In Praise of Peripheral Experience

I had dinner the other night with an old friend who was one of my lecturers at Napier University. I did my undergraduate degree there in composition (first class honours – thanks for asking). I was very lucky to study composition under Kenneth Dempster. Not only is he an excellent composer, he's an excellent teacher of composition – a rare combination. My experience at Napier was transformative; not only was I composing pieces from day one, there were many many opportunities for having the pieces performed. The program integrated student composers and student musicians in a way I have never heard of any place else doing. I was able to write pieces that ranged from string quartets to musique concrète. In my fourth year, I was able to put on an entire concert of my work, and for a final project was able to stage an opera I wrote with a 18 piece orchestra. I stopped composing when I graduated, both from a lack of time and a lack of outlets for the finished products.

At dinner my friend asked me if I felt my time at Napier as a composer was wasted, since now I am focused on organology. I told him no, quite the opposite. My experience as a composer has had a huge Impact on my development as an organologist, albeit a peripheral one; in order to compose idiomatically for an instrument, you have to really understand the instrument in the pretty much same way that the player does – tunings, fingerings, extended techniques, et cetera. Musicians can always tell when a composer really doesn't understand the instrument he is writing for. Another composition teacher I had once told me that in a very real way, a composer plays all the instruments in the pieces he or she writes.

The dinner conversation with my friend got me thinking later about how much of my training as an organologist was actually peripheral experience: Who knew that all those years playing in bands and horse-trading guitars was preparing me to write my Ph.D. thesis on the early electric guitar? Who knew that the music copying I did when a kid to pay for music lessons (hand copying – with a fountain pen on semi-transparent vellum paper – individual orchestral and big band parts from scores) was preparing me to analyse original manuscripts of late 16th century harpsichord music? Who knew that making all those RadioShack electronic kits when I was a kid, and talking to my dad about the crystal radios he made when he was a kid, was preparing me to research George Breed's electrified guitar design of 1890? Who knew that being a roadie and live sound engineer in my teens and twenties –  dealing with feedback, ground loops, and 60 cycle hum – would give me insight into the amplification problems faced by early electric guitarists? Who knew that buying, reading about and learning how to play every strange, obscure and wonderful instrument I could get my hands on, was preparing me to be a museum curator? I have had a very strange, circuitous route to get to where I am now, but curiously, when I look back, I see that all the ragtag eclecticism of my life has actually been the perfect training for what I do; there is no way I could have done my Ph.D. if I had gone the normal route. As they relate to organology, my musical experiences may have been peripheral – but they were still essential.

Who knew?