Music man is on top of world in downtown Davenport
Gates Thomas is on top of the world. At least top of one of the most famous buildings in the Quad Cities.
The friendly, 56-year-old Davenport native moved back to town three years ago after many years in New York City, and since last November is the new music director of the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of the Quad Cities at 3707 Eastern Ave., Davenport.
Thomas – a composer, arranger, copyist, and conductor who continues to teach remotely for the famed Berklee College of Music in Boston – lives with his partner Angel in a 10th-floor apartment in the historic Davenport Bank building (with the clock tower) at 220 Main St. It boasts amazing views of the river, the Skybridge, Redstone building, Figge Art Museum, LeClaire Park and Modern Woodmen Park.
“I’m the person who gets called when someone needs a project developed from concept to performance. My ‘bag’ is generating the concepts, programming, scoring parts for vocals/instruments, rehearsing, conducting, recording and mixing,” Thomas said recently. “Fifty or more years ago, there were lots of people in the Quad-Cities who did this as a career. Industry consolidation moved nearly all that work to New York, L.A., Chicago and Nashville by the 1970s. Now, for a lot of reasons, that concentration is slowly changing again.”
In Davenport as a child, Thomas started playing piano and violin, getting serious when he was 13. He played in the QC Symphony Youth Orchestra, and in his high school jazz band (piano).
Thomas admired the former QCSO conductor James Dixon, for programming “amazing contemporary pieces that were off the beaten path.” At 17, the orchestra played a work by the Argentinian Alberto Ginastera (1916-1983) and Thomas said he was “floored.”
“I couldn’t believe it – it just changed my whole world,” he recalled. Thomas started writing arrangements for variety shows when he was 16 and played in a string quartet.
He played in the orchestra and jazz ensemble at Northwestern University. “I feel the education I got here really prepared me well,” he said of Davenport.
Thomas earned a bachelor’s in music and American history from Northwestern, and then got another bachelor’s in music from Berklee in 1992 (focusing on production, writing, arranging, and conducting). Thomas started teaching there right away. “I was lucky,” he said.
He still teaches vocal writing and music production. After Berklee, Thomas stayed in Boston for three years. He moved to New York City to break into the business, but continued teaching for Berklee, commuting to Boston (a three-hour train ride) two days a week.
Thomas has been on the Berklee faculty 17 years altogether off and on, and still teaches remotely for Berklee (two classes just one day a week). He has a maximum of 15 Berklee students in his Zoom classes.
“Given what I wanted to do, which was jazz primarily, New York was the place to be,” he said. “Really a market for people who needed the services of an arranger. It’s a huge town, but it’s a zillion small towns all packed into one. If you’re in a certain business and you frequent the places where you meet ‘em all, it’s a huge place but it’s also a small world. That’s why I went there.”
Among the many musicians Thomas worked for was jazz guitarist Pat Metheny, including his “Secret Story” album (1992), with a full orchestra. He did transcriptions of music Metheny recorded for a score. The record won the Grammy in 1993 for Best Contemporary Jazz Album.
“I’m not starstruck anymore,” Thomas said. “They’re people just like us.”
One of his favorites is Abe Laboriel Jr., who was a Berklee classmate, a drummer who has played for Paul McCartney on tour and records for 20-plus years.
Thomas also went to Berklee with singer-songwriter Paula Cole (“I Don’t Want to Wait,” “Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?”). “We sang in an a cappella quartet together,” he said. “When you reach that level, you have to put barriers up.”
From NYC to Davenport
He and his partner were in an apartment in Kew Gardens, Queens, N.Y. (which Thomas said reminds him of McClellan Heights). In March 2020, Thomas had just left a music director position at a Unitarian church in Manhattan, after seven years.
“I was still doing the commute to Berklee,” he said recently. Angel’s work (for a logistics company) takes him around the country and Puerto Rico, and he had to inspect a site there when the COVID shutdown happened.
“We flew back, pretty much the last flight out,” Thomas said. They decided to move to Davenport in August 2020 (they first met in New York through friends in 2012; his family is from Rockford).
He had read up about Davenport history, and Angel got his boss to agree he could move. He only has to travel once a quarter and loves the QC Airport for being hassle-free, Thomas said.
The composer previously came back to visit his parents a couple times a year.
He wanted to live in some place really nice, and was familiar with the 1927 historic landmark (originally Davenport Bank & Trust and last home to Wells Fargo before being renovated for apartments in 2013 and Wells Fargo relocated in 2016).
It’s a 12-story building, with apartments up to the 11th floor. Thomas’s father worked as an attorney in the building 40 years for the Lane & Waterman law firm (which is the only commercial tenant in the building, in three floors).
At the QC Unitarian church, there is an interim pastor, Patrick Price, now in his second year. The previous music director left in August 2022.
Thomas is responsible for choosing music for services; rehearsing the choir, and playing for all services. He’s arranged some music for the choir.
“It’s emotionally satisfying to be making music with humans again,” he said. “For two or three years, everything I was doing was remote.”
A Fair-ly major work
Thomas has two major new original pieces on his music stand currently, incorporating his longtime hobby and undergraduate major, history, into his musical work.
