I thought this sounded fascinating and asked my mother if I could switch to that teacher. About the same time, we got a Steinway piano at home. The combination of a new teacher and a new piano helped trigger me to become a composer.

The magic road

In winter, when the trees were bare, you could see the George Washington Bridge from our dining room window, the magic road to New York. I went to Ramaz School, in Manhattan. I’d stay around in the city as long as I dared and come home late. There was stuff going on in the city, and the suburbs were deadly to someone who is interested in things. Every night it felt like leaving paradise to go into exile.

The Hong Kong Bach Choir at 50: from division to diversity

The teachers who liked me thought I was rebellious. The English teacher who I was close to thought I was like James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause, which wasn’t true at all. I was simply completely undisciplined, I hadn’t learned how to focus yet. Schoolwork came easy enough that I could get by without doing a lot.

My school music teacher put me in touch with her friend, Bruce Saylor, who was on his way to becoming a prominent composer. I studied with him in my last year in high school, and he advised me about universities.

Good conductor

I studied music at Brandeis University, a liberal arts school outside Boston. I joined the student shows and it quickly became apparent that the musical leadership wasn’t very good, and people started relying on me. Before my second year, I proposed that I conduct the next year’s student-run show.

I talked my way into that, and it went well – it was something that came naturally to me. When you are a beginner you don’t know enough to be scared.

Hong Kong drag queen Coco Pop on climbing the cross-dressing ladder

After my second year, I spent the summer in Israel, where my brother was working on his dissertation. The Rubin Academy of Music, in Jerusalem, was running a summer course with Igor Markevitch, a famous conductor of the old school. As someone from the States with some experience, they didn’t even make me audition, and immediately put me in the group.

I got a lot of encouragement from the players in the orchestra and it went well. This is a field in which you keep going until someone says no – and no one said no. I had various successes early on – before I knew anything – and that puts the pressure on because you are identified as someone.

I felt the pressure, it made it harder.

Knowing the score

I graduated in 1978 and for a year rented an apartment in the north end of Boston, where all the Mafiosi families lived, so it was very safe. I got a couple of part-time teaching jobs to pay the rent and spent the year practising and studying scores and then I applied for a master’s degree at the University of Wisconsin, where Catherine Comet, a French woman who had been a conductor of the Paris Opéra Ballet, took me on. She was a natural, so she didn’t know how to teach, but I got a lot of experience and she was a good mentor.

From there I went to the Peabody Conservatory of the Johns Hopkins University to do a doctoral thesis in conducting. In 1982, I married Rhondda May, an oboist I’d met in Wisconsin. My teacher and the department secretary conspired to get us together, they thought we’d make a good couple.

Rhondda got jobs in various orchestras and I did some guest conducting. We moved to Baltimore and then to Pennsylvania, to Kansas and then she decided to go back to school and we went to Cincinnati and along the way I was going back to where we had been previously to conduct.

Building a repertoire

Rhondda was hired to play in the Hong Kong Philharmonic, and we arrived in Hong Kong in 1991. I began sending off my CV and Hong Kong Baptist College offered me a part-time job. They wanted to restart their orchestra and were running a bridging programme to convert diplomas into degrees. Within a year it became a permanent position and I ended up working there for nine years.

In my second year at Baptist, a colleague, Michael Ryan, who had previously conducted the Hong Kong Bach Choir, told me they were looking for a new conductor and asked if I might be interested. It had been founded in 1970 and was run on a British choral society model, which is very amateur, people aren’t paid.

I made it a condition of my coming that I be paid. It was a token amount, but I wanted to make it a more serious group, with serious aspirations and a more ambitious repertoire. I also sought to make it less of an expat group and more of a universal group that included locals. In 1997, the choir was invited to participate in the British farewell ceremony at Tamar.

Not for profit

After my time at Baptist, I spent a couple of years as head of artists and repertoire at Naxos Records. I learned what people do when they work in offices and also learned that I had no talent for business; I had no appreciation of the profit motive. I went back to teaching and writing.

All through my time in Hong Kong, I’ve done various things at RTHK Radio 4, from presenting classical radio shows to doing CD reviews. I had two children with Rhondda – they are now 26 and 28 – and she moved back to the US in 2006, where my daughters went to university. I met my current partner, Grace, when she auditioned with the choir.

Within a week of her audition, my rehearsal pianist had a schedule change and I needed a pianist and Grace stepped in. She has been a serious pianist and won national competitions in Canada as a kid. She went back to Hawaii to finish her dissertation and returned to Hong Kong to take a post with Lingnan University.

She contacted me and we ended up going out for dinner and have been together ever since. She’s still at Lingnan and I teach a class there now and then.

Hitting the high notes

The choir is now more than 50 years old – the 50th anniversary concert on December 7 is a little delayed because of Covid-19 – so I’ve been with it for more than half its life. We first did Bach’s Mass in B Minor for the choir’s 25th anniversary, in 1995. That was my first time doing the piece and I was terrified. It’s a mammoth, gigantic, overwhelming masterpiece and it’s very presumptuous for any musician to say he or she is up to performing this piece, but by now it’s probably the piece I’ve done more than any other so I have an idea of how it should go.

My goal is to keep making better and better music. Conductors are fortunate in the sense that the age that a lot of people retire is when we’re thought of as just getting good. I hope I’m healthy long enough to be able to profit from all the training. Now I feel like maybe I’m finally getting the idea and next time can actually get it right.

I’m fortunate that the choir is coming along with me and continues to improve and that the best orchestral players in Hong Kong are still willing to play for me. I try to do music that will interest them, too. I just want to keep doing more of this.