By: Dr. Andrew Yox, Honors Director
The former Supreme Court Justice, Sandra Day O’Connor, once noted after she stepped down from the nation’s highest court in 2006 that she would have liked to have “retired from [her] retirement.” Alas, retirement can have many meanings. In the case of NTCC’s former, Director of Computer Services, Kenny Goodson, retirement in a sense did not end a career as much as synthesize two paths he had pursued in life. Goodson with a Master’s Degree in composition has composed many pieces for bands through the years, and was also a band director at Mount Pleasant High School and other area schools. With a Master’s Degree in educational technology, Goodson was also once the computer expert at NTCC. Now he can craft winsome works of music rapidly, improvising through a Logic Pro interface, and tone generator, and scoring works through Dorico, a software suite that provides notation.
Just how winsome this sound can be is perhaps best heard at the forty-nine second-mark of the film Goodson scored for the NTCC honors film on the traveling preachers in 2024. This was actually a second, though better rendition of a work Goodson had pioneered for the trailer of this film. Like some of the best fugues of Johann Sebastian Bach, the melodic subject begins un-ostentatiously, though with a kind of promising authenticity that leaves the listener wondering what can happen. An accompaniment emerges with a bass violin providing a profound escort to the original theme and doubling its intensity. With the onset of a fuller string section and piano arpeggios the work blossoms into a highly engaging musical kaleidoscope. At this point it is not only startling in texture, but rich in the promise of still greater levels of grandeur. This Goodson delivers, allowing his now glorious theme to modulate up a note, and to be joined by a counter melody of trumpets which impels the music of a mysterious unveiling in the opening on to a triumphant climax.
Goodson has many other signal works that inspirit attention. On his professional website, there is a work, “Victory on the Brazos,” that evokes the shock of a major victory, and an inventive musical approximation of elation. The “Smoke Music Overture” composed for last year’s honors film on toxification and premiered this past fall combines a rollicking, dramatic parade of musical tension with an almost eerie rapture. The score nudges the viewer to see the smoke as one might espy horrific, life-controlling clouds.
Goodson has thus far scored hours of music to the NTCC honors film series. In a major act of work-in-kind philanthropy, he was scored the last six feature length films of Honors Northeast. All of the films have won an award of some kind at the yearly spring meeting of the Texas State Historical Association. Four of the six have been intervarsity awards, pulled from the grasp of university competitors. Rather than see the final production of the films as something less student centered, judges have tended to credit the students for maintaining the services of a regional composter, and developing a connection that has greatly enhanced the final product. More than just providing music, Goodson has also narrated four of the six film trailers in a sonorous, exact, and decidedly Texan baritone. He has provided technical advice, helped student directors to define what they have wanted, and has played a kind of efficacious work tag with student producers, finding ways to send huge film files electronically.
Honors Director, Dr. Andrew Yox notes, “Our students have been so privileged to have worked in a sense with the John Williams of Texas, a composer who can always be relied on to summon states of grandeur, musically. But I would even go beyond that. Willams’ overtures for Star Wars, Jaws, and Indiana Jones, though grand and deeply descriptive also have a juvenile banality that persuades critical listeners to continue their focus on classical music. Especially in recent years, Goodson has been reaching moments of pathos and originality that have become a singular expression of culture at our time and place in Northeast Texas.”
Goodson is a product of Northeast Texas, and a proponent of a type of marching band music indigenous to East Texas, the 6-to-5 military style, as well as contemporary corps-style. His father, Bill, a director of bands at Paul Pewitt, Daingerfield and Greenville, was inducted into the Texas Bandmasters Hall of Fame in 2003. Kenny Goodson has been composing and arranging music for bands throughout the state through most of his life, and has been active in several ensembles in Northeast Texas, both religious, and secular.
