Over-trained as a classical pianist; entered into too many contests too early, Bob Wood left the
conservatory training after one year for overseas service in WW II where he played with many fine
jazz musicians: on piano, trombone, bass fiddle, and arranged music for Army bands, and played
church services and ran a pickup choir from an Estey pump field organ.
Near his discharge from the military his father almost persuaded him to drop music and go into the
family business, but Gil Evans- then leading the combo, advised him to finish his music degree, get
the “drivers license-as a teaching backup”” then come to New York where he’d get all the free lance
work he could handle.
At the rigid, competitive, midwest conservatory he found his most useful learning experiences (like
Bernard Shaw) outside the lockstep of classroom syllabus. He formed a small combo to play night
clubs and burlesque shows in nearby towns where constant improvising, adapting old arrangements
into workable club presentations on the spot made music theory work fast in a functional way.
But the lifestyle was that of the gypsy, the circus, the travelling show. Before leaving the school he
met his future wife, Marilyn, a history student with extraordinary musicality, ( as a folk guitarist she
had performed for Andrés Segovia). With her dramatic charisma and powerful motivation he hoped
they might establish together a community arts program with truly open ended music and dance for
everyone - not just a selected “talented few”.
On graduation Bob went to Chicago with the last of his G.I. Bill education money for a piano tuning
course to equip him to set up a piano retail business to finance the Community Arts School. He still
wasn’t sure he could teach music well. But three years later he was invited to New York City to try
teaching at the New Lincoln School- partly on the basis of his two questions to the Director: Dr. John
J. Brooks:
1- “Why does everybody love music until they get to music class?”
2- “Why does almost every adult I ask say he or she gave up a music instrument. They all
'took' violin, piano, etc..and dropped it”
Conviction that these two questions might be answered as a life quest- led them to hire him under the
tutelage for four years with Hugh K. McElheny .
He decided first to build musical instruments with no wrong notes for hundreds of people to play
without practice. Then in parks and camp came tree houses to climb into where drums and marimbas
were perched and people could proclaim their height in the world with joyous abandon.
In 1963 he started a new Junior High School music program in Brownsville, Brooklyn- teaching
beginning strings - using recordings to do the heavy lifting- and within three months- his beginners
performed the 1st movement of Eine Kleine Nachtmüsik, and the Overture to the Marriage of Figaro,
with a 6 year old girl playing Für Elise- as a concerto he had arranged. The parents sat IN the
overflowing orchestra to get the full impact of the music they had come to think of often as
excruciating scratching. Tax supported public school music meant everyone got to play, including
those parents whose children handed them the instruments,then showed them how to pluck the
strings together as an ensemble.
Playing cello in community orchestras, he tired easily of the simple salon pieces, and felt the eternal
distance between artist and audience had to be somehow narrowed. Arts funds were drying up in this
country - new venues needed to be developed. His wife, Marilyn Wood, after many performances
dancing with Merce Cunningham, formed the Celebrations Group, and they often travelled together
on residencies around the U.S., and overseas after music teaching was wiped out in New York City. It
had already lost real relevancy and now public funding disappeared. With a small inheritance he set
up a sound studio to produce audience interactive, participative radio programs called: Music By Ear”
for three years on WBAI in New York City, had Public Access to Music residencies for the Natl.
Endowment for the Arts, ran summer instrument making workshops in New York City parks.
With a two year grant he set up a community based high school arts program at Park East High
School-offering fine arts photography,painting, mural making, steel drumming, Festival Instruments,
and enrollment at Mannes Music College: any art discipline attracting serious student interest. Then
for ten years Bob Wood did other things. Camping on 80 acres of forest land upstate New York -
logging, house carpentry, fireman, then as an EMT for three years on ambulances in the South Bronx
until he was injured and retired upstate to think about reviving music for public access.
Computers were not easy to learn at his age. But with continued support and help from his editor,
Madeleine Spiegler; his daughter Leslie and son-in-law, Jon Strom, and with powerful support from
friends, Gitelle Kaplan, Maureen Rodgers, Fritzi Barker, Minoru Suzuki, Jane Culp and many others
when the going was very rough, he has been able to sustain his determination to fulfill that first
promise; to finally answer parts of those two basic questions that kept him at this work.
