I should have taken the hint granted me by the gods at my first piano recital. I was seven, and performed on a Steinway grand at the local high school. I can't remember what I played or much else except that after taking a hurried, embarrassed bow (very much unlike the dignified and gracious bow I had been carefully coached to give) I turned around and tried to walk through the curtains to backstage. I had had no trouble in coming out through the heavy, velvet-fronted curtains, but on the way back they conspired to hide their parting, and I encountered nothing but dead-end pockets in the folds of cloth. Repeatedly I had to return to the gaze of the audience. My emotions and actions got increasingly agitated until by luck I found the gap and slipped through to the merciful gloom of backstage. Then I had to go back out to reclaim the music I had left on the piano.

I didn't heed this plain warning about the nature of a musical career and continued to perform. After deviating this way and that and completing studies in other subjects, I eventually decided to try for a Ph .D. in music. At this rarefied level of scholarly attainment I sought to improve my skills at composing, performing, and conducting.

What I sought and what was taught were two quite different animals. At the first meeting with my advisor – a professor of music assigned the task of setting up my curriculum – I was asked to sing a chromatic scale. Singing is not my greatest strength so I was puzzled by his request, and said so.

"I want to see," he said, "if you need to take the singing class." His wide, angular, and clean-shaven face had an avuncular look; I had confidence in his judgment in this new and intimidating environment full of real, professional musicians. I didn't particularly want to take singing, I told him. But the professor told me that singing was absolutely essential.

"Why?" I asked.

He explained that he didn't necessarily want me to become a proficient singer, but that we had to be able to sing in order to prove that we could hear pitch relationships accurately.

"If you can't sing it, you can't hear it," he concluded.

"I can't sing," I admitted, but I didn't think that his reason for taking the singing class applied to me. I had come into the University playing keyboards and a number of ancient instruments, and a strong speciality in electronic and computer music, which at that time was esoteric and rare knowledge. I had demonstrated my ability to tell a sine wave from a triangular wave from a square wave, and could analyze sounds by ear well enough to be able to do reasonable computer syntheses of whatever I heard. In this particular ability I stood alone among both students and faculty, and it was judged to be a wonderful thing for the coming age of electronic music. It was this ability that had made the faculty anxious to accept me. Certainly, I thought, this should be enough to demonstrate that I had a trained ear.

"You have to sing," he said, repeating the local dogma, "in order to be able to hear well."

Repeating his point failed to create a valid syllogism in my mind, but logic was not the order of the day. Without putting a word about it in the college catalog or anywhere else, the music department had decreed that singing was one of two subjects in whose mastery all musical skill resided: the other skill was playing percussion. But right now I was fighting to not take the singing class. In exasperation, he offered to let me take a test. I wouldn't have to take singing if I could sing a chromatic scale.

"I can't sing a chromatic scale." I said, trying to show that I knew my limitations.

"Try anyway," he said, encouragingly.

I tried, but after going up and coming down I had strayed far from where I had started.

"But I can whistle a chromatic scale," I argued, "which requires just as much ear training as singing it."

My father had whistled well, and would whistle classical airs, scales, folk, and popular tunes. I learned by copying and at an early age I could whistle Vivaldi, Bach, Fats Waller or whatever. Because I did it a lot, my whistling had fairly good pitch accuracy and a touch of virtuosity, including baroque embellishments such as trills and mordants. I could whistle non-tempered "blue" notes and Indian scales as well. I was sure that being able to create pitches accurately by any means that relied entirely on my ear for intonation would prove that I could "hear well."

"Nonsense," said my professor, "I'm sure your ear isn't good enough for your whistling to be right considering your dismal attempt at singing."

"It's not my ear," I replied, "it's that I haven't practiced singing much."

And before he could argue further I whistled an accurate chromatic scale up and down. I waited, smug in my knowledge that he could not find fault with my performance.

"I guess you can," he said after hearing it. "That's a nice trick, Raskin. Good intonation. I'm surprised." And then he signed me up for the beginning singing course.

Eventually I did well enough to sing with madrigal and shape-note groups, but I was never able to get the enjoyment from it as I should have. I was left with a permanent inferiority complex with respect to musicians who can sing easily and well.

Their other key to musicianship at the University was modern percussion. No matter that my principal instrument was the recorder and I was specializing in early performance practice. I was conscripted into percussion class where I had to perform the sybaritic music of Harry Partch (I appear in a public television special on his music, where I play an instrument called "Spoils of War", among others) and toured through California and Nevada with the San Diego Symphony as second percussion. "Second percussion" in this case meant you played everything but tympani. "Touring" meant playing in high school auditoriums, odd halls, and other acoustically unacceptable buildings in the backwaters and byways of the Old West. I took what pleasure I could in studying rusting mining equipment that I found when I went on walks in the woods during the brief interval between arriving on the bus and the evening's rehearsal.

Not playing tympani turned out to be a blessing since we didn't carry the large copper kettledrums with us, but had to use whatever we could dredge up in each town. My mechanical skills, soon discovered by the timpanist, were usually overmatched by the sad treatment the drums had endured. I enjoyed trying to fix them, since it excused me from having to set up the chairs and music stands.

