It was sometime around 3 a.m. when the cops began knocking on the door of the music building.

Wayne Oquin was pounding away on piano keys inside when he spotted red and blue lights flashing through the window. Oquin was a regular there inside the small rehearsal space, practicing nightly for composition and piano classes. John C. Schmidt, music professor at then Southwest Texas State University, had given him a key and Oquin took advantage — he was, after all, taking 31 hours that semester.

The police, of course, weren’t after Wayne Oquin early that morning. But the lone light on in the building looked a little suspicious.

“I explained to them that I had a key from the dean, and they let me stay and work,” Oquin said. “After a while I just started working with that light off.”

Taking on more than 30 hours of course work, studying into the early morning hours may not seem normal. But Wayne Oquin was never an ordinary student.

A Southwest Texas State graduate, Oquin went on to earn his masters and doctorate at the Juilliard School in New York, working as both a composer and performer. And recently, on the eve of his graduation from the school, Oquin was invited to become a full-time member of the Juilliard music faculty. For someone who just turned 30, it’s an accomplishment that’s hard for his peers back in San Marcos to even put into words.

But they aren’t surprised at all: Old teachers and friends always knew Wayne would do great things. And they have a simple way of describing him. They call him a genius.

“I remember telling Wayne several months back, ‘when you get your doctorate, my prediction is that you won’t be leaving. They’ll ask you (to be on the faculty),” Dr. Robert Whalin, a professor of Wayne’s at Southwest Texas State. “He said ‘absolutely no way that will ever happen.’ But when he called me and said he’d been accepted onto the faculty, I just had to say ‘I told you so.’”

Oquin was born in Houston and into a family of non-musicians. But they had a feeling he would be gifted: When his mom sang to him as he fell asleep as a baby, he would sing back. His father bought him a piano at age three, and Wayne took private lessons as a child at the St. Mark’s Lutheran Conservatory in Houston. His parents continued to support his music throughout high school.

“I couldn’t have asked for better parents. They were very proud,” Oquin said. “They paid for my lessons. My mother would wait in the car for hours (during his lesson). They made sure I had suits to wear at the recitals.”

At age 15, his parents divorced. There was very little extra money, but Oquin continued studying at St. Mark’s and received scholarship offers from several schools in Texas and beyond. He chose Southwest Texas State.

“I felt like it was the best decision when it came to education vs. money,” Oquin said. “And I fell in love with it (SWT) instantly. I really got a wonderful educational foundation, and there was a number of faculty that made that possible.”

One faculty member he mentions is Dr. Robert Whalin, who taught music literature at the time. Dr. Whalin heard whispers of Oquin’s potential as a freshman, but didn’t actually have him in class until the next year.

“We’d all heard about him, we knew there was a lot of talent there. He was of course the outstanding student in my class. You just knew that this wasn’t your ordinary student, or person, by any means,” Whalin said.

Peggy Brunner, Oquin’s voice professor here, remembers Oquin as quiet and unobtrusive as a freshman. It wasn’t until he sang a simple version of “The Lord is My Shepherd” that she discovered Oquin’s true potential.

“He came to study in my voice studio, not because he wanted to be a great singer, but as a composition person he wanted to know about voice,” Brunner said. “When he sang that little two-page song, I have never heard anything before or since so moving and so beautiful. It was a simple piece, but his performance of it was profound.”

Whalin and Brunner remember one thing well about Oquin at the time: He never slept. It wasn’t uncommon, they say, for the student to stay up 48 hours at a time composing and studying.

And it paid off. Oquin has the most amount of credits with the highest GPA in the history of the school: He graduated in three years, majoring in composition and piano and minoring in voice and philosophy, while maintaining a 4.0 GPA. For these accomplishments he was recently given an Alumni Achievement Award from the university.

There were other professors, too: Dr. Jeffrey Gordon, whom he credits with helping him become a good communicator, and John C. Schmidt, whom Oquin could call on Saturdays and Sundays to get help with composition notation software.

