When Lawrence arrived at Peabody in the 1960s, Lawrence was getting most of his musical lifts from playing folk music and bluegrass on guitar and banjo. He was accepted into the classical guitar program created by noted pedagogue Aaron Shearer, but Lawrence could barely read music. "Aaron would play some Bach," Lawrence recalls, "and I would say, 'That song sounds cool.' 'Hey, Mike, songs have words; that's a piece.' I really didn't know much."
Lawrence went on to graduate with the first guitar class at Peabody, then gravitated toward film, first as composer for an Emmy-winning documentary by Julian Krainin, The Other Americans, and later as a collaborative filmmaker with Krainin on a dozen documentaries. These include The Quiz Show Scandal, which inspired a film by Robert Redford.
The guitar-training experience at Peabody wasn't forgotten. Once Lawrence started making his own films, he did one on his former teacher, Aaron Shearer: A Life With the Guitar. Other projects include The Mind of Music, featuring revered violinist Yehudi Menuhin, and documentaries on classical guitarist Manuel Barrueco and the Library of Congress.
Until moving to Dundalk in 2002 to the childhood home of his wife, Johanna, Lawrence worked out of a studio in Baltimore where the likes of John Waters and Barry Levinson viewed rushes of their own films. Then came digital technology, "and all of a sudden my 33mm projector and editing equipment were meaningless," Lawrence says. He sold them on eBay.
"My wife basically supports me," Lawrence says. "I keep the bookkeeping straight," says Johanna Lawrence, assistant to the director of performing arts on the Essex campus of Community College of Baltimore County.
"People either love or hate Michael's films, for some reason," she adds. "I think it's because he leaves it to the viewer to interpret."
It's impossible to predict how viewers will interpret the fully edited Bach documentary (expected to be about 90 minutes long), but there certainly is some intriguing material for the filmmaker to work with. After spending a couple of afternoons discussing the film last week in California with his friend and former collaborator Krainin, Lawrence is closer to envisioning the finished product.
"It will take a look at Bach from three vantage points," he says. "There's the emotional, spiritual side. Why is this guy so profound? We won't get any answers, but the question will lead us on a journey. There's the intellectual side - numbers, structures, fugues, fractals. And then the side that has more to do with the physical world of instruments and performance."
