Steven Plank

Steven Plank

Appointed to the Oberlin faculty in 1980, Steven Plank holds bachelor and master of music degrees from the University of Louisville (1973, 1974), and a PhD from Washington University in St. Louis, where he studied musicology under Sir Curtis Price.

His early music studies in performance and performance practice have been under the direction of Edward Tarr, Trevor Pinnock, James Tyler, and Bruce Dickey.

What do you do? How has music shaped your life?

For many years I had assumed I would be an orchestral trumpeter, and in fact had a number of
seasons with the Louisville Orchestra that was a treasured time. But the broad influence of Ed
Tarr and the local experience of a steady diet of Bach cantatas began to move my interests
towards early music. With that turn also came a career refashioning that found me wanting to
be a baroque trumpet-musicologist-organist-conductor. Advanced studies in the doctoral
performance practice program at Washington University with Curtis Price, Trevor Pinnock,
James Tyler, Bruce Dickey, and Nicholas McGegan helped make that kind of configuration,
oddly enough, possible. These days I rarely have the trumpet in hand--alas--but am often
conducting and on the organ bench! I have had the good fortune of teaching musicology and
directing the Collegium Musicum at Oberlin for many decades now, and am grateful to have
learned so much from so many along the way.

Tell our readers a story of how early brass music in general, or the HBS specifically, affected you.

I suspect that what first turned my attention to early brass was the sound world itself more than
historical curiosity. In 1968 or thereabouts, the Christmas gift of the new Columbia LP, "The
Glory of Gabrieli," recorded in St. Mark's with forces including the Edward Tarr Brass Ensemble,
proved to be a particularly felicitous start to my journey.