Amid all the framed concert posters on the walls of Thomas Stacy’s Old Greenwich music studio, there is an 8X10 color glossy that stands out like a seafoam green Fender Stratrocaster in an orchestra pit. It was taken years ago, the musician can’t even remember when, but it all was his idea. As he gleefully relates, he was traveling in Taipei, Taiwan with the New York Philharmonic when the Eureka moment struck. He was strolling in Snake Alley, the fabled exotic night market, and decided it would be great fun to charm a cobra. Mandarin was spoken, cash was exchanged and his solo audience, a well-coiled serpent, was deposited on the pavement in front of him via a pair of off-putting 10-foot-long tweeser-like tongs.

As Stacy, like a modern-day Pied Piper, serenaded the sinuous serpent with one of his celebrated English horn solos, a crowd gathered around. The human listeners were enthralled, but the performance left the reptile less than rapt. “He turned the other way,” Stacy says with an impish grin.

In his 44-year professional career, the cobra has been the only critic Stacy hasn’t been able to make an indelible impression upon.

It is the first time an English horn player has ever been nominated for a Grammy.  He was nominated for best instrumental soloist performance for the track of Fuchs’ Eventide from the album “An American Place” that he recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra with JoAnn Falletta conducting. “It was a thrill just to get this far.”

When Stacy, the world’s most recorded English horn player, plays, the world listens; so do all the critics. Invariably, the reviews are studded with accolades.  Hailed by The New York Times as the “Heifetz of the English horn,” he has charmed, among others, critics at the New York Post, The Washington Post, the Leipziger Volksawttung, Berlingske Tidende and the London Evening Standard. (In one instance, the Washington Post proclaimed that ‘shouts of ‘bravo’ echoed through the Kennedy Center’s Concert Hall for an English horn player. The enthusiasm was well merited … by Thomas Stacy’s sensitive playing.”)

“Performing before a live audience is enthralling,” he says, as he settles into a comfy chair by the fire with a cup of steaming tea and chocolate chip cookies he and his wife, Marie, baked.
Now Stacy’s getting serious. His round, putto face, framed by spectacles and a fringe of straight blonde hair, takes on an earnest look as he describes his passion and his profession. The words come out slowly, as if he’s playing them in his head before letting them sound out.  “It can be very lonesome because it’s just you that has to make the music happen,” he says in the broad, flat tone of a two by four. “There’s slight feeling of power. Perhaps you can make a moment of beauty for somebody out in the audience. As a player, one’s bottom line is beauty.”

For Stacy the beauty lies not only in the music but in the reaction it stirs in those who hear him. “You can tell if you have the audience if they get quiet. If you turn a phrase the right way, it is absolutely quiet, or as absolutely quiet as it can get, in the audience. It means you’ve caught their ears. I try to make this happen a lot.”

For the musician Leonard Bernstein dubbed a “poet among craftsmen,” a successful performance depends upon great attention to detail. “I’m always thinking of new spins on what I can do with a piece,” he says. “That can be somewhat dangerous because how many different spins can you put on it. It may be better the first way you played it.”

But don’t those unrehearsed spins throw off the other players in the orchestra? “I hope so!” he chuckles. “Actually, the English horn is a solo instrument, so it doesn’t matter to them.”

At that, a look of regret creases his face – would that he could cause such a stir! As the cobra photo-op illustrates, there is much more to Stacy than meets the ear.

For instance, when he was playing the solo in the “The New World Symphony” -- the famous “Goin’ Home” one -- he aimed for something that is not only sad but full of hope. “There was another solo, I can’t remember just what it was, I was thinking, ‘This should sound just like my grandmother’s singing on Sunday night in church.’ I try to have some quasi-abstract thoughts to project something beyond just the notes.”

Of course, there are those times, those rare times, when the thoughts strike the wrong chord. “Just the other night – this is a story out of school -- I was thinking, just as I shouldn’t have been during this complicated piece, ‘I really have to get some new tuxedo shoes’ and at that moment I made a big mistake.”

Although popular publications lament the fact that the audience for classical music is on the wane, Stacy says that as an art form, it is alive, well and full of sound. “When I go out into the provinces, away from the big cities, I’m amazed sometimes at how interested people are in classical music and how much they know about it and how many performances they attend, sometimes traveling to our big cities to hear them. Classical music does have a following.”

He is particularly pleased that there are many young people in attendance. “That’s nice to see. To keep this audience, we need creatively focused visionaries in the planning of the future. At the Philharmonic, I hope the Young People’s Concerts receive the creative underpinning, the creative content, that they deserve. Our Young People’s concerts are the most important thing that we do as far as ensuring the future of our art and ensuring that audiences will be there.”    

