Forrest Goodenough Interview with Bruce Duffie . . . . . . . . .

Forrest Goodenough, B.M., M.M., composer, pianist, and professor of music at Trinity University in San Antonio, was born in 1918, in South Bend, Indiana. He received national recognition in the field of composition with works performed by the New Orleans Symphony, Eastman-Rochester Symphony, Horace Britt String Quartet, the First Piano Quartet of NBC, WQXR String Quartet, and others. He was a longtime member of ACA and of the American Association of University Professors.

He studied with Van Denman Thompson at De Pauw University (B.M. degree); Howard Hanson and Bernard Rogers at the Eastman School (M.M. degree); and Henry Cowell, Otto Luening, and Robert McBride at Bennington School of the Arts.

The composer of the much celebrated orchestra pieces, "Chorale Fantasy" from 1950, and "Elegy" in 1960, was totally blind. He also taught at the Texas State School for the Blind in Austin. Mr. Goodenough received awards for his "Two Essays for Small Orchestra" chosen by the Albuquerque Civic Symphony, conducted by Hans Lange, had his "Symphonic Tone Poem" broadcast on CBS in 1943, and also won the Woodstock Foundation for the Arts financial support grants in 1948-49.

Goodenough wrote pieces for multiple pianos, which continue to be requested, including "Dance of the Apes" and "Danza Rhythmica" which have been performed in recent years by keyboard ensembles around the world.

His Woodwind Quintet was often performed on various concerts with his contemporaries, frequently including Gordon Binkerd, Roger Goeb, Otto Luening, and Richard Donovan. His "Five Piano Pieces for Children" was published by Wilking Music Company in Indianapolis.

== American Composers Alliance
== Names which are links in this box and below refer to my interviews elsewhere on my website. BD

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IN MEMORIAM: FORREST R. GOODENOUGH

by C.J. Evans

Forrest R. Goodenough was born July 27, 1918 in South Bend, Indiana, and died on August 14, 2004 in Gravette, Arkansas. He lost his sight at age five, and grew up during a time when our culture had a limited view of the amazing potential of children who didn't see. He was around people who loved him and believed he could do nearly anything -- which came to include carpentry, digging a basement under an existing house, building a cabin, ice skating, riding a tandem bicycle, cooking, finding his way around New York City, attending Butler University and DePauw University, and earning a master's at Eastman School of Music. His earliest musical compositions and performances were in grade school. In 1965 he was ranked 9th of the top 150 American composers by the American Composers Alliance.

In the 1940s he lived in New York City and was the staff pianist at NBC. He also held two other regular jazz piano jobs at the Cotillion Room and the Barbary Room. At that time he met and ran around with George Shearing and Lenny Tristano. In Woodstock, N.Y., he had a year-long sabbatical to live in the Old Maverick House and complete classical
compositions. His first wife, Lucia C. Greer, and daughter have fond memories of their arts colony life.

In 1949 he accepted a faculty position at Trinity University in San Antonio, Tex., teaching theory and composition. In 1952 he and Dorothy Churchill Goodenough began 25 years of teaching at the Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired. Under their guidance, the music program blossomed to include a string ensemble, an orchestra, band, and numerous award-winning soloists. He and Dorothy Churchill Goodenough were married for nearly 51 years. She died in January 2004.

Forrest Goodenough passed on in Gravette, Ark., while at the Texas School for the Blind. An auditorium full of a few hundred friends, former students, and family celebrated his life and contributions. That auditorium was renamed the Goodenough Performance Hall. A charitable fund was established to benefit future students. He was survived by his daughter, Crow Johnson Evans, and her husband, Dr. Arthur F. Evans; his first wife, Lucia C. Greer; and by his niece by marriage and her husband, Diane Churchill Rautenberg and Norm Rautenberg of New Hampshire.

== American Council of the Blind

In doing interviews for many years, I had the pleasure of meeting many musicians both famous and lesser-known. Many of the conversations took place in person, and some were conducted on the telephone. One such telephone chat is presented on this webpage.

Forrest Goodenough is not a name which resonates with many people. My only knowledge of him was his piece on the CRI recording (shown at left). The LP was in my collection because I had interviewed two of the other composers, Robert Ward, and Lester Trimble. Naturally, I had also played the Goodenough work and enjoyed it, so I made a point of getting in touch with him for an interview. He graciously allowed me to call him, and in July of 1989 we spoke on the phone for about 45 minutes.

He was forthright in his ideas about music, and upfront in speaking of his visual impairment. I learned a lot about him and about music, and am glad to be able to share the chat here . . . . .

