It was not until the fall semester of his senior year that he found the eye-opening, life-changing class: Beginner Composition with Professor of Music Lou Spratlan.
"I think I owe everything to Professor Spratlan," Schneider said. "I had enrolled in his class just for fun, to check out a new aspect of music that I hadn't really pursued before; and I came into the class not having any direction as a composer and not even knowing if I could even survive a course in composition. I'd been working on a music history paper for my thesis until then, and one day, I casually mentioned, 'Oh, it'd be fun to write an opera,' and it all of a sudden blossomed into a huge project that needed my full attention. I kind of had this big change of heart and ended up switching theses."
Serendipity
Like his discovery of composition, it seems that many other things in Schneider's life have happened through coincidence and chance. He attended a high school in what he described as "a really, really backwoods part of Northern California," where most people did not go to college.
Schneider was the only person in his class to go to a school on the East Coast. "I actually heard about Amherst through the older brother of my best friend," he said. "I came out to visit him my senior year and it seemed like a good match for me, so it just kind of worked out that I ended up here. It's weird to think about it in retrospect."
It's a good thing he did, because it was at Amherst that Schneider had "the best and most transformative experience" of his life. Except for a few short pieces that he sketched out for class before, he had never really written a piece of music. "I was starting this enormous project with nothing, really, to prove that I could take on such a monumental task," he said. "But as I was taking Professor Spratlan's class, I started getting really, really inspired."
The development of Schneider's opera benefited from this same serendipity. As he was looking for a story for the project, Spratlan suggested that he look at some Latin American and Spanish writers. While browsing through some of García-Márquez's writings, Schneider happened upon a short story called "The Very Old Man With Enormous Wings" and immediately knew that he had found what he was looking for. "I was getting excited just from reading the title," he said. "I was picturing how good some Amherst student would look, wearing huge wings on stage. Then, as I was reading the story, I realized that there were some things in it that I really wanted to bring to life musically."
As a double major in English and music, it seems oddly fitting that there was a single sentence buried in the story that fired up Schneider's musical imagination. "There was a line in the Márquez's story about the old man with enormous wings, who might have been an angel, 'singing strange sea shanties under the stars in an incomprehensible dialect' and I really turned on to that passage," he said. "I could imagine writing some really peculiar sounding music for this otherworldly creature, which I ended up representing as whistling. I turned him into a whistling angel man."
With the opera, Schneider managed not only to integrate his two majors into a single project, but revived an old love for theater as well. Although he was not involved in theater, while at Amherst, it had been a large part of his high school career, and his past experiences gave him a good model to follow when he found himself serving all roles of stage director, composer and producer for his opera. "It felt appropriate, my senior year, to bring back this old passion and combine it with my passion for music," he said.
Using past experience
Even though Schneider only approached music from an analytical standpoint prior to his senior year, he has no regrets about the time he spent in the analytic stage. He described music as a way of "putting yourself in the mind of the composer and trying to think what the composer himself was thinking in his process of writing a piece." Though he said that studying music history and becoming intimately familiar with the greatest works ever written could be inhibiting, and sometimes could make a composer wonder why more music needed to be written when such great music existed already. Schneider called the time he spent working in musicology and music history "excellent preparation" and hinted that it might be something he would return to in the future.
Future Plans
Eventually, Schneider would like to go to graduate school for composition. But for the next year, at least, the only '06 opera writer will be staying in the Amherst community, as the college has awarded Schneider a fellowship to study music in a graduate capacity. Schneider will continue to work on his composing with Spratlan who has agreed to come out of retirement to take Schneider under his wing.
Meanwhile, Schneider has been experimenting with music in new and different ways with his new musical pieces. "All too often, I'm at a concert, and I think that the piece I'm listening to is almost unbearably long," he said. "There is some kind of arrogance in taking up half an hour of somebody's time in a very intense way-it's not like their attention can be diverted in a concert!" As a reaction to musical grandstanding, Schneider is writing a series of compositions he calls "Binary Appetizers." "They're designed to whet the palate," he explained. "They're sort of experiments in brevity-I try in them not to waste notes or people's time."
At the same time, some of his favorite pieces are the slowest and longest compositions in all of music. He mentioned a piece by John Cage being performed in Germany that, at its current speed, would be completed in 639 years. The distinguishing feature about pieces, which he called furniture music, was that they were not designed to be the focus of the listener's attention.
"Eventually I'd love to get into furniture music. More than being listened to, it kind of just exists in space," he said. "It's more, like, I'm just going to kind of be here, and help you, without you even being aware of me." For now, Schneider will have to remain here at Amherst, with his eyes and especially his ears wide open.