February 7, 2002
Profile: The professor and his brass band
| Steve Hill |
| University Week |
Leroy Searle has identified at least two general types of former musicians. “There are those who quit and wish they hadn’t,” the UW associate professor said recently. “And there are those who say, ‘I quit and it’s a damn good thing.’ ”
Then there’s Searle.
An associate professor of English and comparative literature, Searle dropped the trumpet in high school. About 40 years later he started up again and today, he’s the organizer of an impromptu brass group. The Ravenna Brass Ensemble is a collection of musicians of various talent levels that will get together and play almost anywhere, for almost any cause and with little prior notice.
Searle started the group with one little white lie.
His wife and son James, himself a bass trombonist, bought Searle a spot in a summer music camp about six years ago. They thought he’d enjoy spending a week at the camp intensely studying the vocal music that had become such an important part of his life. He had been singing with the School of Music-sponsored University Chorale.
“I lied on the enrollment form,” Searle said, laughing. When it asked if he played a musical instrument, Searle said yes. He packed up the trumpet he had purchased not long before at a yard sale and headed off to the “Midsummer Musical Retreat.”
The truth is he quit playing the trumpet as an adolescent, not because he didn’t have a passion for the horn, but because of an ongoing conflict with a music teacher.
The band director, Searle said, wasn’t as interested in music as he was in the marching band. Because Searle was bigger and stronger than most of the other kids he got pulled from the trumpet in favor of the sousaphone. “The band director just didn’t care about the music. He wanted somebody to swing the horn back and forth in the sunshine.”
So he quit the band and took up vocal music. In the ensuing years, Searle has maintained a passion for music. But it wasn’t until that moment filling out the entry form that he became a trumpet player again.
“It went a lot better than I thought it would,” Searle said of his time at the adult music camp. “The camp was really quite exhilarating. You get this group of individuals together and you practice intensely — six hours a day for five days. And by the end you’re performing together and sounding very good.”
The challenge then became finding an outlet that would allow him to continue his rebirth with the trumpet. One day inspiration came as he walked toward the HUB and heard the sounds of a brass choir filling the air.
“They just appeared on campus one day and started playing,” Searle recalled. “It was delightful. It was the kind of practice one would have found during the Renaissance.”
Jay Scott — who organized the group known as Guerrilla Gabriella, which so inspired Searle — became the English professor’s trumpet teacher. In addition to those lessons Searle began teaching himself music theory and then started learning to transpose musical arrangements for a small brass band.
It might seem like quite a task for an English professor, but anyone who knows Searle isn’t likely to be surprised.
“It’s characteristic of other things I’ve done,” he said. “Every seven or 10 years it’s something new and in the same sort of demented and obsessed way, I learn more than I have a right to know.”
He’s studied photography and photographic theory. He learned to build computers and then realized he’d need to know how to program them, so he taught himself a programming language.
“The music isn’t so odd as the computer adventure. Music has been a constant theoretical and aesthetic interest for me.”
Performance naturally followed. In fact, performance may have been a result of simple genetics.
Searle’s grandfather was a carpenter by day. But in their free time, he and his brothers played in a brass band that would give impromptu performances at public sites throughout Utah and southern Idaho. Then there was the time that Searle’s mother surprised her children by coming home one day with a cello. She hadn’t played the instrument since high school, but her kids were growing up and she had more time to herself.
“She picked it up again and started playing Haydn trios.”
The general public, Searle has found, in some ways isn’t much different from his family.
“Those kinds of experiences are more common than people realize. Lots of people played some instrument during their public school education. Music education is underfunded, yes, but people are very committed to it. So many people get to a certain level and then stop. You just have to scratch at the surface a little bit in the adult population and you can find people who have some interest and some level of experience playing a musical instrument.”
Searle has done that and, thanks to his transposing talents, collected a library of music that the Ravenna Brass players can get via e-mail if they want to practice on their own. Much of the material, however, is basic enough that people can show up and sight-read the music. The library has about 200 titles, including some original Searle compositions.
The Ravenna Brass consists of about 17 players. Four to six usually show up for each performance. They don’t spend a lot of time rehearsing, but Searle hopes to change that. He is looking into securing off-campus space for regular rehearsals. The aim would be to organize a sustainable brass quintet, as well as a larger brass choir to perform more difficult pieces.
Searle will be performing with his daughter, Cassandra Ewer, this spring in Phoenix, where she regularly sings for the Phoenix Bach Choir. A soprano, Ewer credits her father for inspiring a music career that has twice put her on stage at Carnegie Hall.
“I gained my love of music from my father,” she said. “In large part it was because of his influence that I chose to pursue a career in music.”
But a career in music is nothing Searle is pursuing. He plans to continue playing for the sheer fun of it.
“I enjoy playing music, but it certainly doesn’t make me want to quit my day job.”
Searle said musicians on campus who would like to participate in Ravenna Brass can find out more information by sending him an e-mail at lsearle@u.washington.edu.
