The man behind the image:

Derek explained

I FEEL LIKE assuming a regular readership would be kind of an arrogant move, but anybody who’s followed this article fairly regularly has probably heard the name “Derek” pop up at least a few times.

I feel that in some way, by continually making reference to a person that probably only a few people in the school besides myself actually know, I may not always be getting my point across and I feel that at times, what I do write might come off as exclusionary.

Here is a treat then, or maybe a necessity: a 700 word biopic; an explanation of who exactly this friend is and a background of our friendship.

Derek and I met probably for the first time in seventh grade, at Kastner Intermediate School.

I have a hard time pinning down the date because, for the first few years, if I remember correctly, our friendship was something more like an acquaintanceship — we were familiar with each other only in passing.

I don’t understand why we didn’t realize back then how much we had in common. His fourth grade teacher had been arrested for molesting students, and mine was evil incarnate. We’d both had a love for music and a turbulent elementary school experience and should’ve known then that we were bound to be good friends.

We did know each other, however, from being in the school band together. Derek was a percussionist and I a saxophonist.

I imagine that this period in his life marked the first time that he had begun working primarily or even exclusively with pitched percussion — mallet instruments, like the xylophone, vibraphone and marimba.

Derek’s primary instrument before this time had been the piano. Mine had been the saxophone.

Perhaps it sounds dull, but the saxophone and I were in a fairly monogamous relationship until my sophomore year of high school, when I decided to start pretending how to play bassoon.

The second of the two years of middle school, our eighth-grade year, both Derek and I participated in the jazz band.

Jazz band, at that time, occupied approximately 35 minutes of a 45-minute-long lunch period, and we had it every day. Needless to say, we spent a fair amount of time together, at least in the same room.

Our freshmen year of high school, things changed between us. I think at some point between the year preceding and the middle of the year, we both realized our passion for writing music in MIDI.

For those of you unfamiliar with MIDI, it’ll have to suffice for me to tell you that it often evokes the reaction, “That sounds like video game music.”

That sort of comment made both of us real angry.

Our sophomore year in high school, we both fell deeply and irrevocably in love with Gustav Mahler, a composer from the late 19 th and early 20 th century whose harmonic language paved the way for atonal composers.

So, we spent most of high school exchanging MIDI files, talking about things that we’d heard and things that we liked, going off campus to get lunch together when we were deemed old enough, and drooling over the outer movements of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony.

Tragedy befell our friendship in the final months of our senior year, the same sort that likely happens across the country as we realized that we would probably never play in any sort of band together again.

Would our friendship endure the test of time? Were we bound inexorably away from each other? Would we ever discuss music and art and life ever again?

Yes, I say to you, Yes we would Yes.

We spent a lot of that summer hanging out with each other, watching movies, going to concerts, discussing music. His mother knit me a hat that I held dear until I lost it a few months later.

Then we entered college — he at UC Davis, and I here. While I’d entered as a music composition major, he’d listed his major as physics, though he switched, when he’d truly realized how much math was involved, to mathematics.

We’ve both added second majors since then — he is now also a music performance major, and I added an English major.

I think the catalyst for his decision came during the summer between his first and second years in college, when his parents purchased him a marimba and a vibraphone that, combined, probably cost more than they’d ever spent in 19 years of feeding and clothing him.

Derek Peter Kwan, I salute you. Oh, and vote tomorrow.

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