short version
© 1998 by Joseph L. Monzo
short version
© 1998 by Joseph L. Monzo
Born January 5, 1962, in Philadelphia, of Italian ancestry.
Grew up the the Overbrook section of West Philadelphia.
Played piano a bit around age 5 or 6, until we got rid of it. Didn't play piano again regularly until 12th grade.
As a child, very interested in science (especially Astronomy and Chemistry), football (American, naturally), and my coin and stamp collections, especially the coins. Served as an altar-boy in church for a few years, and was really into religion when I was young. I wanted to be Bart Starr (Green Bay Packers quarterback and My Hero) when I grew up.
Learned a bit of Italian in the 2nd grade, fascinated with Russian (largely because of the Cyrillic alphabet). Fascinated with languages and writing (including music notation) Smattering of knowledge of several dozen languages, proficient in French.
1969-1977 spent summer weekends and vacations in Ocean City, New Jersey.
Attended St. Donato's Catholic School up to the 5th grade, public schools after that until graduation from 12th grade. I distinctly recall what a culture shock public school was to me.
About once a month, my father used to bring out a clarinet and play several big-band swing tunes on it for a couple of hours. Other than that, and liking the Beatles a lot, music was not something I thought about much.
Used to play a set of 78-rpm records a lot, but the only tunes I can recall were "Buffalo Gals" and an excerpt from the first movement of Beethoven's 5th. A little later, I got the LP of "Mary Poppins" for my birthday, and played it seemingly all the time.
I got interested in the clarinet just as I started 6th grade, and had access to free lessons in school. In the 7th grade, John Jadus was my new music teacher, and Marc Johnson (not the well-known jazz bassist of the same name) became best friend. Mark and I had a friendly rivalry for 'best musician in the school', and this encouraged my musical development to the extreme.
Around this time I also started paying attention to my father's Beethoven records, and my parents found the score to Beethoven's 5th and Masters of the Symphony, an old music textbook by Percy Goetschius, in a thrift store and bought them for me. I learned a lot from both.
Forgot all about football and became very seriously interested in composing. Introducing Music by Otto Karolyi was an important resource. I tried composing, and wrote a lot of stuff that was bad imitation Haydn and Mozart.
Fascinated with bluegrass music, I became determined to get a banjo. When I found out my friend Mark could play a stomping gospel tune on the piano, I was envious, and decided to learn to play as many instruments as I could. My parents gave me a banjo upon graduating 8th grade, progressing quickly until I could play "Foggy Mountain Breakdown" (my goal), but after that, string instruments have proven to be my nemesis. Had periodic bouts with the guitar throughout my mature musical life (am in round 6 at the present).
In 9th grade Marc went to a different school and I didn't have as much contact with Mr. Jadus, so my musical development took an abrupt turn towards inner development. My self-education in music has continued to this day.
We moved to another part of Overbrook in 1975, and this was when I went totally out of my mind over Mahler, becoming completely engrossed in his musical universe. He's still my favorite composer and I'm still awed by the all-encompassing grandiosity of his musical and intellectual genius.
Began playing oboe, and later bassoon. After 9th grade, I went to a summer music camp with my friend Marc. Our big end-of-camp concert was to be the opening act for George Benson and Maynard Ferguson. Their jazz styles were beyond my taste at the time, but Maynard's version of "Don't Let The Sun GoDown On Me" got me interested in Elton John, of whom I became a huge fan (along with the Beatles). I listened them both a lot right up to the time I went to college.
During 10th grade, I also attended Settlement Music School on Saturdays, taking clarinet lessons, but was much more interested in my theory class, and after class would spend the rest of the afternoon in the school library. It was the first library I had found that had a big score collection. I also became extremely interested in Carl Nielsen's work, particularly his "Inextinguishable" Symphony (what a great title!).
Periodically throughout his life, my father has been serious about painting (in oils), and he's quite a good artist. My brother, Mario, was going to art school (he was very talented as a cartoonist when he was young -- too bad he never went into the field), and I got intrigued by art, and also began to draw and paint.
I went to music camp again after 10th grade, and this time began attracting the attention of the teachers more because of my composing than my abilities as a woodwind player.
My family moved from Philadelphia to Ocean City, just before I started 11th grade in 1977.
My friends here were almost exclusively musicians. Most of the kids who were good were into jazz, and I guess under peer pressure, I began to listen to it and appreciate it (in fact, Maynard was the man of the moment). I played Baritone Sax in the school 'stage band'.
Another new feature of my life was Marching Band. Basically, this was a drag, but I eventually played Tenor Sax as a squad captain. The consolation prize was the band trip at the end of the year. One of my best friends at the time was Jeff Morris, who went on to study acting and became a playwright and director in New York, and is still a very close friend (also living in Philadelphia now).
Became good friends with one non-musician, Chris Wittmann. He loved Emerson, Lake & Palmer, computers, and higher math. We became friends mainly because we both liked Astronomy (the branch of physics) and Queen and Pink Floyd (the rock groups) a lot.
