A few autobiographical words about Dan Coren.

For a list of articles by this author, click here.

When, in 2005, my high school classmate Dan Rottenberg asked me to contribute to BSR, I had already enjoyed the honor of participating in Dan’s past enterprises, first as an occasional contributor to the Welcomat and later as the regular music columnist for the ill-fated Seven Arts magazine. I was delighted then and continue to be delighted today to again have the opportunity to express my views about music.

Because of my parents’ love for Beethoven, Mozart, and the like, I grew up surrounded by recordings and radio broadcasts of classical music. Foremost among the gods of my childhood were Franklin Roosevelt (even though he died when I was three), Duke Snider, and Arturo Toscanini.

Although neither of my parents was a practicing musician, somehow I got the idea in my head very early on that I was supposed to be a conductor. I have vivid memories of standing on a little podium, using the New Yorker magazine as a score, and waving my arms around during a radio broadcast, egged on by the accolades of my grandparents.

I went on to major in music at Columbia College, and then to earn a Ph. D. in music history from the University of California at Berkeley. Although I took a conducting course while at Columbia that allowed me to conduct the student orchestra now and then, the summer between college and graduate school was both the zenith and nadir of my short-lived conducting career.

I somehow got accepted to the choral conducting program at the Tanglewood Music Festival. This meant that from time to time I got to conduct what was, for those eight short weeks, one of the world’s strongest choruses. One afternoon near the end of the session I was allowed to conduct, in its entirety, the monumental fugue that ends the Gloria of Mozart’s Mass in C Minor. There I was, waving my arms around on a real podium using a real score, carried along by wave after wave of Mozart’s ecstatic music.

I went on to join the music faculty at Penn for seven years, but, even though I published my share of scholarly articles and even though I like to think I was a very good classroom teacher, it soon became clear to my colleagues— well before I admitted it myself — that I was not suited for academic life, either. Instead of being the good little classical musicologist I been hired to be, I spent as much time as I could in Penn’s electronic music studio playing with tape loops, the new Moog synthesizer, and a state of the art PDP-8 computer — it had 8K of RAM!— and before long I found myself out of academia and starting a career as a software developer, one that I happily practiced until my retirement at the end of 2009.

My departure from Penn was a bittersweet moment, though, because by then I had realized that I was hopelessly out of my league. I knew that preparing a piece like the Stravinsky Mass (one of our assignments) was well beyond my abilities and that I couldn’t ever hope to compete with my fellow students, who came from places like Julliard, Indiana University and the Oberlin Conservatory.

It was painful at the time, but in retrospect my relationship to music immediately became much happier. I’ve continued to sing in choruses at Penn ever since then and, as I have all my life, I still take weekly piano lessons. But despite whatever practical training I may have received as a musician and despite my academic credentials, I regard myself as an enthusiastic and highly opinionated amateur who is lucky enough to have been given a public forum to express his views.

 
More articles by Dan Coren, newest first