A percussionist always occupies a very exposed position, acoustically, in the orchestra; in partial compensation you were usually hidden in the back row. Every tick, click, clang, and bong you are called upon to produce catches the attention of even the least musically trained listener in the audience. This is especially the case with our featured piece on the tour: Orff's "Carmina Burana". Not only are there lots of percussion solos, but it is a popular number so that many people know it well enough to catch any missing or misplaced wood block tattoo or fluffed xylophone lick.

Percussion parts are designed to put the performer off guard with 180 measures of inactivity followed by two measures of demonic calisthenics, compounded by the preceding frantic search for the missing drumsticks that were purloined by the local kids just before your solo. Often a part calls for just one perfectly placed drum beat. And the conductor – who felt even more than most of the other musicians that the road tour was a Kafkaesque punishment for some unknown crime – had long lost the attentiveness necessary to be able to give me a warning glance or signal.

There is no pleasure to be had after an abysmal performance. The audiences on such occasions were too awestruck with the massed forces of singers and orchestra to notice that the soprano solo was sung abominably, that the percussion missed half its entrances, that the horns were out of tune, and the tympani part was played on a bass drum and an inner tube stretched over a watering trough. In spite of it all, they gave you a massive cheer followed by endless waves of applause. At the end of the tour we were, one and all, too dazed to realize we were home, and it was over.

One day, another graduate student, having been given his opportunity to conduct the symphony, asked me to play the alto recorder solos in the Bach Brandenberg Concerti Nos. 2 and 4. Since one of the scores calls for two recorders, he had found another recorder player. He was a professional musician who dabbled with the instrument. Being of the opinion that the recorder was a toy, he played it accordingly.

I suggested that we rehearse the intricately intertwined solo parts together, but he could rarely find time. The recorder is a very finicky instrument, some of the notes in its top register are difficult to play at all, and even harder to play so that you'd want to listen to them. When you are playing with another recorder in the high register, the least error in intonation will cause intolerable beats that have fatal effects on any creature more highly evolved than a flatworm.

I could sense disaster looming, and did not know whether to be happy or unhappy when I arrived for the first rehearsal to see that the conductor had chosen to use the full resources of the symphony to back us up. In my discussions with him I pointed out that the recorder could not be heard over a full orchestra – save for a few piercing high notes which can be heard for miles in a full hurricane. The conductor had, as a result, said that we could use a chamber orchestra. But local union rules mandated that the full orchestra was to be used in rehearsal so that was that.

At the rehearsal we tried our best. The recorder goes very sharp when you attempt to play it loudly so my protagonist and I had the choice of being totally unheard or being widely out of tune and just barely heard. My soloist colleague chose to be out of tune, and I was forced to play sharp in order to be in tune with him, if not with the orchestra.

Soon came the many dread high notes that Bach used so profligately when he composed for the recorder. As we came to the end of the very difficult fast movement, I glanced longingly at the opening in the wings leading to backstage, anticipating my opportunity to escape the inevitable embarrassment and lick my wounded ears. We finished the piece, and I heard – not the expected stony silence, but the repeated touching of bow to strings that violinists and others of their ilk use to indicate applause. The orchestra's members, I am sure, were expressing their amazement that we had come to the end of the movement at the same time as them. We were repeatedly told how wonderful we were, and how great it was to have authentic instruments playing solos, although the strongest compliments came from musicians who apologized for being placed in the orchestra where they could not quite hear us.

The people who had come to listen to the rehearsal claimed to have loved the performance, and many of them came up to ask questions about my "exotic" instrument . Only my friends confided that I couldn't be heard at all in my solos and that they could only hear a strange bleating from time to time in the duets.

Nonetheless, I had achieved a childhood dream of being a soloist with a symphony orchestra, the promise of the dream diminished only a little by the situation's realities. I was later to perform the Brandenburgs on the road with a smaller orchestra, and with better results.

The university was ultra-modern in its orientation toward music, and my love of ancient instruments was by no means appreciated. When one of the faculty composers wrote a part for great bass recorder along with more conventional instruments and electronics , I was excited and felt honored. Up to then I was the only grad student that hadn't had parts written for his instruments. There are not many great bass recorders or performers on this instrument. But when I got to the rehearsal, the composer started taping microphones to the huge flute. She listed it on the score, and in the later program notes, as the " Great Bass Recorder Console," amplified the clicking of its keys, and had me play it so that it squeaked and bleeped – anything but put out the lovely rotund sound that made the instrument so appealing to me. The three or four real notes that I had to play were, of course, unhearable in the din of the rest of the music.

In my entire stay at the university I performed on keyboard only twice. Once, rather satisfyingly, in a tiny, almost unpublicized concert of Beethoven's chamber music, and once in a very well-attended performance of Leedy's "88 is Great" in which you perform with eight other pianists on a single grand piano, simultaneously. Doing the piece well is a spectacle worthy of a Japanese TV show, and more a feat of gymnastics than of musicianship.

I never did complete my Ph.D. in music. The breaking point came when after having had dozens of my compositions criticized almost out of existence (I had an unfortunate tendency to write music that most people enjoyed) I took some graph paper, a collection of colored pens, and a can of silver spray paint and made an artistic-looking "score" with the names of instruments and terms like "Andante," "pizzicato," "con molto tomatoes," and the like placed at random here and there. It was purely graphic, with only a few G, C, and F clefs at the beginning to hint that it was playable.

