1. I failed my senior recital jury.
2. The composition chair (who also happened to be my teacher, and who I believe was behind my failing the jury) was giving the undergraduate comp majors a pep talk, saying that none of us was ready to go to a graduate program as prominent as, among others, Iowa. I saw him a few years later. He asked what I was doing. “I was recently admitted to the doctoral program at Iowa.”
3. My parents have a handwritten note from Thomas J. Watson, Jr., congratulating them on my birth.
4. I love dogs, but have never owned one.
5. I don’t like exercising, but I like having exercised. Which makes exercise similar to composing.
6. I am extremely proud of my wife and son, which I don’t tell either of them often enough.
7. The professor in a Tonal Forms class I was taking had just published a textbook which was based on a novel and telling theory of form in tonal music. In short, the theory accounted for almost everything in a tonal piece in terms of its function. A fellow student pointed out a particular type of passage that the theory had not accounted for I suggested a fix. The professor: “Why don’t you write your own book?” Me: “I’m not that interested in it.”
8. I went to my first baseball game at the Polo Grounds in New York.
9. If memory serves, one of the pieces that created an interest in composition in me was Lukas Foss’ For 23 Winds. I met Foss a few years later, but didn’t tell him this because I didn’t want him to feel any guilt. He died earlier this week.
10. The best sporting events I ever attended were some international track and field meets in Durham, North Carolina, in the mid-1970s.
11. Sometime during the 1964 Senate campaign my parents took us (there were five children in our family) to a park (I think) in Kingston, New York, to hear Robert F. Kennedy speak. We kids took turns sitting on my father’s shoulders so we could get a glimpse of the recently slain President’s brother. During one of my turns, Kennedy happened to point rather forcefully in my direction and I nearly fell off my father’s shoulders.
12. Fiction is probably my favorite art form, due in part, I’m sure, from outsider’s awe.
13. I was once a (successful, with my son’s help) lifeline on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.
14. I almost never remember my dreams. I did while I was in therapy, but that ended when the therapy ended.
15. The vast majority of my friends and musical colleagues are considerably younger than me.
16. I was reading Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance shortly after its publication. My Dad asked me what it was about. “Everything.” My Dad, who did TV repair as a hobby, said “I bet it’s not about TV repair.” I read to him the paragraph I had been reading and, of course, it happened to mention TV repair.
17. I taught music at the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics in the 1980s.
18. I really enjoyed a job in the mailroom at IBM during an undergraduate summer. I can still hold an envelope and tell its weight.
19. The last rock concert I went to was Chicago in Chapel Hill in 1970. Some may wish to dispute that it was in fact a “rock” concert, given the band. Whatever. There was an interminable guitar solo that the crowd loved. If that doesn’t make it a rock concert, I don’t know what would.
20. I once rode an elevator with John Houseman.
21. The best compliment I’ve ever received on my music came from Eric Richards, whose music is the most original I’ve ever encountered. After hearing a dress rehearsal of a piece that was on the same program as some of his music, he asked “What were you on when you wrote that, and do you have any of it with you?”
22. Another composer, whose music I also admire, said, of the same piece, “It is of no interest.”
23. My mother has strength at which I can only wonder. And grace. And an evil sense of humor.
24. “Penultimate” is my second favorite word.
25. Let be be finale of seem.
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