For the love of music: BYU muscian Kory Katseanes likens his life to a game of pinball

Kory Katseanes was attending a summer music academy when he had an epiphany of sorts.

Having come rather late to the pursuit of music, he found himself surrounded by younger students. "I was 22," Katseanes said, "and my roommate was a 14-year-old."

He was feeling way behind in his studies, until "I looked at the other students, and I realized that in many cases they were better musicians than me. But I knew they could not love music any more than me."

Katseanes is director of orchestras and associate director of the School of Music at Brigham Young University, and has been a violinist and associate conductor of the Utah Symphony.

He looks at his life and his career, and it reminds him of a pinball game. "It hasn't been a straight line, more of a zig-zag."

He'd get bounced in one direction, he says, only to be bounced in another awhile later. "But I scratch my head at how fortunate, how lucky I've been to be bumped in directions that were so educational and so interesting. All the things I've needed to know, I got bumped in the right direction to learn them."

Katseanes' pinball-like pathway began as he was growing up on an Idaho farm. "I was more the typical farm boy. I was into a lot of things. But my mother was a wonderful violinist, so I started violin when I was 8, with my mom teaching me."

It was just something he did, like he did sports and other activities. Still, he got good enough that a few years later he began taking lessons from Lamar Barrus, who taught at Ricks College.

Being a musician, however, was not a goal. "I knew I couldn't play like Jascha Heifeitz because I had listened to his records. I had no idea of the other careers available to musicians. I didn't know of the world of professional orchestras."

He thought about medicine, but after coming back from an LDS mission, "I decided to be a music major. I still had no clear idea of what I would do. At the back of my mind was the idea that maybe I could get a job like my teacher had, teaching and conducting a school orchestra. But I wanted to study something I could pour my heart into, that I could be passionate about. So even though 21 was a little late to begin thinking about a career in music, a series of fortunate events bumped me into orchestral music, and it ended up being my life."

That was when Katseanes happened upon a brochure for the Music Academy of the West in Santa Barbara, where faculty members included Utahns Oscar Chausow and Maurice Abravanel. That was when he discovered that passion for a subject is no small thing.