Inspired by TED Talks, JC Salon is a faculty-driven oratory series that gives insight into niche disciplines thru thought provoking topics. This entertains and introduces the audience to professionals in fields they may not have encountered otherwise.

October’s speaker was piano and digital audio teacher Rudolph Budginas. Budginas, a classically trained, award-winning pianist who has become known for his decision to rip classical music apart and reassemble it, infused with today’s styles and tastes, in order to make it relevant to modern listeners.

Budginas, brimming with his upbeat energy, spoke to the audience in purple jeans about his unique life history in Soviet-controlled Lithuania and how his fascination with sound correlates to choosing an open mind.

The nearly full student center received a light-hearted account of how Budginas entered into the musical elite of Communist society where he was “spoiled with attention and success,” and how the liberating freedom of capitalism “destroyed everything for me,” said Budginas.

After accepting a full scholarship to USC he was near broke and without any kind of support network. He recounted how he gambled his last $50 on entering a piano contest in LA where there was no prize for second place, and losing meant he would not have enough gas to return home in his ’75 Impala. Fortunately he placed first, earning the cash prize and the concert engagements from the win. Back in the game, he toured the states.

After the touring, he didn’t feel very relevant in the American lifestyle, playing formal 200 year old music when so few people support it.

“Life is more casual, people have different interests now, their attention span is three seconds and you can’t torture people with half hour musical pieces. I need to change, I need to change my sound I need to change my ideals,” said Budginas.

The only thing to do was to take a drastic risk and “do something with classical music, just rip it apart in front of everyone,” Budginas said.

His playing then began to feature two sounds, the historical and the more relevant modern influence that today’s audience instinctively enjoys.

After a tour with his new sound for a year, he could not go back to the same place or the old way of playing, he craved more change.

Then: “A miracle happened, Dr. Chong hire[d] me.” Budginas said, gesturing towards the SRJC President. “Now I am here and I am very excited, because I feel this is a place where change is accepted were variety is accepted, where you can be what you are,”

This session transitioned from biographical to informational as Budginas delved into his thoughts on the relationship between sound, vibration and personal choice.

“Everybody is surrounded by sound. For me sound is what you are, we can have a lot of sounds inside of us,” he said.

He explained we do not hear sounds, sounds are vibrations. We hear vibrations and these vibrations are interpreted by our minds based on experiences that vary from person to person.

His fascination with sound vibration is in how we perceive it, depending on who we are, affecting how we process it.

What happens when we hear something that our mind does not recognize? When a people living in the Amazon jungle listens to a saxophone for the first time? They don’t know what a saxophone is ,so their mind cannot tell them how to interpret it. So their emotional perception of whether they like it or not will be pure and bias-free.

For example, when children under three listen to a nice melody they don’t really care about it, but when you play a dissonant sound that is harsh, “a total mess on the keyboard,” they react; they like it better. Yet for adults, Budginas said, “We are destroyed with harmony, we are destroyed by the laws and formulas of music we become square,” and as we get more exposure to music, we become more rigid in our likes till we are so uptight and square that when we hear something outside our standard harmonies, we disregard it as being invalid.

This is why older generations cannot stand the music of the younger generations; we become jaded against it due to our preconceived expectations of what are “good vibrations.”

Budginas further demonstrated this point with Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor.” He played a bit, then asked if people thought of evil, menacing Halloween, coffins and ghouls, which many nodded agreement with. Budginas then explained that the piece was written for the church and was meant to be the opposite of today’s conceptual interpretation.

With these open to interpretation where a very different perspective is given with each version, the point being it is up to us, the listener, to decide which is right, true and valid. This is a conscious choice that Budginas wants us to make while being aware of our conditioning towards preconceived prejudice of the things we prefer.

Budginas concluded with the session saying, “I encourage everybody to be open minded, enjoy what you do – and the most important thing is your mind; it decides how your life will be, how you hear music, it’s how you perceive people and sounds, anything.”