User:Skwaller
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Steph Waller (Real name Sheila Kathryn Waller; Steph is a pen name) was born in California and grew up in many different places throughout the state. Without the advantages of early formal musical training, but raised in a musical family, she taught herself to read music and play the piano by the age of seven. By the age of twelve Steph had begun to write music and play a large array of musical instruments, including piano, guitar, bass, banjo, mandolin, and percussion.
Recognizing her talent, her father Jackson J. Waller, a Jazz, Big Band and Dixieland drummer, made certain that she took up an instrument in school. This encouragement led Steph into seven years of clarinet studies under Robert Raleigh and Henry Kline, respectively. After graduation She began a music career of club dates, concert tours, coffeehouses, rallies, recording, and frequent television and radio appearances. Over two-hundred of her songs have been published.
In 1985, disillusioned with popular music and consumed by a hunger to grow musically, Steph began teaching myself to compose classical music. For a year she virtually sequestered herself with tomes on theory, harmony, counterpoint, orchestration, conducting, and music history. Thus, as an autodidact, she learned from Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Tchaikovsky, Handel and Schumann, to name only a few; she taught herself, first by imitating them, then by exploring my her own inner musical landscape.
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[edit] Education
In 1986, during a chance encounter with Dr. Burns Taft music director of the Ventura County Opera Association and founder and of the Ventura Chamber Music Festival, Steph was introduced to Maestro Frank Salazar (1926-2000), then founder and music director of the Ventura County Symphony. He expressed that in his 30 years of teaching he had never before encountered such native talent in someone who was self-taught. He subsequently urged her to enroll at Ventura College, where she was immediately placed in the music department's highest semester courses. Very soon after, Salazar invited her to become his sole private pupil, gratis, and also hired her as his TA at the college, as well as Conductor's Assistant with the symphony. A solid friendship quickly blossomed between them, based on mutual esteem and a deep love of music, and Steph found herself accepted into the warmth of the Salazar family.
"Frank was a genius, and that's a word I don't often use because it’s so over-used and misused. Through his musical integrity, his passionate devotion to music and his selfless, sensitive guidance of my musical evolution, I acquired more education during those six years under his private instruction than I could have at any university. He taught me more than music as a textbook subject--he taught me about life, music as life, art as life and myself as an artist. He took what I instinctively knew and gave it a name. I often compare his influence to the scene in 'The Miracle Worker' in which Annie Sullivan finally reaches Helen Keller with word for water. It is not an overstatement for me to say that this is what Frank did for me with music."
[edit] Composer
Steph's music, which relies heavily on harmony and classical symmetry, is made up of memorable melodies and playful themes drawn from the vitality and simplicity of folk music. Her slow movements tend to be emotional and introspective, while her faster movements are usually buoyant, though never boisterous. Steph's more somber pieces evoke deep, mystical feelings and although listeners might sense my affinity with the Classical era, they will also recognize the sustained chords, pedal tones and progressions Steph assimilated through the Rock and Folk music of the 1960s and 70s.
"The Beatles, Donovan, Billy Joel, the Electric Light Orchestra, the Alan Parsons Project and the Moody Blues all have influenced me. My journey as a musician has been a steady, straightforward climb from the music of my past to what I am composing today.
"Some critics have teasingly called me a mystic. In truth, I believe that to be an artist in any medium, one must be at least part mystic, or magician, or alchemist, or something, because we must create sense, beauty and form from a sea of chaos. I live with one foot in one world and one foot in quite another and I'm not always sure which is the most solid. I think this reveals itself in my music. I used to cringe at being called a neo-classicist, but through the years I’ve come to embrace the term because, quite simply, that’s what just naturally comes out of me. After years of criticism (from other musicians, never the audience) I’ve developed a thicker skin and have adopted the attitude that if someone doesn’t like my music they don’t have to play it. I will not compose anything that is unnatural to me for the sake of my music being thought of in musical circles as "intellectual" or "artsy-fartsy". I feel that while my first responsibility is to myself, the rest is to the audience. If more "intellectual" musicians scoff, and call my music "lowbrow" I really don't care, because it is not they for whom I compose. I strive to compose music that leaves a memorable melody that will perhaps stick with the listener after the performance is long over."
Steph does not compose at a computer, but prefers to use a piano and drafting table, surrounded by manuscript, rulers and Black Wing pencils.
"It is not only the sound or the sensation of composition that gives me pleasure, but also the physical act of writing all those heads, stems and beams. For me, music is not only an aural art; the handwritten score is a piece of visual art in its own right."
[edit] Author
Steph spent the spring of 1994 in Vienna, researching a project she’d had in mind for a few years. Having gained a reputation as a Mozart historian, she began a novel, Night Music, The Memoirs of Wolfgang Amade Mozart. It is written in first-person, as if Mozart is telling his own life story.
"My time in Vienna was very peculiar. I stayed in a hotel only three doors down the Schulerstrasse from the Figarohaus in which Mozart lived during his most successful period. Every morning the Fiakers rolled beneath my windows on their way to the Stefansplatz and opera students strolled by late at night, singing serenades to his empty windows. I felt lost in time, almost like a ghost as I walked the streets of the Old City, averting my eyes from any signs of the 20th century. I avoided being a tourist and became Viennese by degrees. It was an incredible experience. When I returned home the book simply wrote itself over the following year."
Steph has written for several literary newsletters and music journals, including The Sounding Board (journal of The American Composers Forum). She also maintains an extensive, global online correspondence as Mozart at Mozart's Own Weblog, answering questions and helping young music students with reports and term papers, and providing informative, candid conversation with music educators, performers and other appreciators of Mozart’s music.
[edit] Film
In early 2006, Steph was a spotlighted subject in the Rhombus Media documentary, Mozartballs, which is currently airing all around the world for the commemoration of Mozart’s 250th birthday. Rhombus Media’s other films include the Academy Award winning The Red Violin, Beethoven’s Hair, Solidarity Song - the Music of Hans Eisler, Ravel’s Brain, 32 Short Films on Glenn Gould, and many others.
During the summer and fall of 2006, Steph played herself (called "Madam Steph") in the online alternate reality game, The Oculur Effect.
[edit] A Word About Self-Education By Steph Waller
"During my earliest stages as a composer I tortured myself with feelings of inferiority because I didn't have the opportunity to attend university and collect degrees in music. Not long after I began to study privately with Maestro Salazar he addressed this issue. It took many years for me to truly understand the uniqueness and the desirableness of the education I received under his carefully individualized, private instruction. It's not every aspiring composer who is given the opportunity to sit at the right hand of a seasoned, mature conductor and composer for six full years. Not only did every piece I wrote gain the unique and important criticism only a master can give, but because he had his own symphony orchestra I had access to musicians who would play my work for me. I now equate my education with that of composers before the 20th century, when gaining the attention of a master was deemed far superior to studying in the impersonal classroom. Since his death in 2000 I have come to fully understand the honor Frank bestowed upon me by putting his sterling lifelong reputation on the line by taking me under his wing and introducing my music to his friends, patrons, colleagues and fellow professors. I now feel a grave responsibility to return the honor by composing music that reflects the breadth and profundity of his teaching."
