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TODD MOE: It's 12:04 o'clock noon. Good afternoon. I'm Todd Moe with news from Minnesota Public Radio. Republican gubernatorial candidate Allen Quist today added a little known businessman and minister to his ticket.

Dan Williams is a computing consultant and pastor of grace Resurrection ministries in North Minneapolis. Williams is the only African-American candidate on any of the major party gubernatorial tickets. The state Republican convention begins Thursday in Minneapolis.

Officials of the Twin Cities suburb of Richfield and their allies are trying to call attention to their opposition to current plans for a new airport runway. Richfield officials say an environmental impact statement does not adequately address a noise problem they contend would make 1,500 homes uninhabitable.

The city has proposed a 330-million dollar noise mitigation plan. City manager Jim Prosser says the Metropolitan Airports Commission has refused to deal with the city's concerns.

JIM PROSSER: This is simply something you don't do, especially in Minnesota, that is, plop down a runway that close to residential property and then tell residents tough luck. We don't do that here. Certainly, certainly, there's no question about if we had proposed to put a residential community this close to an existing airport, we'd be laughed out of town.

TODD MOE: MAC officials say Richfield has valid concerns, but city officials refuse to negotiate and are trying to get the airport to pay for projects unrelated to the new runway.

Scattered showers and thunderstorms in Western and Southern Minnesota today, partly sunny in Duluth, and then a chance of afternoon thunderstorms. It will be mostly cloudy in the Twin Cities this afternoon with a 30% chance of afternoon thunderstorms, a high near 78. That's the news update. I'm Todd Moe.

GARY EICHTEN: Thank you, Todd. 11:06 o'clock. Programming on MPR is supported by Carousel Automobiles, the Audi store offering the Audi A4 Avant European sport wagons available in front track and quattro models.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

GARY EICHTEN: Good afternoon and welcome back to Midday here on Minnesota Public Radio. I'm Gary Eichten. Glad you could join us. Well, this hour on Midday, we're going to hear Voices of Minnesota interviews with two of Minnesota's best known musical figures. Later in the hour, we'll hear from Dominick Argento, but first, the words and artistry of Romuald Tecco.

[RALPH VAUGHAN WILLIAMS, "LARK ASCENDING"]

GARY EICHTEN: Lark Ascending by Ralph Vaughan Williams performed by Romuald Tecco. He plays the piece tomorrow night for the last time with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra. Tecco is concertmaster of the SPCO. And after 26 years in the chair, he's retiring and moving to New York.

Romuald Tecco was born in Toulon, France, and is still a French citizen. He told Minnesota Public Radio's Tom Crann. He began playing the violin at age 4 to fulfill a bet that his father had made with a neighbor.

ROMUALD TECCO: My father had a jewelry shop and had lost everything actually during the war, but bet a case of champagne with friends that he could learn, for some reason-- I don't know why-- that he could play-- he could learn to play a tune on the violin. I guess it's because there was a violin teacher next door not too far, the next house.

And my father was then 34 or 35. And the teacher said, no, I don't think you're going to make it, not in the amount of time that you've given yourself, but maybe your little son could because he's so young. He will register very fast. And it worked. I won the bet. He won his case of champagne, and I'm still playing the violin.

TOM CRANN: This was were four years.

ROMUALD TECCO: Old 4 and 1/2. Yeah.

TOM CRANN: 4 and half.

ROMUALD TECCO: Yeah.

TOM CRANN: Did you take lessons with the teacher who lived--

ROMUALD TECCO: Yes, Then I took lessons till I was about, I would think, 10 with her. And she was a very nice lady. I would almost go almost every night. Then at 10 years old, I went to the local conservatory and finished there in three years. Then it was either give up or go to the big conservatoire in Paris. And I decided to do that. So I left home when I was 13 to went to live in Paris with people I didn't know. I was all alone. And then for six years, I went to Paris.

TOM CRANN: Was that early to start at the conservatory in Paris?

ROMUALD TECCO: Yeah, rather early. Yeah. I finished when I was 19, then came to New York to the Juilliard School.

TOM CRANN: Was it Juilliard or was it New York that brought you to the US?

ROMUALD TECCO: It was Juilliard. It was the teacher at the Juilliard School was the legendary Ivan Galamian. And the good part, something I didn't know, I didn't speak a word of English when I first came 38 years ago, is that he spoke French fluently. So he taught me for the first year or two when I didn't speak English in French, which was very nice.

TOM CRANN: At Juilliard they're the best of the best in the world.

ROMUALD TECCO: Yeah.

TOM CRANN: From around the world.

ROMUALD TECCO: Yes.

TOM CRANN: So there must have been plenty of opportunity for you to play publicly, to get jobs and also to play with some of the absolute best players. Who were students at Juilliard when you were there?

ROMUALD TECCO: Well, I was concertmaster of the orchestra, and Pinchas Zukerman was sitting right in back of me, not because he was not as good as I was. He's always been better than I was, but it's because he was a little younger and not as disciplined as I was. So he used to kick my chair when he didn't like my bowings or things like that.

Well, Itzhak Perlman was there. Misha Dichter on the piano, Emanuel Ax. But a lot, lots of very good people. It was a very good year. Those five or six years was a very good year, if you know what I mean. It was a generation of now middle aged people that have done very well.