My professor loved it, and said to me, "If only you would write all your music with such intricacy and depth. Finally, you have more than one idea going at a time. And your juxtaposition of stasis and movement is superb!" He wasn't being sarcastic. He had once told me that the secret of his compositions was that he had lots of long notes interspersed with small groups of rapid notes. I was, at long last in his opinion, breaking away and writing music.

Within a few months I was an assistant professor of visual art at the same university, but that is another story. It was twenty-two years later I was able to shake the department's modernist influence, and became a published composer, finally writing the music I wanted to hear.

Two years of university study had left me somewhat weaker in keyboard and ancient music performance skills than I had been when I entered. I had been demoralized at the thought of ever being able to sing (yet brainwashed into thinking that I would never be a professional musician without doing so) and unable to happily compose music that I enjoyed. I was a pretty good percussionist – something I had never particularly wanted to be. On the other hand, I had been able to continue my study of conducting and I did eventually get to be a conductor.

Often I will play the flowing, romantic music of Schubert or Chopin on the piano for myself. I note in passing that playing four-handed music on a piano is, beyond a doubt, as fine and fertile a ground on which to build a romance as any. This was well recognized in the nineteenth century, when so many four-handed duets were written. What could be more innocent than playing together, shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip, on the same slim piano bench, hands intermingling in the intricacies of a Grand Valse Brillante.

My musical romances started early. I met Anita, then a fellow junior in high school, at a dinner given for finalists at the county science fair. I had been bold enough to sit down beside her, and soon had discovered that she not only shared my passion for mathematics and science, but played the piano. I sought every opportunity to take her out, and these opportunities usually took the form of concerts in a series for which my father was the treasurer. Because of his position, I got in free. I also got to know many of the musicians. Among them were Ralph and Flori Lorr, who had played bassoon and flute respectively with the New York Philharmonic under Arturo Toscannini. They were frequent visitors to the after-concert parties that were sometimes held at my parent's house. One evening the Lorrs asked me to join them in a Mozart trio. I could improvise or play a set piece with some facility, but I could not just sit down and play something I had never seen before – a technique called "sight reading." I struggled along gamely until we came to an unscheduled pause, whereupon they announced loudly that I was not even close to being a competent musician. This was in front of not only other musicians, but in front of my relatives who had previously beheld my musical prowess with some awe. Later, they were to more than recompense me by teaching me how to sight read as well as other musical skills, but that night I would have crawled under the piano, had it been a grand.

Due to these parties I got to know many professional musicians, and often enjoyed the privilege of distributing the parts on the music stands between pieces and getting to listen to the concert from back stage. These occasions made for impressive dates, as all the famous musicians knew me. Thus it was that one evening Anita and I were sitting backstage during a choral concert. The accompanist was an otherwise competent pianist who tended to take a wee nip now and then. The concert hall was adjacent to a bar, and at intermission he went out to have a pick-me-up. He did not return on time, and we sat backstage feeling the increasing anxiety of the conductor and the chorus as the ten-minute intermission stretched to fifteen and then twenty minutes. The conductor could wait no longer, and sent one of the tenors to find the accompanist. He was not to be found. So the conductor approached us.

"Anita," he said, "the rest of the pieces on the program are not difficult, so if you could just play the opening bars or just the opening chord, the chorus can carry on."

She looked at him, and must have stood up too quickly because she fainted, into my arms, on the spot. It was the first (and as it turned out, only) time I ever held her. In fact it was our only physical contact aside from the very exciting moments where our hands brushed together while playing piano duets. We carried our relationship on a very high and pure plane. As I eased her limp body onto the bench, the conductor turned to me. Anita coughed and sat up.

"Jef..." he began. I knew what he was going to ask, so I said,

"OK, I'll try."

There must have been a plaintive tone to my voice, since he told me that I'd have to do better than to try. I was happy that the piano was in the back of the choral group, for even though it made it hard to see the conductor, the audience – except for a few people at one edge of the seating – could not see me.

The first few pieces went well, although I was sweating the whole time, fearful that I would ruin the concert. The last piece was by Bach, whose music I love to listen to, as much as I am often intimidated when about to play it. The problem was that I couldn't find the score. The accompanist had either taken it with him or had memorized this particular piece.

The conductor signaled for me to begin. I shook my head. This pair of actions was repeated a few times. He whispered something to a soprano in the first row. She whispered it to an alto in the second row. The alto relayed the message to a tenor, and a tenor to a bass. This last singer was six feet tall, bearded, and standing about four feet up on a platform.

He snarled down at me: Begin!

I looked up and said, "There's no music for this piece!"

He didn't hear me, or affected to not hear me. A few seconds later the choral telegraph transmitted the same message: Begin! The conductor looked at me angrily. Since the key of the piece was listed in the program notes in front of me, I sort of improvised a Bachian introduction of 8 measures in the correct key, leading up to a pregnant five-seven chord, and the chorus began. They began very unsurely and very indecisively, but after a short while got the piece moving.

I felt very proud that I had been able to improvise an introduction, and beamed with pleasure when the conductor came around at the end of the performance. Anita had come to and was by my side.

