{"id":425,"date":"2014-09-12T21:47:55","date_gmt":"2014-09-12T21:47:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/?p=425"},"modified":"2023-05-24T17:57:09","modified_gmt":"2023-05-24T17:57:09","slug":"two-chords","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/2014\/09\/12\/two-chords\/","title":{"rendered":"Two Chords"},"content":{"rendered":"

On February 21, New York City-based composer Allen\u00a0Schulz \u201987 returned to Wabash to premiere a piece of music for Wally Tunes, the College\u2019s Symposium on Music and the Liberal Arts.\u00a0<\/em>For the audience, it was an exciting finale to an afternoon of presentations.\u00a0<\/em>For Schulz it was a tribute to the teacher who had helped him find his calling.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI had long wanted to write a work for my piano teacher from my student days here, Diane Norton,\u201d Schulz says. \u201cWhen I was at Wabash I was really running from music. It was only after Diane began giving me piano lessons that I began to finally see that this was something\u00a0I might like to do.\u201d<\/p>\n

After graduating from Wabash, Schulz studied at Yale Divinity School for two years before realizing music was his vocation.<\/p>\n

\"dianefred\"<\/a>\u201cDiane kept in touch through that entire time at Yale. She pushed me to listen to new music. I tended more toward Bach and wanted to play Chopin, but she gave me Stravinsky, she gave me Bartok. She had me listen to her husband Fred Enenbach\u2019s music. That really made me start thinking\u2014I started composing, and it stayed with me.\u201d<\/p>\n

Last fall when Schulz began work on his composition for this year\u2019s Wally Tunes, he returned to the music of Enenbach, who had died in March 1984.<\/p>\n

\u201cI asked Diane if there was a section from a piece of music written by Fred that I might use as the centerpiece of my new work\u2019s second movement. She sent me a vinyl album of a collection of Fred\u2019s works. She told me to explore a particular piece of Fred\u2019s called \u2018Origins,\u2019 where Fred had used an old American folk song called \u2018Pretty Saro\u2019 as his centerpiece.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t even own a turntable, so I took the album to a sound engineer and had him make digital copies. Then I sat and listened to Fred\u2019s piece. It was beautiful. He used that old folksong without changing it at all. He had a female voice sing the original tune while he composed new and interesting sounds around it.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe story of\u00a0his<\/em>\u00a0piece seemed to me to be one of solitude and yearning for connection. This would be my piece\u2019s story, too.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd the second movement is about how Diane\u2019s voice still calls me as a composer, even though I live in New York City and communicate with Diane only via email.\u201d<\/p>\n

But there was something missing in the piece.<\/p>\n

\u201cI had these two measures I didn\u2019t know what to do with. So\u00a0I went back to Fred\u2019s music and found two chords that really spoke to me\u2014a real counterpoint to what was going on. Completely unrelated. So I stole them, straight out!\u201d<\/p>\n

When Norton began practicing the Schulz composition, she\u00a0recognized those chords immediately.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey made my heart stop,\u201d Norton says. \u201cThey were direct\u00a0quotations from Fred\u2019s work. Those two chords\u2014the way Allen excerpted them directly\u2014were extremely moving. \u201c<\/p>\n

Norton and cellist Kristen Strandberg premiered \u201cVoices Past, Softly Speaking\u201d for the Wally Tunes symposium the afternoon of February 21\u2014the teacher playing work by her student inspired by her late husband. The piece hinges on those two chords, followed by the tune \u201cPretty Saro\u201d played with restraint and yearning on the cello. A few quiet seconds after the last note sounded, the audience was on its feet applauding. Schulz stepped onto the Salter Hall stage, thanked Strandberg, and then hugged Norton, who smiled with the joy of a musician who had played well and the pride of a Wabash teacher whose student had done great things.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe changed the way I thought about music,\u201d Schulz says. \u201cHer words as a teacher and her instruction as a fellow musician have remained with me. She is one of the most important music connections in my life.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On February 21, New York City-based composer Allen\u00a0Schulz \u201987 returned to Wabash to premiere a piece of music for Wally Tunes, the College\u2019s Symposium on Music and the Liberal Arts.\u00a0For the audience, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":427,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"video","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-425","post","type-post","status-publish","format-video","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-class-notes","post_format-post-format-video"],"w_featured_image_url":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/15\/2014\/09\/alllen-diane-hug-two-chordslores.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/425","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=425"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/425\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":630,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/425\/revisions\/630"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/427"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=425"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=425"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=425"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}