The music man

David Rothenberg's high school year book said that in 10 years he would be wandering around the Himalayas doing research and playing strange music. This apparently far-out prediction proved to be prophetic, but chronologically off the mark. Prone to unconventionality and adventure, Rothenberg had already done exactly what the yearbook had forecasted within only three years after graduating from Staples High School in Westport, Conn.

Rothenberg spent the first semester of his junior year at Harvard in Nepal on a study abroad program. "I'd always wanted to go but it just seemed more of a dream, rather than something I could go and get credit for and save money doing--because it's much cheaper than going here." He spent the bulk of his stay living in Katmandu with a family that didn't speak any English, studying many aspects of the country's culture and learning Nepali.

"I went there thinking learning a language like that in four months would be impossible, but it's not once you have to use it."

In his last month in Nepal, Rothenberg went to live in a monastary, primarily to study the "gyaling", a Tibetan instrument that looks like a big oboe with a large conical bottom and sounds like "very noisy bagpipes--very nasal and loud."

"It doesn't make too much sense unless it's heard up in the mountains where it has to echo across large distances." He chose the particular monastary because he had heard about and was interested in meeting and talking to the Lama there. Though the Lama speaks no English, the two attempted to communicate philosophical concepts about music--"concepts that are vague enough in any language."

Though the Lama spoke no English, he and Rothenberg communicated through music.

The two interests of music and communication have figured predominantly in Rothenberg's life, both away from and at Harvard. "It was during the summer before freshman year that I really saw that these were two directions in my life and two things I'd have to be pursuing, somehow separately, maybe together." He came to Harvard thinking of studying geology, but quickly became less enthralled with science.

He took several music courses freshman year that inspired him, but he stresses that he has not taken the conventional approach. "I wasn't so interested in the music department in general--it seemed to require a lot of things I didn't want to study." Although he is an accomplished clarinetist and has studied piano since coming to college, Rothenberg does not consider himself primarily a classically trained musician. He feels he has not had much of the basic standard instruction in performance and music theory, and downplays his proficiency. Rather, he emphasizes the other facets of music he has pursued: jazz, improvisation and composition.

After having taken a course in the music department with Ivan Tcherepnin "which dealt with the way music relates to the world and problems in society," Rothenberg opted for a self-devised special concentration in Music and Communication.

"I had to apply twice to convince them to let me do it. The first time I really wanted to do it, but they wouldn't accept it. The second time, I didn't know what I was doing: I submitted something vague, but they liked that and they let me do it." He wrote a thesis on improvisation: "I decided to write something that somehow explained why something that seemed so much based on chance and unpredictability, I thought could be so important."

At Harvard, Rothenberg was also involved in music for theater, composing and performing for productions all over campus, including the Loeb Mainstage and the Ex. The possibilities for innovation in this type of music particularly appealed to him. "I found doing music for theater you can try different things and do unusual things and people will come and hear it and pay attention." But after sophomore year, he became tired of the theater scene. At the end of his Junior year, he performed a solo clarinet concert that featured classical works, as well as Tibetian and Japanese music, improvisation, and jazz. Last fall, at Currier House, he put on "The Tibetan Book of the Dead" a play he wrote the music for based on Tibetan religious beliefs in reincarnation. "It was a real opportunity to combine what I had learned while being in Nepal with the music I had done before."

Rothenberg lived in South House sophomore year, but when he came back from Nepal at mid-year, he found he had the lowest priority to receive housing. So he moved into the Jordan Co-ops and subsequently loved the experience that the co-op offered--"halfway on campus and half off, not so far away to feel disconnected--and the food is much better."

Rothenberg is notorious for his unconventional style. As a freshman, he got into serious trouble for moving a piano in the Union for a performance. And last summer, while working for Let's Go in Scandinavia, he was arrested in Denmark for tampering with his Eurail Pass in order to use it for an extra month. He spent a day in jail and was threated with deportation, but somehow worked his way out of it. While researching in Finland, he received media fame for participating in a music workshop given by John Cage, one of the foremost innovative contemporary composers.

Rothenberg is not sure about the future, but since he has already done what his yearbook predicted, "I need to make up some new thing to do in 10 years--something that hasn't been done before." At times he feels he would like to get a more traditional music education, and yet he doesn't want to "do music in the academic way." Rothenberg is also in the Outing Club, and has long been involved in the environmental and ecological movements.

He may be active in this field, perhaps in Europe, he speculates. In any case, he is not too worried about his future.

"Sophomore year, when a lot of my friends started graduating, it was always bothering me that none of them knew what they were going to do with their lives, and I said, well, even if I don't know what I'm doing now, when I graduate, I'll know exactly what I want to do. I want to know. And instead of knowing what I want to do, it doesn't bother me that I don't know. I guess that's what it means to graduate."