"How dare you tamper with the music like that!" said the conductor angrily, "you are... you can forget any chance of working with me this summer." and he stomped off. That was the first indication that I was to study with him for the summer, and at the same moment found that the opportunity was lost – or maybe he was confusing me with somebody else in his anger. I never found out.

Not only did the conductor never speak to me again, but Anita joined the boycott of this musical pariah, who never got to explain to either one of them what had happened. Lost loves linger painfully in the memory like invisible cactus spines between your fingers, and I have never forgotten Anita. I was also branded with an impression of the terrible and absolute power that conductors wield. I should have known better. A conductor is, after all, a musician, and therefore a lackey. But I hadn't yet learned this lesson when, many years afterward, I accepted the position of conductor with the San Francisco Chamber Opera Company.

The producer and chief financial backer was a woman whose mind wanderwwd somewhere in the vicinity of the outer planets. But she came well-recommended by a society woman and singer who I respected. The producer had heard of me due to my conducting various early music groups in the San Francisco area. She wanted to put on Monteverdi's Orfeo, in Italian, with original instruments, and promised to give me complete freedom in scoring and hiring the musicians.

I have never been an opera buff (I am easily put off by excessive vibrato), but one of my assignments as a music graduate student had been to conduct a Mozart opera. This opened my mind to an aspect of opera in which I could take real pleasure, and at the same time introduced me to a new form of torture. From the outside, conducting seems to be one of the easier musical skills. I remember a cartoon showing a view from behind a conductor standing in front of a podium, and the score said: "Wave the stick. When the music stops, turn around and bow." In fact, conducting is the most nerve-wracking form of performance that I know, because the conductor must know the score in every detail and be perpetually alert. A conductor needs finely honed skills at management, and this was not part of the musical curriculum I went through.

As a conductor you must memorize every part, whether viol, harpsichord, gamba, or theorbo. You must be able to sing the vocal lines, as you want them sung, to the singers. You must be able to simultaneously read all the parts and catch any detail that is out of place, and know enough about instrumental or vocal technique to be able to tell the musician how to form the sound to your conception. You blend 40 or more egos so that they move, think, and breathe as one.

During rehearsals or performances you must not only be listening to what is going on at the moment, but thinking ahead as well. As you conduct the end of a recitative, you form in your mind the exact tempo and character of the following ritornello. If the conductor is the least bit unsure, that lack of security will be transmitted instantly to the ensemble, and their entries will be ragged and their playing weak. Thomas Nee, conductor of the Minneapolis symphony, and under whose baton I performed and learned, once gave a dramatic demonstration of this. A San Diego high school band was being led by a beginning conducting student of Mr. Nee's as we walked in to see how he was doing. The group sounded unsure of its rhythms and the musical thread faltered and broke, leaving the conductor to try to regroup. Mr. Nee told me to take the baton. I spent a minute or two reading the score, and began to conduct. It sounded like a different group. There was a bit of confidence in their playing, and it hung together. Mr. Nee came up and took the baton. We could again hear the difference as the band played not only securely, but with a bit of sparkle.

When the beginning conducting student took over again, the band sounded only slightly better than they had initially. Mr. Nee hadn't said a word to them. Afterward, he didn't say a word to me either, but the lesson had been clear.

Good conductors can be as musically formidable as legend has them. I will always remember being totally awed by a conductor during the summer after I graduated from high school. Being one of the few people at that time who was both a computer programmer and a musician (my very first Fortran program arranged guitar chords to any melody you cared to feed it), I landed a wonderful job with the Columbia-Princeton Computer Music Project. Three of the principles were the physicist Mel Ferentz and the conductors Stephan Bauer-Mengelberg and Leonard Bernstein. Mengelberg was then assistant conductor of the NY Philharmonic, and Bernstein needs no introduction. Mengelberg was a fine musician, carrying on in his father's tradition, but a bit of a joker, and forever finding ways to make me the butt of any conversation. I seldom saw Bernstein to take the lessons he had offered me, he was always busy. One day I brought him a piano composition to critique. He sat down in a large, stuffed chair and read it through, then walked over to the piano. At that moment (as so often happened with our meetings) a telephone call came in, and he had to leave, handing me my score, apologizing as he walked out.

I didn't get to see him again for about a month. When I did, it was my turn to apologize for not having brought my piece. "This one?" he said, as he walked over to the piano. He played it through, and made some remarks that I suppose I would have found helpful, had I been able to pay attention. I was completely spellbound by the fact that he had memorized the piece from that one quick reading. I thought then that all conductors had to have super-human abilities, and despaired of ever being one myself.

By contrast, it took me over a month of careful study, many hours a day spent at the piano playing each part, to learn the Monteverdi opera. More weeks were spent chasing down historical references – by a stroke of luck, a report (from the beginning of the 16th century) on the first performance of the opera listed the instruments used. It was not the custom to indicate which instruments were to be used on each part since such knowledge was part of the musical fabric of the time. Scoring, besides, was considered flexible, and a matter of taste and convenience. Many scholars had analyzed Orfeo, and I read numerous (sometimes contradictory; often uselessly vague) commentaries.

