East Villager’s Rain
Worthington’s stormy
journey to Carnegie Hall
BY BOB KRASNER
It’s sometime in the early 1980’s, around
3:30 in the morning. Rain Worthington
and her band ZONE are hauling their
equipment off the stage at 8BC, the now legendary
East Village basement performance
space. The chickens that had wandered in
from the lot next door during the load-in
are long gone, but they still had to avoid
stepping on the beer-drinking rabbit that
was a permanent resident.
“If you had stopped me then and told me
that someday my music would be played
in Carnegie Hall, I would have said, yeah,
right.”
It’s been a long and improbable journey
for Worthington, whose Contemporary
Classical composition “Still Motion” will be
performed on February 16th by a chamber
orchestra on the main stage at Carnegie
Hall.
“It would have been inconceivable to me
back then,” she explains, “because at that
time I had never written a piece of music
on paper.”
In fact, Worthington has made a name
for herself in a very demanding field without
the benefit of institutional training – she is
the rare example of a self-taught Classical
composer.
Raised first in a steel hut in Houston that
had flaps instead of windows, then on a VA
Hospital base, she started fooling around on
her grandparents’ piano when she was three
years old. There were no lessons, though,
and she didn’t touch the instrument again
until she was an adult, when she found
ZONE in Tompkins Square Park, 1985. L-R: Rain Worthington, Mitch McNeill,
Susan Compo, Mustafa Ahmed, Charles Compo, Mark Worthy.
herself spending a lot of time alone in a
friend’s family’s house with a grand piano.
“It was kind of like I was a kid again,”
recalls Worthington.
On returning to her home in Boston, she
invested $200 in an upright piano that subsequently
moved with her twelve times. She
began to “make up things” on the piano, but
not being able to read or write music and
without the benefit of a tape recorder, she
memorized all of her compositions.
Once she moved to New York in 1976,
Continued on p. 21
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20 February 13, 2020 Schneps Media