(This article originally appeared in Saxophone Today, March/April 2017.)
I’ve been teaching at the university level for a long time. I’m in my forties now, and tenure and promotion to full professor are years behind me. All those boxes have been ticked, the hoops have been jumped through, and I find myself contemplating “what’s next?” To find the way forward, it can be helpful to look back, to assess what worked, and what didn’t. Were there dreams and goals brushed aside as a matter of practicality? It might be possible to remove old obstacles, or perhaps some of those hurdles disappeared without notice while we were working on other things. When I reflect on my humble successes, they can all be distilled down to a single defining characteristic that instigated it all: curiosity.
Even when I was a child, I had a searing passion for understanding the world around me. One of my experiments gone awry involved testing the flame in the gas stove with a tissue, to see if it behaved like other forms of fire. So at five years old, I set the kitchen on fire (no one was harmed but the linoleum and my dad’s feet as he stomped out the flames). I built working fuses out of foil and I shorted out my model train transformer - again resulting in a small fire. I liked to take things apart, and sometimes they wouldn’t go back together, but at least I learned something along the way. My parents were very patient with me, and when they couldn’t answer my questions, they would take me to the library. My research slowly shifted away from disassembling telephones and creating small electrical fires when I discovered the saxophone. The mysteries that unveiled themselves on spinning black vinyl, and later on shiny aluminum discs became my new obsessions. I practiced like I was conducting experiments, trying to decode the secrets that my keyed brass megaphone held like a vessel with a tiny opening, only trickling out the answers as I slaved away in the practice room. It was curiosity that took me down the path to mastering multiphonics, eventually launching my career.
When I was a junior in high school, I finally made my all-district concert band, and then the Massachusetts All State band. That year, our conductor was the great John Paynter, the legendary director of bands at Northwestern University. One of the pieces on the program was Fred Fennell’s transcription of Wagner’s Elsa’s Procession to the Cathedral. This was the first time that I remember being utterly consumed by emotion while performing; tears streaming down my cheeks, I just tried to keep playing. The experience changed everything for me, because my curious nature left me totally preoccupied with the why: why did that experience overwhelm me? Was it something inherent in the music itself? Was it the quality of the conductor or the performers? Was it the fact that I was exhausted from rehearsing for two long days? As a young musician, I desperately wanted to have that experience again, and as many times as possible! It was the difference between craft and art. I knew that from that moment forward, I wanted to be an artist, and to surround myself with art.
That tearful performance was the first of many, and it was the beginning of my heart opening up to a new way of experiencing art, in a variety of media. I have spent time beyond measure contemplating the art that I love, and the specific elements that bring that rush of emotion. It can be as simple as the strain of a flatted-sixth, yearning to resolve downward, or as complex as a tone row that I can’t manage to sing back. The first time that I saw Water Lillies, I was swept up by the unexpected size of the work (I had no idea how huge it is). I have tried to learn from every experience, whether it was a Buddhist sand mandala or Bach played on a great organ in a huge cathedral. It’s not that I analyze in the moment, but that I use contemplation as a mental exercise to scrutinize after-the-fact, so that I might be able to reverse-engineer the event. My curious nature drives me to understand. Even in the kitchen, I like to use a recipe once, figure out what makes it tick, and then improvise my own version. This approach occasionally spoils a meal or two, but my favorite recipes are my own creative experiments, and they are always works in progress.
In our modern society, curiosity is becoming an endangered quality of character. It isn’t our fault. When I was a little kid, setting fires and getting electric shocks in the late 1970s, a computer was a novelty to the average human. The answers to our questions took effort to discover, often searching through large and heavy books with hundreds of pages. Today, most of us carry super-computers in our pockets, and we can find the answers to many questions by saying, “Hey, Siri!” When I consider how many phone numbers and addresses I used to have memorized, I can only shake my head at how lazy I have become. With the mega-brain of the internet at our voice command, we have little reason to memorize how many ounces are in a cup. I wonder how many young people today can even read a map, and why should they care? The GPS in their cell phone can get them anywhere that they need to go without knowing the name of a single street. If this is the age of the death of curiosity, we are all in trouble. Curiosity seems to be necessary for progress, and if our curiosity becomes limited to “how can I make more money,” we will be trading our prophets for profits, and losing our souls in the process. In recent generations of university students, I see a huge decline in natural curiosity, and even worse, a willingness to accept information without any need for fact checking or research. This has given rise to what I call the plagiarism of carelessness, not to mention “fake news.”
When I consider the path forward for the second half of my career, I find myself returning to the satisfaction that I have always found in taking things apart. I want to break my saxophone and find a way to make it play in a new way. I want new sounds that I haven’t even imagined yet. I want to find a compelling reason to add a new key to my horn, so that it will do something that I have never done before. I want to work with visual artists and research scientists, I want to be moved to tears by a piece of math, and to make friends with people that I might never have met without my raging hunger to experience more. I want to be more, so that I can feel more, and say more. I want more. This seems to be a time when people are thinking more about isolationism, but I want to go beyond boundaries, and to grow in ways that I haven’t even considered. I feel lucky to have chosen an instrument that has given me fascinating friends from around the world. We saxophonists tend to be a curious bunch, creative to the core, and for that, I am grateful. §
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