User:GreggEdwards
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Gregg Edwards (born Cimiotti) has some background to contribute here.
MUSIC
I've written just one wikipedia article in English, and corrected one in German, on the composer and violinist Pieter Hellendaal.
My background here is as a musician-manqué: Raised in a household of professional musicians -- great grandparents who immigrated from Italy to play for a symphony orchestra; grandmother was the church organist; aunts and uncle &c... My father owned (and bankrupted despite well-known hits and bands) a record company and later a night-club which was also a Mafia-infested hangout that I unsuccessfully tried to save.
I was encouraged to start composition at 4. I studied composition at Rice U and U Md where I left suddenly as a Senior before my juried oboe exam, unrealistically thinking I would do better on my own as a computer-based composer. I sang with several groups, scrubbed as a church organist, improv'ed with friends as a jazz pianist with no distinctive sound, and finally dribbled out in overly ambitious compositions, like an opera I keep revising because it just doesn't click.
My biggest accomplishment in this shrinking stream of my life has been in organizing festivals for innovative arts involving thousands of contributors over two decades, and even that was better off when I turned it over to others. Now my name doesn't even make a footnote. A marquee has no room for manqués.
This common-told story did help get me some interesting gigs: One for a few years as liaison on Arts & Science projects between the NEA and the NSF. I got a free pass to an annual meeting of the AAAS as their conference keynoter for raising the money and putting on a multi-media concert & exposition. And I got a several day gig as the principle keynoter for the fiftieth anniversary celebration of RISD.
Some musical background helped me get a few gigs as an actor, and many more as a futurist in the entertainment industry. Mostly, it helped me meet some deservedly famous people whose friendship transformed my life.
