Civic Orchestra of Unknowns Is Medley of Dreams Fulfilled

Where could a 23-year-old insurance company clerk from Van Nuys with a penchant for writing classical music get an orchestra to play his symphony?

And then his other symphony?

It sounds hopeless, like Walter Mitty run amok. Most symphony orchestras, regiments of advanced musical skill and training, sniff at works by composers unless they have been dead and famous since Napoleon wore diapers.

Lee Graham, the insurance clerk from Van Nuys, has heard both his symphonies played by an orchestra.

It helps that he belongs to it.

Varying Backgrounds

That’s one of the advantages to playing with the Van Nuys Civic Orchestra, a collection of professional, semiprofessional and amateur musicians of widely varying backgrounds who get together almost every Tuesday night to play for the enjoyment of the experience and love of classical music.

The orchestra gives about a dozen concerts and eight recitals a year and looks for new composers and new works, especially among its members. The orchestra is preparing for its major concert of the year next Sunday, performing the Ninth Symphony by the not-so-newcomer Ludwig van Beethoven in Liberty Hall at Forest Lawn, appearing with the Hollywood Master Chorale. Admission is free to all the orchestra’s concerts.

“All my life I’ve wanted to play classical music,” said Graham, a viola player who also free-lances with other musical groups.

One of Original Members

He was one of the original members of the orchestra when it was formed six years ago. “I was still a senior at Van Nuys High School, and two or three of us from the school orchestra came over for the first meeting,” he said.

“It’s not easy to get into a symphony orchestra, but I can exercise my skills here, and they play my music. It’s hard enough for a composer to get a chamber work performed by a few people, but to get a symphony orchestra to perform works by an unknown? Forget it.”

The orchestra has 64 musicians on its list but tends to use about 40 to 50 at a time, depending on the needs of the musical piece, said the orchestra’s founder and conductor, James Domine.

Domine may be the only printer in the world, or at least the only printer from Canoga Park, with his own symphony orchestra (“like a 17th-Century prince,” said one of the orchestra members).

‘Music in Their Blood’

Domine, 31, earned a bachelor’s degree in music from UCLA and a master’s degree in composition from USC, but found the world of classical music as economically difficult as it was culturally rich. That’s why the maestro is a printer.

“Many of our members chose the option of making a better living than they could in music,” he said, “but music is in their blood and they live for our Tuesday nights.”

Oboist Deborah Vitek of Granada Hills, 32, fine-arts coordinator for the Hollywood-Los Feliz Jewish Community Center who also plays professionally in other orchestras, said she joined the group because “most of the playing I do is professional, very high stress. I’m getting maybe $300 or $400 so I have to deliver.

“This is where I come to relax and enjoy the music I play.”

The orchestra has gotten progressively better over the years and “there’s a lot of competition to get into this group,” she said. “A lot of other oboists want my chair.”

This represents great strides by a classical orchestra with its roots in a softball team, the Canoga Park Ducals.

That was a team Domine formed and entered in the city Park League. In 1979, the team swept the league championship, 16 to 0, making Domine enough of a celebrity in park athletic circles that he met several park officials.

He tried to convince them that, since the park department organizes softball and volleyball teams, it should help him organize a symphony orchestra.

It didn’t work.

Not exactly.

Donated His Time

But it did bring him to the attention of Sal Errico, a recreation director who was interested in classical music. Errico agreed to donate his time to keep the Van Nuys Multi-Purpose Center open one night a week so the orchestra could meet there for rehearsals.

This was just dandy for Domine’s musical side but apparently distracted him from softball, because the Ducals never repeated as champions.

The orchestra members are a mixture. Roger Greene, 24, of Canoga Park, who plays clarinet and piano, is a free-lance musician. He complained that, on many of the jobs a classical musician gets, such as movie sound-track work, “you get treated like cattle--get in and play the music on the page and get out, with no time to feel the music, to live with it a while, which is what we get a chance to do here.”

Sam Mood, 48, of Glendale is a bassoon player and truck dispatcher for an appliance manufacturer in Santa Monica. He earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in music from Wichita State University in Kansas before going into trucking.

“Playing is a very important part of my life,” he said. “I belong to several chamber music groups, too. I need this outlet.”

Band Director

Roberto Martinez, 35, of Van Nuys, the principal flutist, is director of bands at Buckley School in Sherman Oaks, and also tours the United States and Mexico giving flute recitals. He too has a master’s degree in music composition, from San Diego State University.

“This is fun,” he said. “We play together for no remuneration, and we get to play for the community, to play music by new composers, music that would otherwise be unheard.”

Andrew Pickens, 21, of Sherman Oaks, a violinist and the orchestra concertmaster--the No. 2 man to the conductor--is a music student at UCLA. Leonard Koff, 35, of Sherman Oaks, a cello player, is an English teacher at UCLA who also writes poetry meant to be recited to music.

Student and teacher get a common reward from playing with the orchestra.

It plays their stuff.