This week, The DePauw had the chance to sit down with Scott Perkins of the Music Department and get to know his life inside and outside of music.
The DePauw (TDP): Can you talk a little about your background?
Scott Perkins (SP): I grew up in Connecticut… didn’t have very much of a musical family. I went to college in Boston. I was at Boston University for four years, and I studied music theory and composition there. I was pretty active in middle school and high school in music as well as a singer, saxophone player and as a composer. I started composing when I was around five or so.
TDP: You said your family wasn’t very musically active. What led you to music?
SP: I have no idea. We didn’t have a piano in my house or anything. But when we went to visit my grandparents in upstate New York I would mess around on their piano and just come up with stuff on my own. My mother knew the names of the notes on the piano, but she didn’t know how to write music notation or anything like that. But she’d write it down the best she could and showed it to my elementary school music teacher and] I played some stuff for him as well. He just happened to be the bell-ringer at Trinity College in Hartford, and he decided that he was going to perform my piece there. It was my first primer, I guess, and I was six by that point.
TDP: How advanced are you with singing?
SP: Singing I’ve done quite a bit of. I’ve performed all over Europe and North America as a soloist. I don’t do so much of it anymore. I miss it, but teaching takes up a lot of time, along with composing the rest of the time. I’ve recorded some CDs as a featured soloist with groups.
TDP: Did you base your compositions around your singing?
SP: Well, I guess I started composing, really, before I started singing. I didn’t start singing much until I joined my elementary school choir when I was in fourth grade, but I had already been writing some music before then, not very much, not very seriously. I didn’t really know how to write music down very well until I was about 12. But I do see a lot of crossover between my life as a performer and my life as a composer. I love writing vocal music.
TDP: Do you have a favorite type of music, for vocal or any instrument?
SP: That’s hard to say. I like a lot of different styles, really. I listen to a lot of different kinds of music. My inspiration as a composer is pretty eclectic. It comes from a lot of different places. Sometimes I’m not really aware of where it’s coming from. I mean, there are certain composers that I can think of whose work has had an influence on me as a composer.
TDP: Like who?
SP: I would say Benjamin Britton is one of them. Arvo Part, he’s an Estonian composer, still alive. I’d say I get some from John Corliano, who was at the school earlier this year as our featured guest composer of residence. But it really depends upon the occasion. I write different kinds of music for different situations. It depends on what people want me to write. I work just on commission now.
TDP: What did you listen to growing up?
SP: I grew up listening to pop music. Top 40s stuff. Actually, I kind of got a lot of different styles from different people in my family. My mom liked listening to oldies, my dad loved classic rock. My step-mother liked southern rock, also a little bit of folk music. My brother was really into punk and grunge and stuff like that. I started listening to classical music at one point too when I was about 12.
TDP: How did you come across DePauw?
SP: DePauw I found out about because I went to grad school with the choir director here, Greg Wisto. He was telling me all these wonderful things about the place. I hadn’t actually heard of DePauw before that. Greg Wisto told me there was an opening and that I should check it out. I came out here to interview, which was the first time I had spent more than a couple of hours, I think, in Indiana. And I just couldn’t believe it. It was so different from where I was from. People were friendly. I remember the woman who was working the desk at the Inn at DePauw. She asked me why I was there, and I had said I had a job interview. She had said, “Oh, I’m sure it will go great,” that sort of thing. And then when I came in the evening, she asked me how it went, and I had said it went alright. But she said, “Oh, I know you got it. I can feel it in my bones!” And I was like, wow, you’re so friendly. Who are you?
TDP: What is it like to see a student develop musically?
SP: It’s unbelievable. It’s just my third year, but seeing some of these students, hearing some of these students who were in their first year when I got here, how far they’ve come, it’s really amazing. We have some great teachers here who are helping them along the way. But there’s a lot of dedication here, too, among certain students to really work on their craft. And it shows. It’s incredible, the transformations they’ve undergone.
Professor Perkins teaches music theory and composition and is currently a coordinator in designing the new musicianship program in the 21st Century Musician Initiative that DePauw is using to, in Perkins’ words, “change the way we prepare music students for the world today.”