TOM CRANN: And one person you met there, and I imagine he was very influential, he was one of the reasons you're here in Minnesota is Dennis Russell Davies.

ROMUALD TECCO: Dennis, yes. I was almost going to forget him.

TOM CRANN: How could you? You can't forget him.

ROMUALD TECCO: No, of course not. Yes, we were very good friends from first day. He's two years younger than I am, isn't he? Three years, three years younger than I am. And I met him. We were in one of the music history classes or something like that, and we became instant friends for no reason whatsoever. And then he was a pianist then. And then we switched to conducting.

And then he formed a contemporary music group with Luciano Berio called the Juilliard Ensemble, and they needed a violin. And he asked me if I would join him. And this is how I got to be doing a lot of contemporary music. And I was his concertmaster of that group.

And when he got the job here in St. Paul, there was an opening for concertmaster. So he asked me if I would audition because he'd like me to come here. So I seemed to have passed muster with the orchestra committee, and here I am 26 years later. Yeah.

TOM CRANN: Well, the orchestra then was fairly new. It had been around for--

ROMUALD TECCO: Yeah, it around a little bit. But I must say, actually, almost everybody that I talked to on the East Coast advised me against coming here, not because it was not good, just because there had been so many failures of chamber orchestras all around the country, the Philadelphia, Los Angeles, they all tried. It didn't succeed.

And they say, well, you're losing all your connections. By that time, I was in a string quartet, the New York String Quartet. I was teaching at Juilliard Prep, at Swarthmore University, at the University of Pennsylvania, a few places here and there. I was freelancing quite a bit in New York, and the Juilliard Ensemble.

And they said, you're giving all that up for something that might fall within a year or two. And I said, well, I'm only going for a year or two anyway, so it doesn't really matter.

TOM CRANN: Is that what you thought at that time?

ROMUALD TECCO: Well, I came from America for one year, and I liked it and I came here for a year or two or three, just to test the grounds. And it turned out to be a very good thing, so I just stayed. And the community has been splendid.

It has supported those two orchestras, which is I think is the only city, if you count the metropolitan area of Minneapolis, St. Paul, as I count it, as one city. It's two cities, but I count as one big place, supporting two major orchestras. It's quite something. It does not happen too many other places.

TOM CRANN: But you're working in New York, and it would seem like in some ways a Mecca for musicians.

ROMUALD TECCO: Well, it's a pain to have many little jobs. It's much better to have one big one because they have their favorite people when you freelance, and it's very difficult, you don't get. And I even played second violin for Connie Francis at the Copacabana.

TOM CRANN: So Dennis Russell Davies was here until the early '80s, was it?

ROMUALD TECCO: Till 1980. And then Pinchas Zukerman took over. And that took another personality because he's a different guy and--

TOM CRANN: But a fiddler like yourself, was there ever any tension or friction, or did you get along even better?

ROMUALD TECCO: Oh yeah, there was never, never any friction because of that, not at all. Actually, it's very freeing to play for another musician, another violinist for us violins because he knows it's difficult. And he knows it's easy to make a mistake. It's not like-- so, no, there was never, none of that. We never, ever would criticize if you made a mistake or something.

So that was very nice. But then he took-- the whole thing took another more-- this everybody knows Pinchas Zukerman. With Dennis Davies, it was a little different. He was at the beginning of his career. And when we go places, they had to have a half full house. But when we started touring with Pinchy, then it became to be a full house, especially when we toured.

TOM CRANN: Dennis Russell Davies had a real interest and still does in contemporary music.

ROMUALD TECCO: Actually, I'm going to visit him this summer in Salzburg and of all places, he's doing Mahagonny by Kurt Weill in Salzburg, which is a Mozart shrine. And he just finished doing Lulu by Berg in Paris.

TOM CRANN: But those years, those earlier years must have been-- were the years of experimenting for the orchestra more contemporary.

ROMUALD TECCO: Yes, a lot of it, a lot of very adventurous programming, which to me was very stimulating because I really liked that kind of thing very much. It makes your brains work. You're not on automatic style pilot, not necessarily on automatic pilot, but some very often, you know what Mozart style is.

Well, that's not true anymore because with the new conductors, with the informed performances, techniques and things, you learn a little more. But back in the '70s, that did not exist yet much. So if you played Mozart, you knew exactly how you played Mozart. If you played Haydn, you know how to play Haydn.

But all those new pieces and new notations of music was very stimulating for the mind. And it took a few days to decipher a new piece, which was wonderful instead of now it's one rehearsal and you can play it. But with that kind of music, it was not possible.

GARY EICHTEN: Romuald Tecco. He's retiring after 26 years as concertmaster of the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra. His final concert is tomorrow night in St. Paul. You're listening to our Voices of Minnesota interviews on Midday. Later in the hour, we'll hear a conversation with composer Dominick Argento.

Tecco and his Juilliard classmate Dennis Russell Davies went to work for the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra back in 1972. In fact, they rented a U-Haul van together to make the move from New York to the Twin Cities.