Finding lutenists, theorbo players (theorboists?), cornettists (who play not the modern brass cornet, but the Renaissance cornetto), and the like was not easy, but I was "in" with respect to the early music scene – playing recorders and krumhorns myself. The male lead was to be sung by Louis Botto (later to form and lead the fantastic male vocal group Chanticleer). The female lead was Rene Grant-Williams, who had introduced me to the producer. Unfortunately this producer hadn't the foresight to rent a rehearsal space, and so I assembled the orchestra and singers in my small living room one evening. I lived in Brisbane, a town on the bay just south of San Francisco. The first full rehearsal took place a month before the opening date.

The musicians had all been sent their parts, I had rehearsed the singers individually, and the strings and woodwinds separately. They arrived promptly and after much pushing and shoving they were all packed in with just enough room to play. When everybody was tuned up and settled down, I raised my baton, and as I signaled the first downbeat with vigor and clarity, all the lights in Brisbane went out. A small terrier owned by a friend of mine leapt from her arms and started scampering about in the total darkness. It found the spiral staircase that led down to the bedrooms and fell straight down with a howl that would have pleased Cerebus. Bana, the dog's owner and a recorder student of mine, now played the part of Euridice, and started descending. She slipped, bumping her way down the steps and landing on the dog, who squeaked in protest. Louis, now doubly Orfeo, descended to find Euridice only to hit his head against the risers (which wasn't in the script). His comments were not in 16th century Italian. The lights came on five minutes after everybody had left. We had found that playing by candle light was, albeit authentic, ill-advised.

We eventually did get our rehearsal schedule going and a month later presented the musical portion of the opera to our producer. She was delighted and decided on the spot to put the instrumentalists up on stage, since the unfamiliar old instruments often fascinate audiences. Not being an old instrument myself, I was to stand down in the pit, conducting upwards, an awkward and tiring pose to maintain. She placed the instruments and singers on the right third of the stage, having suddenly decided that the singers would not be acting but that we'd produce the opera in oratorio style. This left two thirds of the stage empty, but she wouldn't tell us what she was going to do with it. I proposed that we project an English translation of the lyrics (which are often witty, and without which the opera can be hard to follow) across the proscenium. She vetoed this proposed innovation as vulgar. I should have patented the idea, which was to appear in opera halls around the world some years later.

At the first dress rehearsal she revealed, with a flourish, what she was going to use the rest of the stage for. Two friends of hers, one male, one female, were going to perform a modern, improvisatory dance interpretation of Orfeo. With exaggerated gestures and clumsy footwork, they proceeded to do execute incompetently their particularly dreadful choreography. It was self-indulgent and irrelevant. I protested, the musicians threatened to quit, the singers went into revolt: but the producer wouldn't be swayed. I reminded her of the efforts we had made, at her request, to perform the music as authentically as possible, and asked that she make a corresponding effort with the visual presentation. It was her penny, she was the producer, and I was just a conductor. It would be her way or nothing.

On opening night we had a good audience. I recognized a few prominent early music buffs and the music critic from the Chronicle as I strode out wearing black chinos, black belt, and a black turtle-neck sweater. The applause was generous, and I felt secure as I raised the baton to begin. The audience gave the music its full attention as the clear timbres of the ancient instruments crackled and buzzed, hummed and tinkled through the four and a half century old score.

Then the dancers came on. I had dreaded this moment, and the musicians and I had conspired to ignore them as much as possible. There was no need for them to ignore us, they were already oblivious to the music and the context of the libretto anyway. The audience grew restless after a few minutes. They quickly perceived that the dance wasn't going anywhere as the two dancers swung their silk scarves round and round, over and over, unconsciously slighting the intense efforts of the musicians.

One review of the performance hit the nail on the head with the headline "Schizophrenic Orfeo" and was kind enough to praise the music, but wondered where we had found the dancers. I showed this review to the producer and told her that I and all the musicians felt the same way, but she refused to make the necessary changes. I managed to get a performance of the music alone in Berkeley, which was very well received. Even that didn't convince our producer. Next on our schedule was a Mozart opera. I refused to work again with her dancers and she decided to find another conductor.

Nobody would work with her except a beginning conducting student from the conservatory, and he could not pull together the required musical talent. On that sour note ended the San Francisco Chamber Opera Co.'s first incarnation. It came back with a different producer and Kent Nagano conducting.

Among the gigs that came my way was a private party for the Gallos at one of the best Italian restaurants in the city. The famous family of wine makers were celebrating the birthday of a patriarch of the family. It was my job to sit in the corner of the dark room – made darker by a deep red rug, dim tapestries, and low beams of nearly black, aged wood – and play my harpsichord. "Play whatever you think appropriate." they told me. I chose to decant the gentle music of Gibbons, Byrd, Francois and Louis Couperin, and Dowland, all suitably well aged, having been laid down in the 16th and 17th centuries.

As usual in such situations, I was ignored by all. When someone's path to the rest rooms took them by me, they might give me a nod or a smile, but otherwise I was of as much interest as the wallpaper. Then one of the strange things that happen to musicians occurred. There is a melancholy Chaconne by the elder Couperin that I often used in such situations. It is undemanding technically, and sits well on the instrument. I started playing, and became caught up in the piece, finding something in it I had never before heard. This magic projected itself across the room, and I was both unaware and aware that the clink of fork on plate and all conversation had stopped.

