Technology enables blind musician and friend to make sweet music together
Paul Kurtz with his electronic braille device and trumpet
Essentially blind since birth, Paul Kurtz of Ortega Forest hasn’t let blindness hinder his careers or his musical ambitions.
Born in 1952, Kurtz has retinopathy of prematurity, a condition caused by oxygen damage to the retina of the eye in an incubator. After learning braille in first grade and typing in second, he was able to attend public school and graduated with honors from Robert E. Lee High School in 1970.
He attended Florida Southern College and earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology in 1974, and a master’s in counseling, health, and rehabilitation in 1977 from Florida State University, where he also took classes in music theory and history above his regular course load. He later earned an associate degree in computer science from Florida State College Jacksonville, where he spent nearly 10 years counseling disabled students. After his counseling career, he spent two decades in computer science as a programmer, analyst and systems manager at Naval Air Station Jacksonville.
Kurtz first began piano lessons at age 8, then later trained in braille music and had more advanced piano training, learned to play trumpet for the junior high school band, then again in college, and in the FSU Trumpet Ensemble. It was then that he gave serious thought to a career in music, teaching trumpet and brass, music appreciation, and music history.
However, since there weren’t braille music materials available at the time, Kurtz had to braille every bit of music he used from junior high school through graduate school, except for a piece of the 1933 Arban Method for Trumpet obtained from The Library of Congress. Assisted by volunteer music readers, Kurtz brailled music a note, slur, and rest at a time. Eventually he would pay for 38 trumpet method books to be produced in braille and has nine others which were produced by The Friends of Library Access, Inc.
Larry Tallman plays the tuba at a Jacksonville Tuba Christmas event
Fortunately, a major change in producing books for the blind has revolutionized Kurtz’ work. Digital braille, where braille files are produced on computer and can either be printed out in hard copy or read on a braille computer terminals or note-takers, has enabled braille to become much more transportable. Also, a program called Dancing Dots was developed to translate digital music into a braille file, but still requires a sighted person to do the front-end work.
Enter Larry Tallman, a tuba player with The Recycles and the Jacksonville Community Band, who now does the front work of editing music for brailling.
Tallman, currently residing in Mandarin, started his latest music hobby in 2008 upon his retirement as a financial analyst with Blue Cross Blue Shield of Florida. He would download public domain, turn-of-the-last century music PDF files by composers like Sousa and Filmore to modernize the arrangement and build a score for his community bands. He would scan in all the parts and change the key of parts to what is used by contemporary musicians, then edit the parts with a notation application called Music Ease and merge them into a conductor’s score.
Dancing Dots allows Tallman to scan, edit and then produce a braille text file that is emailed to Kurtz, who loads it to his braille note-taker. This was so efficient they would convert all the cornet/trumpet parts of an arrangement so Kurtz could be an effective section lead and also cover any missing voices when the piece was performed. Since starting this process in the summer of 2017, Tallman has electronically brailled over 100 arrangements for Kurtz.
Using the music archives from the Chatfield Lending Library in Minnesota, Kurtz and Tallman have been able to provide appropriate music genre like “Never on Sunday,” “The Good, The Bad and the Ugly” and “As Time Goes By” for the audiences of their community bands in Jacksonville.
Submitted by Larry Tallman
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