Bass player hits a high note in a half-century orchestra career

The lights dimmed, the orchestra’s dissonant tuning suddenly stopped, Maestro Jorge Mester strode on stage, and if he had raised his baton it would have been another ritual beginning for a Pasadena Symphony Orchestra concert.

Instead, everyone, including bass viol player Lorion Stillion, was taken by surprise when Mester started talking.

Stillion, the conductor told the audience, is marking his 50th season as a member of the orchestra, a length of service that Mester had never heard of.

“I have never known anyone with such love and devotion,” Mester said.

“I about fell through the floor,” Stillion said later, recalling his fear that he might trip or knock something over on that long journey from the bass section to center stage at Pasadena Civic Auditorium, where he received a gift of a crystal bowl to thundering applause.

Then it was back to business at the November concert: his umpteenth playing of Dvorak’s “Carnival Overture.”

Stillion has two explanations for giving a half-century to his demanding avocation.

One, he is a man of enduring attachments. He taught music in the Alhambra City and High School Districts for 38 years, until he retired in 1975, having taught more than 5,000 students in Alhambra and San Gabriel high schools. He and his wife, Ardell, have been married since 1937 and have lived in the same house in San Gabriel since 1948.

But more important, Stillion said, “I love music. It’s my life. I love playing in good orchestras--or any orchestras. To a musician, nothing else is of any importance. The pay is slave labor, but the thrill never dies.”

He plays, or has played, bass viol with at least seven orchestras from Riverside and Orange County to Ventura, rehearsing or performing almost every night during the winter concert season. He will continue, he said, “until I can’t play any more.”

“It’s held its fascination because it’s constantly changing,” Stillion said. “In good music, the conductor knows how to get what he wants and I always learn something new. I always hear something I hadn’t heard before, or there’s a new way of doing it that’s equally convincing.”

The son of a traveling Baptist preacher and a musician mother, Stillion played the violin at age 3, rebelled against practicing at age 9, ended the rebellion when he joined the school orchestra at Monrovia High School and won a music scholarship to the University of Redlands.

In 1937, the year he graduated from Redlands, Stillion started his teaching career at Alhambra High School, married Ardell and read in the Los Angeles Times that the Pasadena Symphony was seeking musicians.

He started as a French horn player “because that’s what they needed at the time,” and became a timpanist when that was needed and “because I was a better timpanist than horn player.”

He was drafted into the Army in 1941 and during his five-year service occasionally played the bass in small orchestras. When he returned in 1946, the Pasadena Symphony needed a bass player.

There he remains. Fifty years after he joined the orchestra and after 40 seasons in the bass section, he is modest about his accomplishments and youthful appearance, and unwilling to discuss his age.

“Nobody I work with has the least idea how old I am,” Stillion said. “Let’s just leave it at that.”

But music he will discuss.

“The bass is the lowest pitch, forming the foundation of the chord structure of the music,” he said. “Bassists are in a better position to hear what’s going on. A person buried in second violin hears only that. We get to hear it all.”

Another reward is what he calls “the interaction between the performer and the crowd, which is intoxicating.”

But when the orchestra and audience were applauding him for his 50-year service, Stillion said he was dumbfounded.

He was on the stage where every Pasadena Symphony concert has been given since the orchestra was founded in 1936, where he had played more times than he can remember, and for once he was the center of attention.

“I didn’t know what to do,” he said. He got back to the bass section as fast as he could.”