In the moment, we’re usually too preoccupied to recognize the earth moving beneath our feet.
Discovering Randy Foy’s Music Box at age 17 was one such moment for me. Not just a tremor, but a tectonic shift.
Randy was the orchestra conductor – and director of the music program – at the North Carolina Governor’s School, a program started in 1961 by North Carolina Governor Terry Sanford to give kids from a variety of backgrounds the opportunity to engage with contemporary (I guess they called it ‘Modern’ then) thinking in the arts and humanities over a 6-week summer program. For a mostly rural state where the majority of folks came from agriculture and manufacturing, this was a pretty progressive idea, and an opportunity the likes of which some had never had before.
I’d been nominated to Orchestral Music by my high school music director, and, after auditioning – something that often made me quite nervous – I was accepted into the program in the summer between junior and senior year.
Standing in front of cardboard box filled with records and CDs – Randy Foy’s Music Box – I didn’t realize at first the extent to which its contents would inform my listening habits for the next 29 years (and counting). I can safely say that because of Randy – and his music box – I will usually still go out of my way to go to a concert if they’re playing something “modern”.
While rehearsing the first movement of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony, Maestro Foy – from the podium – described a particular passage to us. Randy had a way – as does every good music director – of not only inspiring you to play your best without making it seem like work, he had a way of making you fall in love with the music.
That’s why when he finished the description, there was a pregnant pause before he said “…there won’t be a dry seat in the house.” We all knew what he meant, even as we began to roar with laughter.
And in that magical moment, there were surely at least a few non-dry eyes on stage.
Sadly, Randolph Mitchell Foy passed earlier this year, yet his legacy lives on in the thousands of lives he touched through music in his role as researcher, teacher, and conductor of the Governor’s School Orchestra, North Carolina State University (NCSU) Orchestra, the Raleigh Civic Symphony, the Raleigh Civic Chamber Orchestra, and others.
He’ll also feature in future posts here, as the following could never have happened without his influence. They might very well include:
- Steve Reich’s ‘Octet’ – a tape so worn-out from being overplayed in a brown Toyota Tercel, it’s unlistenable. Yet, I can’t bear to throw it out.
- John Adams – not the president. A composer. A living composer (imagine that!) with his finger on the pulse of America.
- Two marching bands collide, according to insurance salesman and iconoclastic composer Charles Ives.
(Also, I promise that I’ll share – over several blog entries – the contents of that box, to the best of my memory.)
Alive Through Music 