IN THE SWING

There is, among Wittenberg alumni, one of great reputation in a special corner of the music world. He left Wittenberg in 1959 with a music degree, and on the strength of a brilliant senior composition won a student’s position with the French woman who then was the teacher of music greats, Nadia Boulanger.

We approved this course, his parents and mine — and me, for he had been my best friend at college. But we drifted out of contact, he and I, and throughout the years the only news of him came from my parents, who remained friends of his. He was doing “computer music,” we heard.

Then, on the occasion of my 25th anniversary at National Geographic, and with the reward money that came with it, I bought an electronic musical keyboard, the kind with a hundred or more instrument voices, and began to play.

And the very next day, it seemed, I glanced at the New York Times and saw there the long feature article about my old friend.

He had just retired from a brilliant and rewarding career at Stanford University, during which he had done the seminal development of the technological wizardry that allows sounds to be digitally sampled and then reproduced, in any pitch or combination, with near-absolute faithfulness to the original.

His work was at the very heart of the technology; he had earned the patents. And my new keyboard, an amateur version of the professional units he had pioneered that are used worldwide, existed only because of him.

His name is John Chowning, and that is a picture of him taken through a practice-room door in the old music school in the late 1950s as he works to satisfy a “piano” requirement.

He played the violin as well, and so did I, and perhaps at a higher level than he, but his way with all music is to be remembered as “easy,” easy in the way that all masters make their work seem.

I’m not sure how he knew to ask about me, but our initial meeting came during one chapel period in the Union, early in my second year. I heard a voice behind me: “Are you the Dave Arnold from Wilmington?” It was John Chowning.

The name was familiar; perhaps we’d each seen the other’s on the short-list of Wimingtonians at Wittenberg. He’d come to college straight from the Navy, where he’d spent his three years touring the Mediterranean with an admiral’s flagship band.

He was a drummer, and he had an idea about forming a jazz group. He’d heard I played the bass, though to be honest at that time I barely did; I could just about get sounds from it and didn’t even own one.

There was a piano player on campus too, John said. His name was George Lindamood. And so was formed the jazz trio that would soon take the name, the John Chowning Collegiates.

I hope more than the three of us remember us. Think back. The good old tunes, the standards: “Jeepers, Creepers,” “These Foolish Things,” “Over the Rainbow,” “Bye Bye Blackbird,” “Stella by Starlight,” “Don't Blame Me,” “I'm in the Mood for Love.”

I think we tried to put everybody in the mood for love. “I Remember You” — that was another tune we played, and it was true: I do.

One place John got to a little faster than I did was in thinking the Collegiates were ready to “make the scene” (a cool thing we said in those days) back East.

There was the not-small matter of summer jobs, and John’s thought was, why work? Why not play? He turned his father loose, a chemical engineer who was born to be an agent, who was more “hip” than all three of us put together, and the next thing we knew we had a summer “gig” (also one of those words) back in Wilmington. “Can you dig it?” John asked us, and we thought we could.

John's father also had another inspiration. I still don't know how he pulled it off, but toward summer's end, we traveled to the RCA recording studios in New York. We'd been given a session. And more: some pressings. We were going to make a record. We made the tapes — I was so distracted by nervousness that I ended up playing better than I ever had before — and not long after the start of school in the fall we had the pressings.

The “album” — we assembled the sleeves by hand on a counter in the bookstore — sold virtually nowhere but the bookstore. But John’s agent father did send one as audition material to Norman Granz, organizer of the Newport Jazz Festival. We could only smile at his enterprise. He thought more of us than we thought he should.

ON THE STAGE

There were a couple of rambunctious dramatic talents loose among us at Wittenberg in the late ’50s. One was a dimunitive little Brit, a professor named Roland Hammond. An actor, he’d come to Wittenberg more or less straight off the English stage I think the story was.

To watch him direct was as dramatic a thing as the play itself, as he worked with enthusiastic but unproven student-actors and edged them through rehearsals toward full-scale, professional-looking productions.

He bounced and bubbled and effused, and it was easy to love his energy and to forgive the fact that he wasn’t “doing” on London stages but “only teaching” at Wittenberg. Wittenberg had won in the deal. What coach Bill Edwards was doing with football players, Roland Hammond was doing for dramatics: making champions.

I mentioned two dramatic talents, and here’s the second. He was one of us: Phil Sebastian. (By virtue of his talent he was considerably more than one of us.) Single-handedly Phil wrote the book and the music — from out of nowhere, it seemed; we’d never heard of him working on it — and then went on to produce The Remembered Year.

Genius of concept was matched by genius of production. It introduced to us, who had not begun to think about it, nostalgia for our college years. Watching it, participating in it, we were seeing a foreshadow of the memories of our own college years; it was introducing to us both recollection and anticipation. Phil, I think, already knew what we would one day learn.

Phil and director Rick Zimmerman (really a co-second talent) took their show as “near-Broadway” as they could in Springfield — down to the old Fairbanks Theater. The entire production was a student effort: the book, the direction, the financing, the acting, the music — even unwrapping the theater from its mothballs. And when the curtain came down, the entire college, if not the town, stood in ovation.

For some of us — and I’ll single out me because I know it to be true — Phil’s and Rick’s work opened eyes to what could be done with the combination of originality and that old thing called “drive.” And another: “stick-to-it-iveness.” And another: “thinking big.” In the beginning was nothing but the idea.

I’ve thought many times about what I learned from the professors at Wittenberg; I’d like to thank professors Sebastian and Zimmerman for the education they provided as well.

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