Comments on: FAIL!!!

By: Bryan

Bryan — Thu, 15 Jan 2015 04:13:38 +0000

The reason for my shots at Oberlin and Philly are related to my tenure at Colgate. It would have been worse if Cornell was involved. Small college rivalries can be quite bitter.

Actually I was thinking more of wine than anything else, because alcohol seems to bring out the songs we learned as children and bad puns. OTOH, as Ms Parker noted: “I would rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy” in response to a negative comment about the amount of alcohol she ingested.

By: Steve Bates

Steve Bates — Thu, 15 Jan 2015 01:57:21 +0000

Bryan, not to my knowledge. The nature of such workshops is such that every day involves a masterclass on one’s instrument, or two masterclasses on both of one’s instruments, also one or more rehearsals with a chamber ensemble toward a weekend performance, optionally a private lesson with the faculty member of one’s instrument(s), and more practicing in the remaining hours than I’ve ever done elsewhere, including when I was enrolled at UH for a few years. For a select few musicians, recreational drug use is compatible with such an intense practice, rehearsal and lesson schedule; for a lot of us, it simply isn’t… for me it was never more than a couple of beers to relieve the stress at the end of a day.

As to Oberlin students and Philly musicians, the EM world is not subdivided by geography (except perhaps by continent); a lot of Philly’s early music stellar lights studied at Oberlin Conservatory, and due to a series of coincidences, a substantial majority of EM folks in Texas studied there as well. To the extent that the old Houston Baroque Ensemble worked well, part of the success was attributable to having a lot of members who studied at Oberlin either as undergraduates or grad students or pro’s at the summer workshops, and many of the rest who studied at Rice U… as I did, but in my case it was in electrical engineering. 🙂

By: Bryan

Bryan — Wed, 14 Jan 2015 22:59:16 +0000

In reply to Steve Bates.

Was there a ‘chemical’ component to this dinner? That was really bad, and for so many to have gotten it doesn’t say much for music students – but then it was Oberlin and there were Phillie residents present… 🙂

By: Steve Bates

Steve Bates — Wed, 14 Jan 2015 18:59:58 +0000

I am reminded of an incident in about 1981 in Oberlin, OH. A half dozen adult students attending the Oberlin Baroque Performance Institute (a longstanding annual workshop for professional musicians who play the sort of music and instruments I used to play) were sitting around after one of the last meals in the kitchen of the old 12-bedroom student residence house that we called Philadelphia House because of its majority group of residents. On the whole, the veteran Philadelphians were very kind to the four Texans living with them; we were attending the workshop for the first time.

There was a knock at the kitchen door. The house manager answered it and was confronted with a very stiff-voiced man who recited her full name in the manner of a formal question. Puzzled and vaguely troubled, she said, “Yes…” to which he replied, “Here are the forms for you to check out the condition of individual rooms; please complete and return them by Monday at the latest.”

Our house manager agreed; the man left. She said to the remaining residents, “Whew! The way he delivered his message, I was afraid it was some sort of summons!”

“Couldn’t be,” I replied, “because that would have been a (ahem) summons in the kitchen with diners!” (Feel free to sing it; about half the people present did just that.) It was too late to throw me out on my posterior…