At the completion of the piece, there was dead silence, and I looked up. All attention was focussed on me, and I did not know if I had committed a faux pas by emerging from the woodwork. One of the senior Gallos, his face separated from the dark background by an outline of white hair, started to applaud, and the rest of the family joined in. He then walked over and put his hand on my shoulder and announced, "Such a fine musician shall eat with us!" and he had a waiter make a place at his table for me. They would not let me play again until the meal was finished, and then paid close attention to three pieces, which I presented as if in concert, giving the name, date, and composer of each. I concluded with Gibbons' magnificent Earl of Salisbury Pavanne, still playing with inspiration and in full command of my instrument and audience. I then asked them to please return to their conversation, and I resumed my role as background musician.

As I was leaving, my benefactor strode up and shook my hand. To my immense relief he did not press any money upon me (I was already being well paid and would have been embarrassed to take more), but simply said, "Thank you for the music, it has made my party quite memorable." I packed up my harpsichord and went home. The glow of this memory has not faded, but I have never again found just what it was in the Chaconne that made it so wonderful that night. Years later the muse favored me again as I was performing a Beethoven piano sonata at Stanford, but such moments of musical perfection are, for me, rare. I have been granted a glimpse of what it must be like to be a great musician, one who can command the emotions and minds of an audience while becoming himself so absorbed into and by the music so that there is no room in mind or heart for anything else.

A few months after the high point of working for the Gallos, I was asked to play for the annual San Francisco United Way fund raiser. It was being given at the famous and posh St. Francis Hotel. I hadn't really wanted to play this event, but Rene, who had sung for me in Orfeo and who knew anybody who was anybody in San Francisco, had appealed to me to do it. I did owe her a favor.

"All you've got to do," she said, "is to accompany my choral group. They're well-rehearsed, and you don't have to direct them beyond giving them the beat."

This sounded like something I could do in my sleep, though I didn't like the thought of having to sit through a bad dinner, watching plaudits being given to people I didn't know for deeds unfamiliar to me, and listening to fund-raising speeches by earnest and humorless do-gooders. I grudgingly consented. She must have sensed my reluctance, for she offered to have me sit with some important people. It never hurts to be among people who are likely to need your services, as she pointed out. Then again, with interesting dinner companions it could turn out to be an enjoyable evening – better than spending the time in one of the back hallways where musicians usually end up, eating stale sandwiches from a catered luncheon given earlier in the week.

She gave me the name of the group's lead singer, and told me that they would mail me the piano parts. With a toodle-oo, she left, saying that she was going to Portugal and would look me up when she got back. She knew how to avoid an engagement with panache.

When, after a week, the music hadn't arrived, I tried to call the lead singer. Her number was unlisted. By calling friends of friends, I was able to reach one of the other singers in the group, who assured me that the music was in the mail. Three days before the event, the music came.

It was in the form of Xerox copies. The four vocal lines were intact since that was what the singers work from, but the piano accompaniment was cut off. What was left showed just the top of the right-hand part. At least I knew what key they were going to sing in, but I didn't have the piano part. I called the one singer whose number I knew, and she said that those copies were all she had. But she said she would get me the complete scores the next day. That would be the day before the fund raiser.

The music didn't come. So I called her again. Her boy friend answered and immediately hung up the phone, probably thinking I was a rival suitor. Eventually I reached her, and she said that there would be no time to rehearse anyway, but that she would bring me the music an hour before the event started. Now I was getting a bit nervous. But, I reasoned, I could at least figure out the chords from the choral parts and play it as from jazz charts or a fake book. So I sat down and wrote down most of the chords. I had spent many hours in bars and night clubs playing from charts, so I expected to be able to muddle through. Nonetheless, I would rather have had the score and a few rehearsals under my belt.

I drove into the city and hid my beat-up old orange International Harvester truck some blocks away. It looked like something a street maintenance crew had discarded, and I loved it. A punctual beast, it had gotten me there the prescribed hour early. The singers (who I wouldn't have recognized anyway, having never seen them) were not to be found, even though I enlisted the hotel staff to query every likely looking woman. I got more and more nervous until, about five minutes before we were due to begin, four women arrived holding folders full of music.

The lead singer introduced herself, and told me that they were going to do one piece that I hadn't been told about, and, oh yes, "Climb Any Mountain" was going to be sung in G-flat rather than in D major.

"When is this all supposed to happen?" I asked

"First we'll do the National Anthem before the dinner, then we'll have dinner, and then we do the four pieces."

"Do you have the piano scores?" I asked.

"No," she said, "was I supposed to bring them?"

"Oh dear," said the woman to wholm I had spoken on the phone, "I forgot." There was no tone regret or apology in her voice.

"Well," I said, "in that case I won't be able to do the arrangements you expect, but I'll just play the chords. Oh, do you have your arrangement of the Star Spangled Banner for me to look at?"

"You mean you don't know our music?" asked the lead singer in a huff, "don't you believe in practicing before a performance?"

They stomped off. Great, I thought. During dinner I planned to transpose the piece since I had worked it out in the wrong key. I thought I could probably fake the anthem – especially if they would tell me what key they wanted it in. Just then one of the singers ran up to me and gave me the vocal parts to the national anthem, and I breathed a sigh of relief. It was in C major.

