Steuard and Music

I have enjoyed music, primarily classical music (in the broad sense), for a very, very long time. More specifically, I love both the Romantic and Baroque periods, as well as a fair bit of twentieth century orchestral music. My tastes aren't all that unique: my favorite symphony is Dvorak's 9th ("From the New World"), followed closely by a dead heat between Beethoven's 5th and 6th. I enjoy a good bit of Copland, and have been a fan of Pictures at an Exhibition by Moussorgsky ever since I first heard it played (at a concert by a pianist friend of the family who I believe played it at Carnege Hall not much later). I like quite a bit by Vaughn Williams, as well. On a more Baroque note, I like Bach's Brandenburg Concerti, and Pachelbel's canon holds a warm place in my heart, despite being almost a cliche these days. Kim and I have had a subscription to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for a few years, which is just a fantastic treat.

I do like some more recent music as well, don't get me wrong. There are a broad scattering of popular songs that I do enjoy (including, somewhat embarassingly, the Titanic soundtrack). I'm fond of Simon and Garfunkel and They Might Be Giants, though I don't have many of their albums, and my wife and other friends recently taught me to enjoy the Beatles. I listen to enya as well (for some reason, I often ended up listening to watermark while taking take-home tests). I am also fond of a fair number of musicals, including Les Miserables and Into the Woods. These days, most of my music listening is via iTunes, where I've puzzled out solutions to a few vexing issues involving half-star ratings in Smart Playlists and Party Shuffle.

Of course, I don't just listen to music. My singing now generally just embarasses my friends, but I have been in several choral ensembles in the past. Somewhere around 4th grade, I sang in my church's (adult) choir, including a solo at one music-themed service. I went on from there to join Purei Cantores, a Lincoln boys' choir directed by Carolee Curtright. I sang with that group for five years until puberty finally brought that to an end. In college, I sang for three semesters in the Claremont Colleges Choir. That was a lot of fun: my first semester, we sang Carmina Burana, which I have grown to really enjoy. Later on, we also sang Mozart's Requiem and Beethoven's 9th symphony, with quite a few smaller works tossed in as well. My fondness for Vaughan Williams stems largely from the songs of his that I sang in various groups.

I also play the trumpet, although it has been so long that I probably couldn't even hit a high G anymore. (It doesn't help that I wasn't precisely superb when I was playing regularly and taking lessons.) I started playing in fifth grade, where I was taught by Michael Veak. I played in my junior high orchestra in eigth and ninth grades and in the orchestra at my high school in eleventh and twelveth. While I was occasinally first chair in those ensembles, that was as much by default as anything else: it usually happened when the better players couldn't be in the group that semester. During high school I took lessons from Tom Kelley, at which point I finally started to improve a little. He hooked me up with a brass quintet composed largely of his students; I played with them for a year or so before I left for college.

Finally, no discussion of me and music would be complete without mentioning my fondness for writing parodies. Harvey Mudd has a traditional surprise for freshmen that (in many dorms, at least) involves some relyriced Beatles songs; I feel reasonably safe mentioning it here, as this site isn't actually on a Mudd server anymore, but I'll avoid giving too many details. At any rate, when I was first exposed to this tradition, I decided that while Beatles songs were nice, a bit more variety was in order. My sophomore year, I wrote new words to If I Only Had a Brain from The Wizard of Oz, and found a group of people to sing and record it with me for later playback. That only whetted my appetite, however, and led me to create my masterwork: a complete rewriting of One Day More, the finale of the first act of Les Miserables, which includes virutally every character and every musical theme in the show. I found a large group of people who wanted to be a part of that recording, and we actually tried to record it both my junior and senior years, always with mixed success. However, the result was greatly enjoyed and appreciated by members of its target audience, so it was worth it.

Along the same lines, I should mention the song parody that I wrote (and recorded) for the Tolkien Newsgroups parody E-text project. One of my contributions involved the return of Maglor son of Feanor in a chapter entitled "The Pugilist" (which was inserted right after "The Black Gate is Closed"). The chapter title inspired me to include a parody of Simon and Garfunkel's "The Boxer", and for good measure I decided to record myself singing it (both melody and harmony).