Aha Moment: La Forza del Destino
As a kid, Steve Call struggled with school. “At the end of each school year, my mother would go and beg the teacher to pass me on to the next grade,” he remembers, “because I never did learn to read in elementary school.” Call had dyslexia, and although he had a great ear for music and a knack for instruments — he picked up the trombonium, trombone, bassoon, bass clarinet — he assumed his disability would make a career in music impossible.
Then one day during his senior year, the band director asked Call to pinch-hit on the tuba for an upcoming concert. He wasn’t thrilled; tuba was “the bottom of the musical food chain,” but he decided to be a good sport.
As the band played the opening lines of Verdi’s overture to La Forza del Destino, he was stunned by the sound the instrument made. “The vibrations that I could feel, the resonance in the room as the sound attached itself to the other instruments,” he says, “it was akin to falling in love.” The affair carried him into a career as a professor of music at Brigham Young University.
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Video: Steve Call and The New Hot 5
