The Naked Composer: A Memoir of Growing up in Music, Dismissal from Music School, Living in Paris, and Discovering New Sanity for the Arts

USA Book News Awards, Finalist Medal ~ THE NAKED COMPOSER is the colorful and important story of the education of a young composer (the author as a young man) who has quit popular music and has begun to write his first symphony. No special knowledge of music or painting is required of the reader. In his teens, as a guitar playing prodigy, Webster Young was acquainted with the Jimi Hendrix, Jeff Baxter (Doobie Brothers), and John Kay (Steppenwolf). His life changed forever after he met, in the tumult of Berkeley in 1968, a brilliant expressionist painter, Kenneth Frantz, a follower of Carl Jung's psychology, who became his mentor. (Frantz studied with David Park and was part of the San Francisco Renaissance in the 1950's. His paintings are seen for the first time in tis book, in 14 illustrations. ) Young discovered a new basis for meaning in art and music that, even today, could have a liberating impact on the art world. Young converted to writing neoclassical music and is now, thirty years later, the composer of 135 works, with symphonies, ballets, and operas to his credit. THE NAKED COMPOSER is the memoir of his education after conversion to classical music, full of interesting artistic ideas. It is about the influences of people and places upon him - first, that of Kenneth Frantz the painter, and later, that of the city of Paris and the Juilliard School. A third of the book concerns the author's first time in Paris; the last third is about the Juilliard School and New York. 69 illustrations include paintings by Chagall, Rouault, Corot, and Kenneth Miller Frantz. The author has been a journalist in music for Newsday New York, The Catholic Herald, and the Intercollegiate Review, and other newspapers.