William Anthony Vacchiano was born in Portland Maine on May 23, 1912. William was not his given name, but rather an English variant he adopted in later years as being closest to the very Italian original. He was part of a large family of Italian immigrants in a town of many immigrants and was raised in the Italian manner. Vacchiano’s roots were very important to him, it meant family to him and family meant everything.  

The name and presence of Vacchiano was omnipresent for a trumpet player growing up in New York. The test of your worth was whether you had studied with him or not. This was true even among “club” musicians, many of whom had studied with him for a time. It was not uncommon to go to an audition in town and have someone instantly recognize you as a Vacchiano student, so clear was the stamp of his training.

 I had only seen Vacchiano once before my Juilliard audition. While I was at Performing Arts High School we had ventured uptown to our sister school, Music and Art, to hear a Young People’s Concert. I sat up in a balcony looking down at the orchestra. I remember quite clearly observing the trumpet section, especially this one big guy who acted like he was definitely the "spoon that stirred the drink". I remember that Handel’s “Water Music” was on the program, but I have no clear recollection of how things sounded. However, I clearly remember the swaggering attitude of the man, the look of  “power personified” and the energy that seared through at you right from the very back row of the hall.

                                                                       William Vacchiano 1948

I did not go right from Performing Arts High School into Juilliard.  I had had some serious dental problems in my senior year and wound up spending two years at The City College of New York which had just started a new arts program. They were very proud to have added Gerard Schwarz to their rostrum of teachers. Gerry was the star of the American Brass Quintet at the time and was just about to be awarded the principal trumpet gig with the New York Philharmonic. I studied there for two years with Gerry and he often spoke of Vacchiano, invoking his teachings and warning that there were certain things that I was doing that Vacchiano would not stand for. This always held the message of great finality. Judgment of the most severe nature had been passed. Change or quit were the options offered. In my second year we began to prepare for my audition at Juilliard. When the time got close, Gerry would often say “Don’t worry, Vacchiano’s going to love you…you’re Italian.”  

And so it was that I was destined to finally meet him at my Juilliard audition. I played some Charlier etudes; then onto excerpts. At this point, Vacchiano took a commanding position among the jury. He asked for the usual, “Petrouchka”, “Tchaik 4” and the opening to “Pictures”; but then, he wanted to hear the call from Zarathustra. I hadn’t actually prepared to play this, but it’s not like it requires memorization. Being young and reckless, I let go for all I was worth. Vacchiano’s face broke into a very large grin as he began to laugh, telling the jury panel that if I had missed it, they would have been “cleaning it off the walls for weeks” and he continued to carry on about “what a swipe I had taken at it”.

As I said I was young and stup…I mean reckless, and this break in the solemnity of the occasion prompted me to ask this marvel of the trumpet playing world about a legendary story that had circulated among all brass playing students regarding this excerpt. I thought I might actually get the inside track…for a change. In my ignoran…ahem, that is, in my innocence, I asked Mr. Vacchiano if it was true that Adolph Herseth had been asked to play the famous octave lick over and over again by some insane conductor and had actually managed to do it every time without missing. Vacchiano immediately assumed his “shock and amazement look” (something that I was to see again, fortunately only on very special occasions; usually followed quickly by “Hey, you’re putting me on, aren’t you?) Kind and gentle man that he was, he said, “That story is about me!” Being one of the most modest and totally unassuming people that I have ever known, Vacchiano basically scoffed the incident off, joking and laughing. Only many years later, when I knew him better, did he tell me the whole story.

Philharmonic on the air: (1935)                             The Columbia Network broadcast the New York Philharmonic Sunday afternoons. Directed by Otto Klemperer and later by Arturo Toscanini         Front row: Vanni, William Vacchiano, Nat Prager,   Harry Glantz, Mario Falcone                                    Standing: Roy Haines, George Lucas, Allie Clark, Robert Paolucci

It seems that early on during his tenure with the New York Philharmonic, when he had just been moved up from 3^rd chair to 1^st, Artur Rodzinski (music director from 1943-1947) was conducting Richard Strauss’ Also Sprach Zarathustra. When the orchestra got to the infamous #18 in the score, Rodzinski decided to test his young principal by pretending to work the section over and over again, forcing Vacchiano to play the call a good 20 times in a row. The orchestra recognized, with nothing apparently wrong, that Rodzinski was doing his best to intimidate and if possible to unnerve the young player. The brass section was getting pretty riled up by these goings on, but Vacchiano kept muttering, just loud enough for his section mates to hear, “I’ll play it until your arm falls off.” It was finally Joseph Stagliano, the principal horn player, an older and highly respected member of the orchestra who finally stood up to Rodzinski (which might have easily meant the loss of your job in those days) pointed his finger at the conductor and said (judging by the look on Vacchiano’s face when he would recount the incident) in a very threatening tone, “You stop that now…that’s enough!”  Well, Rodzinski moved on, and that was that.