My musical tastes were branching out quite a bit. I also had a different set of friends in Ocean City -- the kids in my neighborhood, most of whom I had known since 1968, from summer vacations. I remember that the school bus ride in the morning was just long enough for us to perform Frank Zappa's "Billy the Mountain" in its entirety before we got to school. I had never heard it, but knew it by heart by the time I graduated.
Hanging out after school with Dave Nickerson in 12th grade introduced me to Devo, Anthony Braxton, and finally some actual Frank Zappa records. We would listen to all sorts of unusual music, they stranger the better, and at one point formed a little jazz group that never went anywhere.
I studied composition, theory, counterpoint, jazz arranging, clarinet and conducting privately with Flip DePhillips, a local clarinetist/ saxophonist, composer and music teacher. I also played clarinet in the Ocean City Cultural Arts Orchestra, conducted by Edmund DeLuca, and for short periods for other groups that never quite got off the ground.
My trumpet-playing friend Steve Villager once played a Don Ellis tune called "Bulgarian Bulge" (download a video of it here) for me. The metrical subdivisions fascinated me -- I would later seek out Bulgarian music.
I had gotten accepted to Manhattan School of Music. I majored in composition with Elias Tanenbaum, who opened up my mind to corners of the musical universe that I never dreamed existed. I became good friends with Rand Steiger and Aaron Jay Kernis, both of whom have gone on to fame if not fortune, and with the small self-contained "composers class", which included Dan Palkowski, who later became a roomate, Santiago Perez, who is apparently quite successful these days in Barcelona, and Deniz Hughes (I knew her, pre-marriage, as Deniz Ulben), who is still active as a New York composer.
Dan also kept trying to turn me on to Yes, and I finally became a big fan the year after I left school. This was also the period of the all-night copying sessions with Santiago, while we listened to Steve Reich's "Music for 18 Musicians" over and over again.
Other than the vast new horizons Tanenbaum opened up to me, the most important musical influences at this time were my discovery of real Bulgarian folk music (download "Shareno Horo" at this site), with its fast asymmetrical meters and unusually close and dissonant vocal harmonies, and the increasingly popular style and technique of composition called minimalism, particularly Phillip Glass's "Einstein On The Beach". I went really nuts over both.
I also became infected with a perversely intense interest in maps (something which I've been surprised to find in quite a few of my friends) and a concommitant wanderlust. (To me, the interest in maps, travel, languages, and music notation is all of a piece)
Back during my first semester (1979), when I lived in mid-town Manhattan, I had purchased an interesting-looking book called "Genesis of a Music" by a composer I had never heard of named Harry Partch. To this day I'm not sure what caused me to buy it -- little did I know that it was a turning point in my life. He had some nice things to say about Mahler in the first part of the book, and there were color pictures of very odd-looking but beautiful instruments that he had built himself, so I bought it. I enjoyed reading that philosophical first part, but was bewildered by the mathematics which followed. It would be several more years before that part of the book would be absorbed and have any kind of effect on me.
I progressed quite well in school up to the end of my second year. Then suddenly, I got severe composer's block. I didn't realize it until later (after I had finally digested Partch's theories), but the cause of the problem was that, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't write in the academically-accepted serial manner because I personally couldn't escape the shackles of tonality which I felt around my musical thinking. But at the time, I didn't know the cause and was very frustrated.
After my girlfriend Christine and I broke up, I left New York, headed for Montreal, but instead spent the summer in Los Angeles, mostly just bumming around Venice Beach.
August 1981 I moved back in with my parents, who had moved while I was away at school, to Williamstown, New Jersey. This was at the time a little country town near the middle of "South Jersey". Their relationship had deteriorated while I was away, and a few months later my father left and they divorced. I've remained in contact with both of them, although they haven't spoken to each other since then. My father started playing clarinet again, gigged quite a bit for a while, and was quite good the few times I saw him. My mother and brother Mario both moved (separately) to Miami a few years later.
Because I hadn't written anything over the summer, when I re-auditioned at Manhattan, I didn't make it. So I ended up staying in Williamstown, learned how to drive, worked intermittent various day jobs, finally understood Harry Partch (more on that later...), and became a keyboard player in a heavy-metal band, Meanstreak.
This didn't last long. The group only did one gig, and Bob Toppi, the bass player from another band, the Midnight Riders, saw that gig, and he was impressed enough by me to take my number. I really don't know what he found so impressive - I wasn't doing much but pounding out chords on the Rhodes. I suppose it must have been my stage presence -- I've always loved acting absolutely wild on stage while playing rock'n'roll. Bob called me inviting me to their gig, I went, and joined the Midnight Riders that night.
I stayed with them from 1982 until 1985. The night I first saw them, they were a raw, musically very limited, but very exciting band playing southern rock (the best stuff was by the Allmann Brothers) and Rolling Stones tunes. The only music I had ever played that came as close to this in excitement was Tchaikovsky's 4th Symphony, and that was left totally in the dust by these guys.
They were a biker band, and after I joined the musical direction changed somewhat, with more emphasis on new-wave dance music and punk rock.
