Alum divides time between engineering and composing


by Peter Page

Places and things prominent in childhood are nearly always shrunken when revisited as an adult, but for David Berends '78 the piano looms as large now as when the instrument awed him as a preschooler.

"I remember going to church and seeing the women play and wanting to play, begging to play,'' he said. "From the time I was three, I told my parents I wanted to play the piano. I think I started when I was five or six.''

Mr. Berends, 44, is not easily categorized by occupation, not even by himself. His engineering career, pursued entirely at firms within lunchtime jogging distance of the Delaware & Raritan Canal, has taken him to Sarnoff, where he works in the digital television group.

In Mr. Berends' music career, conducted now in hourly increments each morning playing chops on the piano in his home, has included innumerable radio, television, and concert performances with the likes of jazz guitarist Stanley Jordan and the legendary Chuck Berry.

The first of his two CDs, Fifteen Exceptions for Piano, earned enthusiastic reviews in classical music publications. Mr. Berends' second CD, Rhapsody in Life, original piano compositions of his played by him, was released in late 1999.

So does Mr. Berends, the son of an engineer, regard himself as an engineer or a musician/composer?

"Both, at this point.''

Unlike Mr. Berends' love-at-first-sight calling to the piano, there were a few forks in his path to engineering. He transferred to Princeton as a sophomore from the University of Pennsylvania.

"I reached the point where I knew I did not want to study music theory or music composition, and I was not willing to pursue math to a doctorate,'' Mr. Berends said.

A fascination with electronic music brought Mr. Berends, admittedly by process of elimination, to study engineering.

"I got very interested in digital signal processing. This was back in the days of the old analog synthesizers, which are wonderful if you are not into electronics,'' he said. "I studied electrical engineering, but whenever I had an elective I took a music history course. Whenever I selected an engineering course, I made sure it was somehow applicable to audio.''

Mr. Berends graduated, married Mary Pat, had two children (Andrea, 14; Christopher, 10) and pursued an engineering career that never kept him far from Princeton and his favorite local amenity, the Delaware & Raritan Canal.

"Basically, every job I have ever had has been within a mile of that canal,'' he said. "Wherever I have worked, at lunchtime I run down to the canal.''

And during those lunch hours, Mr. Berends' mind shifts restlessly from the demands of engineering at Sarnoff to the music he labors to create in the precious hour of every morning.

"I get up in the morning, get ready for work, and practice for an hour,'' he said. "It's hard in an hour to juggle keeping your chops up and trying to compose, but sometimes I can actually take the raw material, the thematic material that I am constantly jotting down and recording, and turn it, finally, into a work of art.''

Composer/engineer is a daunting dual career, but Mr. Berends is, by experience, a realist about the merciless nature of a solely musical career, especially of the sort shaped by his drive to compose. Engineering has allowed him to avoid artistic compromise, but at a price he pays every morning when he leaves the piano just as he is getting warmed up.

"It gets to the point in music where you think, do I compromise on this so I can eat tomorrow, or do I push on? I do this the way I am doing it because I don't have to compromise, but the trade-off is I don't have enough time to do what I want to do,'' he said.

Two careers, passionately pursued, are bound to bump into each other. For Mr. Berends, sometimes engineering preempts music. Sometimes it's the other way around.

"If there is a big project at work, I find myself sitting at the piano, going through the mechanical motions while trying to solve some technical problem,'' Mr. Berends said. "But there is almost always a piece of music going through my head. I think that is one of the curses of being a musician. You know how people complain there is a tune stuck in their head? There is always a tune stuck in my head.''

David Berends '78 spends his morning practicing the piano, his work day at Sarnoff Corp., and his lunchtime running along the Delaware & Raritan Canal.

Dave Berends two CDs: Fifteen Exceptions for Piano and Rhapsody in Life, which can be purchased at amazon.com or from: I Virtuosi Records, P.O.Box 320, Pennington, N.J. 08534.

Phone: (609)737-3328