Eight years ago, professor of music Bruce Trinkley traveled to the South, where he had a life-altering experience.

He went through Tennessee on the Natchez Trace Parkway, a historic road once traveled by famous explorer Meriwether Lewis.

Along his journey, he came across the Meriwether Lewis Monument, the place where Lewis took his own life in 1809, four years after his famous expedition.

"I immediately wondered how could this great American hero, four years later, fall so low that he would take his own life," Trinkley said. "And that was kind of the beginning of the saga."

Since then Trinkley has devoted nearly all of his time to studying the adventures of Lewis and William Clark.

"Pretty much Lewis and Clark has been my life, my work, my play, my hobby for the past decade," he said.

This wasn't the first experience that influenced Trinkley's passion for music.

When he was in 11th grade, he was living in California and went to see the San Francisco Opera perform Benjamin Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream.

"I was just blown away by it," Trinkley said. "I thought, 'Wow, this is phenomenal.' "

After high school, Trinkley attended Columbia University, where he wrote many shows -- including one that won an award for best college musical in the country.

He received his degree in musical composition from Columbia in 1966 and later, through a sequence of odd coincidences, found himself at Penn State.

A professor at Penn State named Lewis Spratlan left to teach at Amherst College. Meanwhile, a professor at Amherst decided to leave and come to Columbia, and Trinkley then left Columbia to come to Penn State.

"The three of us kept just trading jobs," he said.

Spratlan went on to win the Pulitzer Prize in Music last year.

The strange coincidences don't end there.

"I also knew that his name was always M. Lewis Spratlan," Trinkley said, "and it turns out the 'M' is for Meriwether Lewis Spratlan, and he is a distant relative of Meriwether Lewis."

Trinkley has been writing music for more than 40 years and has been teaching composition, orchestration, and opera literature at Penn State for 33 years and is also the director of the Penn State Glee Club.

Brad Shockey, glee club president (senior-management science and information systems), said Trinkley is very laid back with his students and fun to work with.

"I don't think that he feels he has anything else left to prove, and so he has fun with his job, and he makes it fun for us, too," he said.

Trinkley said York: The Voice of Freedom is definitely his proudest accomplishment.

"It's been a dream for about eight or 10 years," he said.

"A composition is a kind of lonely, [you] do it by yourself, you sit in the studio at a piano or a keyboard ... you're always imagining what is it going to sound like," he said. "And when you come down to that moment of truth, of actually hearing it, and you realize it works... that's just the greatest thing a musician or a composer could have. And we have that situation."