Davies later took a conducting job in Germany, but Tecco stayed on with the SPCO and has been concertmaster for St. Paul Chamber Orchestra conductors Pinchas Zukerman, Christopher Hogwood, and Hugh Wolff. Let's return to Tom Crann's conversation with Romuald Tecco.

TOM CRANN: I want to share an observation that a friend of mine made coming to a classical music concert for the first time. It was a colleague where I used to work. We went to the orchestra there, and he'd never been. And out comes the concertmaster of that orchestra. And we all clap, and he turns to me and said, you know, I was at the football game this past weekend, and I've probably clapped more now and no one's played anything. Why do we clap for him, the concertmaster?

And so the same thing will happen at the Ordway. And you come out on stage always sort of exuberantly, look like you're ready to go to work, but you're enjoying it. And the audience applauds. But what's gone on? Before you come out on stage, what does the concertmaster stand for, and what have you done with the orchestra? In other words, what is your job?

ROMUALD TECCO: That night, you mean, that night--

TOM CRANN: That night or during the week

ROMUALD TECCO: --I have done nothing, absolutely nothing. I still wonder why they applaud. I have no idea. I guess it just signals the start of the concert or the show or whatever people would like to call it. I think it's just the formal start. That's about it. And then you're supposed to have been having a good time. I always have a good time when I do it.

Well, the job of the concertmaster, that's a toughie. It's a little more complicated than-- you write down bowings for the violins, which means in which direction the bow is going to go. And it's very complicated. Then you also-- the hardest part is the interaction between the conductor and the concertmaster.

Very often conductors will say, not all of them, some of them are very specific, but they will say, I want this a little more dreamy mood. So you have to translate that so everybody will understand what a dreamy mood will be in technical terms. And it's not that they don't understand. Everybody knows. But you clarify it. It's just I will turn around and say, well, let's do this this way, and do you like this, to the conductor. And if the conductor likes it, that's fine.

And also sometimes, the diplomacy. When you don't like what the conductor does, if it's somebody you don't know, you have to really be walking on eggs, trying to make them change. If you don't think it sounds the best with this orchestra, you try and you try to do it behind the scenes so nobody gets hurt. So it's a lot of little things to do.

But as far as being getting applaud-- actually, I have a very funny story on this. There's somebody in our orchestra who has a nanny who also works on their spare time in a rest home for older people.

And one of the nights she brought one of her most favorite, not patients, but residents of that rest home where she was. And it was an older lady who had never really been to a concert. And after the intermission, when I came again for the second time after the rest of the orchestra, she turned to this young woman and said, now, why does this guy always arrive late? So you see, it's different things to different people.

TOM CRANN: Do you feel if you go back to France, have you been to France with the Chamber Orchestra?

ROMUALD TECCO: No, never.

TOM CRANN: Never, really?

ROMUALD TECCO: Never, no, and I'm very sad about that. We were supposed to go, I think, in '93 and somehow the French people canceled. They are very insular in France. They don't like people to come from other countries much. And that's too bad.

TOM CRANN: The phrase that's often used for concertmaster is first among equals. And you've been with the orchestra 26 years. Are many of the players-- you've known many of the players for many years.

ROMUALD TECCO: Yes.

TOM CRANN: How important is it that you all get along and that you get along with them because of your leadership role.

ROMUALD TECCO: It's very, very important, very important because if the mood is not right, you can't do good music when people don't like-- if people don't like each other, you don't make good music. So this is a very unique group, I think that-- well, I don't really know because I haven't worked that much and many other groups. But this group is really very good.

When we're on the road, we all try to eat together, if possible, sometimes not, but most of the time, yes, because you need your privacy a little bit sometimes. But I don't really socialize after concerts or something. No, no, I just come home and have a beer or a glass of wine or whatever.

No, what I think what the audiences usually don't realize from for orchestra musicians, it's not the same as theater people, because once the theater people have rehearsed, they perform, and perform, and perform, and perform, and then they may do a little-- but we change programs every week, and we have to rehearse.

So our day starts at 10 o'clock. And usually, it starts earlier than that because you got to warm up. You just can't play, especially as you get older, you can't play without warming up for a good 45 minutes or something like that. Just like when you're like an athlete, you have to warm up. That's why we all play injured activities because when we're young, we don't really take seriously the advice of warming up.

And so let's say it starts at-- for me, I always get to the Ordway theater around 9:15 and warm up till 10:00, then we rehearse till 12:30. And then maybe till 4:00, from 2:00 to 4:00 again. That's it for the day. So that's almost a 9:00 to 5:00.

But then days of concerts, many a time-- let's take tonight and tomorrow. Tonight, we have a concert at 8 o'clock, which starts for me at 7:00 because I warm up. Then tomorrow morning, I have another concert at 10:30 till 12:30.

Then I have the rest of my day. I have to do what I have to do during the day, just like everybody else. You have to do your correspondence. You have to make your phone calls. You have to do your business. You have to go to the grocery store, do the laundry.

And then I got to get myself ready to give a concert again that night at 8 o'clock. So which starts at 7:00 again. So it's a much longer day. So that's three concerts in 24 hours plus our own business, plus we've got to have a life like everybody else.

