Well, in thinking about that that summer
my dad said well let’s look
at maybe some other things.
And one of those other things was
let’s take a look at this Sudbury Valley School.
And so that summer
I’m not sure if it was June or July
but some time in that summer of 1968 came
and came upstairs for our meeting
with Joan and my parents.
And that was really quite a day in my life
because Joan kind of acted as a therapist
and also as a parent but she wasn’t my parent,
but she was a parent to me,
and she said well,
what do you want to do with your life?
Do you want to go to this technical high school?
That could mean giving up your music
because you’re going to be channeled into an MIT or
– and maybe I would have been good enough
or had the energy to do
a couple of different things in my life
such as a science background and music.
But I didn’t think that I had it in me to do that
so I said you know I’m not ready
to give up the past few years
of a burgeoning interest in music
and instrumentalism for that.
So she said you’re going be allowed to do...
to pursue your dreams here at Sudbury Valley.
And she said it may be a little bit scary at first
because we don’t have quite the same structure
as a Boston Technical High School.
You’re going to have to create your own structure here.
And I think my next four years,
because that summer we decided
that I should go here,
I should give it a shot – just give it a shot.
Well, I wound up spending four years at Sudbury,
graduating in ‘72.
So I guess you could say that I was
in the first four-year class
of a high school graduating class
– I guess I was in that class.
So I presented my thesis
in front of the School Meeting
that I believe it was April or May
and it was successfully . . .
I guess I successfully defended my thesis
that I would be responsible in the community
for my life and for my career
and I hopefully showed that
and I set forth on basically the rest of my life.
That spring I auditioned
for the New England Conservatory of Music
and got accepted as a Freshman French horn player.
Throughout my years at Sudbury
I was diligently practising the French Horn
and also on Saturday mornings
going to the New England Conservatory Prep Division
taking lessons not only in French horn
but also in additional music theory
and I had ensembles – wind ensembles,
and I don’t think I had orchestra back then
– but it was some wind ensemble experience
in the community.
We didn’t have a band or orchestra
here at Sudbury Valley
but we did have a staff member or two
who were musicians and developed
and fostered my education here as a musician
and I played small ensembles with them
and they also
– to mention one in particular
that was Jan McDaniel –
really helped me a lot in my early days
of deciding to become a musician
and helping me to find my own way to do that.
So I spent a lot of time here pursuing that dream
and I’ve been lucky enough
to be in the music profession
as a performing musician
now for some twenty-seven years,
making my living at that
and it’s not an easy profession to be in
and many of my teachers have said
you know Mark it’s really a business
because these organizations have to make ends meet.
And nowadays, there are many creative ways
that ensembles have to do that
but so many of them have tremendous deficits
if they don’t have endowments and
but that’s a whole other story so . . .
Anyway, to get back – I graduated from SVS
and went on to the New England Conservatory.
After my Freshman year there
I did some soul searching,
I had some physical problems with braces
and I took a year off trying to figure out
what my next move would be.
Would I come back to New England Conservatory
having gotten braces and having some problems
actually playing the French horn.
In an attempt to make myself play better,
I got braces and it was a kind of mixed result.
And I had high standards for what I wanted to do
so I took the year off.
Eventually, I wound up having roots in Minnesota
at the University of Minnesota and that’s a...
getting there is a whole other story in itself
because I didn’t have traditional transcripts.
And so they wanted to know what the heck
I was doing with my four years of high school.
Well, I had taken the SAT test my senior year here
– or my fourth year here –
and they were respectable
as I told Danny earlier tonight.
But they made me write a thesis – what have you done?
They wanted something like 15 or 20 pages and
so I think me just presenting
my thesis of responsibility
at Sudbury Valley to graduate
helped me when I got out into the world
and they were saying
we don’t know what you’ve done here,
except for your credits
from the New England Conservatory
which did transfer over to Minnesota.
They said we don’t know what to call you
if you’re not going to be majoring in the French horn.
You’ve got some music credits here
and history and theory of music
but we need to figure out
how to get you into this institution
if we are ever even going to accept you.
So I wrote a fifteen page essay
and luckily got accepted
and four years and a summer later
I wound up with a degree in music
– a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree –
with a speciality in oboe.
Now in my twentieth year of life I switched to the oboe
and it was a very natural fit for me.
Perhaps for those of you that want a little more detail
can talk to me afterwards of how that exactly happened
but four years at Minnesota,
wound up with a degree.
I then applied to Northwestern University in Chicago
and I got in
as one of the two graduate students majoring in oboe.
And I got to study with the principal oboist
at the Chicago Symphony.
I was his graduate teaching assistant
and had a great couple of years there
– really, really wonderful years.
I got to play extra in the Chicago Symphony with him.
And it was hard, it was very hard
because I had taken up the oboe rather late in life
although I had a real background in music
from a young kid and it was in my heart,
it was in my blood, that I needed to be a musician.
And the year that I took off
between New England and getting into Minnesota,
I did some soul searching and thinking
I’m going to go off in a different path
but I just couldn’t do it.
I had to stay with my music and take that chance
so I went to Northwestern,
spent an extra year in Chicago after I graduated
– freelancing and learning a little bit more
about the trade of being a professional musician.
As a freelancer and hitting the audition circuit
and being a professional musician is
as Nikole and I have talked about
is really putting your life on the line
for what you love to do.
And I took a chance that I would do this
because I had to do this.
I felt that I had to be a musician because
it was really everything I had done in my life.
I didn’t want to do anything else.
As quite a few of my music teachers have told me,
don’t do music unless you have to.
And that is kind of a two-sided coin meaning yeah,
it’s a tough business
– it’s like being an actor in Hollywood
where you go to LA and you wait tables
and you hope for a lucky break.
And if you’re good, that helps a lot.
But there’s no guarantees.
But then again there’s no guarantees in life either.
There’s some perhaps more...
how can I put it...
more ways that are easier
– that if you follow a prescribed course,
more than likely you’ll
get to a place that you’ve tried to get to
but after I graduated from Northwestern
and spent that year in Chicago,
I got my first professional job in a symphony orchestra
and I knew that I would probably
have to travel...