River Music: An Atchafalaya Story

Chapter 6: Austin

c h a P t e r 6 Austin A t midnight on New Year’s Eve, 1989, Earl and Vickie pulled into an apartment complex at Ben White and First Street, a busy corner in south Austin. Earl had rented a unit there,sight unseen,on the promise of trees,but the next morning he realized how big an architectural transition he’d have to make. “This place looked like a motel,” he said. “The only redeeming feature was that the pool had an overview of Austin.” Earl started work on a master ’s degree in composition, and Vickie found a job as a dental assistant. “Going 86 chapter 6 to UT was, psychologically, like leaving a house with fifteen-foot ceilings for a cabin with eight-foot ceilings,”Earl said.“I had entered a world where it’s all about competition and ego, and here I was trying to carry with me a secret vessel of nothingness.” He was referring to an essential precept in his Zen practice: muso toku, the attitude of no profit or gain for oneself—a parallel,perhaps,to the Atchafalaya’s natural cycles and the plentitude that arises from within. Yet he didn’t want to leave his thirst for intellectual expansion unresolved. He says he enjoyed researching and writing papers and discussing ideas with colleagues—a luxury that had often evaded him in Louisiana. “You enter a new town and you may not like it,” he said, “but still, there’s something there you want to fulfill.” Karl Korte, Earl’s major professor, with whom he would work all the way through a Ph.D., remembered when Earl came to UT. “He’d already had a successful career in the printing business, and he wanted, in his midthirties, to get another degree in music. I thought that was a pretty gutsy thing to do. “As a student, he was very curious, and we shared a great love of jazz, so we talked about that a lot. He would sit down at the piano and play passages from Miles Davis charts, stuff like that. He usually took my suggestions for his music very seriously, and though sometimes we would disagree, it was never anything but a pleasure to teach him.” Outside private lessons, Earl and Korte developed a friendship that continues today, though Korte, now retired, lives in upstate New York. “We would occasionally go out for a drink or two,” Korte said, “and we talked about it all—man talk, but also, literature, philosophy, and so on. He’s so well read. He was tremendously serious, much more so than I was used to, in students. And he’s a tremendously likeable human being—I’ve always been very fond of him. He’s an unusual guy. Very honest—no bullshit at all.” Hanns-Bertold Dietz, a musicology professor specializing in eighteenth-century music, agreed to serve on Earl’s doctoral committee after Earl worked as his technical assistant for a multimedia course titled “Exploring the Fine Arts.” austin 87 “It was while walking back from the College of Fine Arts Building, where I taught the class, to the Music Building, that we struck up conversations about historic, social, philosophic, or aesthetic topics related to art and music and life,” Dietz remembered. “It was the breadth of his interest and the genuineness of his thoughts that made me agree to serve on his committee.” Dietz recalled that Earl, though an A student in his eighteenthcentury music course, did not stand out in the class. “When asked, he would always have thoughtful answers but would not volunteer questions, because—I later found out—he did not want to disrupt my plan and direction of presentation. He struck me as a typical Southern gentleman.” Dietz later worked with Earl one-on-one in directed readings for his comprehensive exams,and vividly remembered“the ‘calm’ excitement” Earl brought to the sessions, especially concerning the question of the composer as moralist. Dietz also said Earl enjoyed teasing out the changes in Haydn’s compositional process in his symphonic output between the 1770s (Farewell Symphony) and the 1790s (London Symphonies). He added that Earl seemed to him to be a procrastinator. “He had his own rhythm of work,” he said. “He wouldn’t fit into the typical corporate lifestyle.” Dietz and Earl still keep in touch. “All that trouble to finish the Ph.D. and...