So it's a little different from people who-- when you get out of the office at 5 o'clock you don't really-- that's it. When we get out of rehearsal, we still have to practice the pieces for next week. Every week, we practice on our own before we practice with the orchestra the pieces for the next week because we only have three-- when we have a Baroque series, we only have three rehearsals.

And when we do for the big Masterworks series, we only have four rehearsals. And sometimes it's very difficult music, so if you're not ready to perform-- to rehearse it and knowing all the notes, you're in trouble. And this is where this orchestra is very good. Everybody is usually quite ready by the first rehearsal.

TOM CRANN: Memories and, of course, since you're retiring--

ROMUALD TECCO: Good and bad.

TOM CRANN: Yes, good and bad. I want to talk-- everyone's going to ask you this. Was there ever a-- now as concertmaster, you're called upon to lead the orchestra. To put it politely, was there ever a crisis on the podium in a concert where you were called on to, in effect, conduct or lead the orchestra.

ROMUALD TECCO: Well, there was one when the conductor was a violinist, and she got sick. Her name is-- she's the leader of the St. Martins in the Fields.

TOM CRANN: Iona Brown?

ROMUALD TECCO: Iona Brown. Yes, Iona Brown, yes. Iona Brown was here and she was supposed to perform The Seasons and then other things and conduct from the chair. And she had pneumonia on dress rehearsal. So I did not play The Seasons. But, one of our second violins, Michael Sobieski, got up and played The Seasons without rehearsal, The Four Seasons, four of them.

So I went to rehearse with him because I was supposed then to conduct from the chair. And then there was a Mendelssohn symphony and something. So we did it-- I did it from the chair. And that was a crisis for me because I've never really done that. And I don't really care for it. If I want it to be a conductor, I'd be a conductor. I don't care for it.

And then there was once another know the conductor. He is now dead was a famous cellist-turned-conductor from Romania, I think, was quite famous. And he became one night very drunk on the podium. So that was tough and kept shaking his finger at me, wanting to fire one of the second violinists because he didn't like the way this bow went or something. I have no idea. And so I just took his hand and thanked him very much and took him backstage.

TOM CRANN: During the concert?

ROMUALD TECCO: No, at the end of the concert. He was shaking during the whole concert his finger right in front of my nose asking, fire that guy, fire that guy, and then trying to conduct him. And I remember I was playing the Bach double, and we asked him, we said, we can't play this with that conductor because we've done it before. I said, and no, he wanted to conduct, though. He was completely roaring drunk. That was a crisis. Yeah.

TOM CRANN: Now, more pleasant memories, what are some of your more pleasant concerts and would they have happened here or on tour?

ROMUALD TECCO: I always quote the most fabulous ones as far as I'm concerned, because I love the voice-- if I had my choice, I'd be a singer even though I have a lousy voice-- was when Jessye Norman when Pinchas Zukerman because of his friendship with her, she accepted to come here.

And in 1983, I still remember, she did Les Nuits D'été by Berlioz. And because of my privileged seat where I sit, I always can be next to the soloist, whether they play anything or sing or play the horn or play the piano. I'm always next to them. And to be next to that voice was something else.

TOM CRANN: Now we know you're not crazy about the Minnesota weather, but you have equally fond memories in many ways of being here. What will you miss, or what's a special thing for you living here in Minnesota and working in St. Paul.

ROMUALD TECCO: I think the civility, probably the civility of the region. Everybody is really-- Minnesota nice is just the start of it. People are very, very civil, and civilized, and friendly, and polite, and that I'm going to miss very much.

TOM CRANN: And what's ahead for you? I can't believe you're going to just put the fiddle and bow down and--

ROMUALD TECCO: My body has to heal first. My body is really hurt. So from my hips, from standing and practicing crooked, nobody ever told me about it, to my rotator cuffs and both my shoulders, arthritis in fingers, and tendinitis in elbows and wrists, you name it. I got it. So this is one of the reasons why I'm stopping. It's just time I stopped because I'm hurting myself too much.

And I've tried, what do you call it, rehabilitation or re-education. In French, it's re-education, rehabilitation. And that worked a little bit, but it still hurts. And I'm in traction every day. I have a pulley on the door. And then I have a harness on my head under my chin and my neck, on the back of my neck. And I pull myself up with a weight.

TOM CRANN: This is very physically demanding work.

ROMUALD TECCO: It's very difficult. Well, especially the violin or the viola, the viola probably even more because it's even bigger and longer. But for all of your life, your professional life, you fight gravity. The cello you play with gravity. The piano you play with gravity. On the violin and viola, your arms are up all the time.

For sometimes when I was younger, I would practice 10 hours a day. For 10 hours a day, you're up. You squeeze the violin with your neck, and both your arms are up fighting gravity. And you even fight the gravity with holding the bow on the strings. Otherwise, you crush the sound. So nothing works with gravity. So you're always harming yourself, always, always.

TOM CRANN: Well, let's hope for a restful period for your retirement--

ROMUALD TECCO: Also I'm looking forward to the day where I can wake up and say, I would like to practice because right now I say, I have to practice, which is very different. But "would like to practice" would be a very nice phrase to be able to say to myself.

TOM CRANN: I wish you all the best. And it was a pleasure to talk with you. Romuald Tecco, thank you.

