Day 100: 100th Anniversary
36yearsago.com
Vienna 1971—A Student Journal
A year of music, study, travel, sightseeing &
friends.
Day
100 — 100th Anniversary
10-November-1971
(Wed.)
TRANSCRIPT
Ditto for other days. Except saw La Boheme
again.
REFLECTIONS
1971.
Ditto=a
busy day in ’71. La
Boheme.
100th
Anniversary. It’s 100
days of blogging and reflecting. I’m enjoying it.
Hope that you are as well.
Still, Puccini’s music warms the heart.
I worked at the Musical Arts Center as a student-worker to help pay for my expenses. It was a mixture of many things, sometimes setting up mics for performances or climbing in the rafters to check on mics as well. It was a good experience.
The quality of audio and video in yesterday’s Internet feed of La Boheme was quite remarkable. There was just a bit of background or “machine” noise somewhere in the loop. Streaming video has the ability to replace some TV watching. I enjoyed it. Ideally, you would then stream directly to Apple TV and HD widescreen TV, neither of which I have.
John at IU. I spent a year and a summer at IU. It was the only year I had to pay for school; I’ve been fortunate. The campus at Bloomington is just beautiful. I had great friends in the graduate dorm. During the summer, I had a wonderful girl friend and fellow horn player—Fleur. Hi Fleur. I played 1st horn in the third concert band and then was promoted to 2nd or 3rd horn in the 5th orchestra. I believe that IU had five orchestras and three bands. All of these ensembles were quite good.
It was a year-plus of hard work but I ended up with my Master’s degree in Music Composition. I studied composition with Professors Fox, Heiden, and others. I wrote music for a full Master’s recital and thesis. I found the recital tape a while back, maybe one day I’ll play a bit for you. Writing serious music is very difficult for me, but I enjoy what I write—though you can sometimes tell that I am at the student level. I also did some work in their electronic music lab as well.
IU story. I like to tell this story about IU. It is not easy to get into. If I remember correctly, I had to take about 10 or so tests and ended up taking two or so remedial (no credit) courses to make up my deficiencies—early music history, piano, and I’m not sure if there were a third. Well, in early music history I would go to class and take down a “million” notes. The professor never stopped talking. Facts. Facts. Facts. We also had listening tests, where we listened to repertoire in the listening library and had to aurally identify works by time period, composer, style and such. We were supposed to listen for about 4 hours a week. Well, the grading in the class was on a bell curve. And eventually, we were all in the listening library for 10-12 hours a week, perhaps (can’t remember and I may be exaggerating). Why? Well, I asked one of the guys who was always in the library. Answer—he was a musicology major, a music history major. He was taking a deficiency course in his major. He and others had to put in so much time for their major area of study, and we had to follow. Damn bell curve. Regardless, I never learned so much in a single course, and my ear became pretty well attuned to style and identification.
Just a story.
John
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