Bruce Duffie:   Thank you very much for agreeing to chat with me this afternoon. I appreciate it.

Forrest Goodenough:   The pleasure is all mine.

BD:   I’ve just been rehearing the Elegy for Orchestra on the CRI recording. I enjoyed it very, very much.

Goodenough:   Oh, thank you very much. I appreciate that. I don’t hear that too often. I don’t think a lot of people play it, so I’m always glad to hear places where it’s being played.

BD:   At the moment, is this the only commercial recording of your music?

Goodenough:   That’s it, yes, that’s the only one that I have.

BD:   Are you pleased with the way the recording came out?

Goodenough:   Very much so, yes. I originally heard the work played by the San Antonio Symphony Orchestra and some other orchestras around this area, and, of course, at that time I had a little input on the performance, in rehearsal. But in this case (of the recording) it went with the American Composers Alliance to Norway, so I didn’t have any idea what kind of a performance I would get. I was really very pleased with the way it came out.

BD:   When you were writing the piece, did you fill it with lots of details about interpretation, or do you want the performers to find what they can in the music?

Goodenough:   I gave a general outline, but it wasn’t a detailed interpretation. I was fortunate enough to have a wife who was a violinist, who played with the Austin Symphony Orchestra here for years. So she was a great help in things like the bowing. Since I’m a keyboard person, I’m not too great on that type of thing. So I did get a lot of good help in the phrasing in the strings particularly. But that was about the extent, other than just general dynamic levels and indications like that.

BD:   Other than general technical ideas about range and perhaps awkwardness between a few notes here and there, is it necessary for the composing musician to be aware of problems that might creep up in each and every instrument in the orchestra?

Goodenough:   I suspect that it maybe ensures against some unexpected results occasionally, if they are any, but in general the composer can rely on the players, especially when you have competent groups. Not only somebody performing, but also conducting. He or she knows what’s going on, and can sense that something is grossly out of line and can change it. But we used to get general hints. When I studied orchestration with Henry Cowell, he used to say, “I can tell you a lot of things, but the worst thing I can think of that you could do to commit a gross error in scoring would be to write a trio for three tubists!” [Both laugh] You were going to be pretty safe if you didn’t approach that level. Anyway, he had some little gems like that that he passed on.

BD:   [With a wink] There’s no chance that now someone might call for a trio for three tubas just as an effect?

Goodenough:   [Laughs] In this day and age, I wouldn’t be surprised if somebody might use that group. As a matter of fact, I heard a piece not long ago... I don’t know who did it, but it involved several tubas! You can move the boundaries out a long way now, compared to those older days.

BD:   Is there any chance that we have moved the boundaries out too far?

Goodenough:   That would be a matter of individual taste. I don’t know how one figures it is too far. I hear elements in things now that most of us expected. I’m thinking now of things like what we call sensitivity, where things get where there are too many repetitions. It’s called the Minimalist, where you have a repetition over one ground figure forever and ever. It depends on the ingenuity of the composer to write the little variations over that, which is fine, but in some of the works that I’ve heard, I find it goes a little bit too far for my taste. But I’m sure there are people who really get a lot out of that. I went to a concert with one of my composer friends not long here at the university, and there were a lot of contemporary things. In the middle of one of the pieces, which involved a great deal of unusual things, the percussionist threw tennis balls at the rest of the players. My friend leaned over to me and asked, “Has this done anything for you yet?” [Much laughter] I thought that was a little extreme, but, of course, not being able to see it, they could have been throwing watermelons or anything. It wouldn’t have mattered to me. I wonder in this so-called rock age, if something of that sort has crept into some of the attempts at so-called serious music, and maybe repetition is part of that. I don’t know.

BD:   Let me ask this, then... Where is serious music going today?

Goodenough:   I hope that it’s moving somewhere other than where it is! I’ve heard some people say that they are returning more or less to some of the neo-romanticism. You have to remember that I grew up in that age, so I’m steeped in being a student of Howard Hanson, so my point of view is probably going to be way out of line with some of the younger people that are into all these current new-age things. If I listen to that long enough, I find some of those things probably have some validity. They’re probably keeping new composers in tune with what’s going to happen. I don’t think there’s much doubt about that.

BD:   Should music be a reflection of the past, or should it be pointing in the direction of the future?