ROMUALD TECCO: Same here. Thank you very much.

GARY EICHTEN: Romuald Tecco. He's retiring after 26 years as the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra's concertmaster. Tecco spoke with Minnesota Public Radio's Tom Crann. His final performance with the group is tomorrow night in St. Paul.

Here's a portion of a recent recording of Tecco and the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra performing Dvorak's Serenade in E Major Opus 22, The Final Movement conducted by Hugh Wolff.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

GARY EICHTEN: You're listening to our Voices of Minnesota interviews coming to you on our Midday broadcast.

[DALE WARLAND SINGERS, "PETER QUINCE AT THE CLAVIER"]

GARY EICHTEN: A portion of Peter Quince at the Clavier, composed by Dominick Argento and performed by the Dale Warland Singers with Paul Schoenfeld at the piano. Dominick Argento has written 13 operas. He's a regents professor of music at the University of Minnesota, won the Pulitzer Prize, as a matter of fact, for music back in 1975 for his song cycle From the Diary of Virginia Woolf.

Dominick Argento has lived in Minnesota for 40 years. He was born in York, Pennsylvania. Argento told Minnesota Public Radio's John Zach his formal music training started late.

JOHN ZACH: You certainly weren't the child prodigy.

DOMINICK ARGENTO: No.

JOHN ZACH: You started in your teens somewhere, right?

DOMINICK ARGENTO: As a matter of fact, I started at the age of 16 to have piano lessons. And what had happened was that my father had a restaurant. And in that restaurant, they used to have a band that played on weekends on Fridays and Saturdays for dancing, three or four piece band.

And I recall to this day that my father, who had been an immigrant, didn't very much care about people who wrote and ask you for money, like organizations called ASCAP, because he was playing ASCAP music. He didn't know what ASCAP was. And certainly I didn't. I was a child.

But the ASCAP people came in one time as they were surveying. This is back in the early '30s. And the band started to play You Can't Pull the Wool Over My Eyes, which I thought was rather ironic. And so they fined my father. He had an injunction.

He couldn't use music, so he paid what he thought was a colossal fine of $800, which was absolutely outrageous. He had no reason why. I wish he could know how much I get from ASCAP these days. He'd feel the investment was worthwhile.

But in any case, what happened was that at the age of 16, they ceased having music at my father's place. And he said, what do you want for your 16th birthday? And I said, I would like that upright piano we have at the restaurant there. It's an old piano, but you're not using it. And I can only use it on Sundays when we're closed.

So he said, do you want that? You want to bring it to the house? I said, yeah, could I have it? He goes, all right. I came home on my 16th birthday from school, eager to see that upright piano in some corner of our home. There was a brand new baby grand piano. He had gone out and bought it. And I just felt, with that, I simply had to become a musician. There was no going back. And I started taking piano lessons.

So I did take piano lessons at 16 to 18 was drafted. And when I got out of the army, I had the G.I. Bill, so I wanted to go to conservatory. I thought it was going to be a piano major. I signed up as a piano major. And when I got to the conservatory, I discovered that absolutely everybody in the conservatory, including secretaries and janitors, played the piano better than I did because two years there was no preparation for a conservatory student.

Luckily, just about at the point where I was considering suicide or accounting, something different, the harmony teacher I had was a gentleman named Nicolas Nabokov, first cousin to Vladimir Nabokov. And he noticed. He said, your harmony exercises are all very interesting. Do you write music? And I said, no.

He said, well, would you consider thinking about it over the summer, write some piece. Go home and read the letters of Mozart and write some pieces. And that was the strangest bit of advice I've ever had. I did get the letters of Mozart, and I did read them, and it did change my life. And I did write a few pieces of music. And I came back and he said, let's make you a composition major.

JOHN ZACH: I've talked to some composers who seem to have had these epiphany moments when, say, they're listening to the radio or to a record where all of a sudden that music clicks. It speaks to them in a way that nothing else has. And from that moment on, they knew they have to have a life in music or maybe even writing music. And it doesn't sound like there was really that same moment for you.

DOMINICK ARGENTO: Well, there was something similar. At about the age of 14 or so, I was starting to haunt our local public library, mainly because I was building model airplanes. And that in the hobby section was rather close to music, which I stumbled on.

And there was a biography of George Gershwin, the name George Gershwin. I had heard Rhapsody in Blue, but, I wasn't thrilled, but I heard it. And here was a biography, and I thought, well, I'll read it. And in the biography, he talks about Igor Stravinsky. Nevertheless, he mentions rite of spring. Actually at the library, you could get records at the time. And I did get the recording. And I thought, that's not bad.

And I read his biography, and he talks about Rimsky-Korsakov. And little by little, I worked my way through music backwards all the way back to Josquin des Prez or someone. It was never an epiphany, I'm sorry to say. I wish I could say, I was struck by a bolt of lightning. Somebody-- Puccini says, God tapped him on the shoulder and said, write operas, now mind, nothing but operas.

JOHN ZACH: Did the family-- did your folks pressure you to get some honest work instead of music.

DOMINICK ARGENTO: One pressure of being immigrants, music was a flighty notion for a career. And like a good Jewish family, they would have preferred me to be a doctor or a lawyer. I don't think they even knew there were other vocations, but those were the two top ones, if there were any.