This was not the first test that Vacchiano had had to endure coming into the orchestra. During one of the very first rehearsals he attended after being hired, the orchestra was scheduled to play Tchaikovsky’s Cappriccio Italien. The piece starts with a loud trumpet fanfare for all three trumpets played in unison. Played on the Bb, the part starts with lots of low C#’s. Harry Glantz, the principal trumpet player at the time, decided to test the young player. He told the rest of the section not to trigger the C#’s and left Vacchiano to be hung out to dry. Fortunately, the orchestra manager, Bruno Zurato caught wind of the plot and things were quickly smoothed over.                                                               Backstage at Carnegie Hall  (1937)

 During one performance of Shostakovich’s Symphony #5 under Arturo Toscanini, Vacchiano recalls looking over to the first chair to see that Glantz’s face had turned ashen gray. Finally, Glantz had to stand up and leave the stage during the piece. Vacchiano had to switch over quickly just in time to play the major solo in the 4^th movement (measure #108). 

Vacchiano was a great and sincere fan of Harry Glantz. Back in those days the enormity of the sound you could generate was everything. Many prominent players of the past like “Capo de Ferro,”  “Bone Head Panella” (both major players on the New York scene of the 30's era) and even the great Gustav Heim were huge guys that could easily fill a concert hall with plenty of sound. Vacchiano would joke that people would be hired based on how they could tip a scale. Vacchiano would tell me that they would make Capo de Ferro alternate his seating from side to side of the hall to give the other players in the orchestra, and the audience a break. Now that’s power!

While Vacchiano was still a student at the Institute of Musical Arts (which later became the Juilliard School) he said that he would begin everyday by listening to a recording of Harry Glantz playing “The Coronation March” from Meyerbeer’s “Le Prophete”. Vacchiano always spoke about the importance of getting the proper sound “in your ear”. He could recall having heard Glantz playing one of Stokowski’s arrangements of Bach. You could easily tell by the face he put on while singing out broadly how this experience had impacted him as a young student and how strong the memory was for him even after 40 or more years. Interestingly, I happened to be telling this story to Doc Severensen one day while doing some work for him in our New York shop. Doc cocked his head to one side and said, “Now isn’t that funny, I used to listen to Vacchiano play the solo from Copland’s Prairie Night’s (from the Billy the Kid Suite) everyday to get Vacchiano’s sound in my ear.”  

Vacchiano’s early musical training reflected his European background. His first teacher was an Italian gentleman who taught him the art of solfeggio. He received a year’s worth of instruction in this practice before he was allowed to start on an instrument. Back in the day, teaching methods were a bit different than they are today. Vacchiano would often tell me the story of how he had been out playing one day and had bruised himself  before going into his lesson. When he got home later that evening, his Father took one look at the bruise and said, “Heh, you must have been really dumb today!”  

		His ability in this area was truly impressive. I had observed that whenever he wanted to demonstrate his prowess he would whip off the Characteristic Etude #1 from the Arban book. He would offer to do it in any key, and could do so with great ease, even at a tempo of about quarter note = 144, or to the point where the ability to articulate the syllables was the greater problem.
	Lewison Stadium, 1939 : Harry Glantz, Nat Prager, William Vacchiano, Sol Lubin

After a few years, I caught on to this feat and had decided that it was no big deal seeing as how the etude was merely the tonic chord arpeggiated followed by a descending scale in a kind of thirds pattern. This is not to say that I could do it like he could, but I considered it a monumental achievement to just be able to understand what was going on and to be able to reproduce it myself…okay a lot slower.

One day Vacchiano received a complimentary copy of a new etude book by his former student Tom Stevens. The etudes were atonal and of a high level of difficulty in terms of rhythm, mixed meters and intervallic leaps. Knowing how Vacchiano always loved to show off his solfeggio expertise, I thought I had found the perfect medium to finally “catch him out”. I started setting him up as it were, for the ambush. I could see he was up for a challenge and eyes twinkling he offered to sight sing anything out of the book. “In any key?” I devilishly anteed up. His eyes met mine. I could see he was loving it. The chase was on. I set to selecting, of course the wildest page therein. Arming myself, I prepared little land mines for him. I got to a passage and analyzed it so that I would have a hope of being able to tell whether he was putting me on or playing fair! The stage was set. With joyful anticipation and great pleasure in my own cleverness I awaited the denouement of the great solfege master myth. With complete nonchalance, he glanced over the page for but a few seconds and began. He went so quickly, I lost my place and couldn’t really be sure whether I had been had or not. Maintaining my cool, I pretended not to be impressed by his sight singing of the insane intervals or his handling of the rhythms, and pretended to have noted some irregularities in the solfege. I asked for another key (something along the lines of soprano clef reading). Again he whipped it off. Asking for the equivalent of the transposition from Bb to E trumpet (up and augmented fourth), I challenged him again. I finally was able to grasp that, in fact, the sequences were recognizable and that he had indeed met the challenge above and beyond what I had even had the ability to preconceive. I don’t remember how much credit I offered him at the time, (I feel it’s important to keep the sycophantic stuff under control in the presence of greatness) but, to this day, I still get goose bumps thinking about this feat and how completely disarmed I was by the many levels of his knowledge and skill.