Goodenough:   Probably there ought to be a pointing to the future. A lot of what my generation did was really a rehash of what had been going around in the European era in the nineteenth century. We probably didn’t look ahead as much as maybe we should have. I read an article the other day where the idea was that America had never really developed its own idiom other than jazz, and that when American music is exported, jazz is usually the thing that people like, and that they think of as being truly American music. I like jazz. I played jazz piano for awhile, and I had a great interest in it. [See photo below-left.] I can see that maybe it does say something about this country, as far as the native style of music and idiom. Some of our attempts have come out, where they all have something that hint more of that throwback to the past. Then there are the attempts to merge the two, like Gunther Schuller, who has tried to mix both the jazz element and the formal training that we had from the European school. That never quite gelled.

BD:   Should we try to blur the lines between these two very different types of music?

Goodenough:   At one point, some of us thought that it might be a good idea, but there seems to be too wide a gap between the two elements to really get them to blend well. No matter what you do with it, it always sounds like we’ll go a little bit this way for a while, then we’ll stop it and go back and play some nineteenth century music, and then we’ll come back and do a little free improvising in a jazz medium. But you can’t even get it to sound like a concerto grosso or anything like that, because the two styles are so far apart. Somebody may do it, but I don’t think they’ve done it yet. The minute they try to take some of the old forms we had, and do it purely in jazz, it doesn’t seem to come off in my mind very well.

BD:   We’ve been dancing around this question a little bit, so let me ask it straight out. What do you feel is the purpose of music in society?

Goodenough:   I suppose it’s to give pleasure. There is an entertainment factor. It’s to reflect the culture, like what is going on in society and the people that write it, I suspect, and from that standpoint, the validity about what we were saying about the jazz and all that. There’s quite a bit of weight I would think. I had never really thought about it, other than the fact that it should have a strong influence on the development of people. Music does a lot to develop character in people. It depends a little bit on the type and as to what the result is. It certainly has an effect on it.

BD:   The type of music or the type of people?

Goodenough:   The discerning person reflects the type of influence that the type of music has had to a great extent. If you were brought up on nothing but the Renaissance period, you might be a different kind of person than if you had been brought up on strictly the twentieth-century, such as Stravinsky and that group. Some people say that you have to have a wide interest in music, which I do, but maybe it doesn’t stretch quite as wide as the boundaries are now.

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BD:   There is not a lot about you in the note on the record jacket. Could you fill me in on a few details of your life and career?

Goodenough:   I don’t remember whether the jacket mentioned that I lost my sight when I was about five years old.

BD:   No, it doesn’t.

Goodenough:   I got the basic education at the School for the Blind in Indianapolis. I did that for twelve years. Then when I finished my graduate degree at Eastman, I worked with Howard Hanson and Bernard Rogers. In the meanwhile I studied with Otto Luening and Henry Cowell. I went from there to commercial work in New York. I went on to be the staff pianist for NBC for a while, and I played a lot at hotels and club-type jobs. I did a lot of background music for supper clubs. When I left Eastman, they asked me if they should put my name on the list for jobs, and I said no. I didn’t think I really wanted to teach, so I spent three or four years in New York playing commercially. Then I decided maybe I would like to try teaching. I finally ended up with a job at Trinity University in San Antonio, teaching theory and composition. I spent three years there, and that’s where I met my wife. She was also in the theory department, so we met and married. Then we moved to Austin, Texas, in 1952. We came here temporarily and we’re still here! [Both laugh] I was going to work on my doctorate degree at the University of Texas, and my wife was offered a post as concert mistress for the Symphony Orchestra here, so that looked like a good opportunity. She could earn the bread and butter, and as it turned out, we were both offered jobs at the School for the Blind in Austin. They needed a violin teacher and a piano teacher, so we thought that would be great temporarily. We’d do that for a couple of years and then we’d go back to the University level teaching again.
goodenough

BD:   Is your wife also blind?

Goodenough:   No, she is sighted. She is a graduate of the New England Conservatory. So we started teaching there, and as it turned out, we stayed there twenty-five years. We retired from there in 1977. It was a little early but we figured we’d maybe have a few years left to do a little something else by that time. We wouldn’t starve to death, even though teachers don’t make a lot of money, and composition is no place to look for money for the most part. [More laughter]. So, we really enjoyed that, and I thought a couple of times maybe of trying to return to the college level, and I almost made it. I almost went to the University of Arkansas about midway in those twenty-five years, but it turned out that a young man who was into computer and theory teaching was hired. I wasn’t into the computers yet, so they were probably smart to hire him. I have since gotten very interested in computers, but unfortunately they haven’t made access for the blind possible into the music programs. The editing on the screen is still then pretty much with a mouse. Of course, getting the music on paper has been my major problem all the way through.