The M.C. was a buxom lady who handed me a program as she said, "Welcome Professor Raskin, we are very glad that you have consented to perform for us."

"It's nothing," I said. I hadn't been called "professor" since I had quit being an art professor nearly a decade earlier. "I'm just accompanying a few songs." Clearly I had been set up with a reputation sufficient to get me seated at the front (corner) table.

She went off, repeating to herself, like a character from Alice In Wonderland, "So modest, so modest..."

When the singers walked onto the stage I hastily walked up to the tiny upright spinet the hotel had provided. It was at the same level as the tables, and I had to look up to see the vocalists. The instrument was finished in a blond veneer, now peeling off in paper-thin curls, a piano by convention only. Given its outward appearance I imagined with dread the condition of its mechanism. Pianos of this size are purchased because they are inconspicuous and can be had in a variety of finishes to meet the needs of any decor. They are relatively light, cheap, easily moved, and seldom tuned. Having tried and failed for years to find out how to fit my nine-foot concert grand into normal-sized living rooms gracefully, I understand why these miniature pianos are so popular with interior decorators who are only required to look at a room, not listen to it. Fortunately, the thin sound of these diminuitive uprights quickly discourages students and amateurs (professionals know better), so their musical inadequacy is rarely apparent. With these encouraging thoughts in mind, I had just placed the music for the national anthem on the instruments stand one of the singers, alertly realizing that my score was in C, suddenly hissed down at me, "We do it in A-flat!"

They had gone from an easy key to a more difficult one. In the few moments left I studied the music, transposing it into A-flat in my mind, then the lights suddenly went out, and a projector blasted a picture of the American flag on the screen. This did not help my musical problem, as both the score and the singers were now invisible in the general gloom. My eyes adapted enough in a few seconds to see the lead singer motioning for me to begin. Staggering along in A- flat, I cobbled up an introduction and the entire audience arose. I remembered my earlier "Bach" improvisation as they began to sing. They were a bit wobbly since I hadn't played the introduction they were used to. I gamely tried to keep up with them, but they used extreme rubato and while we were sometimes neck and neck, more often one of us was winning by a mile. Finally, they did a dramatic shift of keys, with a glissando up a whole-step, for the grand finale.

I was totally unprepared for this last key change, and as they modulated to make the tonic B-flat I came resoundingly down to what had been the tonic, A-flat. The resulting carnage left the singers and myself in dead silence, the audience stunned to hear the national anthem mangled so. At the same moment, the singers and I realized that we had to finish the closing phrase: "And the home of the brave." If I had started first, it might have worked; if they had started first I would have sat out the ending. However, for the one and only time of the evening we started exactly together, with them somewhere between the key of B-flat and the key of B (their voices having risen from stress), and me still in A-flat.

It was worse than before. With a sound like a motor whose bearings just died, we ground to a halt. In a few seconds, the lights came back on. Like cat burglars, they had fled the scene in the darkness, the lights revealing me at the piano, grinning sheepishly at the crowd, and having to take the entire blame for the fiasco.

If you had asked me then if this was the worst moment of my musical career, I would have said, unhesitatingly, yes. But now I had to eat dinner with a few notables: the bishop, a well-known TV news commentator, the head of the Board of Supervisors, the wife of a billionaire, and the ambassador of a major European country.

My conversation must have been distracted at best, considering that all through dinner I was trying to transpose "Climb Any Mountain", the score of which was sitting on my knees, accumulating food stains. The dinner itself would have been enough to destroy conversation.

Dinner over, we were now the entertainment. I sat down at the piano, and the singers came out to the absolute minimum – a mere smattering – of applause permitted by social convention. The M.C. came out and, before she had a chance to introduce us, I pulled her aside to ask if they were going to turn out the lights again. "Yes," she said, "they are going to show slides during the singing." I asked for a light for the piano so that I could see the music.

So she got up to the podium, and begged the audience's indulgence for a few moments while they got a light for the piano. With remarkable rapidity for a hotel, they hooked up a proper brass piano lamp to the music stand on the spinet, and turned it on. She announced the names of the singers and that they would be accompanied by "Professor Raskin," and stepped down.

Feeling reasonably confident, I smiled at the singers and lowered my eyes to the illuminated score, ready to give them a downbeat as soon as the house lights were lowered. The lights went out. At the same time so did the piano light, since it was plugged into the same circuit. With a spotlight on their faces and white gowns, I could see the singers, but they could not see me. They motioned for me to start, and, not having looked at the particular piece for a few hours, I couldn't remember so much as what key it was in – not only that, it was a piece that I didn't even know except from having played through the vocal lines a few times. The more flustered I got, the more I forgot. I whispered up, "what key do you want it in?"

"The one it's written in, stupid."

"I can't see it."

"In G." said one of them, exasperated.

"In D." said another.

"I'll give you a G," I said, taking charge of the situation, "then you begin."

"No, play the introduction."

"I can't see the music," I reminded them.

I played the G, and they sang a capella, which sounded pretty rough. It was especially bad during the long rests where there were supposed to be piano solos.

The next piece was familiar to me, and we got through it moderately well, considering that we had never done it together before, that I was improvising, and that wherever my taste said forte, theirs said pianissimo, and so forth.

