Short answer: It’s not the destination but the journey. (You’ve read that on a poster somewhere, haven’t you?)
First some information on Norman Dello Joio (whom I was at first confusing with Ola Gjello). Dello Joio had a fascinating life and career. He was descended from an Italian family known for producing church organists, and he himself became one at age fourteen at the St. Mary Star of the Sea church in the Bronx. (Isn’t that a cool name for church? If you’d like to read an explanation of why Mary would be associated with this title, go to my post here.) His father was a teacher and performer, and his childhood was full of music and also musical glamour, as some of his father’s voice students were from the Metropolitan Opera and would arrive for their lessons in their Rolls Royces. Dello Joio was given a scholarship to Julliard and then went on to graduate studies there, ultimately deciding that he didn’t want to spend the rest of his life in church organ lofts. Instead he pursued a career as a composer, studying composition in 1941 with the great German composer Paul Hindemith at Yale. (Hindemith had emigrated to the US from Germany in 1940.) Hindemith encouraged Dello Joio to remember that his (that is, DJ’s) music was “lyrical by nature.” Dello Joio said that he hadn’t understood Hindemith’s statement at the time but realized later that he meant, “Don’t sacrifice necessarily to a system, go to yourself, what you hear. If it’s valid, and it’s good, put it down in your mind. Don’t say I have to do this because the system tells me to. No, that’s a mistake.” (This information is from the Dello Joio official website; you can read more about his life by going here.) Dello Joio went on to have an extremely successful career as a composer, with his latest work dating to 2003, five years before his death, when he was ninety.
