Dr. Daniel Robbins has just come from work. The slim, unassuming 75-year-old divorcé with perfectly combed silver hair is unwinding leisurely outside one of the many coffeehouses in Huntington Beach while his cherry red Saturn waits for him somewhere down the empty street. 

Robbins, a seasoned concert pianist and orchestral reconstructionist, has come a long way since his days as a young undergrad at the California State University, Long Beach. He graduated back in 1970 with a bachelor’s in music composition. 

Robbins was raised in a Catholic, nuclear middle-class family, and at the age of five, he moved to California from New Orleans, Louisiana at the mercy of his father’s job. His father, who built ballistic missiles for NASA, was distant, and his sister constantly ridiculed him. He was, however, closer to his mother. 

“The worst music is the music that you play from Ben-Hur,” his sister would say.

He would usually ignore these jabs, but sometimes her words would discourage him, especially when she ridiculed Ben-Hur, the film that helped him discover his love for music. When his mother saw this, she would try to bring him comfort.

“Don’t let her fool you,” his mother would tell him. “People like her have no basic thing that they love. People like her see you and wish they had a passion like yours.”

As a reconstructionist (a title he is especially particular about), he spends his days shuffling through scribbled, yellowed manuscripts, listening back to old orchestrations of discarded songs, and stitching them back together on paper—only from sound. Sometimes, he’ll conduct and even play, but Robbins was not always so proactive with his music. 

“I was an NPK: a no-practice kid,” Robbins recalled.

As a child, Robbins began piano but initially resisted. When he voluntarily went back to it at 11 years old, Robbins found it difficult to practice. “I just don’t think I know how.” One day, a teacher, Ms. Zook, taught him.

“I won’t tell you how long to sit at the piano and practice. You tell me how long you can do it everyday,” Ms. Zook said at the piano bench.

Robbins answered unsure, “A half-hour?”

She said, “Okay. A half-hour,” and proceeded to make what looked like a college schedule on a piece of paper, coordinating practice times to the difficulty of the pieces.

She wrote “everyday” next to Beethoven which was on top because it was the hardest. On others, she wrote “every other day,” “two days,” or a certain number of minutes. 

When she finished, she said to Robbins, “Okay. Now time yourself, and don’t go over. What’s going to happen is that you’re going to find out 10 minutes goes by awfully fast. Make yourself stop and go to the next piece.” 

Robbins went home and put the schedule up on his stand. He started with Beethoven. He played a part wrong and started again. After finally making a solid pass, he moved on to the next piece listed on the schedule. He glanced at the clock before starting this one. 35 minutes had passed. 

After Ms. Zook, Robbins went on to cycle through a few more piano teachers that eventually led him to pursue music in college. He went on to study at CSULB, and when his senior year came, he was under a lot of pressure to pass “the jury.” If he didn’t get the jury’s approval to perform his senior recital, get his bachelor’s degree, and move on to graduate school at USC, he would have to face the draft for the Vietnam War.

When Robbins was young, a piano teacher told him, “Practice like mad the day before, but don’t touch the piano the day of.” 

He took this to heart for his performance for CSULB’s jury. The day before, Robbins perched at his piano practicing a Bach piece he had been slaving over for the past year. His fingers stroked the keys playing the song over and over, but somewhere in one of those repetitions, Robbins began to hit a wrong note. He tried the part again. He missed. He gave it another shot. And still missed. Robbins recalls this as “passage block.”

This is what happens when a musician misses a note over and over again, and it begins to stick in their muscle memory. Robbins ran for the phone and asked his professor how to fix it.

“Stop practicing,” she said. 

“Okay,” he answered.

Jury day came. As Robbins approached the bench in front of the four-person assembly, his heart pounded. Lingering in the back of his mind: the note he kept missing and the possibility of his army draft. As he sat, his hands shook, but he followed the instruction of another piano teacher. He set his hands on his lap, allowing the fear to shed, and when he felt he was ready, he played. He stopped shaking after the first page, and he missed the note. When he finished his set, one of the jurors spoke.

“I can’t get over that fantastic piece,” he said.

He was referring to a sonata by Miklos Rosza: the composer whose work, Ben-Hur, inspired Robbins to become a musician as a young boy. Rosza was Robbins’ hero whom he later became very close friends with. Robbins is actually today’s leading expert on Rosza and his work—scores such as Hitchcock’s Spellbound and Hollywood classics like Ben-Hur and Ivanhoe; scores which are often the ones he now gets hired to reconstruct.

To Robbins’ surprise, the jury served him warmly. They bantered over his music choice, and one of the jurors gave him a constructive masterclass for the Rosza piece. Finally, another juror, a man infamous for giving students a hard time, interrupted the conversation.

He told the rest of the jury, “Well, I’m ready to pass this boy… How about it?”

Every muscle in Robbins’ body eased. He was not drafted that year. He was allowed to perform his recital, and he went on to obtain both graduate and doctorate degrees in music. He proceeded to accomplish an impressive oeuvre working alongside Miklos Rosza, and today, Robbins continues his work as a film score reconstructionist while also volunteering as an accompanist at a small public high school by the town where he grew up. 

He still looks forward to every performance. For each one, no matter how small, Robbins waltzes over to the piano bench, gracefully settles, and puts his hands firmly down on his lap waiting for his anxiety to subside. It never really passes completely, yet he lifts his hands, still shaking, and lets his fingers dance on the keys holding onto every criticism and compliment from every piano lesson he ever took from the time he was 11. He knows he just has to keep going, and by the time he reaches the second page of music, the shaking stops. Sure enough, he’s always smiling—even when he hits a wrong note. 

Photos courtesy of Dr. Daniel Robbins

This story was previously published by DIG Magazine