FSU Professor Honored with State Arts Council Award

With the semester in full swing, physics professor Dr. Greg Latta finds himself occupied with teaching, grading homework, and meeting with his students. However, Latta’s interests span beyond physics. Latta is an accomplished musician who, earlier this year, received a Maryland State Arts Council’s award in the category Non-Classical Music: Solo Performance. This is the third time he has received the award. Besides music and physics, Latta also counts astronomy, electrical engineering, amateur radio, woodworking, and metalworking among his interests. He hosts a show on FSU’s WFWM radio station every weekend. Among his many interests outside of physics and mathematics, though, music is his greatest. Latta’s musical interests are no mere hobby; they are a second career. It was his musical talents that led him to receiving the Arts Council’s award. The Bottom Line sat down with Latta to discuss the award.

Question: Is it easy to get this award?

Latta: “This award is competitive. That means you don’t just apply and automatically get it. You must win it. What’s most important to me is not the money; it’s the fact that I won it again for the third time. To not only to get one of the larger monetary awards, but to win it for a third time, is most important to me.”

Q: What do you plan to do with the reward money?

L: “It’s not like I got a grant – it’s an award. I could do anything with it I wanted. If I wanted to go on a southwest vacation with the money, I could. But to honor [the Arts Council], I use the money in the arts. There are people who have won Nobel prizes and used the money to buy log cabins, which is fine, but in my case, I wanted to turn the money back in to the arts.”

Q: So you have received this award three times?

L: “Yes. These awards go in three-year cycles. They have all of these awards, and each year they do a certain number of them. So I’ve gotten this same award three times over the last six-year period: 2012, 2015, and 2018.”

Q: How is this award given?

L: “For this award, what you have to do is submit two recordings, no more than five minutes in length and no more than three years old. So, you can’t rest on your laurels and use your old stuff; you can re-record stuff, but it has to be a recent recording. The files are submitted with no metadata, so there’s no indication of who the performer is. Then [the files] go to an out-of-state jury. Then they make the decisions and send the results back to the Arts Council, and then they hand out the awards.”

Q: What did you submit for the award this time?

L: “One of the recordings that I did for this last round of awards was The Butcher Boy. If you listen to that, you’ll hear cittern, guitar, banjo, electric bass, and vocals – all done by me, recorded by me, engineered by me, and mastered by me. On the other recording, Tir na Nog, which I’m working on the video for, it features vocals, bouzouki, recorders, and electric bass. That’s not unusual, but usually someone else plays the instruments – but I’m playing all of them, and that’s the gift I was given.”

Q: Are these recordings different than other recordings you would do?

L: “When I do these recordings, they’re much more difficult than conventional recordings because I’m trying to demonstrate all that I can do. And so the jurors know I can play cittern, recorder, guitar, and electric bass … all at a level good enough that I can do recordings. And so when I say I’m a multi-instrumentalist, well, that’s my niche. I make these recordings so that the judges will hear what I am capable of doing compared to the others.”

Q: What is it like to get one of these awards?

L: “It was an honor, the honor to get it. For one of the awards, the certificate I got was signed by the Governor and the Lieutenant Governor. That, to me, is really significant. I don’t have gold records, but I have a wall where I display various certificates in my home. This is as close to a Grammy Award as someone like me will ever get.”

Q: Have you received any other awards for your music?

L: “I’m a champion hammered dulcimer player. I won the Eastern Championships three times and I’ve been runner-up in the National Championships twice. The interesting thing is, on all those recordings I’ve won the [Maryland Arts Council] award for, there’s no hammered dulcimer.”

Q: How do you balance being a musician with being a physics professor?

L: “It’s all connected. There’s no separation between the arts and the sciences. What happens, fortunately for me, is that the music tends to be out of phase with the academics. So for the festival season, I tend to perform more in the summer. And then when that wraps up, here I am [in the university]. But, I also have a recording studio and do recording work both for me and for other people. I have two award-winning records I’ve produced for another person, and we just got an award this year for the work we did. Sometimes I perform, other times I’m the recording engineer. I do it all.”

Q: How does music overlap with your other fields of interest?

L: “I was a photographer when I was ten years old, so I started into photography when I was in grade school. What I’ve always wanted to get in to, which combined photography and music, is music videos. So with the last award, I took half of the reward money and got a Nikon video camera. And that’s now paying off for the university because I’m shooting videos and doing photography for the department. Like I said, it’s all connected.”

Q: What do your instruments mean to you?

L: “I made a commitment, a long time ago now, to only play the best instruments – the ones that sound the best, regardless of the cost. I seek out and either commission or find and wait to get the greatest. I don’t collect instruments – they’re tools.”

Q: Can being a musician be frustrating at times?

L: “You have to learn to constructively use your time. There’s a time for play, a time for sleep. You have to learn how to take it easy. Otherwise, you’ll just go nuts. There’s a time for everything. Now, this will sound absurd, but there are times when it’s best not to practice. The point is, I have had situations where I try to do something. I try to do it too hard, and all I do is get frustrated. The best advice – back up a bit and then try again. Sometimes I don’t practice for a week and then I’ll come back and it comes out exactly the way I want. It just has to stew for a while.”

More about Latta can be found at his personal webpage, www.greglatta.com.

He can also be found on YouTube under the channel name Greg Latta.