When my musical life is ordered, and I am able to connect in this way to kindred spirits (both composers and performers), my life is in harmony.
When young, although more-or-less a casual mathematics prodigy (I started riding my bicycle up to the University of California at Berkeley when I was eleven), all I really wanted to do was play trumpet. I was captivated by music. This started early. Here is an example: about the time I first started listening to lectures at Cal, I had a bad case of the flu, and my mother told me I could not practice my trumpet that day. I was in the middle of a set of exercises I had been working on for weeks and was afraid I would be set back to the beginning. Although it was raining, I climbed out my bedroom window just after dark (then six P.M. -- winter time). I practiced under a hedge in a nearby park, soaking wet, until eight P.M. when, after several dizzy and abortive attempts, I managed to climb back in the my window. I was just in time to avoid detection. "Look at you, your fever has gone up... see how much you are sweating!" (...fortunately my mother is not yet on line, or I would hear about this! :))
I once went about fifteen years without missing a day's practice on my trumpet. This included such interesting times as the day I had three wisdom teeth extracted.
In high school, where playing in the school orchestra was generally a relatively rowdy experience, at the first reading of a new piece I played the offstage trumpet solo -- a simple little tune, not at all technically difficult. Although the piece goes on after this, everyone just stopped playing. It was dead silent for about fifteen seconds, and then all the other musicians, and the teacher/conductor, stood up and gave me a standing ovation. Afterwards I asked a friend what "that was all about." He said, "I don't know man, it's just the way you play sometimes -- it gets to us. One minute we are all screwing around, the next minute something special has happened, and everyone knows it." [So what was this? Probably just a chance for high schoolers to fool around. But who knows... maybe from time to time something was present in the music I played that was worth hearing...]
At the Eastman School of Music, home institution to many of the world's foremost musicians, a teacher of mine said of me, "In the ten years I have been here at Eastman I have never met anyone who loves music as much as Clark does. Being around him is captivating, lifts our spirits, and reminds us all why we are here." Ironically, at the time I was, save for one person, the worst trumpet player in the school.
After studying music all day, most students were screaming for the exits, and recreation. For me, recreation meant going to the Sibley Library and listening to their fabulous record collection until closing time. After four months at the school, the first non-musical activity I took part in was to take a walk one Sunday morning in December --- to get a new needle for my stereo.
Alas, as mentioned above, I was not a very talented trumpet player, despite my desire. On the other hand I was, and am, a decent musician. Although I absolutely do not have a good ear in the traditional sense, I do seem to have an exceptional gift for hearing subtleties in complex combinations of sound. I was often called on by others to help them tweak performances during rehearsal, and to recommend aural adjustments with respect to staging, and the concert hall.
Later, for almost a year I listened to single notes on the piano for ten to twelve hours a day, developing a sense of the "beats" created between the three strings of a piano note, and great depth in the subtle timbre of the musical sound. From there I progressed to two notes, and so forth, until at my peak I was able, with no natural talent, to more or less report all of the notes when someone simply put both forearms down on the keyboard. Also, at my peak, I was able to compose, with great accuracy, simple contrapuntal pieces in my head --- giving me, temporarily, a minute glimpse into the world of people like Beethoven, Mozart. Without rigorous practice, this ability has atrophied almost completely, because, as mentioned, I have no natural talent in this area.
As a private music teacher in Berkeley I had a waiting list of people wanting to study with me, of never less than thirty. I believe that I had an odd combination of very strong desire to be a musician, and in many practical ways little talent, that gave me insight into how to teach others to learn that which is normally just considered a God-given gift.
For a year I drove eight hundred miles round trip in my little British sports car to take trumpet lessons three times a month.
Although between working, getting my Ph.D., and raising three children, I have had to give up practicing my trumpet, I still listen as much as possible, and study my recordings. I have about five thousand records.
I own no compact discs. I have tried on many occasions to listen to them, but because of the sensitivity of my hearing I just cannot bear the sound they produce: in years past this experience was as though someone were scraping their fingernails on a blackboard; more recently I can take the sound for a few minutes at a time. In all cases, always, the heart of the music, for me, is absent. Cellos sound like garbage cans being ripped open, pianos as though someone were hitting the strings with a metal hammer, and in general the rhythm is always dull and confused -- an abomination. I recenlty had a ten-thousand dollar CD player in my house, making some cabling tweaks for a friend, but after two days had to restrain myself from, literally, throwing it out of the window in a maniacle effort to exorcise that brutal, grating, demonic anti-music sound from the sacred space of my listening room.
Riding my motorcycle from Berkeley, California, to the Aspen (Colorado) Music Festival, I needed to practice my trumpet, but could not afford the time to stop. Instead I used an accelerator lock, steered with my feet, leaned against my bedroll, and practiced about three hours a day, while I rode on the interstate.