Aha Moment: La Forza del Destino

As a kid, Steve Call struggled with school. “At the end of each school year, my mother would go and beg the teacher to pass me on to the next grade,” he remembers, “because I never did learn to read in elementary school.” Call had dyslexia, and although he had a great ear for music and a knack for instruments – he picked up the trombonium, trombone, bassoon, bass clarinet – he assumed his disability would make a career in music impossible.
Then one day during his senior year, the band director asked Call to pinch-hit on the tuba for an upcoming concert. He wasn’t thrilled; tuba was “the bottom of the musical food chain,” but he decided to be a good sport.
As the band played the opening lines of Verdi’s overture to La Forza del Destino, he was stunned by the sound the instrument made. “The vibrations that I could feel, the resonance in the room as the sound attached itself to the other instruments,” he says, “it was akin to falling in love.” The affair carried him into a career as a professor of music at Brigham Young University.
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Video: Steve Call and The New Hot 5