Alice Mentzer: Diabelli-Contest 2016

Alice Mentzer Music has been a thread that continued from early childhood, though it took decades for me to realize that. A baby grand piano stood in our childhood living room. A record player was stocked with Strauss waltzes. Our grandmother had been trained as a concert pianist, and also played the violin and harp. We didn't like our piano lessons because the teacher hit our hands with a wooden ruler. The school's music lessons were blackboard and pitch pipe experiences. Taken to concert as a child, I had an unforgettable experience when I fell asleep during a performance of Haydn's Surprise Symphony. It was only years later, when I saw the movie 'Amadeus" that I realized classical music was wonderful.

I had the advantage of much education and amazing work experiences. Liberal arts and artist skills initially, later there was the digital, technical skills, computer programming.

In college, my roommate asked if I would come and play a violin in the school orchestra. The Director had said he would give a piece of bubble gum to anyone who brought a student to play the violin. "I'll show you how", she reassured me. I was seated in the orchestra, way back and inside. Two years later, I was sitting in the concert master chair, without realizing what that meant. My Grandmother heard I was doing this. She told me to go up the attic and bring down her violin. That gift has changed this part of my life. Back then, I considered playing the violin was a school activity. So I put it away when I went into the work force, then married. Because it was from my Grandmother, though, I kept it with me through each move. But I didn't play it again until about ten years ago. Downsized for the second time, while I was engaged in finding another job, I thought I would restore Grandmother's violin, and for the first time take lessons until I got another job. Within a month, I realized that music WAS my next career.

Unlike the easy success while playing in my girlhood orchestra, nothing about music now came easily. That is, nothing except composing. I composed as naturally as breathing. From a seemingly endless source of musical ideas, given a purpose, I would listen to the music in my head and write notes. I had the help of a fine musician to polish up what I was writing. Because I had so many ideas, I had been writing musical ideas for a few measures, then abandoning them, went onto another idea without developing the first.

Trained as an artist, I would paint, sculpt, engrave and such. Trained in Liberal Arts, I would write reams of various types of publications. Trained as a computer programmer, I became fluent in the language and easily wrote long programs as if they were letters written to a friend. Now, I was writing music. You'd think all these would be very different experiences. They weren't. There was a thread of creativity, an experience of going into timelessness, internal focus and silence that was common to all of these. The experience of writing music was so wonderful that the writing was a completely satisfying experience, just as painting, sculpting, authoring, and programming has been.

The music for this competition was sung by the Select Choir of Georgia Institute of Technology's School of Music, directed by Timothy Hsu, Ph.D. These remarkable musicians first saw the music only an hour before recording.