He’s working on musical settings of George Washington’s letters from the American Revolution, and has finished an orchestral arrangement of a long-forgotten march by the Davenport composer Ernst Otto (1865-1939), titled Mississippi Valley Fair and Exposition.
Otto (originally from Germany) wrote 50 pieces, in a variety of formats, and Thomas spoke with his great-granddaughter (who lives in Davenport). Most of his scores were lost and the only ones that survived were about eight pieces reduced to piano only.
Thomas was inspired by the “Mississippi Valley Fair” one (written over a century ago). “I could hear how this one would have progressed,” he said recently of the march, and he orchestrated it (for about 50 instruments) last fall. Otto penned the piece for the inaugural year of the fair (which just wrapped up this past weekend) in 1920.
“I just looked at it and I thought this was a great piece,” Thomas said, noting he’s searching for an ensemble to premiere it here. It’s about four and a half minutes long.
“I really want to hire and use local musicians, because there are great musicians here,” he said.
“Now that I’m here, and I don’t feel like I need to hustle all the time, it’s given me a little breather,” Thomas said. “Our rent went down by almost half and our space tripled.”
“With my mindset, I want to do things that are interesting to me,” he said. “Now I can set poems by George Cram Cook and Arthur Davison Ficke and Susan Glaspell,” Thomas said of noted Davenport authors.
“Having more time and being closer to the source of all this local inspiration, that’s gonna really tie into hiring local musicians to do locally generated stuff,” he said.
A new Washington monument
He’s nearing completion on a cantata (for large choir and orchestra), in five movements, based on first president George Washington’s writings. That includes just two letters to his wife Martha that survive.
One letter he wrote to the Surgeon General inviting him to dinner at an Army camp “is so snarky and it covers so much of George Washington’s personality,” Thomas said. “I’ve structured it so that each movement is geared toward a different element of his personality or a different role he was playing at that time.”
He said he’s found himself as a composer more in the last 15 years; before, he focused on arranging. It was the Washington piece (which he started in about 2014) where things clicked for him.
Thomas earned a Mount Vernon Fellowship in 2015-16, when he spent the summer of 2016 at Washington’s Virginia estate, and did research with a stipend. Thomas’s research project was to create a modern musical work with texts chosen from Washington’s letters during the Revolutionary period.
“I got to sit on Washington’s porch,” he recalled of the huge portico, that overlooks the Potomac River.
Washington’s letters to his cousin Lund (who managed the estate during the war) frequently lapsed into reveries, and instructions about how to plant trees on the grounds. One movement of the cantata is taken from a letter GW wrote using the trees at Mount Vernon as metaphor, Thomas said.
“This was the first movement that I composed when I started the project, and it will be the last movement of the piece. So when I was there, that movement was already done, and I took plenty of photos of trees,” he said. “There are perhaps two dozen on the property still standing from Washington’s time.”
“The most moving experience of my time there was being able to read Washington’s letters from the originals,” the composer said, noting they worked at desks set up in the vault for this very purpose, and the main rule in handling the letters was “clean, dry hands.”
This letter is one of only two Washington wrote to his wife Martha which survive; she burned all of their correspondence after his death, Thomas said. “Apparently, she missed these two, and we are very thankful for it. They were found stuck between two drawers of Martha Washington’s writing desk by her granddaughter Eleanor about a decade after Washington’s death.
“There was one other letter purported to be from GW to Martha, but that was easily determined to be a forgery (probably done by the British in an attempt to embarrass Washington),” he said by email.
The two authentic letters were both from June 1775, written in Philadelphia just after GW was appointed commander in chief of the Army. The first of the two letters is housed at a different museum in Washington, D.C. and was dated June 16, 1775; the second one is from June 23, and was written literally on horseback, as Washington was waiting for his entourage so that he could start off to Boston to join the Army, Thomas said.
This second letter is in the collection Mount Vernon. The musical movement Thomas crafted is a composite of the two letters. From this second letter, here are the passages that he used:
My Dearest,
As I am within a few minutes of leaving this city, I could not think of departing from it without dropping you a line…
I go fully trusting in that Providence which has been more bountiful to me than I deserve, and in full confidence of a happy meeting with you sometime in the fall. I have not time to add more, as I am surrounded with company to take leave of me.
One of the reasons the Washington Library accepted Thomas’s proposal is that “they are interested in any project that provides an updated iconography of George Washington — to get people to see behind the tired old man that Gilbert Stuart took such an instinctive dislike to that he exaggerated the facial distortions caused by GW’s false teeth,” Thomas wrote.
One high-profile part of the iconography project involved intense, wide-ranging research.
It combined historical, artistic, and forensic research to capture Washington’s true appearance, he said. “Other than the French sculptor Houdon — who, everyone agreed, perfectly captured Washington — artists had trouble capturing Washington’s likeness, which is why there are so many images that look very different,” Thomas said.
They used the Houdon sculpture as the basis for his bone structure, and from that they were able to conjecture how his face, hair, skin, etc. would have appeared at different times of his life. From this, they constructed three life-size wax models on display at Mount Vernon.
The George Washington Presidential Library at Mount Vernon offers fellowships to support the growing community of scholars whose research focuses on the life and leadership of Washington, and his place in the development of American civic life and culture.
To learn more about Thomas, visit his website HERE.
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