If you're reading this, you've surfed the Web all the way to Vienna, Austria, home of Mozart, Strauss and myself. (If you think I forgot about Arnold Schwarzenegger...I didn't ! He's from Graz...three hours away from here.) ...no here --- that's on the other side of the big pond !

I'm a transplanted Texan and have lived here for the last ten years or so, after travelling through Europe for a few years with various musical theater tours.
Prior to that, I lived a couple of years in NYC and learned the art of survival in the Big .
You know what the song says."...if you can make it there, you'll make it anywhere...". ;-)

I've been a musician just about as long as I can remember, and that's a long, looong time ! ;-) I began as a classical pianist, but my musical travels have taken me just about everywhere that you can find music.

I started taking piano lessons at the age of four in my hometown of Jasper, Texas. As a teenager, I began to get interested in other styles of music. At my mother's encouragement, I sometimes "sat in", playing ragtime at the local Shakey's Pizza Parlor in Waco, Texas where I lived then. (...does anybody remember Shakeys's ?!?) ;-)

As I developed in the art of "playing by ear", I also began playing in various rock, funk and (of course, because I was living in Texas !) C&W bands. But I still loved classical music and kept on with my piano and theory lessons.

I also took clarinet lessons, and of course, played in the band in junior high and high school. Somewhere along the line, my band director advised me to learn bassoon. He said that there too many clarinet players and never enough bassoonists, and that I'd have a better chance at getting a scholarship later if I could play bassoon, so I learned to play that too. BTW, he was right...later I did get a few scholarships as a bassoonist. :-)

I also had the priveledge of attending the Interlochen National Music Camp in Michigan one summer during my high school years. That was a truly great experience, and I loved Interlochen so much that I went back there to work the summer after graduating from high school. As a staff accompanist at Interlochen, I was also assigned to accompany ballet classes, which was the first of many experiences for me playing for dance.

I then studied music theory, orchestration and arranging at North Texas State University in Denton, Texas. (...great school !) While I was there, I began to get interested in musical theater, so it seemed only natural that I became involved with the Dallas Summer Musicals, which provided me with the background experience for my later musical theater work in NYC and Europe.

After I was finished at NTSU, I lived and worked in Dallas for a while. My past theater and dance experience came in handy, and I soon decided the time was right to make the big plunge and give up being a big fish in a little pond. I moved to NYC and soon found out what it was like to be a little worm in the Big Apple. In NYC, I worked an arranger and vocal coach, and was musical director for quite a few cabarets and Off-Off Broadway shows. I also helped make ends meet by playing for dance classes.

While living in NYC, I got a job offer to be musical director for a European tour of Hair, and since I'd never seen Europe, I couldn't pass up that chance ! I loved Europe immediately and became hooked on it. I toured all over Europe and Scandinavia with productions of Bubbling Brown Sugar, A Chorus Line and Barber of Seville as well.

After living in NYC and touring Europe, I ended up here in Vienna, where my musical sojourn finally brought me to the wonderful world of MIDI. Now I'm a real, honest-to-goodness "till-death-do-us-part", "dyed-in-the-wool" MIDIot !

My motto is: "Beat me, whip me, call me trash, but don't take away my MIDI interface !"

My biggest problem is, I can't decide what style of music I like best, so my compositions include a little bit of everything. A famous musician once said, "For me, there are only two kinds of music...good and bad music." I share this opinion, and I hope that mine belongs in the first category.

If some of the things I've mentioned here about my background have made you curious and you'd really like to know more about me, then maybe you'd enjoy reading a few of my unpublished autobiographical anecdotes. Actually, I had already crumpled them up and thrown them in the wastepaper basket, but Fred fished them out before he took out the trash the other day. He smoothed out most of the wrinkles, and insisted that we put them on-line.

But first, you have to promise (cross-your-heart-and-hope-to-die...)that you won't tell anybody else, and that you won't inform the FBI, the CIA, the police or the local mental authorities.
I'd also like to add that the names have been changed to protect the innocent.
Just click the button to give me your word of honor that you won't repeat a word of it to anybody.
...not even to your best friend or your mother.

              
 [Home Page]    [My MIDIs]   [Cakewalkin'...]  [MIDI gear]   [Favorites ]  [Lots of links]

Betty Kainz