And they did think they'd like me to do it. But somewhere, because of my interest in building model airplanes and all, when I got to high school and I was starting my piano lessons as a matter of fact, I got a choice-- I don't know if they do it any longer in high school. I had a choice of taking what was called a commercial course, which was learning to be a secretary or a bookkeeper or something. The classical course, which prepared you for college or the industrial course.

And I chose the industrial course. I don't think I even consulted my parents about it. They didn't know much about those things. So I chose the industrial course, which meant that throughout my entire high school experience, two weeks were spent in a factory on an apprenticeship to be a machinist or a toolmaker and two weeks in school. And I just loved that. I thought that was neat. I was going to become a great toolmaker, whatever that means, but I was very interested in doing that.

And I don't-- I had no college preparation. But throughout all of that, the parents never said one thing or another. If I wanted to be in a Giasco course, fine. If I wanted to have a piano, fine. They would have liked the lawyer or the doctor degree. But if it was not to be, there was no pressure about it. They weren't particularly musical either, so they had no feeling one way or the other.

JOHN ZACH: Are you a craftsman with your hands?

DOMINICK ARGENTO: Yeah.

JOHN ZACH: Do you like stuff like that?

DOMINICK ARGENTO: I think there's a real relationship between all of that. Maybe it only applies to me, but at least in my own case, I see it. The idea of that the army decided that I was a cryptographer. I didn't decide that. But they gave you various tests when you were first drafted. And they were giving us this test on Morse code. I had never heard Morse code.

But about 250 of us were in this room, and they were playing slowly, dit dit dit doot. And you were supposed to recognize the letters. And to me, it was rhythmic. It was always dit-dit-dot, and then little by little, it sped up. And it got faster and faster, the others around me were dropping like flies.

And after a while, I was the only one left in the room. And they're going dit-dit-dot dit, dit, bop, bop, bop. And I'm hearing it as music, I'm hearing rhythmic patterns, so I'm recognizing it. And they said, this boy is a budding genius on the Morse code. And before I knew it, I was sent off to intelligence school and learning code and cryptography and the whole business.

But in my mind, there's an association or a connection between cryptography, which I had a natural knack for, building model airplanes, which I wanted to do, writing music, which I think is another form of solving problems, and the fact that I'm an incorrigible reader of mysteries. I'll read the worst mysteries in the world. I think I do read the worst mysteries in the world because I've read all the best ones.

But all of those in my mind are connected with something that you're given some things and you have to consider them, contemplate them, and come to a conclusion about them, whether the final object is a plane or a composition or a decoded message.

JOHN ZACH: Is there something that really intrigues you about the problem of it, though, the problem solving?

DOMINICK ARGENTO: The process is what pleases me. It's not so much the outcome. For example, to get down to nitty-gritty, if we have a sewer back up in our basement rather than call Roto-Rooter which I can't afford to do, I would rather try to find a way to do it myself.

I like doing it. It's the process that you're building toward an end, or you're starting something in order to accomplish his goal. And it's not so much what it is at the end. And it's funny, composition isn't exactly like that. Composition for me is quite a different matter.

No composition I've ever started turned out to be the composition that was on paper. I always think I'm starting to write this piece, but when it's finished, it's that piece. It doesn't go where it wants to go, and we can talk about that if you like, but it's just that's a different one. Maybe it is connected. Maybe what I'm still just enjoying is the procedure, not the actual result.

GARY EICHTEN: Composer Dominick Argento talking with John Zach. You're listening to our Voices of Minnesota interviews here on Midday. Dominick Argento attended the Peabody conservatory and received his PhD from the Eastman School of Music. He's been a University of Minnesota faculty member since 1958. Let's return to John Zach's conversation with Dominick Argento.

JOHN ZACH: What is the course of a composition for you? Do you-- when you set out to write a piece, what are you trying to do with that piece? What is the end goal? Are you trying to communicate an emotion to somebody, an idea, or something else?

DOMINICK ARGENTO: I think there are two kinds of composers, and I think we are pre-wired. There are those who are simply pre-wired to be experimenters, pioneers, martyrs, if you like. Then there are other composers who simply are not. And I think their purpose is simply to write music that does communicate.

They might-- the thing that comforts me most of all is that side by side are these two wonderful composers, one named Richard Wagner, who's out there muddying up the whole playing field. And then here's Giuseppe Verdi, who simply grinding out one more beautiful opera after another. To me, they have equal value.

But there's something in Wagner's psyche that just said find a new way of writing drama and opera music. And there's something over here, Verdi, who's saying, I wonder if I can do this better than Rossini did it. But those are the two types.

My type, I know, I'm not born to experiment musically. I may in other forms, in the way I do plumbing and so on. But the idea of writing a piece for me, the primary idea is to make some spark cross from me to you. And it's the music I write that I think carries a spark.

I think every artist primarily goal is to give the spark of ignition, and it depends on the listener out there what kind of fuel is in them, whether they're going to catch fire or not. Somebody who says it's far better than I could ever say is Joseph Conrad in the preface, the only preface I think he ever wrote about art is the preface to the Nigger of the Narcissus.

