Renaissance Outdoorsman

Avid hunter, fisherman is also a renowned music composer ||

TIETON, Wash. — Doug Nott is every bit an outdoorsman, right down to the Cabela’s cap on his head and the worn-to-fraying jeans and tattered vest.

Douglas D. Nott is an award-winning composer whose music is performed by symphony orchestras and high school bands not only around the country, but around the world.

The storage room in Doug’s home between Naches and Tieton is cluttered with the accouterments of his avocation, right down to the hunting bow on one wall and, on another, the mounted, 17-pound northern pike he reeled in during a break from caribou hunting in the frigid Canadian hinterlands far north of Montreal.

Doug Nott is a man of diverse interests -- from hunting and fishing to writing and conducting classical music. (SARA GETTYS/Yakima Herald-Republic)

In the garage at Douglas’ house, sharing space with the garden sprayer and the little Gator utility vehicle his grandchildren consider their own, rest the fruits of his vocation — boxes upon boxes of the sheet music he has written. And he wrote none of it as what he might refer to deprecatingly as a “finger composer,” one who must first run through those embrionic wisps of melody on a piano to hear how they sound.

No, Douglas hears the music in his head and pens it before ever playing it out loud, just the way Beethoven did.

That creative epiphany may come anywhere. Douglas once had an inspiration for a choral piece soon after beginning a drive from Bellingham back to Yakima, bringing his then college-aged son home for the holidays. He had it written, on the composing pad that is forever within reach, before he got to Issaquah, without ever giving up the steering wheel. His son cringed the whole way.

Kids, don’t try this at home.

A composition Douglas calls simply “the most beautiful piece I’ve ever written,” is one for oboe and string orchestra called “In Memorium, H.P.”

H.P. stands for Harold Godfrey of Selah, who died in 1998 and, says the composor, was “just a super, super guy.” And a hunting buddy.

Douglas and Doug are one and the same, of course, comprising a true renaissance outdoorsman.

Prior to his 1999 retirement from the faculty at Yakima Valley Community College, Nott, Doctor of Musical Arts, had for 28 years taught music theory, jazz history, music composition, orchestration and woodwind, and also directed the college’s jazz and concert bands.

He also, over those same 28 years and for another two years after, taught a class on fly-fishing.

Nott, 65, is a dichotomy no less enigmatic than his father, who was both an opera singer and a truck driver, or his mother, Caroline Paulson, 89, who was both a country-western singer and a champion bowler.

One of Nott’s better-known compositions, “The Kalama,” was inspired by his love of steelhead fishing on the Kalama River. “Cascade,” his most popular symphonic piece, was inspired by the mountains in the panoramic view from the living room of his hilltop home.

His in-boxes and answering machine are regularly full of messages, e-mails and letters from around the world, many of them from aspiring musicians still in middle and high school asking his insights on the best ways to approach his compositions, on which passages to let emotion carry the moment and when to keep the playing close to the vest.

His freezer, at least today, is full of elk meat, venison, Hungarian partridge, rooster pheasant and half a steer, the latter raised for the beef in partnership with a neighbor.

If you look in a New York publication called “Best Music For High School Band,” it’s full of Bach, Mozart, Dvorak and Bernstein … and one Douglas N. Nott. “Isn’t that funny?” Nott says with a grin. “I think it is.”

And if you look in “The Elk Hunters Cookbook,” you will find two recipes by Doug Nott — one for “Grouse Au Gratin,” which he concocted to break up the culinary monotony on a deer-hunting expedition with buddies into the Colorado wilderness, and “Nott’s Steelhead Delight,” a seafood ambrosia including sauteed mushrooms, lemon, bacon and an oyster stuffing.

The walls of Nott’s home don’t tell much about who he is. There are no hunting trophies, no elk and deer mounts — “I’m not into that,” he says — and the only decorative concession to his backwoods bent is that northern pike in the storeroom. If you look closely, you might find the frame containing first royalty check — from Shawnee Press in Pennsylvania — that was made out in the whopping sum of one dollar and 13 cents.

“That’s not the worst one I ever got,” Nott says, chuckling as he tells the story about the one he got from music publishing behemoth ASCAP for an Irish public radio performance of “The Kalama” that earned him 35 cents — minus the 35 cents automatically taken out for the stamp. “The check was actually made out for $0.00,” he laughs. “That’s almost like something out of a ‘Seinfeld’ episode.”

His rule of thumb with his music publishers was that he wouldn’t write music between September and December, because it would cut into his hunting. He once turned down a lucrative Hollywood offer to compose film scores when the studio refused his demand to be allowed to live here and commute between Yakima and California during the soundtrack process. “This was pre-Internet,” he says with a shrug.

Nott also once wrote a textbook on how to write music on computer, but it wasn’t mass-published because, like so much in the computer age, it was obsolete by the time it was finished. Instead, he self-published it and donated all the sales to the YVCC Foundation.

Nott isn’t wealthy, in large part because of his choices and his priorities. But what he considers most important to him is obvious in the copse of trees behind the house on the 20-acre property he shares with his wife, Deb; there he has created a wooded maze for the seven grandchildren who regularly run through it, passing the wooden signs carved in their honor, like “Easton’s Trail No. 1,” “Kya’s Pass” and “Ada’s Corner.”

“I like my lifestyle,” Nott says. “It’s certainly not perfect. You make choices.”

And, in Doug Nott’s case, a lot of friends and a lot of music. Sometimes the two are one and the same.