John D. Gottsch’s memories of his father bring to mind the boat trips the two took down Florida’s wild and exotic Ocklawaha River. Both are full of currents that propel him downstream and around hidden twists and bends, showing him vantage points he never dreamed existed.
Now, Gottsch, a distinguished researcher and opthalmologist at the Johns Hopkins Wilmer Eye Institute, has turned his memories into a 30-minute symphonic poem.
“Ocklawaha: Tales My Father Told” recently won a Suncoast Regional Emmy Award in Florida for composition — a development so unexpected that Gottsch compares it to “being on a spaceship.”
That rocket hasn’t yet come down to earth; the film featuring Gottsch’s musical poem is currently making the rounds of film festivals. It will be available for broadcast on PBS stations nationwide beginning in March.
“I worked nights and weekends for years on this score without any expectation that it would ever be performed,” said Gottsch, 74, of Hunt Valley. “And then I won an Emmy Award for a composition on a topic that meant so much to me. It was exhilarating.”
Some of the early “Tarzan” movies were shot along the Ocklawaha, and Gottsch uses musical notation to conjure up the atmosphere of that “wild and exotic” river.
“There were alligators, snakes and monkeys in trees,” he said.
“For a young boy, it was like dying and going to heaven. My father told me stories about the Seminole Indians who lived along the river and about a Civil War battle that was fought at Sharpes Ferry. He said, ‘God never created a finer man than Abraham Lincoln.’ It made a big impression on me.”
What happened next causes Gottsch’s voice to thicken and grow tight.
“It was just a couple of years later that my father died,” he said. “I was 9-years-old. He was struck by lightning.”
The bond between father and son might have begun on those boat trips, but it took other forms as Gottsch grew up.
He represents the third generation in his family to make a career as a surgeon; Gottsch’s grandfather, Erwin Julius Gottsch, was a battlefield surgeon during World War I, while his father, John Erwin Gottsch, was an orthopedic surgeon in the 1950s.
Two decades after his father died, John Dunnegan Gottsch enrolled in the University of Alabama’s medical school. He later developed a specialty in corneal transplants and became a researcher who has identified five new genetic eye diseases.
Now, Gottsch, chairman of Wilmer’s Department of Opthalmology, and his team are studying whether gene-editing tools could correct those genetic mutations — raising the possibility that the corrected cells could one day be transplanted into patients.
“For 30 years,” he said, “I have found great satisfaction in finding the genetic cause of my patients’ diseases and figuring out how to correct them.”
But even when he was an overworked medical student and young father, Gottsch’s love of classical compositions persisted.
As a boy, Gottsch spent 12 years studying the piano and also played the trumpet. But it wasn’t until he was an adult that his musical abilities found their truest expression.
Gottsch’s composing career may have begun in the operating room as he listened to WBJC-FM, Baltimore’s classical music radio station, while performing surgeries. Over time, he began collecting scores for his favorite symphonies and string quartets.
“I would hear something that was a fantastic piece of music and get the score and study it,” he said. “If you spend 40 years studying scores, you can learn a lot about the different types of of classical music.”
In time, his compositions began to find an audience.
Two orchestral works, “Sunset” and “Princess Yurievskaya” were recorded by the South Florida Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Sebrina María Alfonso and released on the Naxos label in June, 2021.
The South Florida Classical Review described the latter piece as “a rich and exciting new score.” The publication praised the composer’s “virtuosic violin writing” and added that Gottsch “brilliantly fuses Russian and Viennese ballroom tradition.”
Gottsch often writes compositions on environmental themes. His Emmy-winning symphonic poem was inspired partly by a distressing discovery he made in college when he tried to replicate his boyhood travels down the Ocklawaha — once an uninterrupted, 74-mile waterway.
“A large part of the river had been destroyed by two dams,” he said. “The river had been so pristine, and it was my father’s getaway. It was really upsetting to me.”
After Gottsch completed his score for “Ocklawaha: Tales My Father Told,” he offered it to the South Florida Symphony Orchestra, where he had previously spent two years as composer in residence.
The symphony sent out a social media alert in advance of the January 2023 world premiere that caught the attention of the advocacy group Florida Defenders of the Environment, which has been working to remove the Ocklawaha’s dams and restore the river to its original state.
Gottsch’s score struck Defenders interim executive director Steve Robitaille as inherently cinematic from the moment he first heard it.
“It’s very evocative of the river,” Robitaille said. “It’s a series of vignettes, and each vignette is a tale that his father told him. As the events evolve, the music evolves with him. For instance, during the Civil War vignette, there is a new power and force to the music.”
Robitaille arranged to record a concert version of the piece in Miami’s New World Center and then raised the funds to make a film that could accompany Gottsch’s score. He tapped the renowned wildlife filmmaker Mark Emery to direct, and persuaded acclaimed baby boomer icon Peter Coyote, also an actor featured in several of Ken Burns’ documentaries, to narrate the movie.
In the film, the role of Gottsch’s father is played by his real-life nephew, while his sister’s grandson depicts the composer as a boy.
Robitaille said his group is creating an educational curriculum based on the film. And he is cautiously optimistic that Gottsch’s creation will play a role in bringing back to life a waterway that both men love.
“I wouldn’t have spent two years of my life on this film if I didn’t think it could help the save the Ocklawaha,” Robitaille said. “Now that the film is being seen and John’s score is being widely heard, it is winning hearts and minds.”
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