The Musical Autobiography of a Neo-Primitive Composer

 

Walking down memory lane can be a nightmare. It seems all roads lead to something unpleasant if followed long enough. Let it be known that all these events took place against a backdrop of mental and physical violence, the dissolution of our family, divorce followed by the proverbial wicked step-mother, mental illness, a troubled adolescence, confusion, inner-city ghetto living, desperation, depression, borderline poverty and overall anomie. 

​

Many of my earliest memories are associated with music, going to concerts, in the parks, the symphony and at the Conservatory. I think the first live concert I remember was of Carmina Burana at the Peabody Conservatory although all I really remember is a vague sensation of liking it and the burnished brown color of the woodwork in the hall. My father was an “audiophile”, had a good stereo system (which he called “the system”, it sat on the “rack” which was a heavy duty arrangement of metal shelves) a large collection of records which he played all the time. No one, not even my mother, was allowed to touch “the system”, or his record collection. My father  played music almost all the time.

​

My mother enjoyed playing piano. I recall her playing pieces by Bach, Bartok, Satie and a song called The Fox Went Out on A Chilly Night and we’d sing along. I loved listening to her play. She criticized herself harshly and seemed never able to advance, which, sadly, was symbolic of much of her life. My father would improvise on the piano which I always enjoyed as well. His improvisations were like wanderings, chords in the left hand, and chromatic passages in the right. This finally came to an end as he got older, slowly trailing off and definitively killed when the beat-up but great sounding Steinway upright was sold after his second marriage and we inherited an out of tune baby grand with a cracked sounding board which rendered it incapable of being tuned. This progression in pianos is symbolic of the overall curve of developments in the family.

​

In terms of practical music making I recall enjoying the Glee Club (singing), playing recorder, playing saxophone (for a short time, I recall liking the strange taste of the reed and playing the Schubert 8th symphony), taking trombone lessons for a short time and that which I enjoyed most, piano lessons, these all came to an end for one reason or another.

​

When I was 14 I began taking trombone lessons with personal conscious intent (rather than as part of a school program) at the Preparatory Department of the Peabody Conservatory of Music in Baltimore. My teacher Kenneth Kennedy taught me to read music as we went along. I had a basic idea already, I’d taken the aforementioned music lessons for a short time before, but nothing really had stayed with me, this time it did.

​

After a year or so, I don’t recall exactly, I was playing in the brass ensemble. One day I asked the conductor if I could write a piece for the group, he said yes, I went home and wrote one. The next week I brought it in, it was played; I heard and liked the experience and after never stopped writing music.

 

At this point, for reasons best not gone into but hinted at in the opening italicized paragraph, my formal musical education ended.

 

When I think about it, besides Kenneth Kennedy, the only other person who ever taught me anything even remotely useful was Asher Zlotnik, a teacher who in disgrace had left Peabody and gave private lessons from his home. But what he was able to give was limited because I thought he wasn’t a composer and thus not entitled to really talk about writing music, thus my mind-set at the time. But he did talk about chord sequences and later this helped me when I began composing songs. I should add my mother, who though she also was very discouraging at times, did suggest an idea about writing individual lines (write one, then another super-imposed, then another super-imposed on the first two, and so on) that has stuck with me. My father actively discouraged my studying music with a violence hard to understand.

​

In addition I’d look at scores with varying degrees of understanding, read, without really getting the point, harmony, counterpoint and orchestration books, and come up with various what I now consider to be useless theories about music. At the time I didn’t because they were all I had to go on. There’s no point in going into all the time I spent in frustration and all the false steps I took – and am probably still taking.

​

Allow me to note that studying The Well-Tempered Clavier, Debussy and Liszt’s piano music was the way I started to understand how the keys work, how to access the 12 tones through modulation, etc.

​

My father, on a positive note, did give me his old Sony TC-350 reel-to-reel tape deck and an Electrovoice microphone and I began composing electronic music. Later I began giving live performances by combining it with another Sony Tape deck, linking the tape between the two which allowed for delay, speed change, and tape manipulation. Sadly, reel-to-reel tape machines in good working condition are impossible to find these days. I say sadly because I think they are a great tool, different and thus not comparable to the computer, for studying sound construction; the sound is on tape, physically in your hands.

​

I was, unfortunately - due to what I have no idea, the times, being in a conservatory? - hung up on non-tonal and post war musical ideas, those of Schoenberg, Boulez, Cage, etc. I wish I’d never heard of any of them with their inflexible ideas about various forms of “progress”. Though I like some of their music, I find the polemical aspect of their thought to be less appealing. I wish I’d been left alone, but fate willed it differently.

​

I tried to give a concert in 1979, wrote a double woodwind quintet, contacted a group at Johns Hopkins University but it turned into a fiasco and never moved beyond the first rehearsal.

​

In Baltimore in the 1980’s I was more or less constantly giving shows of live electronic music, doing film music for my brother’s films and improvising with the local art scene types (which I never really enjoyed because it was almost always identical – at first slow and soft, then faster, then loud, then louder, then loudest… I know this will irritate improvisational musicians but that’s how it was, always follow the leader to a state of cacophony).

​

My first real concert was of a piano sextet and a piece called Octet for 11 Instruments – each movement had a different orchestration (this I think being a direct reflection of my desire to be modern). Since that time I have learned, slowly but surely, to be more practical.

​

Then I formed a group to play my music, the Dick Turner Ensemble. We gave shows of small pieces I’d written for bass clarinet, saxophone, trombone and cello, all amplified. This lasted a year before they all revolted against me at the instigation of the least talented among them. I recall our last show at the Black Cat in Washington DC when they were all criticizing me after the concert and John Zorn looked in the dressing room and said he’d liked our show which shut them all up… but didn’t save the group.

​

This will serve as a bit of advice, when you have a group it is always the least talented person who causes the greatest trouble - through politics.

​

I then moved to Paris. I kept writing music, finally gave a concert in 2004 and another in 2005. Tried to contact better known players to play my music, encountered zero interest.

​

Then, once again, the shit hit the fan in my personal life and in an attempt not to drown, literally from one day to the next, I started to write songs in what I thought to be popular styles. This was on 22 June 2005. My reasoning was it would allow me to actually share my music with people, which in fact turned out to be true. First I gave solo concerts and then later when approached by some young guys formed two different rock groups. We gave many concerts and I enjoyed the experience of being on stage though I could never really convince myself of the musical value of what it was we were doing. I wrote 300 + songs. I don’t judge the songs because I don’t have a standard of comparison, when I wrote the them I believed in them 100% now some I like, some I don’t; at this point in time they seem a little like someone else wrote them. I still occasionally, that is when asked, give concerts as a solo singer.

​

Then in December 2016 I composed my solo-opera Totem and Taboo which was a transition back to composition though still essentially a long song. I also wrote a rock opera Fandy Rant, which, though done for electric guitars, drums, etc. is in the same line.

​

I officially broke up my rock group and went back to composing in January 2017.

​

I performed Totem and Taboo here in Paris, in Berlin and Norway and it always went over well. I gave a concert of piano and cello music in January 2019 and met some players who seem to be willing to work with me. The next concert is planned for 10 May, 2020.