Bill Kanengiser '81, MM '83


His first guitar was purchased with 46 books of S&H greenstamps. Technically the steel-string belonged to his older brother, but anyone could hear the youngest Kanengiser had all the musical talent. “For some reason I was just hard-wired to do this,” he says, recalling how, at 9, he devoured an introductory manuel in two days.

“A good player, but unfocused,” is how Kanengiser describes himself when he left New Jersey to attend USC. “It’s sort of embarrassing: What drew me here wasn’t that I could study with the greatest virtuoso of the guitar. I didn’t know who Pepe Romero was!” Rather, he came to be in the record industry hub. “I had these ridiculous adolescent dreams of becoming a rock ’n’ roll guitar-god,” he says. “I thought I could do both classical and pop.” Watching the nimble-fingered jazz and blues musicians in USC’s studio guitar program, however, Kanengiser quickly realized he was out of his depth. So it was no great sacrifice when Romero pressed him to focus exclusively on classical. Within a few years, Kanengiser was winning competitions in New York, Toronto and Paris and playing classical solos on movie soundtracks like the guitar cult-classic Crossroads – a 1986 film loosely based on an episode in the life of bluesman Robert Johnson – and on the 1993 historical drama Sommersby.

Kanengiser also has kept up an active recording career. Don’t bother looking for Albéniz or Tárrega on his solo releases, though. The selections are playfully iconoclastic. His debut CD, Rondo Alla Turca, includes a Mozart piano sonata, a Handel suite and new music by USC colleague Brian Head MM ’91. His Levantine-spiced Echoes of the Old World has folk tunes by Bartók and Kabalevsky, a Chassidic song by Ian Krouse MM ’79, DMA ’88, and Carlo Domeniconi’s mesmerizing Turkish delight, “Koyunbaba.” His recent Caribbean Souvenir cruises the tropics for lesser-known works by Cuba’s Leo Brouwer and Mexico’s Manuel Ponce.

A master transcriber and arranger, Kanengiser is a relative neophyte at composing. His first original effort is the title track on Air & Ground – a neo-Baroque air with bluegrass and banjo-stomp elements. “I found it emotionally painful to write,” he says. “I drove my wife crazy. I played the piece constantly in my head, writing most of it while driving to and from USC. I was slowly going mad, I think.”

USC is one of two stabilizing forces in Kanengiser’s maddening life. “I’ve been here either as a student or faculty member since 1977,” he says. The other source of stability is his wife Collette, a special education teacher in Whittier, Calif. The only married LAGQ member, Kanengiser met his mate at one of his first professional gigs: the 1979 opening of her uncle’s Beverly Hills cigar shop. She offered him a ride home, “we stopped for Chinese food, and have been together ever since,” she says, laughing. The couple has an 8-year-old daughter, who has yet to ask for her own guitar.


Photo by Pamela Springsteen