And he talks about this lonely business of the artist who reaches within himself, pulls out whatever it is, this piece of his temperament, and passes it on to someone. And if he's lucky, there'll be someone out there who has a similar temperament, who will understand and respond to or get the feeling from it that he wants them to have the feeling of. This is probably the time to talk about how I go about writing a piece.

JOHN ZACH: Yeah, I'd like to know what you do with that.

DOMINICK ARGENTO: You can start anywhere. And usually, I start by rummaging in my drawers for an old piece that I never finished. I don't throw anything away, no matter how bad it is, because it might fit somewhere else.

And I always start that, and it never works. I always go through these hundreds of scraps. And I go, there's got to be something here. Nothing. And so we start with something else. And I can guide a piece. I can write and add to it day by day until the piece is about one fourth of its length.

And at that point, the piece begins to write itself. And I don't mean that in any mysterious way. I mean that I don't have much choice about it. After this, I just know it's got to be that. And the reason I know it's got to be that is because the piece is now telling me that's what I want here. It really starts to take over.

And that's why I said earlier that no piece I've ever written turned out to be the piece that I started to write. Because when I start, I never foresee what's down there at the end. That sort of just happens when the piece is, say, a quarter, a third, even less done.

And then it starts to say, well, why don't we do this, Dominick? Hey, how about let's do, and it's the reason why I drive my wife crazy, but I can never add one bar to a piece of music without going back and playing it from the beginning again.

I can't play the four bars up to this point and then add one more bar, then add one up. I've got to go back all the way to the beginning to find out if it fits and it makes sense where it is. And so the piece says, OK, let's go. That's all right. We'll accept that.

JOHN ZACH: With Peter Quince at the Clavier, what kinds of things were you trying to achieve with the choir and the text setting, let's say? How did you illustrate the text or think about illustrating that text so it would come across in a way that was more than just reading?

DOMINICK ARGENTO: Well, the worst thing I think you can do in setting text is to simply ape the original meter. One of the reasons I've almost exclusively set prose in my whole career, I've set very few real poems to music and almost no contemporary poems except the Wallace Stevens one.

I prefer prose. I like I've set letters, diaries, journals, pamphlets. I could set the back of a detergent box, the instructions on how to do silk or whatever. I like that because I get the opportunity then to make the rhythm of it. I get the opportunity to decide which are the words that ought to be stressed rather than the poet.

It's too difficult to take a real poem to be or not to be that. We already got the iambic pentameter going. You can't just sit on the two part. You've got to get to the B. Whereas with prose, I feel completely at liberty to do whatever I think is there.

And everything has a subtext for me when I'm setting it to music. It's not just the text is being sung, but there's underneath that another text I think much, much like it. But there's another text that suggests certain emphases that you wouldn't do in the original one or certain ways of stressing or prolonging words.

As you may have noticed from even that piece, I will never, never repeat words, the way often is done in songs or particularly in older music. Bach could make a 5-minute piece out of I will be a shield upon thine arm. That would drive me nuts, obviously, for Bach is another aesthetic. But apart from that, I think I pay more attention to words than probably some composers do. I'm very fond of words. I'm very fond of language.

JOHN ZACH: And you're also setting English texts, and English probably doesn't fall that way as much as, say, Italian.

DOMINICK ARGENTO: More so, yeah. English is probably the most difficult language, I think--

JOHN ZACH: It got to be.

DOMINICK ARGENTO: --rhythmically because, well, a wonderful thing about Italian, you can take a verb like I am, "io sono", and you can say "io sono". And four vowels are "io sono" and three or "io" or "io son" on two or just "son" on one. Apparently, it doesn't make any difference. It certainly didn't make any difference to Verdi or Puccini.

You can't get away with that kind of thing in English. And I think, the French are so tied up to their language. They're so respectful of it. They wouldn't dream of the kind of approaches that Americans take to American English.

JOHN ZACH: You got the Pulitzer Prize for the song cycle From the Diary of Virginia Woolf, 1975, I think it is. That work may be your most widely recorded work.

DOMINICK ARGENTO: Oddly enough, it's not.

JOHN ZACH: Not really?

DOMINICK ARGENTO: No. I had to make up a discography, and I discovered there are four recordings of Virginia Woolf, but there are six of Six Elizabethan Songs. And Six Elizabethan Songs are simply, well, they're more recordable. They're easier to sing.

And they happen to be on the required repertoire list in all Canadian schools of music, which is a big deal to me. I think I find that more interesting than the little surprise that you can't get out of a Canadian school of music as a voice majors unless you learn Six Elizabethan Songs.

JOHN ZACH: You also, as I understand it, you were writing one text or you were working on one text, and then when you were trying to research that novel, you went to the diaries and then you ended up setting the diary instead.

DOMINICK ARGENTO: A wonderful friend of mine, Robert Moore, who taught English at the university, had one time called my attention to the interludes in a novel called The Waves. And the interludes, which happen about every 30 pages or so, a paragraph or two on the rising of the sun out at sea.

So at the very beginning, it only comes up slightly. And then you have to read part of the novel. Then the next section continues that progression until the full sun is out, the high sun. And I thought, well, that was an interesting idea. You could write four or five songs, each one a progression. And then I started to think about, well, maybe that ain't so hot.