If his nights are full, so are his days: In between practices, rehearsals, recordings and performances for the New York Philharmonic and other orchestras around the world, he teaches at The Juilliard School and at the Mannes College of Music, where he is chair of the woodwind department. “It’s a killer schedule, and I usually work in a nap – on a couch at Avery Fisher Hall – so my brain won’t shut down in mid-concert.”

The teaching, he says, is a good change of pace. “When I verbalize, what I do and what I think it should sound like, it reinforces what I do,” he says. “I was fortunate enough to have kind, caring teachers, so I try to repay that to the world.”

He doesn’t have a lot of time to the things he likes – dabbling in decorating, painting pictures or even baking chocolate chip cookies from scratch. “Music is my profession and hobby and everything all rolled into one,” he says.

The studio, an efficient space tucked beside the formal dining room, is his home away from home. It is here that he practices and spends hours making the reeds for his trio of Laubin English horns that he special orders from a little shop in Peekskill, N.Y.

Still, his name is not unknown in the town, but that’s because his wife, Marie, a bass player turned banker, is on the board of the Greenwich Chamber of Commerce and is a past president of the Greenwich Rotary Club. They have two sons and two grandchildren, none of whom is pursuing a professional career in music.

Stacy can’t remember a time when music in general, and the English horn in particular, didn’t breathe life into his own life. When he was growing up in Augusta, Ark., his mother, a public-school music teacher, introduced him to piano and the violin. “We had a classical record collection. I had the love of classical music built into me. My father, a cotton farmer and broker, married a musician and people used to kid him that he had one. I studied piano with my mother, which could be the reason I can only play two or three pieces,” he chuckles. I played piano so well at Eastman that I got to take it an extra semester, if you get my drift.”

The violin was a whole other matter. “I had a small motorcycle and everybody in this little town in Arkansas used to laugh at me because I used to strap my quarter-size violin to the cycle’s back.”

It wasn’t until he was in grade school and heard a recording of an oboe on a Rossini Overture “La Scala Di Seta,” or “The Silken Ladder” that the defining note in his life was played. “I was intoxicated by the sound of the oboe, and when I was in junior high school, I heard an English horn in a band concert, and I thought, ‘Oh, that’s even better than the oboe. That’s what I really want to play. So I sold my motorcycle, and here I am. I was pretty much self-taught until my audition at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester. I auditioned when I was a junior in high school, and my mother played the piano for my solo.”

Stacy, who is 67, never even considered another career and never pictured himself doing anything but playing. “My parents always supported me in everything I did,” he says ‘They always gave me the freedom to think beautifully, which is what it takes to be in the arts. I just drove straight ahead and with force and believed that I could do it.

After Eastman, he played with the New Orleans Symphony for a year. Then he and his horn headed to San Antonio, another yearlong gig. The next stop was Minneapolis, where he played for nine years. In 1972, opportunity knocked again, and he and the New York Philharmonic have been in harmony ever since.

He’s not one to blow his own horn, but ever since the Grammy victory, his schedule has been jam-packed, and he has a score of new projects in the works. In April, he’s off to Riga, Latvia to perform a concerto, written especially for him and his horn, written by Latvian composer Peteris Vasks. “I’m excited,” he says of the work that premiered in Stamford a few seasons ago, “because I’ve never been there.”

Right now, he’s having a great time working with “A Prairie Home Companion” creator Garrison Keillor on a piece about what goes through an English horn player’s mind while he’s waiting for his big solo. Stacy doesn’t want to give the whole thing away, saying only that  “we may hear the results of this in March, when Garrison is with the New York Philharmonic for a special concert.”

During the summer, he will re-record the New Rorem English Horn Concerto, one of more than 30 that have been written for him, with a European orchestra. And in time for the holidays, he and Greenwich musician Rob Mathes hope to do another Christmas CD to complement their popular “New View Christmas” on London Records. “That first recording was mainly with synthesizers accompanying me,” Stacy says, “but this one will be the unplugged variety.”

In between these projects and his philharmonic performances, he’s working on a recital to open his Stacy Seminar, the 28th annual installment of the weeklong master class that English hornists from around the globe gather in Carmel, Calif. to attend.

By the way, in case you’re wondering, that snake picture wasn’t the only odd photo op inspired by his Puckish sense of humor. There is the photo of him outside Wagner’s summer house on Lake Luzern. “I played the third act of ‘Tristan’ with the house in the background; this was to the shock of the people walking around the grounds,” he chuckles. “And there’s a really good picture of me and my wife, Marie, sitting on a rock in the creek that runs through Vail. We were there because the New York Philharmonic plays a summer residencey there at the Bravo Festival.”

The tone-deaf cobra, however, is the only one he has framed.