College of Marin Interview

Graduated 1976 – I think I started in 1973.

Music

Got an AA from COM, then went to U.C. Berkeley for B.A. (COM had no BA)

B.A.

My experience at COM was pivotal in every way.

Here's how it happened: since I was a kid, I'd been inventing musical comedy shows and producing them. I'd never learned to read music, but I could play the piano. I had my own kind of musical shorthand I used, based on a rudimentary jazz notation my mother had taught me when I was about 10. The other performers couldn't read music either, so there was no advantage in learning to write it – in fact, to the contrary, they could understand my notation better than they could have understood standard notation. When I was 18 or 19, I invented the idea for a full-length operetta. I started composing the music, playing by ear as always, and suddenly I had this moment of epiphany, sitting at my piano in a little shack on the Tomales Bay in West Marin. I suddenly understood where I was and what I was: an ambitious, prolific, musical illiterate. I said to myself: OK, Deborah, say you invent this musical, what are you going to do, travel around with it in your head and personally teach it to everyone who performs it? It was at that moment I knew I needed to learn to read and write music. I asked around and found out that COM had a great music department. It was described to me as being as good if not better than the training I'd get at a major university. So I enrolled. I knew exactly what I wanted to learn and why. By the time I finished at U.C. Berkeley 6 years later, I had written the musical, produced it in a joint project with the Music & Drama departments and went on to produce it publicly as well.

What amazes me now, in retrospect, was how dedicated the teachers at COM were to helping me create a strong relationship with music and understand it at both a practical and theoretical level. I honestly don't think there was a teacher I had there – from Phys Ed to Music Analysis – who wasn't committed in ways, I learned later, was not the norm.

COM had truly great, practical training in music. The fact that I was able to avail myself of that training, having a very limited income, was – well, I don't honestly know how I would have ended up doing what I do today without College of Marin.

I know for sure that if it weren't for COM I would not be playing the harp today.

The tale goes like this:
I was singing in the chorus and it came time for the Holiday Concert. While there's plenty of religious music I think is spectacular, one of the songs on our program was not in that category by a long shot. Both the words and melody were so banal they offended my musical self-respect. I could not stomach singing that song (I had the same reaction to "The Happy Wanderer" in grade school – it was as bad as when they tried to make me eat an avocado in pre-school – blaaaah!). Anyway, not to dwell on it too much, I was searching for some way to avoid singing when I noticed that the music manuscript said, "Optional Harp or Piano accompaniment." I'd had a half-dozen harp lessons as a kid during the period when my parents were trying to get me interested in ANY instrument. This was before they learned I didn't want to play an instrument, I just wanted to invent music. But I'd learned enough about the harp to know I could tune one. I figured if I learned the harp part to the offending Christmas tune, I'd get a reprieve from the singing and if I couldn't learn it, well, I wasn't any worse off for trying. I went to the conductor and said, "Look, if I could learn this harp part, could I play it instead of singing?" "Yeah, sure," she snickered. "Sure. If you can learn to play this on the harp, then you don't have to sing."

So, I learned it. I played it in the concert and then someone on the faculty came up to me and said, "We need a harp in the concert band. If we pay for your lessons will you play in the band?" and I said, "Sure."

Enter Linda Wood, harp instructor, who psyched me out immediately and set a series of musical challenges that kept me interested enough to become skilled on the instrument. She also convinced me to try out for the COM concerto contest, "Just for the experience," and when I did, since no-one else showed up, I won. So two years after I started, I was playing a solo with the orchestra.

Actually, that summer I had two auditions: one for the Concerto Contest and one for the lead in “The Music Man.” I won the Concerto Contest and lost “The Music Man” lead – and that probably determined my career path – but not my ultimate goal, which was to write my own music theater. In fact, that's what I do, but instead of other people performing it, I write the orchestral parts and then stand up with my harp and perform it. So I get the best of both worlds!

While the music training was great, probably the greatest thing about COM for me was the breadth of what I was learning. I learned about composition in Art Class and as much about performance in Phys Ed as I did in Music – and what I learned there reinforced my music training. I still think very often about those teachers, and tried some years ago to reconnect with them. I'm still working on the principles they gave me. For example, the Phys Ed teacher said, in swim class, that if you are not riding into the glide of your effort, you are not completing it, you are only doing half of it. To this day, I am still working with that concept, using it to guide my playing and, on a more conceptual level, my life.

The list of influences goes on and on. The Art teacher, Mr. Blank, demanded we ask ourselves why we made each line, what function and role it had. Because of my German class, I became interested in touring Germany, ended up recording several albums there and performing for years – in German! A new teacher of a literature class taught me to look at language, to understand the importance of translating everything: not just words, but emotion, nuance, gesture – and this awareness affects how I write lyrics. My history teacher, Eduardo Bodipo-Malumba taught me to understand the importance of having an outside perspective. It tickled me at first that a non-American would be teaching me American History. I foolishly thought that BEING an American would give more, rather than less insight into my history.

I came to COM because I had a specific problem to solve: I was conceiving and inventing large-scale musical theatre pieces, but I had no idea how to get them down on paper so they could actually be performed. So basically, I came to learn to read and write music. By the time I left, I had a much wider mind, a new instrument and a direction for my life.

In addition to all the other reasons I’ve given, when I even begin to think about it I'm dumbfounded at the quality of education I got for free. This was a serious music department. The facilities were great. It was a comprehensive two-year program (though I think I stayed for three, getting as much as I could out of it).

I also loved that I went through the program with a fixed group of students, although the classes got smaller and smaller, and by the last quarter there were probably only 20 of us out of the 150 or so that started – but it was great to have that continuity, to watch each other develop.

If it's anything like it was when I went, I got at least as good an education as I would have gotten had I started at U.C. Berkeley (which is where I transferred from COM), but without certain kinds of pressure. It was unusual to have the kinds of challenges, opportunities and level of teaching in a school that didn't have the kind of external pressure a university has. By external pressure I mean financial pressure, the pressure of students who are rabid about their careers. For me, it was great to be in an environment where it seemed that the focus was on LEARNING, not on getting a degree.

It was also the perfect school for me because of the integration and cross-pollination from the diversity of classes (history, literature, art, phys ed, music, language). My work depends on integrating and developing ideas, more than on a concentration in one field, so COM was a great beginning for me, and it enhanced my learning experience because of its size, teaching ethic and quality of teachers.

I always wondered about that – and even asked about it at the time – how it was possible for the school to get such a high quality of teachers, even though it was a "Junior College." I was told at the time that the reputation of the school attracted great teachers.

Certainly there were many individual and specific challenges that individual teachers helped me with. Honestly, the greatest challenge to me at the time was how to get a good education when I had no money, and how to get the kind of diverse, integrated education that I craved.

For better or for worse I was also (and still am) very self-directed and I knew exactly what I WANTED to learn when I started at COM – so one of the greatest things about the school was that I could find the resources I needed to pursue my own self-directed way.