Composing Again

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During junior high school I learned a few of the easier Mozart and Haydn sonatas and some introductory pieces of Bach, Beethoven and Schumann. In among all these Germanic masterpieces, Dr. Kooiker interspersed “contemporary” pieces by Bartok, Tcherepnin, Sowerby and others, published by Frances Clarke. The graded anthology books are still available in updated editions. I found the pieces were odd but kind of interesting and I grew to like them. On a couple of occasions I showed them to friends as curiosities. I didn’t do that with Mozart and Haydn. I’m sure that this music was partly basis for a renewed interest in writing.

Kooiker had me attend a recital of a graduating piano major at Hope College (Dec '70) that included a piano sonata that he had written. I don't know who this person was nor do I remember anything about the piece, but it was enough to get me started on writing my own. I quickly (in ten days) whipped off a four-minute sonata with a first movement echoing Mozart K. 545 and the slow movement and rondo closer to the Haydn D major (Sonata #37) that I had learned that fall. That piece was never performed, and I discarded it years later, but the next thing I wrote, a set of three very short piano pieces in a 20th-century modernist vein, had a little more staying power. The third piece of the set was an intentionally goofy jig in two keys at once. I saw that piece as kind of guilty private pleasure, rather than as a masterpiece to share openly. Kooiker had to insist over my reluctance that I play it on his next studio recital, and I did so with flinching self-consciousness. My school classmates liked and laughed at this piece and would occasionally ask for me to play it again. This getting attention by playing the clown may have had a mixed effect on my ego, but it did demonstrate that there could be social benefits to being a performing musician.

Over I wrote three more short piano pieces, and an alto saxophone piece in the next few days. The last of them, “Three Moods” Dad didn’t like that much, thinking I must be joking around, although it wasn’t much different from what was in the Frances Clarke anthologies. I stopped writing for a couple of weeks, then picked it up again, with more ambitious ideas and at a more deliberate pace. A couple of the pieces were for concert band, and Mr. Morse had me conduct at least one of them, an “overture”, in rehearsal. A flutist remarking to her stand mate "I like it if we can play it". Mr. Morse, for his part, cautioned me about a lack of development in the piece. Several more efforts followed, both for piano and band. This whole initial, two-year-long composing spurt ended with a “Fanfare to Washington & Lee Swing” that Mr. Morse requested. It was supposed to be an attention-getting fanfare that set up the school’s fight song, but it was tried once, didn’t come off well, and discarded.

The pieces were very much juvenilia and I wouldn't present any of it today, but I do envy my twelve-year-old self for coming up with half-decent material so easily and reliably, and for finishing the jobs so quickly.*

At one point during a piano lesson a colleague of Kooiker’s (probably Joan Conway) poked her head briefly into his office for something. As they talked Kooiker mentioned that I was composing, and I interjected that I hadn’t written for awhile. “It must be spring fever,” she joked before retreating. By this, I inferred that spring must have a way of draining people’s energies.

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*My first-ever "late-nighter", i.e., staying up past midnight to work on something, was in ninth grade writing out parts for one of the band pieces. I never did that for school homework until college.

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