mmmdcccxli

Becoming The Musician That I Am Not Helped Get Me Here

The misadventures of my youth
included tons of melodic ad
venture: brass mouthpieces
freezing my lips off, fingering
chopped and screwed Scott
Joplin chords in record-break
ing slow motion, faring Ol’ Joe
Clark well in chamber chorale
on many an evening or afternoon,
sometimes with disappointingly tiny
audiences and other times with the
arrhythmically tachycardic panic attack
anxiety and sweat that comes when you’re
on a tiny stage with four or five other tiny
humans amid throngs of mostly drunken
festival attendees with nothing for ammo
or armor but your vocal cords.  I took piano
lessons that were paid for in hard-earned
fashion and almost never practiced for any
of these weekly outings (these lessons took
place mostly at the mid-sized town of Fort
Smith, Arkansas until I graduated from high
school in an even tinier enclave in a sprawling
bit of Ozark rural-suburbia that existed a couple
dozen miles away from Fort Smith, and then for
three more years at a gem of a liberal arts college
down the highway a bit from Little Rock, where
I also took a couple of years of voice lessons!).
As I let this sink in to my own little head, allow
me if you will to pose as an educated guess that
during all of this time the average amount of weekly

practice these fingers and vocal cords had between each 

piano or voice lesson: cumulatively around fifteen
minutes.  Plus, I sang for and with puppets that I some
times also puppetteered, performed in many church
musicals, tooted a trumpet and tinkled the ivories a
bit for a jazz band, played xylophone for an award-
winning half-time performance at no less than two
dozen high school football games for a percussive
interlude that was a version of (for real!) John Denver’s
Thank God, I’m a Country Boy which took place be
tween our marching band’s performance of the theme
from Rocky and our grand finale, a version of On
Broadway, during which I had an improvised
fluid high-pitched swift-paced (ta-ta-ka, ta-ta-ka)
brass solo.  I was even the senior high school band
president.  It was my junior year.  Somehow, musically,
I’d go on.  Three years of choir, including annual tours 

and candle-lit Christmas  performances.  The tours hit

most of the “larger communities” of Arkansas (and some 

that were even a wee bit beyond the border).  I played 

Reveille while marching for a couple of miles during 

my small hometown’s Veteran’s Day parade.  I played 

the organ during some church services, during which

I also had numerous piano solos in which I would be

so nervous that the entire grand piano would be shaking, 

I had vocal solos, duets and was a member of the youth

and adult choir, all performances that would often transpire

while the plates were being passed around at the Baptist 

church in which I practically grew up.  I sang a duet of Bette 

Midler’s The Rose with lovely, strong-willed redhead named

Kim at a Valentine’s Day Banquet when I was thirteen or 

fourteen.  On top of all of this, on several occasions, I’d 

be hired to direct the same church’s music and adult 

choir some Sunday mornings; this after I had left to 

attend college some sixty miles away.  I sang at more

weddings and funerals than I can count, again, mostly
all as a teen (this I sometimes think is the primary
reason I began to slowly exit the musical performance
scene that had always played such a large part of my
young life).  I played Nathan Detroit in a pretty swell
community theatre production of Guys & Dolls the
summer I turned twenty-one, and a few years later,
in the early 1990s, I portrayed Elvis (more hip-
shaking than singing, this gig) in front of hundreds
of people in Bowling Green, Ohio during a summer
theatrical production in a play I loved dearly.
I wrote my master’s thesis on renowned postmodern

opera director Peter Sellers’ productions of the trio of

Mozart and da Ponte operatic collaborations (Le nozze

di Figaro, Cosi fan tutte and Don Giovanni).  And I 

was piano accompanist for a 2nd grade version

of The Nutcracker and (clearly the most
amazing—and most amazingly impossible—
accomplishment, the one of which I am most

proud, if not stunned to have successfully

performed) was two of the four hands as

piano accompaniment to many of Brahms’
Liebeslieder Waltzes, night after night and day
after day for the Hendrix College Choir’s spring
tour during my junior year in attendance there.
So you first might imagine, as I now do, how I
did all of this, especially the piano performances,
without much practice at all, or certainly not enough.
I’ve really no idea.  But what I do know, as I listen
giddily to my “Discover Weekly” playlist on
Spotify this week (and do they ever have my
algorithm, my list most always being a motley
assortment of the most bizarre but generally
upbeat ditties to which I could find myself 

happily dancing, yet most would otherwise 

have some difficulty finding a place in any 

of even the most newfangled genres;

I’d call it a bunch of happy synthetic
and organic noise combinations that
exist on the most far-out fringes in whatever 

might be called pop on any given week),

is this: that whatever my commitment,
whatever my patience or my discipline
in what has NOT been the study of music, of
my education of it, despite the lack of taking it
serious enough to practice on my own before so
many musical performances that I have invariably
found myself in, music has been an integral part of
my life, and for as far back as I remember.
But I’m not a musician.  Maybe a bit of an
afficianado. However...I am always more than
happy to spend whatever time it takes
to put together a few lines like these
to tell and/or retell such seemingly
inconsequential stories, or build
collages, pastiches such as this
one, to toss out into the ether, often

wondering if they ever manage to make

it to your eyes, to entertain or distract

in any way that one might consider at

least worthwhile of doing so. This is what I DO:

on this task, I spend my time practicing, and with 

discipline and commitment, as my friends
here on the bookshelves around me
can at least attest.  This is a thing
about which I have made quite
a point to set aside the time for
a long-term, ongoing education
and practice.  Which means I can
spend hours on it pretty much
every single day, often humming
a few bars of some tune or another
as I go at it.  Relatively speaking,
for me, it is this act that seems
to be my one indefatigable passion.