Governor's School Week: Part V of V

The feeling of hearing Scintillation performed in a reverberating chapel for the Closing Ceremonies instilled in me the hunger to compose (a hunger which soldiered on through years of composition lessons that had varying degrees of annoyance, until it finally consumed itself sometime during grad school). When I returned home, I immediately wrote Glossalalia March, and these two pieces became the bookends for my Fifth Year Recital at Virginia Tech in 2001. I followed this up with a new composition every month throughout high school, and ended up as a composition major in college.

So, despite the silly activities and embarassing curriculums, Governor's School as a whole was a positive experience for me, because it allowed me to explore aspects of music I hadn't considered before and interact with musicians that were far more ambitious and determined than I ever was. Had I not gone, I know for sure that I would have spent the summer month playing Doom 2 on the computer and biking around Old Town. I would have ended up going to college only for computer science. I never would have been able to write such pop hits as Bubba's Fried Chicken Stand or arrange One More Mozart Aria That Shac Is Currently Obsessed With But Will Forget In Two Weeks. From there, I would not have gone to grad school in Florida or gotten Booty, and eventually there would have been a typhoon in Japan.

Of all the artistically-inclined students I met at Governor's School, a few stand out in my steel trap of a memory:

At the beginning of the month, we all received a little book full of blank pages which we were supposed to use for taking notes in class. When my book was still blank three weeks later, I had the bright idea to have all of my Gov School posse sign their names and a brief message for posterity. Had I patented this brilliance (I called it the "yearbook"), I would be independently wealthy by now.

I am a great guy with great skills, and I'm gonna do great.	This note came from a cellist I had a mild crush on but was too shy to ever actually talk to. I wasn't even totally sure she knew who I was when I had her sign it.
Here is a visual representation of the "dramatic half-whisper" necessary to pronounce the title of my piece.	Marika was a theatre person in my LEGENDARY VISIONS (OF THE GODS) class. There's nothing special about this note, but it could be the coolest handwriting sample ever.
It's interesting, the people you affect without even noticing. I probably talked to this girl four times all month long (she roomed with a girl from my high school) and never realized it was a big deal at all.	Like all yearbooks, the entries can be divided into two categories: "I don't know you, but have a nice summer." and "Inside Commentary". My inside commentary was pretty evenly split between people liking my blue mask and jokes about stealing music from Aaron Copland.
Humanities student, T.C. Wiliams '96 Senior Class President, future sportswriter in Elmira, NY, and elder brother of Chris Sharp.

So Governor's School concluded on July 29, 1995, and after farewells with hugs and tears, we all returned home as changed people. Following a brief flurry of letters in the next two months (during the halcyon days of no mainstream e-mail) and promises to hold reunions and keep in touch, everyone from Governor's School vanished into oblivion, and I never thought of any of them again for the next twelve years. Now that I've gone through my little file folder of programs and trinkets, I wonder where they've all gotten to, but haven't really tracked anyone down, even with the magic of Facebook (the problem with Facebook is that, unlike 95% of the other people with accounts there, I, and almost everyone I went to Governor's School with, was born before 1980).

I hope you enjoyed this week's feature!

Happy Birthday Matt Jenkinson!