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At 4:09 PM -0800 1/14/03, Clayton Gary Lehmann wrote: >Dr. Z, are you classically trained? Not really. Other than a year of trumpet lessons in fifth grade I never studied an instrument. I picked up guitar on my own and took lessons only after I'd played professionally for several years. During my undergraduate years I took four music classes. One of these was a basic survey course (basic theory, ear training, and music history), one was a composer/performer workshop, and two were a sequence of counterpoint and harmony theory classes (the teacher was good, though, and later ended up directing the Eastman School). A few years later I undertook music study full time at a community college. Although this was a lower division curriculum, the faculty was quite good. I learned enough and built enough of a portfolio to be accepted with a Regents Fellowship to the composition program at UCSD. I faked my way through this to some extent but managed to earn a doctorate in five years. On the question of whether classical studies can put a damper on an artist's native creativity, I'd have to say that it certainly CAN happen but that it doesn't have to. I personally went through about a year of arrested development when I focused more attention on deterministic notation-based composition when my natural proclivities were to use improvisational processes in the context of intermedia theater. I sorted it out in time and spent the rest of my doctoral program creating theater works that didn't use any musical notation. This might be viewed by some as a bit of cheating, but my feeling is that I put together the kind of graduate curriculum I needed to support my creative work and that it just happened to fall within the music program. >Do you ever play "classical" music? No, but I did sing in several choral groups during 1975-79. The groups ranged in size from an octet to a large group comprised of two college choirs joining forces on Verdi's Manzoni Requiem. The best of these ensembles was the Cabrillo College Chamber singers, under the direction of Dr. Allen Illick. This was quite an accomplished group of 18-20 voices. Our repertoire ranged from Renaissance motets by Ockeghem, Lassus, Palestrina, et al.to 20th century works by Poulenc, William Schuman, and various jazz composer/arrangers. I normally sang bass, though I also faked my way as a first tenor for the Verdi. >Also, here's some loop content--what classics do ANY of you loopers >integrate into your performances? Any familiar tunes pop up? Is >everybody >improvising? Since most of my recent performances have been based on commercial recordings, there is always a mix of "classic" works. Some of these are "classical" in the common sense of being pieces of art from the Renaissance through the 20th century. Some are "classic" in the sense of being significant "oldies" in a particular genre. Therefore any given performance might have Gabrielli, Bach, and Satie comingling with Stockhausen, Xenakis, and Cage or Dick Dale, the Who, or Dion. My performances are almost always improvised but are not always completely "blank slate" improvisations. I select source materials and practice with them in the days leading up to the gig. Then I spend as much time as possible fine-tuning on the day of the performance. I usually have the source CDs (and sometimes cassettes) laid out in a rough order, but from the moment the master fade comes up I'm winging it. -- ______________________________________________________________ Richard Zvonar, PhD (818) 788-2202 http://www.zvonar.com http://RZCybernetics.com