Introduction
By Stephen Kent Goodman
Bio/profile: Stephen Kent Goodman
Dear Automatic Musical Enthusiast;
My life has been a rare synthesis of automatic music with human performers. At age 14, I dropped out of junior high school to form my own professional concert band, which lasted about a year. I conducted a massed band made up of several high school bands performing my marches at the world's fair of 1964-65, and in 1966, became the youngest guest conductor of the last professional concert band in America, performing in Central Park in New York City. After earning a musical composition scholarship to the University of Southern California in 1968, I cut classes to learn automatic musical instrument rebuilding from Don Rand in Burbank. I spent many hours listening to the rolls on the various machines that passed through Rand's hands between 1967 and 1980. Several years later, I opened my own restoration shop in Beaumont, CA, and Rand & Openshaw (who owned the Los Angeles Griffith Park Carousel at the time) would outsource band organ and orchestrion parts to me to rebuild for them, as well as fashion new parts for their clients' orchestrions and band organs. In 1974, I began to learn how to make organ pipes and voice them from J. Lee Haggart of Granada Hills, master organ builder and former employee of both the Robert Hope-Jones Co. in New York and the Morton Organ Co. in Van Nuys, CA.
Automatic musical instruments played an important "roll" in my development as a composer/arranger. I first discovered WurliTzer music courtesy of a style 30-A Mandolin PianOrchestra in the Playland Arcade, Balboa, California. I had lived in Balboa during 1963, and visited almost every weekend later in the sixties. The owner of the 30-A, Richard Sandoval, offered me the machine for $10,000.00- a fortune in 1968 for a 17 year old kid. Later, Terry Hathaway bought it and it subsequently found its way into the collection of Mike Aames of Solana Beach, CA. I must have played every roll on its 6-roll changer dozens of times, thoroughly absorbing the famous WurliTzer school of arranging. Between that instrument and subsequent Seeburg, Coinola and WurliTzer and other instruments I would later own, plus 88-note "full orchestra" rolls played on my player piano, I became educated in the various roll arranging styles (which were based upon the solid band and orchestra arranging of the day) utilized for paper rolls. I also learned "period" arranging from listening to the Pryor Band, Victor Military Band, Prince's Band (and orchestra) & Edison Military Band 78s.
In 1976, I took my musical/pneumatic knowledge/skills and developed a new art form, automated musical sculpture, which was shown at several Los Angeles, San Diego and New York art galleries and museums. My ensemble of electro-pneumatic "art" contraptions played "music" using a tuning system of nearly 100 notes to each octave! Here was avant garde based upon the automatic theater organ technology of the 1920s! They recorded compositions and played them back digitally- years before the Yamaha DisKlavier (r) et al. The system I had designed was among the first incorporating usage of CMOS chip technology, and it allowed visitors to the installations to either try their hands (on touch-sensitive key boards arranged like no other keyboard had ever been) in creating their own compositions, or hear pre-recorded (and digitally encoded to operate the acoustic structures) music I had composed, mostly improvised, often with friends and associates.
At age 23, I was elected to the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) and did professional scoring in Hollywood of films and commercials.
In the early 1980s, I began composing original ragtime for concert bands, brass bands & other instrumental ensembles. Today, my compositions are published by Bernel Music, Ltd. (brass band), Bourne Co. (concert band), Concert Works Unlimited, Dorn Publications, Ludwig Music Publishing, Manhattan Beach Music, plus my own company, SKG Publishing, which in addition to publishing band & orchestra ragtime, has the largest listing available today of ragtime and blues for saxophone quartet. 1995 marks the 4th year I have been awarded an ASCAP Popular Music Composition Award for ragtime. In 1987, my rag for band, "That Newport Rag", was commissioned by the city of Newport, Oregon as their "official" music. I have also received commissions from the San Diego Symphony Orchestra, The Brazil Concert Band, to name a couple. I have contributed articles on ragtime, particularly for band, for "The Rag Times" (15522 Ricky Ct., Grass Valley, CA 95949) and was ragtime editor for "The West Coast Rag" from 1990-91. The demand for ragtime for bands and orchestras is brisk and growing fast- both for my originals as well as arrangements I have made. There are two contemporary piano roll arrangers planning "full scale" arrangements of several of my rags- a real treat for me as I have been a collector of rolls and music machines since the days of Hathaway & Bowers in the late 1960s!
Recordings: if you like the sound of band organs, why not hear the full concert band sound they originally tried to imitate? The third ragtime concert band CD I've done for Stomp Off Records is now available and features a nearly 50-piece Los Angeles based symphonic band, made up of both amateur and professional musicians, conducted by yours truly and offers the most exciting line up of seldom, if ever, recorded rags from the pre WW1 ragtime era plus several of my own numbers written over the last 12 years. Contact me for more information.
In conclusion, I want to thank Robbie Rhodes for getting me to take the time from my busy schedule to actually write and post this info, plus his enthusiasm and support (he's arranged and transcribed several of my numbers) of my original works, plus his occasional (and much too rare) public performances of them.
Contact me @ E-mail: ADBYTES@delphi.com Voice phone & fax: 209-226-7292
Respectfully posted,
Stephen Kent Goodman
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(Message sent Sun 20 Aug 1995, 16:20:24 GMT, from time zone GMT-0400.) |
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