I knew her writer's diary had just come out. And I thought, I'd like to look up in her diary what she was thinking about, what she intended by this when she was writing these episodes. And the moment I got hold of the writer's diary and started reading it, I realized, forget the wave. This is where it is. Because first of all, it's so private. It's so non-public.

She wasn't writing that diary for publication, and it's so sparse, and it's so pure. There's not a bit of flab on it. It's a complete honesty in those remarks. That just sold me on the text.

JOHN ZACH: I've heard that you have quit writing operas now.

DOMINICK ARGENTO: I haven't quit. I'm just tired. I've written 13 operas, if you count one before that, even 14. But the point is that, and there's a kind of-- I've been lucky. I don't I've ever written an opera who didn't have a second performance. And a good many of them had third and fourth.

And some even have gone on for a while, but none of them really has made a way into anybody's real repertoire. I was going to say, if it gets done, it's the oddity on the season. And since they're all so fresh and unknown, they're all practically virgins. I don't know why I should add to the population of-- if people want to do an Argento opera, they're not there to pick from.

They have either not been done in this town or not been done in that town. And that, I feel a little peculiar adding more to that. I have a vision of the repertoire. I think other composers may share it. Here is something called the repertoire. It's a big mountain.

And we composers make our little spitballs, and we throw it up. And for a moment, it looks like it's going to cling and it stays there for about 2 seconds, and then it starts rolling down. And before you know, it's off again.

Every opera company in this country has a 23 or 24 masterpiece list. And they will choose their five or six operas off of that. And they'll go for five years, and they won't repeat it. And it's time to go back to Pagliacci and talk about it. And they're very happy with that.

They really don't particularly need a new opera. I don't know what it is that it would be. I wish I had the energy to contemplate it. What does it take to make an opera company realize that they not only have become a museum, but they've now become a kind of dusty, boring museum at that.

JOHN ZACH: Well, now that you have entered your eighth decade--

DOMINICK ARGENTO: Is it that already? Don't say things like that.

JOHN ZACH: I'm sorry.

DOMINICK ARGENTO: At heart, I'm 16 years old. I'm just waiting to go for my next piano lesson, and hope I don't get rapped on the knuckles.

JOHN ZACH: I was going to make a nice comparison to Verdi in how he wrote some of his best stuff when he was in his 70s.

DOMINICK ARGENTO: Yes, he did.

JOHN ZACH: Is this going to be the glory decade for you?

DOMINICK ARGENTO: I don't know. The fact that you bring up there he was in retirement and he had vowed he was not writing any more operas. And when he did get around to writing Falstaff for Otello, what he did was do it for himself and do it secretly. And it was not commissioned, and nobody was going to pester him to sing the lead in it or have the first premiere and so forth.

JOHN ZACH: Having been a teacher for 40 years, does that change your point of view as a composer?

DOMINICK ARGENTO: No, the good thing, I guess, about having done it is that talking to the student critically. In other words, looking at their music and making observations about, you've used that high note 16 times in this first page. Don't you think that's a bit much.

All of those kinds of criticisms, you become much more conscious about them in your own work. So when you go back and you're doing, saying, my god, I've been doing that too. I'm worse than that. But it just keeps you fresh about what it is you're doing.

And with a variety of students, there are so many possible things to criticize that would improve it that you get back and you start to think about. I could do that in my own piece. I could fix that. I could make that more interesting again by drawing this section out and cutting this one off, the thing I was just telling a student earlier. So those are--

The other thing-- the wonderful thing about teaching was just the enthusiasm you see around the young composers. I think, I don't know, I can't say that I've kept enthusiasm or not kept it, but I've felt enthusiastic about music all through it because I've been around kids.

They are kids to me, 19, 20, 21, 22, and some graduate students in late 20s. But the love for writing music that they feel is contagious. And I'm an old warrior at it, so I should have lost, but I haven't.

When I go to New York, for example, and I sit on a jury with some colleagues, composers who are even more famous than I am, we don't talk about that kind of thing, that kind of enthusiasm. We talk about the politics which have kept so-and-so from being famous. The other one ace him out of a Pulitzer Prize.

We're up in the world where all of the bad things are happening. And if you stayed in that world very long, I think you'd lose your enthusiasm. And it's such a relief to leave New York after that three or four days and come back and meet a student who comes in just full of beans and wants to-- what I've been thinking of, Dr. Argento. I'm going, yeah, that's the answer. Well, I'm so glad you got the solution. And it's fun. That's just wonderful.

GARY EICHTEN: Composer Dominick Argento speaking with Minnesota Public Radio's John Zach. Our Voices of Minnesota interview series is produced by Dan Olson. Well, that does it for our Midday program today. Gary Eichten here. I like to thank you for tuning in, and we hope you'll be able to join us tomorrow. I think it'll be a good program tomorrow.

11 o'clock tomorrow morning, we're going to be talking with the DFL Party's endorsed candidate for governor, Mike Freeman. Of course, later this week, the Republicans will be getting together in Minneapolis to try to endorse a candidate for governor. And we'll be providing extensive live coverage of tomorrow. We're going to be talking with the DFL's endorsed candidate for governor. That's at 11 o'clock