PVCC Puma Press: December 2002

“I’m a people person. It’s the New Yorker in me,” Chris Scinto says, swinging slightly in his swivel chair. Dressed in a dark gray shirt and black pants, Scinto sits in his office, between an upright piano and an electric keyboard. Behind a pair of thinly framed glasses, his dark eyes radiate with energy.

Scinto, the head of the music program at PVCC, speaks of New York with affection.

“I love it. It’s a piece of my heart,” he says. “I go back once a year. It’s like medicine. I have my week in New York and I soak it all up and I’m good for the rest of the year. I’m going over Christmas break to get my medicine.”

Scinto moved to Phoenix from New York when he was 18 years old to attend ASU.

“I wanted to move away from everybody and start fresh,” Scinto says of his move away from home.

The move, however, left Scinto with a feeling of “total culture shock,” making his first semester at ASU one of great adjustments and homesickness.

“It took six months to get used to the pace, or lack of pace, compared to New York,” he says.

He begins to list off things that he missed the most that semester: “…no weather, no change of seasons, not being able to find good pizza, not being able to watch the Yankees on TV,” he says. “Just the things you grow up with; you don’t realize you’ll miss them, and then you do.”

When Scinto first came to teach at PVCC in the fall of 2001, the music program was in a state of disarray.

“It was a series of isolated classes with no rhyme or rhythm in the course offerings,” Scinto says.

His immediate goal was to offer more music classes that would qualify as humanity credits for students. He added many new courses to the schedule, such as “Rock Music and Culture” and “Music in World Culture,” and he moved the community chorus and community orchestra from non-credit courses to credit courses.

Scinto also created a contemporary music ensemble called Crossing 32nd Street in his first year at PVCC. The ensemble, jokingly referred to among its members as “the ASU refugees,” is made up of recent ASU graduate students and performs a series of concerts of contemporary classical music by mostly living composers. It is the only professional ensemble in town dedicated to performing this type of music, Scinto says.

Scinto’s long-term goal for PVCC’s music program is to create a fully comprehensive music department that will serve what he sees as the three categories of music students at PVCC: music majors who want to move to a four-year university, students who want music humanity credits, and community members who want to further their learning through piano lessons or other music classes.

Scinto’s original plan was to write music for movies, but he got a teaching assistantship during his master’s degree and fell in love with the classroom.

“There was something about making students ‘get it’ that gave me a greater joy,” he says.

The class he taught was 20th Century Music Theory, a class which Scinto says most students usually have trouble with.

“[The class] is kind of a point where students begin 20th century music theory. They’ve spent their entire lives studying classical, and then 20th century music is like a foreign language. Students have the most trouble with it,” Scinto says. “Being able to see that students didn’t understand it and then by the end of the semester they understand it and enjoy it” is what gave Scinto the most joy, he says.

Scinto says that one of his greatest fears is losing his love for teaching and in turn not being able to help people.

“Part of my heritage and upbringing was to be generous and helpful,” he says.

Scinto’s biggest influence on his life is his parents, he says. His mother moved to the U.S. from Italy when she was 10 years old, and his father is also Italian. Though neither his mother nor his father was tremendously well educated, both pushed education for their children and instilled a strong work ethic in them, he says. They also placed a strong emphasis on family.

“My family made family an important part of everything we did,” Scinto says. “We had a strong sense of who we were.”

His Italian heritage has also influenced him.

“Music is apart of almost every function in Italy,” he says. He muses over the way his grandparents spoke and the way they were always singing. “The language is so musical,” he adds.