Music has been part of my life for as long as I can remember. My father, Albert Lichty, played bass in a group called "The Wings of Swing" on the Army Air Corps base at Chico, California, before I was born in 1948, and continued afterwards as a professional bass player who played swing and jazz jobs all over the LA area. My mother, Jeane Lichty, studied music at UCLA under Arnold Schoenberg and played violin, viola, organ, and piano, accompanying the church choir where, years later, I sang baritone.
I had a wonderful childhood, playing up and down the different sandstone levels of the soaring backyard at my parent's house in the Echo Park-Silverlake District of LA; or spending the lazy days of summer swimming in the placid ocean waters of Treasure Island Trailer Park in Laguna Beach California, and roaming its secluded coves, playing Peter Pan and Wendy with my sister while climbing the perilous trail up Pirate Mountain.
As I grew, I listened to LP's of Broadway shows like "My Fair Lady," or to movie scores, like "Around the World in Eighty Days," and of course, the classics like Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms, which were always vibrating in the air of our house. Over the years, I wore out the grooves on the records of Raphael Mendez and his blazing trumpet solos. And somewhere along the line, I learned how to read music.
I remember my mother's stern words as I entered Thomas Starr King Jr. High School, 'I don't care what instrument you are going to learn, but you are going to you learn an instrument, okay, Normie?' So, with red hot trumpet licks still cooking in my soul, I chose the trumpet and rapidly gained ground. But one fateful day, I saw a broadcast on television of an orchestra playing Mahler’s 1st Symphony, "The Titan," and was entranced by the look and the sound of the eight horns, and the next day in school, I told the band leader that I wanted to switch to the French horn. He warned me about the instrument, and its difficulties, but I was hopelessly smitten, and insisted.
During those early years, my first teacher was Wendell Hoss, an older gentleman who lived in an intriguing Maya-themed house designed by the son of Frank Lloyd Wright. He was a gifted horn player who had held the first chair in several major symphonies in the East, and was lured out West by the booming and lucrative movie studio recording industry.
I played the horn in the orchestra in Jr. high, then at Marshall High, where I also sang in madrigals, and acted and sang in the Broadway shows that were so professionally staged by Mr. Weintraub, the Theater Arts teacher. After high school, I played horn in the Los Angeles City College Concert Band, and in the orchestra under the baton of Dominic Disarro. After transferring to Cal State LA, I continued to play in the concert orchestra, and the pit orchestra under the baleful baton of Gaylord Brown, and continued to study horn technique with the retired studio player, Fred Fox.
The section leader at Cal State was a brilliant young horn player named Ron Applegate who took me under his wing and with his teaching and guidance, I began to play in orchestras all over LA, such as the San Gabriel Symphony, the Immaculate Heart College orchestra, the Doctor’s Symphony and others. I also played horn in the Santa Barbara Symphony, and continued my horn studies with Ralph Pyle who was at that time the second horn in the LA Philharmonic. He was a kind, generous, and spiritual man who gave me lessons for free in the room by the pool in his stately home in South Pasadena.
The years went by and in the meantime I earned a BA in Anthropology. Then the time came for my last performance as a concert hornist, and it was indeed thrilling: I had the chance to perform my favorite symphonic work, the one that had started me on this life-time love affair with the horn, The Mahler 1st.
In the early eighties, I had the opportunity to play with a group in San Diego called "Interval" that played music based on the music of Harry Partch, and we performed a concert in Mexico City. In 1985, I returned to LA and joined the Los Angeles Unified School District as a bilingual educator to the children of the Pico Union-Korea Town district, a post that I would hold for the next thirty-one years until my retirement in 2016.
One day, in the early 1990’s, a vision came to me to form a musical group, so with my brother, Loren Lichty, and Ron Muller, and the gracious help of a friend of mine named Anthony Khulman, who played bassoon, and was a winner of the Coleman Auditions in his youth, and the former first chair in the Lima, Peru Symphony, Terra Nova was born. Over the ensuing years, our combined talents and experience lead us down a creative pathway that bore some interesting and innovative musical fruit.
Life comes in phases that ebb and flow like the tides at the foot of the bluff where our little Cottage Home trailer was perched, and the next phase in my musical life was when I joined Koroyar as their stand-up bass player, the Eastern European folk ensemble founded by the pioneer Richard Unciano. Over the next series of years, we played folk music all over the LA area, including a recording session where we made a CD.
One Sunday, when we were performing at a Macedonian church in Whittier, I asked one of the dancers in the group, named Betty Sanchez, for her phone number, and our lives joined together in a new phase of evolution. With her assistance and motivation, I danced for two consecutive years in the Nisei Week Parades wearing a kimono; danced Hawaiian, and became an emcee in many of her venues; and co-authored a book with Betty, under the pen name Robert Collins, about our trip to the country of Myanmar, a place that is practically not known to the outside world, that is why it is entitled Black Hole With a Heart of Gold.
Music became an important part of our daily lives and our afternoons are now filled with the sound of the flute, piccolo, soprano and alto saxes, penny whistles, recorders, piano, and of course, the French horn. Terra Nova continued when Betty, Ron, Loren, and I reunited to play a variety of international folk songs together.
During the course of our lives, Betty and I have both been fascinated by the myriad ways that the universal themes of life can be expressed; and it was that love of culture that created Terra Nova.
This fascination has taken us to over seventy-five countries, and five continents. One of the places that is impregnated in my memory is the palace of Frederick the Great in Potsdam, Germany where he lived, and was a warrior, a king, and a world class flautist and composer; and the name of his palace was "San Souci," which, loosely translated, means, "No Worries."