With a twice-annual show lineup at The Shaw Center for the Arts and a new music composition degree, success seems to come easily to local pianist Michael McDowell.
Over the span of a decade, the classical musician has spent countless hours of practice to improve his competitive craft.
The choice to pursue a career in music wasn’t the easiest to make — especially with pressure from family members to study something more practical.
“When I was in high school, my parents wanted me to get a ‘normal degree,’ not like a liberal arts degree, which is understandable, as parents,” McDowell says.
A Baton Rouge native, the University’s School of Music was a clear choice in McDowell’s college search. The recent alum, who graduated in December 2016, gushes about his main professor Dinos Constantinides and credits him as “the man.”
The professor accepted McDowell into the School of Music after reviewing an orchestral composition of his. The student looks up to his professor. Constantinides wrote the music for the opening ceremonies of the 2004 Olympic Ceremonies in Athens, Greece.
“If I had to have a career goal with music, it would be [my] music, on some level [featured] in the Olympics,” McDowell says.
But, McDowell’s love of music started much earlier than college. Family ties laid heavily on McDowell’s introduction to the piano.
His older sister started piano lessons and their parents negotiated a deal with her: stick with it for five years, and the family would buy a piano. The deal worked out in the children’s favor. McDowell says the piano caught his attention and he started to mess with it. When he reached the third grade, he officially began taking piano lessons, a passion that would carry through the next 14 years.
“I remember, distinctly, that my parents bought me a keyboard because I was playing all of the time, and they say ‘you need something with headphones.’ The first song I played on [the keyboard] was ‘Splish Splash I was takin’ a bath,’ I remember that,” McDowell says.
As a former front ensemble captain for the Catholic High marching band and cymbal player with LSU Tiger Band, McDowell encountered a wide variety of percussion outlets aside from his mainstay piano.
“If you need a snare drummer in a pinch, I can do it,” McDowell says, “But piano is far and away my favorite.”
His career at the Shaw Center took off while he was still at the University. In September 2014, Allen Toussaint, a popular pianist from New Orleans, hosted a show at the venue. McDowell played alongside him, and the theatre offered him a contract following the performance.
“[Toussaint] said, ‘are there any piano players in the house?’ and I raised my hand,” McDowell remembers. “I improvised some [things], but it was really good . . . when the executive director hired me, it happened in the wings of the stage.”
He says he remembers it in a “very blurred sense, almost like a movie.”
McDowell considers his strongest suit on piano to be New Age music, which he says he considers “straight harmonically, but theoretically dense, like jazz, and not as structurally concrete as classical.”
“When you go onto Spotify and type in ‘instrumental piano,’ it’s that,” McDowell explains.
McDowell displays his New Age dexterity during his shows at the Shaw Center, where he plays improvised mashups of popular songs. McDowell walks onto stage, selects two song titles from a fish bowl and plays an impromptu arrangement of the two songs in real time.
The pianist’s next Shaw Center performance, on June 3, will consist of the same improv style, but with a new theme. His performance theme will be “Piano Legends” and all of the fish bowl titles have prominent piano parts, like John Lennon’s Imagine.
McDowell also currently plays for mass at Most Blessed Sacrament Church in Baton Rouge.
But, no matter where the classical musician plays, McDowell’s passion and genuine enjoyment of his craft are what motivates him to continue furthering his career in music.
“I kind of sat down and had the conversation with myself about what are you gonna be the most happy doing…I wasn’t going to be happy doing anything but music.”