But it wasn’t until Oquin was nearing graduation that the word Juilliard came up.

“We knew that he had so much going for him. But very honestly, from Southwest Texas State University? Somebody here get accepted to Juilliard?” Whalin said.

Oquin scheduled a meeting with the chair of the music department to discuss his current scholarship, which he thought had been unfairly reduced. The chair agreed, but the best she could offer was a $500 compensation allowance to use as travel money for a grad school audition. Oquin took the money and went to Juilliard.

“I had looked around at some other schools, but I was looking primarily at the faculty,” Oquin said. “I knew that one could go a lot of places with big names, but you were going to have to ultimately work with people. I saw Milton Babbitt there, I saw Sam Adler there. I just thought ‘that’s a wonderful group of people.’”

Once he got to New York City and prepared to audition, Oquin learned that there would be three openings and more than 250 applicants. What followed was a grueling two days of exams and interviews.

“One exam was set up like this: They played a Beethoven quartet and you had to write out the composition as it plays. The exam is designed for you not to complete it,” Oquin said. “We started the second day with five one-on-one interviews with the faculty.”

It wasn’t until a month later in a conversation with faculty member Sam Adler that Oquin heard the news.

“He asked me ‘have you heard from Juilliard yet?’” Oquin said. “I told him that I hadn’t. And then he said ‘I’m going to tell you something that will make your day. Milton Babbitt wants to work with you.’ I said ‘Mr. Adler, you’ve not only made my day, but you’ve made my life.’”

And for the past nine years, Oquin has studied at Juilliard, earning his masters in two years, teaching for seven years on a teaching fellow scholarship, recently earning his doctorate. He’s lived in the dorm the entire time, making money as an active performer and composer.

Oquin’s music has been performed on three continents. His original compositions have been premiered in London, Paris, Prague, Moscow, Toronto, Tokyo, Vienna, Warsaw and throughout the United States — including countless summer church concerts around Central Texas.

In 2007, The Juilliard School commissioned one of his most unique works: “A Time to Break Silence: Songs inspired by the Words and Writings of Martin Luther King Jr.,” in which the music is actually played alongside MLK speeches.

He’s also brought Juilliard to San Marcos. In March 2007, Oquin founded Juilliard Joins Texas State for a Common Experience in the arts. Each year, he brings several Juilliard actors, dancers and musicians to Texas State for a performance on the Texas State campus. Both performances thus far have played to sold out audiences, and helped build bridges between both communities along the way.

“When I was at Texas State, I always felt like some of these institutions were a long way off, both geographically and in terms of stature,” Oquin said. “I thought they were unattainable.... I do like that these students at Texas State can see what their peers are doing — not people that are 10 to 20 years older, but their peers. I’m sure that having seen that, many of these Texas State students go home and spend a little more time in the practice room... I’ve often felt that where I am now is a long way from where I came from, but those two worlds get to come together (at these performances) and that’s a good feeling.”

At the recent Juilliard commencement ceremony, Oquin was awarded —along with his doctorate — the Juilliard Interarts award, a prize previously reserved for undergraduate students. The coveted award was announced as a surprise from the dean at the end of the ceremony.

“At the end, he announced I would be joining the faculty and we all went home,” Oquin said.

But it’s really not that simple. Oquin’s been assembling his own legacy for years: Working when others are sleeping, careful attention to detail that others overlook, a brilliant mind and an ongoing pursuit of excellence.

And when he steps up to the piano or sits down to write a score, that’s where brilliance takes over.

"Being a composer, I find that I approach every aspect of musicianship, particularly performance, from a compositional perspective. When I interpret Beethoven at the piano I approach the music with the same care and regard for detail on the printed page that I would want a performer to use when interpreting my own music. I know what kind of attention I have paid to compositional nuance and I can only imagine the level of discernment that went into the masterworks of previous centuries," Oquin said.

There’s a word for that. It’s called genius.