A photo of mountains, purple in their majesty, glared from the screen and we began "Climb Any Mountain." I couldn't see my carefully prepared transposition. The piece wasn't "in my fingers", then again it was in a key for which I had not properly prepared. The song came apart in about 25 measures. I called it quits and walked back to my table in the darkness to get my things, this time leaving the singers on stage to do the best they could. They deserved it. Finally the slide was turned off, and I could hear the sad shuffling of invisible feet from the stage at the front of the room.

The house lights came on to show a bare stage. I now wished that I hadn't accepted the offer to eat with the bigwigs, I would have been out of there and on my way home. Now I would have to sit and listen to a piano performance listed in the program, which I had not had time to read beyond seeing where the singers were listed. Besides, I didn't care what it was or who it was: whatever the pianist did would just make me look that much worse. I was just thinking saying a hasty goodbye to the people at my table, envying the singers who had just slunk off backstage, when the M.C. pointed to a curtain on the right side of the hall, and it opened revealing a spotlighted grand piano rotating slowly on a round stage, with part of a dance band's apparatus set up around the piano.

"Professor Raskin," she beamed, "has graciously offered to perform two etudes, one by Lizst, and one by Chopin. Professor Raskin!" Now there was applause: not generous, but well-meant.

I walked up to the M.C. and whispered "Nobody told me that I was going to do a solo tonight, besides I don't know any Lizst at all, and I don't play the Chopin Etudes." The fact was and is that those pieces were quite beyond my technique and from a different tradition and time than the music that I usually performed.

"So what will you play?" she asked, obviously puzzled, looking at a note that Rene must have left her.

"Nothing." I said. "I'm not prepared."

There was no guile left in me, and I was reduced to the truth.

"You must," she said, giving the impression that she would die on the spot if things didn't go according to plan, "it's on the program."

In the program, my name appeared as piano soloist. She gave me a pleading look, and the audience was watching expectantly.

Trapped, and not bold enough to just leave, I walked up to the piano, stepped up to the band's mike, and announced that there had been a change in the program, and that I would be playing a short suite by the little-known baroque composer Profurio Bandolini. I had had decided to improvise something on the spot; it was the safest thing I could think of.

I started quite credibly and was just beginning to think I could pull it off, when the dance band members began setting up around me. This is in utter disregard of normal musical etiquette, but they were probably being paid as well as I was. I managed to ignore these distractions until one of the dance musicians leaned over and whispered: "who d'ya think you're foolin' mister?" After that vote of no-confidence, my improvisation fell apart. I finished with a limp musical flourish, and bowed to a smidgen of faint hand clapping from a few well-brought-up members of the audience. The audience was just too polite to throw things.

This really was the lowest point of my musical career, and I consoled myself with the thought, as I crept out the back way among the waiters carrying the other debris from the hall, that it could only get better from this point on.

In my life I have oscillated between the arts and the sciences, spending a few years in one and then returning to the other. Some years after the lugubrious opera, when I was busy creating the Macintosh computer at Apple, some of my old musician friends found themselves short a keyboard player for a wedding. I was free that Saturday and, after a rehearsal, we went to the expensive Los Altos home where the wedding was taking place.

Due to circumstances that would make this story too long, by then I owned and drove a Rolls Royce Silver Shadow. It was large enough for all the musicians and their instruments: besides, my harpsichord fit nicely in the wool-lined trunk. The car caused some confusion when we arrived. The staff at the wedding assumed it was for the bride and groom, and parked us front and center. Forgetting for a moment how musicians are usually treated at such occasions, I assumed that we had been parked near the main door to make it easier for us to unload our instruments. When we foolishly told them who we were, they ushered us away and had us park out back, where it was a few hundred feet of walking and two flights of stairs to climb to get ourselves set up.

The father of the bride and many of the guests were also in the electronics industry, and from time to time one of them would stop and watch us play for a moment. Between numbers, one man seemed to have a particular fascination with my playing.

"You look familiar," he said, "didn't I see you playing harpsichord at a wedding two weeks ago?"

"No, I don't think so," I replied, "I wasn't doing a wedding two weeks ago."

"I don't know," he said, "you do seem familiar."

Indeed, I should have been familiar. We had just spent the last two days across the table from one another, negotiating a contract. But my protective coloration as a menial was completely effective. We were acoustic decor, non-people, to be rolled up and sent back to the rental agency along with the red carpet that had been laid across the driveway for the occasion. He could not move my face from one context, a respected businessman, to my present position as a hired servant.

After the wedding we moved the Rolls up front to make things easier and loaded ourselves back into the car. The man who hadn't recognized me happened to leave late, and did a double take as he saw us in the finest car at the wedding; at best the other guests drove Jaguars, Porsches, and Mercedes. He came up to the driver's side, leaned over to look through the open window, and asked:

"Is this your car?"

"Yes."

"You own it?"

"Yes."

"Do you mind my asking how musicians can afford a car like this?"

I was prepared for the question; I had often dreamed of being asked it.

"Practice." I said.

Now that music is mostly a hobby for me, I do not suffer such stressful occasions. I am not expected to be more than an amateur, and people are therefore pleasantly surprised when I make it from one end of a piece to the other without mistakes. Or with just a few.