My entry into a music program at university was probably the major turning point of my life. Which university? The University of Victoria on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada. The only reason this was possible was because we had moved to a smaller town on Vancouver Island in 1965. Prior to that I lived in northern BC and Alberta. No universities up there back then. But UVic was only a two and a half hour drive from where we lived.
It was a major turning point not just for my musical life, but for my intellectual life. For the first time I realized that I was intellectually starved. One look at the million book university library and I realized just how big the world of ideas really was. Living on campus, my pianist roommate and I took out the maximum number of records from the listening library every day: six. I had never seen a listening library before. Recall that this was in 1971, no streaming and even poor selection at record stores. We had hardly heard any of the classical canon.
But so many doors were open: my courses included German, Linguistics, English Literature, Philosophy, Music Theory, Ear-Training, Music History, Choir and private lessons. I was a guitar player and I expected guitar lessons. However, the guitar teacher had moved away and there was no replacement--literally, there was no qualified guitar teacher in Victoria. The university didn't offer a guitar program until 1985 when they hired me to start one. There's an irony for you! So, what they signed me up for were piano lessons. Of course, this was perfectly reasonable from their point of view. Playing piano was a necessity if you wanted to be a music theorist or historian or a conductor and so on. But from my point of view it was absurd. I also was assigned an ensemble: a trio in which I played lute. Yes, they had a lute and they thought I could play it. It wasn't the lute that was the problem--the music we were playing was Machaut. Recall that less than a year prior I had been playing bass in a rock and blues band. I was not ready for medieval rhythms and counterpoint.
But the best part was the whole university context. I was surrounded by people who came from musical families, who were already virtuosos, who studied Greek in private school, who came from wealthy or at least prosperous families. I was so engaged in my studies that I hardly realized that my class background was rather different. Yes, I came from fourteen generations of dirt farmers, mostly on the Canadian prairies. I was the first one to set foot on a university campus.
I solved my personal problem, of needing a real guitar teacher by leaving UVic and going to Alicante, Spain to study with the great maestro José Tomás. But that was in the future. What I really got out of the first couple of years of university was an introduction to music history and theory, a fantastic course in philosophy where I met Bishop Berkeley, Thomas Aquinas, David Hume and Plato, a wonderful course in English literature where I met Theodore Roethke, Ernest Hemingway, Franz Kafka and others and an entirely new life.
I spent two years at UVic and in 1974 I flew to Spain, my first time out of Canada and I didn't speak a word of Spanish. I will describe my time there in the next post.
Here is a piece by Machaut. It doesn't sound too hard, but for someone who had spent much of his musical life playing B. B. King and The Rolling Stones, it was quite a challenge.
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