orange color. Before long I stopped playing tenor trombone completely, though they forced me to play it in the university concert band the second year.