This is Part 2 of a multi-part series of posts.  I suggest that you start with Part 1 if you have the time and really want to appreciate the full effulgence.

As a studied musician I never really had much formal training.  Oh, as a kid I learned my drum rudiments, I took a couple of years of piano lessons resisting nearly every practice session with dreams of baseball until my mom regrettably let me stop.

I picked up the guitar in college knowing that there just had to be more to music than just backbeat drumming.  I was the student choir director under my mentor, Jack Eyerly, throughout high school and college, and I also took a course while at the University of Virginia my freshman year in music composition from an extremely boring graduate student teacher that I nearly flunked because I rarely knew what key I was in.

So here I was suddenly serving as composer-in-residence at America’s greatest developmental theater in the 70s cranking out show after show and learning my theater craft on the job.

Joe Papp introduced me to a strange, quirky young ex-Jesuit priest who had just started directing at The Public Theater named AJ Antoon.  He was to become my favorite collaborator and best friend for many years and together we were to create a surprising number of hit shows.  One of the first projects that we worked on together was Wm Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing which AJ set gracefully and brilliantly into the period of the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair.

We staged the show first at the NY Shakespeare Festival’s Delacourt out-of-doors Theater in Central Park where it became the hit of the summer, then moved it to Broadway in the fall where it then got even better reviews and became the longest running Shakespeare play to ever run on Broadway.  It was also produced by Joe Papp for television in a 3-hour IBM special that has played perennially year after year since then.

I wrote a few songs for the show and over an hour’s worth of underscoring that gave the show an almost musical quality and, in fact, I was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Composer for a musical even though the show was definitely not a musical.

It was the most graceful and smooth experience I ever had in the theater.  It was, for me, my penultimate experience.  A great play, a terrific concept by a brilliant young director at the height of his powers and a wondrous cast led by a young Sam Waterston.

Working at Shakespeare in the Park was always the best of times.  The theater, sponsored by NYC, was hugely supported by the city and would sell out every night because the tickets were free, so whatever was produced would be appreciated by the astute Shakespeare loving audience.  The setting of the theater by the lake in Central Park is gorgeous and families would bring picnic dinners to the park and eat pre-show and enjoy the good ol’ summertime.

AJ and I had a great idea to create on stage before the show a beautiful park gazebo designed by the great set designer, Ming Cho Lee, and do, with the band for the show, a half hour Oom-Pah band concert of 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair pastiche music that I would write and arrange.  This would set the mood and time period for the show in magical fashion and kick things off.  We named the band Private Papirofsky’s (Joe Papp’s real name) Genuine Nickle-Plated Portable Musical Brass Band – Trumpet, trombone, clarinet, drums, tuba, banjo and ragtime piano.

I wrote ten rollicking numbers that reflected themes later heard in the show as underscoring, and the concert worked like a dream.  The people cheered each number like it was a rock concert and the theater and park became 1904 once again.

I used the song In The Good Old Summertime, a classic from that time period, as my model with its sweeping and leaping melody and simple chord changes.  When I would write, I would always start off my composing sessions by singing that song from start to finish and that would put me smack dab in the middle of the time period and feel for the music.  I also studied the music of Scott Joplin and hired a great stride pianist, Peter Phillips, to play the show and be our musical director.

I was not a pianist, however.  My instrument at the time was acoustic guitar – not at all the instrument on which to write this kind of music.  But I did it because it was all I knew.  And I had my imagination that always worked for me even when my limited technical facility did not.

I remember sitting at my dining room table writing out the orchestrations for the band.  I had a little beaten up 20-page pamphlet that told me the note ranges of the various instruments, and as I wrote down my thoughts in musical notation probably for the first time, I was a nervous as a cat.  Would they laugh at me and my feeble flutterings?  Would the musicians just smirk behind their music stands?

My first rehearsal went gloriously.  Seven top hand-picked Broadway musicians played my music beautifully and the sound instantly came together.  Each musician made great suggestions and the entire first rehearsal went like magic.  I was thrilled, greatly relieved and most proud.

After the first rehearsal while all were packing up I was approached by our tuba player, Sam Pilafian, one of the world’s greatest players. He wanted me to hear how high he could actually play the tuba countering what the book had said.  He showed me that a tuba could sing like a soprano and do wondrous things far beyond oom pah pah.  He wanted to show me his virtuoso style so that I could write for it.  And of course I gobbled up his advice and used his great talents to the max.

I was feeling pretty good about myself when he finished his post rehearsal demonstration until he leaned over my shoulder, pointed down to my conductor’s score and whispered in my ear, “Oh by the way, Pete, when you’re writing in the bass clef, the little stems go on the other side of the circles (notes).”

I had made the most pedestrian of first grade errors.  I’m sure I blushed red as a beat.  He had caught me.  I was exposed.  A fraud.  A musical nincompoop.

Then this most graceful guy said, “But don’t worry.  The music sounds great.  That’s all that matters.”

Here was the greatest lesson of my entire musical education given me by a most sweet and sensitive tuba player.  “… don’t worry.  The music sounds great.  That’s all that matters.”

The technical would be learned.  I would never make that mistake again.  I would never again worry about my lack of a formal music education.  The proof was in the pudding – not in the bowl or the spoon or the mix master.

In that one moment I was freed from my demons.  From then on I could laugh at my technical shortcomings (that were many) because I realized that the technical was simply the way of communicating the ideas.  What was most important were the ideas.

If it ends up sounding good, who cares how it gets there as long as it gets there.