I spent the summer of 1983 in Wildwood, New Jersey, working in Cape May, still gigging and rehearsing with the Midnight Riders in Williamstown, and again travelling by bicycle. This was a really crazy summer -- almost a match to Venice Beach. Musically the most significant thing that happened was an amazingly intense new interest in Bruce Springsteen, whose records I used to hate with a passion. Suddenly, he caught my ear, and I listened to his stuff almost daily all the way up to about 1992, when I got married.
While sitting around at Mom's house with no job, I re-read Partch's book about four more times, and finally began to understand what he was talking about. This was the key to my "serious composing" problem! I realized immediately that I wanted to compose in just-intonation, and that I wanted to do it flexibly and accurately on the computer. This is a dream that is only now beginning to be realized. But it has been my obsession for the last 14 years.
During the fall of 1984 I drove once a week to New York, to study computer music with Charles Dodge at Brooklyn College. I learned a lot, but unfortunately (mainly because of distance) it didn't really gel into what I hoped it would.
I had gotten interested in Atlantic City during my summer in Wildwood, so I studied to be a craps dealer at the Casino Career Institute there, was quite good, got my license, but then was offered a good job as a real-estate field appraiser, so I never did get to the casinos to work, until years later when I played music in the lounges.
After quitting the Midnight Riders for the second time, I had gotten acquainted with a new circle of musicians who were very much into progressive rock -- King Crimson, Yes, Rush, Genesis, etc. By this time I had come to like this kind of stuff, and we formed a band called Tsunami, which was musically the most able band I ever played in, but unfortunately it didn't last long enough to get us a gig. About this time, I also first got to know the work of Van Morrison, Rickie Lee Jones, and the blues, all of which influenced me a lot.
By this time, I had moved out of what was now Mom's house and into an old farm house with a few of these friends. This was another very creative period in my life. We turned an old chicken coop into a studio, and it seems like we played and wrote music all the time.
But I tired of life in the country, and moved to the nearest big city (so I could keep my day job). So I returned to Philadelphia in 1986.
Nearly a year after moving to back to Philly, I met Theresa Sanders, the woman with whom I had the first really serious relationship in my life. She already had four children, and I moved in with her and the kids. We were together for three years.
A few years after meeting Terri, I was keyboard player with a Top-40 band called One Night Affair from 1989 to 1993. We also gigged a lot, not only locally, but as far as the Catskills and the "Jersey shore". We eventually made it to the casino lounges, not doing our own act, but as back-up band for Tony Saxon, a talented and funny casino entertainer.
In 1990, I bought a house in Germantown, a very historic old neighborhood in Northwest Philly, which has historically always been very ethnically and religiously diverse and integrated, which appealed to me as much as the beautiful country-like, and hilly, setting. Terry and I broke up not long after I moved into the house by myself.
One day in March 1992 I met Helena Riley. She had a great interest in music, and is an outstanding dancer, and a talented singer and model, among many other things. She fell in love with me and what she considers my genius, we had a whirlwind courtship, and married in November 1992. She agreed to support us both for a year so that I could put my notes together into the book I had been wanting to write for years, and for that I will be forever grateful.
I also got to fulfill what had been a life-long dream, and became an announcer at WFLN, Philadlephia's classical music station (now defunct).
Helena and I had planned on having a child, but again things didn't work out as planned, and after putting up with our marital difficulties as long as she could, Helena left at the beginning of 1996. It was a crushing blow to me, but we've since at least remained close friends (in a sense we're closer now than when we were together).
Almost all of my large CD collection (many of which were extremely hard to find in the first place), practically all of my records (ditto, but even larger), and all of my keyboards, instruments, and musical equipment, were stolen while I was out of town.
During 1997 I worked as a clerk at Legalgard, and since the beginning of 1998, I've been working on this website and projects I've had on the shelf for as long as ten years, including my book JustMusic: A New Harmony -- Representing Pitch as Prime Series. I've become a subscriber to the TUNING List, which has given me a nice forum to debate topics of microtonal interest before they get published in my book, and work is finally progressing on my microtonal software.
I embarked on a trip across the US in June of 1998, spent the summer in Phoenix, Arizona, and finally moved to San Diego in September, where I established myself.
Jonathan Glasier, founder and publisher of the seminal microtonal journal Interval, has generously provided me accomodations and access to a computer, and along with Denny Genovese, founder and former director of the Southeast Just-Intonation Center, the three of us have formed the Sonic Arts center, headquartered in Jonathan's Sonic Arts Gallery, the purpose of which is to bring together and provide services for as many microtonal musicians as possible.
I December of 1998 I returned to Philadelphia to take care of my house and other business that I had left hanging, and that's still where I am now. Johnny Reinhard invited me to perform a piece on the Microthon! concert of the 1999 AFMM, and so I composed A Noiseless Patient Spider setting Walt Whitman's poem. It was very well received (see Kyle Gann's Village Voice review.)
I've also recently written a few reviews of microtonal concerts, three of which have been published online in David Beardsley's Juxtaposition Ezine. And, I run a locksmith business, specializing in auto lock-outs.
That's the story as of June 2, 1999.
