Well, in thinking about that that summer

my dad said well let’s look

at maybe some other things.

And one of those other things was

let’s take a look at this Sudbury Valley School.

And so that summer

I’m not sure if it was June or July

but some time in that summer of 1968 came

and came upstairs for our meeting

with Joan and my parents.

And that was really quite a day in my life

because Joan kind of acted as a therapist

and also as a parent but she wasn’t my parent,

but she was a parent to me,

and she said well,

what do you want to do with your life?

Do you want to go to this technical high school?

That could mean giving up your music

because you’re going to be channeled into an MIT or

– and maybe I would have been good enough

or had the energy to do

a couple of different things in my life

such as a science background and music.

But I didn’t think that I had it in me to do that

so I said you know I’m not ready

to give up the past few years

of a burgeoning interest in music

and instrumentalism for that.

So she said you’re going be allowed to do...

to pursue your dreams here at Sudbury Valley.

And she said it may be a little bit scary at first

because we don’t have quite the same structure

as a Boston Technical High School.

You’re going to have to create your own structure here.

And I think my next four years,

because that summer we decided

that I should go here,

I should give it a shot – just give it a shot.

Well, I wound up spending four years at Sudbury,

graduating in ‘72.

So I guess you could say that I was

in the first four-year class

of a high school graduating class

– I guess I was in that class.

So I presented my thesis

in front of the School Meeting

that I believe it was April or May

and it was successfully . . .

I guess I successfully defended my thesis

that I would be responsible in the community

for my life and for my career

and I hopefully showed that

and I set forth on basically the rest of my life.

That spring I auditioned

for the New England Conservatory of Music

and got accepted as a Freshman French horn player.

Throughout my years at Sudbury

I was diligently practising the French Horn

and also on Saturday mornings

going to the New England Conservatory Prep Division

taking lessons not only in French horn

but also in additional music theory

and I had ensembles – wind ensembles,

and I don’t think I had orchestra back then

– but it was some wind ensemble experience

in the community.

We didn’t have a band or orchestra

here at Sudbury Valley

but we did have a staff member or two

who were musicians and developed

and fostered my education here as a musician

and I played small ensembles with them

and they also

– to mention one in particular

that was Jan McDaniel –

really helped me a lot in my early days

of deciding to become a musician

and helping me to find my own way to do that.

So I spent a lot of time here pursuing that dream

and I’ve been lucky enough

to be in the music profession

as a performing musician

now for some twenty-seven years,

making my living at that

and it’s not an easy profession to be in

and many of my teachers have said

you know Mark it’s really a business

because these organizations have to make ends meet.

And nowadays, there are many creative ways

that ensembles have to do that

but so many of them have tremendous deficits

if they don’t have endowments and

but that’s a whole other story so . . .

Anyway, to get back – I graduated from SVS

and went on to the New England Conservatory.

After my Freshman year there

I did some soul searching,

I had some physical problems with braces

and I took a year off trying to figure out

what my next move would be.

Would I come back to New England Conservatory

having gotten braces and having some problems

actually playing the French horn.

In an attempt to make myself play better,

I got braces and it was a kind of mixed result.

And I had high standards for what I wanted to do

so I took the year off.

Eventually, I wound up having roots in Minnesota

at the University of Minnesota and that’s a...

getting there is a whole other story in itself

because I didn’t have traditional transcripts.

And so they wanted to know what the heck

I was doing with my four years of high school.

Well, I had taken the SAT test my senior year here

– or my fourth year here –

and they were respectable

as I told Danny earlier tonight.

But they made me write a thesis – what have you done?

They wanted something like 15 or 20 pages and

so I think me just presenting

my thesis of responsibility

at Sudbury Valley to graduate

helped me when I got out into the world

and they were saying

we don’t know what you’ve done here,

except for your credits

from the New England Conservatory

which did transfer over to Minnesota.

They said we don’t know what to call you

if you’re not going to be majoring in the French horn.

You’ve got some music credits here

and history and theory of music

but we need to figure out

how to get you into this institution

if we are ever even going to accept you.

So I wrote a fifteen page essay

and luckily got accepted

and four years and a summer later

I wound up with a degree in music

– a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree –

with a speciality in oboe.

Now in my twentieth year of life I switched to the oboe

and it was a very natural fit for me.

Perhaps for those of you that want a little more detail

can talk to me afterwards of how that exactly happened

but four years at Minnesota,

wound up with a degree.

I then applied to Northwestern University in Chicago

and I got in

as one of the two graduate students majoring in oboe.

And I got to study with the principal oboist

at the Chicago Symphony.

I was his graduate teaching assistant

and had a great couple of years there

– really, really wonderful years.

I got to play extra in the Chicago Symphony with him.

And it was hard, it was very hard

because I had taken up the oboe rather late in life

although I had a real background in music

from a young kid and it was in my heart,

it was in my blood, that I needed to be a musician.

And the year that I took off

between New England and getting into Minnesota,

I did some soul searching and thinking

I’m going to go off in a different path

but I just couldn’t do it.

I had to stay with my music and take that chance

so I went to Northwestern,

spent an extra year in Chicago after I graduated

– freelancing and learning a little bit more

about the trade of being a professional musician.

As a freelancer and hitting the audition circuit

and being a professional musician is

as Nikole and I have talked about

is really putting your life on the line

for what you love to do.

And I took a chance that I would do this

because I had to do this.

I felt that I had to be a musician because

it was really everything I had done in my life.

I didn’t want to do anything else.

As quite a few of my music teachers have told me,

don’t do music unless you have to.

And that is kind of a two-sided coin meaning yeah,

it’s a tough business

– it’s like being an actor in Hollywood

where you go to LA and you wait tables

and you hope for a lucky break.

And if you’re good, that helps a lot.

But there’s no guarantees.

But then again there’s no guarantees in life either.

There’s some perhaps more...

how can I put it...

more ways that are easier

– that if you follow a prescribed course,

more than likely you’ll

get to a place that you’ve tried to get to

but after I graduated from Northwestern

and spent that year in Chicago,

I got my first professional job in a symphony orchestra

and I knew that I would probably

have to travel...