It's a small Jupiter, after all

My wife and I recently celebrated our 32nd (!) anniversary. I was lucky enough to fall for a girl from South Arkansas. We don't exactly share the same tastes in music, but we try to tolerate the differences.

We have a friend who lives "back home" in Arkansas and went to Stephens High School. The band director there at one time was a gentleman by the name of Lars Nygaard. He was from Denmark and was a pretty accomplished clarinetist who had performed in vaudeville and in John Philip Sousa's band. The Nygaards had three children -- two boys and a girl.

Our Arkansas friend's mom went to high school with the younger of the two sons, and also knew the older boy, Jens, who was a few years ahead of them. Jens had -- well, let's call it a complicated childhood. He readily picked up his father's love of music, but his mother was apparently quite the taskmaster -- making young Jens practice constantly when he should have been going fishing (which he loved) or just playing with his friends.

But Jens was a musical prodigy. By the time he left high school, he could play the piano and most of the orchestral instruments. He got into Louisiana State University on a clarinet scholarship, but also played the violin and was a church organist.

A year or so after graduating from LSU, Jens Nygaard headed for New York, where he enrolled in Juilliard. He earned a master's degree in 1958, but he struggled with a growing sense of what he wanted to do and what his Juilliard teachers thought he should do. He wanted to play violin in the student orchestra, but was not allowed to do so because the faculty wanted him to concentrate on piano. He knew by this time that he really wanted to conduct, but was prevented from joining the school's conducting program. In response, he organized some concerts outside the school, including one to commemorate Mozart's 200th birthday in January 1956.

Life after Juilliard was even rougher for Nygaard. He was often homeless and in 1959 suffered a mental breakdown. His love of music helped pull him out of his morass, although he struggled with mental problems for the rest of his life. He spent most of the 1960s and '70s conducting suburban orchestras around New York City and organizing chamber music series and single-theme concerts that explored more obscure music and composers. He began to gain a reputation for his innovative and imaginative programs.

Nygaard always retained his South Arkansas twang and was never quite accepted by the New York music world. By the late '70s, his conducting career wasn't really going anywhere, and he toyed with the idea of giving up music altogether when he organized a concert with an interesting but varied program by the Westchester Chamber Symphony. The New York critics praised the concert, and Nygaard took those reviews to the Rockefeller Foundation, which he persuaded to give him a $35,000 grant, with which he and a couple of friends started the Jupiter Symphony.

"Jupiter" came from Mozart's Symphony No. 41, which carries that nickname and was included on the orchestra's first concert. Nygaard got permission from NASA to use a striking photo of Jupiter taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft to publicize the concert on posters and in brochures. That marketing, Nygaard's offbeat programs, and musicians who obviously loved what they were doing made the Jupiter Symphony a hit. (Voyager 1, by the way, is still around after 35 years and recently made news because it has traveled almost to the edge of the solar system and should soon be traveling in interstellar space.)

The Jupiter Symphony lived constantly with financial problems, and Nygaard is said to have once paid his musicians in subway tokens. But the passion that he and his sometimes overworked players had for the music they made never wavered.

In 2001, director Martin Spinelli produced an award-winning documentary on the life of Jens Nygaard. It is strikingly candid and thorough. It's called Life on Jupiter: The Story of Jens Nygaard, Musician, and is still available through Amazon or the website www.lifeonjupiter.com.

To me, one of the more interesting scenes in this film shows Nygaard rehearsing his orchestra in the first movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. In the first part of this scene, he is working on precision in playing the constantly driving eighth-note theme -- perhaps classical music's most famous motif -- that moves throughout the orchestra during this piece. He demands that they count the eighth-notes long before they have to play that rhythm, so they'll be ready to attack it. He is now the taskmaster, himself.

At another point, he is trying to get across that this piece is Beethoven at his grittiest. He exhorts the strings to "grind it out" and yells at them: "Don't make it pretty -- leave that for Juilliard!"

Nygaard considered himself more of a kapellmeister -- the guy who had to take care of everything involving music in a German church -- than a modern conductor. That's why his business card said "Jens Nygaard, Musician," and thus the subtitle of Spinelli's documentary.

Jens Nygaard died of cancer in New York in 2001. Some of his musical survivors continue his legacy today as the Jupiter Symphony Chamber Players. And I feel a little bit of a connection with an unrivaled, though eccentric, musical genius, thanks to his and my ties to South Arkansas.