BD:   May I ask an indelicate question? What are the mechanics of getting the notes on paper for someone who is not sighted?

Goodenough:   There’s only one way that I know of, and that’s to literally dictate it to somebody. Or you’d have somebody who has a good ear and can play certain things so you don’t have to transcribe every detail. In my case, I got hold of an old Remington typewriter that was adapted for music way back in the middle 1940s. It was considered a failure, but it turned out that it served my purposes. I can type my music in print notation. I knew what it ought to do and where it ought to be on the page. I had to make a few minor adaptations to that machine, and I got it so that I could type my own scores. But the problem then was I didn’t know whether I’d made it hypergraphic, or if I had gotten down what I thought I did. So, it wound up that after I had laboriously typed the whole thing, then I’d have to go through with a sighted person and proofread it. There was a great deal of pasting and corrections, and then usually that copy would have to be recopied onto some sort of transparent paper for reproduction. My wife turned out to be an excellent scribe, and she can make beautiful manuscripts. So after we married, my problem got somewhat simplified... except that she worked all day teaching, and then I’d keep her up all night writing music. [Laughs] After a few years of that, she began to grow a little tired, having done a whole lot of it. I’ve been hoping that I can find a computer program that I can operate. I got the word processing and all of that now with the speech mechanism on my Apple. I have a good time with the computer, but I haven’t gotten the program yet.

BD:   Do you know a man named Cecil Effinger?

Goodenough:   No, I don’t.

BD:   He invented a musical typewriter years ago, and now he’s been working with IBM getting the next generation of computer musical typewriters working. He would be the one to talk to find out if some things are possible.

Goodenough:   Is he in Chicago?

BD:   He lives in Colorado. As a matter of fact, he’s having a 75th birthday over the weekend, and I’ve just put together a show. That’s why all of this is in the front of my mind. His Little Symphony was on a Columbia record years ago, and he’s got a few other works. It may go nowhere, but he’s the one who’s been working on the computer things, and he might be able to tell you what is available, or if something is or not workable.

Goodenough:   I found a couple of young programmers at the University of Kansas, trying to develop a program that can be used by the blind for notating music. They had a little grant, but they ran into money problems because there wouldn’t be enough demand for it, and then nobody wants to spend time to develop it. The wife is a blind musician, and she wants to offer it to church musicians. She wants to have a program where she can do her work. He is a programmer in the Science Department there, but I don’t think it’s anywhere near the marketplace yet. The trouble with those things is that they’re so expensive when they finally do come out. I hope some day somebody does invent one, as it would make a big difference. But in my case, I sometimes would notate my ideas, and then I would either dictate them, or, as I say, I did them on this typewriter for a while. I remember one time when I was in graduate school at Eastman, I got my first typing machine. I had a counterpoint class, and one day I did my counterpoint assignment on the typewriter, and took it into the class next morning. I handed it in like everybody else, and the professor took my paper and just stood there for a long time. I wondered what in the world I did, and assumed something terrible must have happened. After several minutes, he said that he had been in this business for thirty years, and had never seen a manuscript as neat as this. He asked how in the world I did it. [Both laugh]

BD:   Of course, there was the typewriter!

Goodenough:   Right! I remember one time in Howard Hanson’s class I had some ledger lines below the staff or above it. That key was close to the small p [indicating piano, or softly]. One time, apparently I got on the wrong key. I thought I’d made this repetition of ledger lines twenty-four times across, and I wound up putting in twenty-four small ps. Obviously, I didn’t know this, so I handed in the work to Hanson, and he sat there for a little while, and he said, “Well, you really want this soft, don’t you?” [Both laugh] We got a lot of laughs over that. But yes, it’s very difficult.

BD:   With all of the handicaps and obstacles that you managed to endure, is composing rewarding for you?

