 I went to the boy choir school for five years. My voice changed, not for the better we have heard because I've been recorded. But in fact, I had every opportunity in the 50s to offer a musical efflorescence and transformation of my spirit. Since my family had two grand pianos in the living room, one of them a Kurzweil and the other a Steinway O brought into the house on March 11th, the day my dad was born. In those days, the middle class of America was taught culture how piano companies were very canny and came up with a campaign in advertising called matrimonial gifts. Every Joe Dokes would get a piano at home to prove to his neighbors of his acculturation. But that wasn't needed in the Parks family. In the 1890s, there were over 47 people, I heard, I think that's probably 48, but I heard that there were 47. Parkses, the people by the name of Parks, in the band, in the band shell at Leechberg, Pennsylvania, up there on the banks of the mighty Kiskaminatis River. As a boy, I had studied, the backstory is interesting. Preceding Carnegie Tech is interesting. Why? Because Carnegie is all over my life as an inheritor of Pennsylvania experience. We went to Chautauk, it was almost like my conduit to the art, to the arts of music and dance and theater and oration and poetry. Because in Chautauk, although it was a Methodist campground started in the 1880s, it was illuminated and non-dogmatic. My parents hid rum and old granddad in the trunk of the car when we'd sneak up there through the gates in that Methodist campground back in the 40s. So in 48, I'm looking at my first opera, Aida. I'll never forget the parade. So I'd seen a bunch of stuff, musically. And my liberation from all of the impositions of McKeesport, and they were many, were completely solved in my relationship to Carnegie Tech. I went there as, and by the way, I was probably the most inferior pianist in my class. But I did do Mendelssohn's Variation Series triad. To perfection in front of William Steinberg, I didn't miss, I didn't drop a ham, an inch, a stitch. No flatterer, William Steinberg. So I showed my colors. I had a pianistic flair, I still have it. I still play piano almost every day. This is all the result of my trying to get a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at Carnegie Tech. Did I get the degree? No. I may be the oldest undergrad of Carnegie Tech you'll talk to today, David. But that doesn't mean I didn't learn everything that was there to learn. Why did I leave Carnegie Tech? I was about a year and a half in, I believe. Actually, I've been there for about two and a half years with Nelson. I wasn't sure if I was even capable of deserving a birth in a junior college in Pennsylvania teaching piano. I didn't know. I was very uncertain. I knew that I did not like where serious music was going. Serious music was sometimes not even heard. If you ever met John Cage, there were glimmers of hope. Aaron Copeland came in one day, I was in a class that he, I would think, say monitored would be a fair analysis. Percy Granger came through. The incredible Percy Granger. Why did Percy Granger affect me? Because even when I was going to Carnegie Tech, I was interested in pilot piano music. I was interested in the literature of folk music, the people that had captured folk idioms. Check it out. When I went to Carnegie Tech, who was the band leader? Philip Catalina, who had been a stalwart aficion for the Salvation Army. But just because he was Scottish, don't let this bother you. The guy put forth, what did he do? He orchestrated for Von Williams. Little did we know that. We were struggling to. We sounded like a gaggle of geese and asterisks. The band sounded dreadfully honking and crude for this veteran of a station with Von Williams, for whom Von Williams wrote a tuba concerto. Oh man, Martha, what was Martha's name? Eurythmics taught us that there is a relationship between movement and dance. And you can hear it when you hear a G by Bach. You can hear dances. You can hear what people are doing. And Martha Sanchez taught us that. I was deeply in love with her. There was a Robert Parks who taught speech, allocution there. I never learned how to speak. I just knew I spoke too much, my mother told me. So you could see that there was a question in my mind about whether I should continue at Carnegie Tech to get the Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. And this is gonna be an interesting moment for me to reckon with this in front of you. I chose to go to take a notch year as it were, to go to California to join my brother to play guitar. I learned guitar in a few months and I'm ably because I sweat. There's blood, sweat and tears, okay? Neither rain or sleet nor gloom and night stays this career from the swift completion of his appointed round. What is that? The discipline of music. This is what only, the only thing that really interests me. The only thing is what my day is. A day without Bach, it's an exaggeration, but not that much. A day without Bach is a barren day to me. I love it. I love music so much, unfortunately. My brother, Ben, the second eldest in our ladder, he had, he died in Frankfurt where he was, he was the second, actually he was the youngest person in the history of the State Department or Foreign Service, my brother, Ben. Unfortunately, he died in July of 1963. I was just out of college trying to figure out if I was able, an able musician, and I had no money to go to his funeral. My brother and I got me a job arranging the bare necessities for Disney. My first job, it paid for my black suit and our round trip ticket that we may put our brother in the ground at Plum Creek Cemetery in Pennsylvania with the elders. I couldn't afford to go back to Carnegie Tech. I would now have to tough it out on the street and learn what, take that poison that appealed to me and what was that? It was a populist insistence that music is very important. It's more important fundamentally than politics and the pursuit of that. The arts are not a decoration. The arts are essential. Andrew Carnegie was right to put his bang in these bucks. He was right. In an era where the arts are being minimized and treated as a, as a bubble till they kicked around like the NEA. We must protect the arts. We must defend them.