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The Bay Area Lute Pages A Northern California Chapter of the Lute Society of America |
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~ In Memoriam ~
Robert Douglas Buzzard
June 21, 1926 - July 13, 2008
~ Some memories from Mike Peterson, April 2009 ~
I only recently found out that one of our long-time Bay Area Lute members, Bob (Buzz) Buzzard, passed away in San Diego last July, 2008. In the past he was a regular attendee of the San Francisco Early Music Society's summer programs as well as our local Bay Area Lute events, only recently moving back to San Diego several years ago for his health.
I met Bob for the first time at Dick Hoban's first Texas Lute Seminar (I think) back in 1994, held in Fort Worth, Texas, on the Texas Christian University campus. One of the attendees to the weekend seminar was an older and impossibly-tall wild-looking lute and gamba player who showed up at the campus or Dick's house daily with his old red camper-shell pickup and dog. Little did I know what an impact Bob would later make on my music life. Bob was impossibly eager to learn everything that our instructor, Cathy Liddell, had to offer and was unabashedly enthusiastic about any early music.
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A few years later Bob began to show up at our regular monthly lute seminars and get-togethers at Franklin Lei's house in Berkeley, and asked for coaching on a theorbo as well as his lute! He was also there at one of the first SFEMS Early Music Summer seminars that I attended and every year thereafter. Later I found out that Bob barely survived a traumatic auto accident in 1990. He told me he suffered massive head and chest injuries and was not expected to survive. After being in a coma for weeks, he did wake up and slowly resumed his rehabilitation. However because of the nature of his untreated chest injuries, the accident left him with limited breathing function and mobility, but that never seemed to slow him down. I was very accustomed with his slow limping gait and his impossibly-long theorbo being lugged along, and I enjoyed hanging back and talking to him on our way to the dining commons every morning at the SFEMS Summer classes. Those were the best days ever! His determination to overcome his resulting handicap and to continue his musical life has been an inspiration to us all. I was always glad to see him. |
Bob was always trying to get me to try something new. One summer at SFEMS he had a 17th century Italian trio (in tablature) for 10-course lute, theorbo and renaissance guitar! I had the 10-course lute, he had the theorbo, and we hunted down a vocalist who had a 4-course mandolino that we retuned and showed him how to read tablature, and we were in business! Other times he talked me into taking my archlute down to the gamba players nightly "jam" sessions to play continuo while he played his gamba with them. He was always enthusiastic and eager to play any kind of music despite his handicaps, and was the sweetest and most gentle human being that I ever knew. He was always patiently trying to explain music theory to me when I was stuck on a continuo problem, and we always loved waving our long-necked lutes over the fearful heads of the violins and singers at SFEMS "Play-ins."
Bob's early professional life centered on computers and engineering, but his great love (after family life) was music. I later found out Bob began playing recorders in the 1950's and kept expanding his musical frontiers to include viola da gamba, guitar, lute, theorbo (his favorite), and most recently modern and baroque cello. He was an enthusiastic participant at many early music workshops across the country- if you do a google search, you will find him mentioned everywhere! I was heartbroken when he decided to move from Northern California to San Diego. Our loss was their gain; he was one of the founders of the San Diego Early Music Society, and there he was ceaseless proponent of amateur music.He will be greatly missed and remembered by his friends. I am so sad to have lost track of him, it seems his passing has left a large hole that will be hard to fill. How many of our other lute friends have we lost track of? http://sdems.blogspot.com/2008/09/remembrance-of-robert-buzzard-june-1926.html
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Photo courtesy of the Viola da Gamba Society of America.