Goodenough:   Oh, yes. Not so much these days because it gets very difficult to get performances with the trends today. Also, my interests haven’t kept up with the way things have developed. I haven’t had the urge to go into the electronic music and all that. I didn’t really feel I wanted to do that as much, and with the type of thing that I could do, it would probably not get a second look any place. I haven’t really indulged in a lot. I do little things here and there, but I haven’t done any scoring or anything, and if something did come along, I don’t know if getting it down would be any easier. Whether I’d get inspired and want to fiddle around, I don’t know. Right now, I haven’t done that. But what I have done has been a big help to me in many ways. It gives you a little prestige and helps getting employment when you’re handicapped. Anything that puts you in a little bit of a different category, or gives you a little extra boost helps. So I found it helpful that way. I’ve had some really nice experiences. Some of the things I did earlier got played in various cities, and then some of them went abroad. I had some things performed in South America and in Europe. I’ve been a member of the American Composers Alliance since very early in my career. I think I’m probably one of the first people that got into that in the middle 1940s, and by being a member there, they have made it possible for the works to be displayed in the American Music Center. It also kept me in circulation a little bit. It gave me a little added boost, so with one thing and another it’s been a good project, but it’s not a way to make a living. I never did really think it would be a way I could use to earn money. I’ve had a few choral things published that were anthems and some piano pieces, but there’s nothing that really pays off. So, like most composers, you wind up teaching or performing as I do. I still play the piano around, mostly as a hobby now. Some fellows that I have worked with here for the past twenty-five or thirty years still hold forth once in a while, like last night at the Retired Club with dances.

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BD:   We’ve been talking about your being blind and it being a handicap. It is stereotypically understood that people who are blind have a better feeling for sound, and a better understanding of things that can be heard and not seen. Can you either confirm or dispel this rumor?

Goodenough:   I don’t think you gain any extra ability in your hearing when you go blind. You have to use your hearing more, and maybe that’s what creates the impression. I don’t think you’re given any compensating excess of hearing facility when you lose your sight. But I do think in your tendency of necessity is to concentrate more on what you hear. Vision is supposed to be a stronger percent than hearing in most people. Your visual impressions are very strong, so very often a blind person may take something in that the sighted person hearing the same thing is not going to hear, because he’s distracted by all the good things he can look at. [Both laugh] I’ve noted that with television. You can sit in a room and be watching the same show, and the people are taking in much more what they see than what they hear. That’s probably what happens. As far as the ability to hear the music or recognize pitch, or the relative pitch, I don’t think it’s any stronger. You either have that or you don’t, whether you can see or not. It doesn’t make a whole lot of difference. Elsewhere, you have to develop a lot of techniques as far as mobility and being aware of what surrounds you, and where you are, and how to get from here to there, and what’s in the way and what isn’t. All of this has to be done by hearing, obviously, rather than seeing, and from that standpoint you do get a little bit more acute on the hearing level. I’ve noticed the difference because I’m beginning to get a little lost in the higher frequencies now. That comes along with some of the other things of old age, which you can’t do much about. I’ve noticed a tremendous difference, because when you lose the higher frequencies, you begin to lose your mobility. Since you’re depending on the sound reflex from objects around, when the higher frequencies are lost, it’s very much more difficult to tell an object. Say, you’re walking along... I don’t know whether you’ve ever heard a blind person say, “There’s a tree. I can hear a tree.” What you’re getting is a rebound of the sound from the tree in front of you, and if you begin to lose the higher frequencies, you don’t hear those trees so well. You’re apt to find the trees in another way, but that will be a little bit more uncomfortable! [Both laugh]

BD:   It’s almost like an undeveloped sonar that you have?

Goodenough:   Right! It’s just like the bats. When you say ‘blind as a bat’, you really mean it! [Both laugh]

BD:   What advice do you have for young composers coming along, and would that advice be different for sighted and non-sighted potential composers?

Goodenough:   That’s quite a question. [Thinks a moment] I don’t know if it would be a whole lot different, if they have a strong urge to do it. I suppose I would tell them to just become aware of the society they’re living in, their surroundings, and the times, and try to put that into sound. It would be pretty much the same for both sighted and non-sighted people. Whether it’s advisable or not, I have some reservations about that. Until the mechanics of actually getting the job done, or improving it a little bit, it would be quite as frustrating. This goes back again to the actual business of getting the notation down. In the field of composition, probably that is more difficult than the performing field. Performing is difficult for everybody, whether you can see or not, as far as opportunities go. I was reading an article the other day by Yo-Yo Ma, and he said it made him sigh when he teaches these classes. He lamented about all the talented kids! They’re studying, and he wonders what they are going to do. [Laughs] There’s just not enough room in the world for all the people that can play as well as they do to make a living. I suppose that’s always been true, but it seems to be more so now with so much of the traveling. Yo-Yo Ma can cover a lot of ground in a couple of days, and so that limits the field.

BD:   You’ve experienced a lot of musicians, and we know that the technical ability has actually gotten better over the years. Has the musical ability also gotten better?

Goodenough:   In the young performers?

BD:   Yes.

