(Caption: “Bruckert performing with Vinto Van Go / Courtesy Vinto Van Go’s FaceBook page”)
As Wright College English professor Vincent Bruckert gets ready to grade his student’s finals, he will have another thing on his mind: hitting stages across Chicago and the Midwest with waves of sonic psychedelia.
A member of the blues psychedelic rock band Vinto Van Go and hot off their Feb. 3 release “Every Other Afternoon,” Bruckert is looking forward to what musical evolution this summer will bring for him.
During The Wright Times’ discussion with Bruckert one thing became apparent: his passion for music, particularly psychedelic rock. A fan of all things Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix, Bruckert proved to be an untapped well of 60s and 70s discographical wisdom.
His passion, however, started by happenstance. Following a family move from Chicago to Florida, he found himself dealing with something he had never experienced before: music class.
“I became a sort of clown during it because I got so excited,” Bruckert said. “I genuinely loved it and I genuinely loved singing the main song we sang everyday which was ‘Candy Man.’ I didn't realize if all my classmates were laughing with me or at me, but they were laughing the entire time I was singing.”
From that point, Bruckert was a changed person and music became a core part of his being. By fifth grade he had purchased his first guitar and, taking influence from The Rolling Stones, The Shadows of Knight, and other blues and garage rock bands, started creating his own music.
Decades later and now dealing with an audience of students rather than concertgoers, he adores his time at Wright, and defines himself as a professor rather than a writer. This transition was not easy, however.
“When I first arrived at Wright College – my first semester, I had a lot of speed bumps,” Bruckert said. “I had been at [The University of] Loyola and I had begun talking and treating and thinking with Wright College students like I talked and treated them at Loyola, which doesn’t work. Wright college students have a much deeper history of understanding the city, understanding the importance of work to one’s well being,” he explains.
(Caption: “Bruckert (R) performing with Vinto Van Go / Courtesy Benjamin Scholz”)
Part of what got him through this transition was his love of music, partially because of the many benefits to learning a musical instrument.
Music can produce changes in mood, behavior, and physiological functions of the body such as, breathing rate, heart rate, and blood pressure, writes Scottish musicologist Laurence O’Donnell in his 1999 senior thesis. Furthermore, learning an instrument improves memory, fine motor skills, verbal reasoning, and non-verbal reasoning, he explains.
These benefits have become important components to many aspects of Bruckert life, including parenting. “For my daughters, we had them learn piano because we understood that music was a system of thought like mathematics and learning to think within the system of thought, in music, would translate,” he said.
This aside, the same joy he had in first grade was now something he saw in his own children, “We just loved to hear them sing and play the piano, and their joy in doing it too, was fantastic,” Bruckert said. “Up until they hit that age where they realized they were adolescence and were too cool to be themselves.”
There are a multitude of cliche reasons why somebody may learn an instrument whether it be a longing to be famous, wanting to attract others, wealth, etc., however Bruckert finds something deeper: necessariness. He finds it necessary to go see music, necessary to listen to music, and necessary to stick to an instrument if you start playing even if you’d rather take a break.
This perseverance is something that has also transitioned into every aspect of Bruckert’s life. “There were so many times in my life where I’ve thought, ‘Oh, it'd be a good time to put this away and focus on something else,’ but it’s that necessariness.”
Above all this though, according to Bruckert, is music’s power to communicate, and it is that aforementioned necessariness that enables us to talk to one another.
“I think that’s what music offers us - it gives us language and when someone learns the language of music they learn the power of that communication, and I think that’s what I’m feeding off of,” he said. “I want people to talk to me, I want them to tell me through song what it means for them to be alive, and I’m just in my own music, just trying to say, ‘I want to participate too, let me chip in a little bit too.’”
Vinto Van Go’s music can be streamed through SoundCloud, Spotify, and Bandcamp. Bruckert’s own music is also available to stream through SoundCloud.
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