I'M STILL HERE

Several years ago, I saw an Italian film by Paolo Sorrentino entitled The Great Beauty. It is the story of a writer at the end of his career, who showed great promise, but never lived up to his potential. At the time I was retiring from New York University where I spend 50 years developing a multifaceted, technology-based performing arts department in what became the Steinhardt School (having started as a School of Education). For a while I thought The Great Beauty was my story. But now I know it's not. My story is still unfolding, and while music remains central to my identity, I have emerged as a poet and writer. But maybe that was always me.

In truth I am merely a poet. Poems began to flow from me when I was eight years old, and perhaps earlier when I  published neighborhood newspapers at the age of seven. I began writing lyrics to "safety"operas in grade school, and lyrics to songs by the sixth grade. Parallel to those efforts, I started a book of poems, hoping to emulate Whitman, a book I continue to write in even today.

I think because I was somewhat autistic I found the piano allowed me to create the musical language of my immediate experience. I didn't read music, but I could improvise and create new works which were retained in my memory and became my musical works. When I was twelve I started to learn music notation, but all the while I edited and published newspapers in Junior high school and ultimately Amarillo High School where I won the Columbia University Award for editorial writing.

Now I write books, mostly poetry, but also a phenomenological inquiry on music composition MAKING MUSIC. Still to come are some short short stories about New York City as a kind of homage to O Henry's stories of NewYorkers entitled THE FOUR MILLION.

Recently I gravitated back to the keyboard and found that I still have songs to sing and maybe more. The music flows, and it grows, and I find these musical moments are spontaneous shapings of new ideas... fleeting and ephemeral...but maybe they will take hold and become realities.