Jan Bach

Jan Bach lowers baton
on prolific NIU career – with high note

by Mark McGowan

Jan Bach glimpsed his career destiny at a young age – and it had nothing to do with his last name.

“I started playing piano, and then I was able to play chords. I started rewriting songs my teacher gave me. It just drove her nuts,” Bach says. “The old lady piano teacher wanted me to play what was on the page, and told me Mozart and Beethoven didn’t need improving. Then I started composing my own pieces. I was 8 or 9.”

More than a half-century later, with an impressive resume of symphonies, operas, choral pieces, string quartets and more, Bach is still busy writing music while his own career of teaching music gradually comes to an end.

Bach, who came to NIU in 1966 and taught his last class in the fall semester of 2002, is gradually cleaning out his office in the Music Building.

The task is not without challenges: His St. Charles home has no room left for his career artifacts, including the published scores of pieces he wrote and his hand-written pencil drafts. He also is converting old reel-to-reel tapes and cassettes of his own works and student compositions into mp3 files, although he’s beginning to doubt he’ll finish.

Perhaps someone else will want his mementos, however: The Fox Valley Arts Hall of Fame has inducted Bach into its ranks of honor.

The mission of the Fox Valley Arts Hall of Fame is to remember the famous artists of the past, celebrate the outstanding artists of the present and inspire future artists who might one day themselves become icons of the arts in the Fox Valley.

“I remember that Cary Grant, the popular and accomplished actor who had never received an Academy Award for his many movies, remarked when receiving a special Oscar for his body of work that ‘there is no greater tribute than the one that comes from your peers,’ ” Bach says.

“I’ve been thrice-blessed in that regard: honored by my students with the Excellence in Undergraduate Education award, honored by my university colleagues with a Presidential Research Professorship, and now honored by my Fox Valley friends and neighbors with this recognition of my activities in musical composition.”

Growing up in the small Illinois town of Forrest during World War II, he was fortunate to study the violin under an excellent music teacher who would’ve moved on had not all the jobs been frozen. When that day did come, in 1948, Bach decided to learn another instrument.

His father, a successful lumber dealer who benefited from robust homebuilding activity following the war, could have afforded to buy the oboe recommended by the local band director. Bach instead chose the French horn, something available at school.

It proved a wise decision.

Bach played the horn all through elementary school, middle school and high school, earning scholarships for high school music camps and college along the way. It was during middle school that he began arranging and composing music on request, either adapting tunes for school events or creating new works for classmates.

And “the horn kept me out of Vietnam,” he says. “I was drafted in ’62, after the Berlin Wall went up in ’61. I auditioned for and was accepted into the U.S. Army Band in Washington. I played for presidents. I played Kennedy’s funeral. I played the White House several times. I stayed in Washington all three years of my enlistment.”

When he left the Army in 1965, he found a job at the University of Tampa in Florida, where he taught while continuing to work on his doctorate in composition and playing in the Tampa Philharmonic and the St. Petersburg Symphony.

Missing the Midwest’s change of seasons, however, he returned to Illinois a year later and joined the music faculty at NIU. His teaching duties included both French horn students as well as theory and composition.

“I was getting notice, and winning awards, for my compositions,” Bach says. “It made a good case for going 100 percent into teaching theory and composition.”

His list of compositions and their subsequent honors is long.

He figures he’s written music for every instrument or ensemble – although “not much” for organ or guitar – including band, orchestra, choir, strings, brass and even accordion, steel pan and tuba. Unique combinations of instruments intrigue him.

Bach’s resume notes six Pulitzer Prize nominations, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, two Illinois Arts Council grants and countless commissions from international music groups and performers. He won NIU’s Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Award in 1978 and, four years later, was among the first class of Presidential Research Professors.

Yet the process, and the life of the composer, are never-ending sources of frustration and joy.

First, there is the job of actually sitting down to write.

“It’s still fascinating, and it’s hard, and it gets harder with every new piece,” he says. “I always tell my students that the enormity of writing a half-hour piece is one you never want to think about when you start … (but) there’s a point when you suddenly feel guided by some other hand.”

Of course, he must keep his head about the process. “If I want my piece to be played, I have to make sure it’s not too easy or too hard,” he says. “If the musicians like the piece, they will telegraph that to the audience.”

And then there are the reviews.

“The Student from Salamanca,” an opera of Bach’s that won a contest sponsored by Beverly Sills, was performed several times in New York at its debut, again a month later in Cleveland, and then, he says, “never again.” Reviews always are “an emotional roller coaster” for Bach, who remembers one negative appraisal that took to task not only his composition but all the critics who had praised it elsewhere.

Yet the thrill of hearing a composition played makes the blood, sweat and tears worth their toll – which is why he’s marked his calendar for 7 p.m. Sunday, May 30.

The Lyric Opera Orchestra and its first horn, 1976 NIU alum Jon Boen, will perform (and record for an upcoming CD) Bach’s “Concerto for Horn and Orchestra” at Pick-Staiger Hall on the campus of Northwestern University in Evanston. Bach dedicated the piece to Boen when he composed it in 1983.

“When Johann Sebastian Bach was alive, he rarely heard a piece of his music played more than once because he had to provide new music every week for churches,” Bach says. “I’ve had the good luck to have many of my pieces played countless times, and I still get a rush every time I hear a piece of mine played.”

More information about Jan Bach is available online at www.janbach.com. More information about the Fox Valley Arts Hall of Fame is available online at www.foxvalleyarts.org.

5-3-04