Goodenough:   I think so. In fact, there’s no doubt about it. Yo-Yo Ma said, “Another thing that I have to admit is that there are a lot of these people I’m teaching who could probably play better than I do now. The day will come, not too far along, and those kids will ask who was that back there who played the cello... Yo-Yo Somebody-or-Other?” [Both laugh] When you look around and hear some of these young people, it’s fantastic what they do at the tender ages of eighteen, or twenty, or twenty-two. Of course there were some child prodigies back down the line too, but there seems to be a lot more young people who really apply themselves. Especially you see a lot of it in the Orientals. They say that Juilliard is one third or more Oriental now. They really apply themselves. I guess they have a better discipline than most of us Americans. We’re a little bit laid-back in the way we do it.
goodenough

BD:   Being in radio, I’m always conscious of the new developments in sound reproduction equipment. You’ve been listening to music both live and reproduced all your life. Have we really made the strides that we think we have as far as getting the sound to be more accurate with better reproduction?

Goodenough:   It’s certainly made strides. I don’t know if I have ever heard any mechanical reproduction yet that really equals the live sound, but some of the new compact discs are pretty fantastic. I don’t have a real high-quality system yet, but even my compact disc player was quite a revelation. All those things are pretty convincing. I remember several years ago we went in a theater some place. I believe it was South Pacific that was being shown, and it was one of the first stereo-type sound things in the theater, with the big screen and the big speakers. I actually was pretty convinced that it was a live orchestra. Whoever I was with finally convinced me that it was mechanically reproduced. [Both laugh] I heard a system in Boston one time in a record store that had a very realistic sound, so I guess I can be fooled once in awhile.

BD:   Have you ever worked with synthesized sound, or electronic-type music?

Goodenough:   Oh yes! We work with the DX7 in the band I play with, and I have a little electronic instrument now that I can carry around. It weights about 24 pounds, and they call it a piano, but it doesn’t really sound all that like a piano. I’ve talked to several of the other keyboard people around, and I have a feeling that it’s very difficult to find a satisfying sound. The DX7 we have has probably eighty combinations or more of sound. You can also change the cartridge and get eighty more. Whenever I work on that, I find that I can do about sixteen bars, and then I’m tired of that sound, so I start trying to hunt around for something more satisfying. I haven’t yet found it, and I don’t really enjoy it, but that’s just my reaction to it. I know that Kurzweil has built some pretty fantastic synthesizers. I even heard one with a voice. I thought it was a choir for a little bit!

BD: [At this point we discussed a few of the performance recordings that he had in his collection, and also a couple of other composers who were close friends.] One of the composers here, Karl Korte [1928-2022] is in the process of semi-retiring from the University of Texas, and he goes between here and New York quite a lot now. [Korte studied at Juilliard with Peter Mennin, William Bergsma, and Vincent Persichetti. He later studied composition with Otto Luening, Goffredo Petrassi, and Asron Copland.] Karl is a very good reader, and he’s done some recordings for the blind. So he reads for me once in a while when he’s around. Kent Kennan lives here, too.

BD:   I did a 75th birthday show for Kennan [and would do encores for his 80th and 85th].

Goodenough:   Very good! We’ve been friends for a long time. As a matter of fact, he’s one reason that I wanted to go to Eastman when I was still in high school. I heard his Night Soliloquy and I wondered where I could go to write music like that! Later on I happened to be in the same town with him, and I told him if it wasn’t for him, I would never be doing music! [Both laugh]

BD:   I hope that impressed him!

Goodenough:   Well, we’ve had a great time.

BD:   I appreciate your spending some time with me this afternoon.

Goodenough:   Thank you. I’ve enjoyed it very much.

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This conversation was recorded on the telephone on July 22, 1989. This transcription was made in 2026, and posted on this website at that time. My thanks to British soprano Una Barry for her help in preparing this website presentation.

To see a full list (with links) of interviews which have been transcribed and posted on this website, click here. To read my thoughts on editing these interviews for print, as well as a few other interesting observations, click here.

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Award - winning broadcaster Bruce Duffie was with WNIB, Classical 97 in Chicago from 1975 until its final moment as a classical station in February of 2001. His interviews have also appeared in various magazines and journals since 1980, and he continued his broadcast series on WNUR-FM, as well as on Contemporary Classical Internet Radio.

You are invited to visit his website for more information about his work, including selected transcripts of other interviews, plus a full list of his guests. He would also like to call your attention to the photos and information about his grandfather, who was a pioneer in the automotive field more than a century ago. You may also send him E-Mail with comments, questions and suggestions.