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opportunity, joining the band, the orchestra, the dance band, and the Pro Musica. He also acquired an affectionate surrogate musical father in Bob Hanson, the conductor of the distinguished Golden Gate Park Bandshell unit. Eventually, Lesh would play second trumpet for Hanson in the Oakland Symphony and earn the first chair in Hanson’s Young People’s Symphony Orchestra. Hanson would remember a thin, restless boy with a marvelous ear who lacked wind, but not persistence. By graduation in June 1957, Lesh’s ability to transpose keys on sight would earn him the first chair at a high-quality college-sponsored music camp and send him that fall to San Francisco State University. Less developed as a personality than as a musician, he soon dropped out of State and returned home.
    As demanding and critical of the world as he was of himself, Phil was troubled by what he perceived as the raw deal that life had given his father, who had worked brutally hard and had little to show for it. At this juncture Lesh was certain that whatever he did with his future, he didn’t want to be stuck in his father’s trap. Commitment to anything conventional was to be avoided, and he fully identified with the artistic tradition.
    A year later, in September 1958, he resumed his studies, this time at the College of San Mateo (CSM), on the peninsula twenty miles south of San Francisco. An eccentric, intellectual loner, Lesh found his first good friend in a local young man named Mike Lamb, the son of a Stanford administration staff member who had become acquainted with the local cognoscenti. Lamb groomed him a bit socially, and then a succession of intellectual encounters further opened Lesh’s life. First, Morse Peckham’s
Beyond the Tragic Vision
defined the philosophical underpinnings to his inner certainty that only the arts could be free of the fraud that was society: “Absorbed in the work of art, we can for a moment experience life as pure value . . . Aesthetic contemplation is our only innocence.” Then Peckham made these words visible by introducing him to the pre-impressionist English painter J. M. W. Turner, whose hellish, prophetic Rain
Steam and Speed
depicted light as a shining thing in itself, the music of the spheres put down on canvas. When Lesh’s student job turned out to be evaluating new records at the library, his intellectual menu was complete. He discovered the experimental
Music Quarterly,
and learned that music could be created, stored on tape, and fully controlled by the author. Beethoven and Charles Ives were his heroes. He wanted to be a Komposer.
    Meantime, he was caught up in the highly competitive world of the CSM music department. The school’s contest-winning jazz band, a powerhouse group that played the cool West Coast jazz exemplified by Stan Kenton’s arranger, Bill Holman, featured five trumpets, saxophones, and trombones each, plus four rhythm instruments. In his pursuit of the first trumpet chair, Lesh generally found himself behind William “Buddy” Powers, who would take eight years to graduate from CSM due to his habit of dropping out to work with groups like the Woody Herman and Benny Goodman bands. Still thin and lacking the blasting lung power the genre demanded, Lesh increasingly experimented with composition. Fortunately, the band’s rehearsals were wildly open. He would create ten-bar exercises for bizarre orchestrations like the “mother chord,” a dissonant blast that included all twelve chromatic tones, or his first chart, in which the bass player had to tune down his instrument for the first line and then retune it for the remainder, while the brass players began in the highest register, and each section of the band was in a different key. He would recall the piece as resembling “blocks of granite sliding together . . . pretty weird for a junior college.”
    His best exercise title, at least, came from James Joyce’s
Finnegans
Wake:
“The Sound of a Man Being Habitacularly