Of Rock Bands, School Bands (and Other Ensembles), and Musical Diversity

Musical diversity pervades the lives of these twelve composers, although that diversity came about in different ways. Daniel Bernard Roumain played violin throughout his public school education, however, he attributes his experience with popular music to becoming a multi-instrumentalist. He explained:

By fourth grade, I had already been in different bands. We all had bands in our garages. In this garage there was a rock band and then we had a funk band over there.

I just started picking up other instruments. In the rock band I played bass. In the funk band I played keyboards. If somebody got grounded or didn’t show up—you know, the drummer—then you played drum kit that day. We would all just switch. It was kind of a lab.

For some composers, rock bands and popular music forms were places for experimentation and pathways to composition. Peter Bernstein, who took piano lessons in his youth, also played bass and toured with various rock and roll bands and singer- songwriters. His composing career evolved from there:

I produced records, I became an arranger and orchestrator, then composer, and now composer and conductor. A lot of people in film composing go that route because it’s become an offshoot of popular music. Fewer people have gone the full classical route, and even if they’ve done that, they’ve also done the other. I was a bit of both. Part of my rock and roll days were borne of knowing in some inchoate corner of my soul that I was a musician, but not wanting to be anywhere where my dad (Elmer Bernstein) was. Big shoes—and who wants to be like their parents anyway?

John Adair, who also had diverse musical interests early in life, made a bargain with his parents:

They would allow me to learn the guitar as long as I also learned a real instrument. For me, that was the clarinet. I knew what they meant. They meant if you want to do this, we would like you to know how to read and understand music. I think my interest in popular music is where my motivation to try to write music came from, but music instruction is what gave me the tools to do it. Somewhere around age 12 or 13 I started messing with writing melodies, and then I’d write a lead sheet.

Adair played guitar in rock and bluegrass bands in the Washington, DC, area during high school and “started doing some writing there too, getting interested in how things were arranged and put together.” He continued playing clarinet and saxophone in high school ensembles but was “not really indulging any creative impulses on that side of things” until his family moved to Olympia, Washington, and his high school band director invited an advertising composer as a guest speaker. Adair was fascinated but continued into college as a clarinet performance major and later switched to composition.

Steve Hampton, “a rock and roller from the beginning,” played classical guitar in college because that was the only option for guitarists to be admitted as music majors at the time. He graduated with a music theory and composition degree, but, he explained:

I had no idea what I was going to do. Meanwhile, a friend who had a studio called me and said, “Hey, I have a friend who has a business and he needs music for a radio commercial.” I knew nothing about it, but I did it, and I thought, “Well that was kind of fun” The other thing that happened in college was that I had been into a real recording studio with a band. We’d record super late at night because nobody was there, and it completely changed my world. It was like, this is where I want to be. I’d love to write music and be in a studio, and I have no idea how I’m going to do that. Then this little commercial came along, then another one . . .

Miriam Cutler’s first instrument was piano, and while she longed to play cello, her parents had other ideas. She played clarinet during her school years, but her musical pathway traveled through dance. She commented:

I started by playing folk music. I was a folk dancer, so I learned a lot about world music that way. When they found out I played clarinet, they asked, “Why don’t you play in the band?” I’ve never played legit clarinet. I played the blues, I played ethnic music, swing. I knew early on that I was never going to be a virtuosic musician.

Cutler started college as a music major but changed to anthropology after one semester in music theory, explaining, “It gets in the way of the way my brain works” She left graduate school to work as a research investigator for public interest lawyers, which she loved, however:

I was very young—23 or something. I was working on really heavy stories— corruption, graft, murder, unnecessary surgeries—and I thought, “I can do this when I’m older. I’m just going to be a kid now.” I ended up in bands like Oingo Boingo. I was in a feminist band,³ and I did my own stuff. Little by little, I was a songwriter. That’s how I got started. I put together a little recording studio for my songwriting.

That home studio became the base for what is now Cutler’s career as a leading documentary film composer.

While Miriam Cutler was absorbing folk music, swing, and the blues, Daniel Bernard Roumain grew up in a family and in a neighborhood rich with musical diversity:

At the time in south Florida, my neighborhood, even though it was kind of segregated—we were the first black family in our neighborhood—was still very diverse. You could walk down the street and hear music from Jamaica, the Bahamas, Israel, the Middle East, Spain, Italy. My parents were from Haiti, so a lot of Haitian music, and my father was very eclectic. You might hear Jackson Five, then it was von Karajan and the Vienna Philharmonic on Time Life Records.

Roumain identifies this diverse “listening palette” as part of his pathway to composing.

Some composers had in-school experiences that supported their interest in composition. Steven Bryant wrote brass quintets and pieces for the basketball pep band. Jennifer Jolley attended an arts high school in Orange County, California, where she took a composition class that included “some assignments—definitely a piano variation” She continued:

A group of students were asked to participate in an LA opera outreach. They were premiering Tobias Picker’s opera, The Fantastic Mr. Fox, and we got to write pieces as a group based on the story. I learned that sometimes group composition can be a little fraught. You’re dealing with high school egos. But I was very proud that I wrote one section of this collaborative piece.

Even when music composition classes or experiences were not available, the recognition and support of teachers affirmed these composers’ early creative inclinations. Mari Esabel Valverde explained:

In eighth grade I had little chicken scratches that I would take to my choir director. In retrospect, she really helped me get on track. I almost want to cry remembering it . . . the fact that she would play through my things, which sounds really silly when it’s just two or four bars of 4/4 and it’s all quarter notes and I don’t know what I’m doing. But she was playing something I wrote and I felt really proud of it.

Connor Chee described a similar experience:

My elementary school music teacher really encouraged me to do what I was doing— to play piano and write my own music. She helped me write things down before I could really write the notes, and she submitted it to some local competitions. I think what I liked about it was that it was purely what I felt and what I wanted to do.