AN INTERVIEW WITH LARRY MAXEY - The University of Kansas

AN INTERVIEW WITH LARRY MAXEY
Interviewer: Jewell Willhite
Oral History Project
Endacott Society
University of Kansas
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LARRY MAXEY
B.M., “With Honor,” Michigan State University, 1959- Public School Music
M.M., Music Literature and Performance, Eastman School of Music, 1960
D.M.A., Performance and Pedagogy, Eastman School of Music, 1968
Service at the University of Kansas
First hired at the University of Kansas, 1970
Assistant professor of Clarinet, 1970-1975
Associate Professor of Clarinet, 1975-1980
Professor of Clarinet, 1980-2007
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AN INTERVIEW WITH LARY MAXEY
Interviewer: Jewell Willhite
Q: I am speaking with Larry Maxey, who retired as professor of clarinet at the University of
Kansas in 2007. We are in Lawrence, Kansas, on December 17, 2007. Where were you
born and in what year?
A: Michigan City, Indiana, in 1937.
Q: What were your parents’ names?
A: My father was Charles Sheldon Maxey. He was named after Charles Sheldon, who was
the author of What Would Jesus Do? He was at a church in Topeka, although my
grandmother, who lived in Indiana, had only heard of him. My mother was Bernice Frey
Maxey.
Q: My mother’s name was Bernice also.
A: Not a very common name.
Q: What was their educational background?
A: They both had bachelors and masters degrees, and my mother had a nursing degree. She
went on to accumulate a lot of graduate hours over the years and eventually ended up
with a masters degree in education as well. My father had a master’s. He taught in high
school for his entire life.
Q: What did he teach?
A: He started out as a wood shop teacher, then he taught distributive education, which was
the program whereby students went to school half time and worked half time. He
supervised that program during the later years of his career.
Q: Was your mother employed also?
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A: She was a school nurse at one time. Then she took over what was called the classroom
for crippled children. This was way back in the fifties, before anybody heard of what we
now call special education. She worked with people with all sorts of disabilities in one
classroom. I used to work with her class a little bit. It was a challenge. She had all kinds
of kids in there, but she loved them and did them a lot of good, just kind of learning how
to do it as she went. She had some training, but I think she was chosen because she was a
nurse and because she had a lot of empathy for people.
Q: Did you have brothers and sisters?
A: Yes. I have a brother who is retired from Upjohn Chemical Company in Kalamazoo,
Michigan. He had a very successful career as a chemist.
Q: Did you grow up in the town where you were born?
A: Right.
Q: What elementary school did you go to?
A: I went to Marsh Elementary, which was two blocks from my house. In those days I
remember that everybody went home for lunch. There was no lunch program at the
school. Everybody went home and the mothers were at home. You went home and had
lunch and you came back to school.
Q: When did you start playing clarinet?
A: In the fourth grade.
Q: How did you happen to choose clarinet?
A: I really wanted to play the trumpet. We walked into the room where they had all the
instruments out on display and the band director was there. The band director looked at
me and said, “You look like you ought to be a clarinet player.” I didn’t know any better
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so I said okay. What that really meant was he needed clarinet players, not trumpet
players. So that’s how I got started on the clarinet.
Q: They had band in elementary school then.
A: Yes, they did. I had a very distinguished gentleman who started me on the instrument.
His name was Fred Weber, who at that time was just beginning to publish a series of
beginners and intermediate band methods. These became best sellers across the country
and he made a tremendous amount of money. Shortly after that he left public school
teaching and continued to write the music method books. He was very successful and a
very big name at one time in music education.
Q: Since I played clarinet too, I think I remember that name on some music. Did you belong
to organizations, such as Boy Scouts, or things like that?
A: Yes, I did all the usual stuff and lots of clubs in high school, debate club, math club, etc.
Q: What was the name of your high school? Was it a high school and junior high?
A: It was Isaac C. Elston Junior High and Isaac C. Elston Senior High School in Michigan
City.
Q: Were you in both marching and concert band, I suppose?
A: Yes. I enjoyed the band. I didn’t like marching, but I liked the band. The band
director’s name in high school was Palmer Myran, who was never very well known. But
the thing that made him unique was he was a violinist who was very interested in jazz.
He had a jazz program at the high school in those days before this became common. I
became interested in jazz early on as a result of his influence.
Q: Did you play in a jazz group?
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A: Yes, there was a dance band. We played for all the school dances and we played for
money for some outside things as well.
Q: I supposed you participated in music contests.
A: Always.
Q: Solos or groups?
A: Mostly solos. We had a clarinet quartet one year but it was mostly solos. We had a
saxophone group one year as well.
Q: Oh, you played saxophone too?
A: Yes, I played saxophone. If you are in a jazz band, you play szxophone and only
occasionally double on the clarinet. So I picked up saxophone in ninth grade, which was
very easy after learning the clarinet.
Q: Did you have influential teachers?
A: Those two. Fred Weber in grade school and junior high and Palmer Myran in high
school.
Q: Did you have jobs after school or in the summer?
A: I never worked. I did not want to own a car, and I wasn’t spending money on girls, so I
had no reason to need any money. I really wanted to spend my time doing other things.
So I never worked in high school, except for the dance band.
Q: Was it always assumed that you would go to college?
A: Oh, yes.
Q: When did you graduate from high school?
A: 1955.
Q: Where did you go for your undergraduate degree?
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A: Michigan State University. There was a very distinguished teacher there by the name of
Keith Stein, who was the reason I went. He wrote a well-known book called The Art of
Clarinet Playing.
Q: You lived at the school then.
A: Oh, yes.
Q: Were you in a fraternity or did you live in a dorm?
A: I was in a music fraternity, Phi Mu Alpha, which was quite unique. Usually it is just an
honorary fraternity, but we financed and bought a house, which I think was the only Phi
Mu Alpha fraternity house in the country. Some brave faculty member signed on to
guarantee the loan. The house was very successful, although I doubt it exists now.
Q: And you were all musicians.
A: Right. It was a good experience.
Q: That would be a great thing to have in common. Did you have jobs in college?
A: I was in a dance band that was very popular and worked a lot. In the spring we had jobs
every Friday and Saturday night. In the winter it would be most Friday and Saturday
nights, in the fall a little less so. In those days fraternities and sororities hired a real band
to play for their dances. This was a seven-piece group, two saxes, trombone, trumpet,
piano, bass and drums. It was a really good band and it was a lot of fun to play in. It was
quite lucrative for that time, and I made at the time a fair amount of money doing this. Fr
Q: What did you call yourselves?
A: The leader of the band was Bob Eberhart and his orchestra. The band was well-
established before AI got there, but he had an opening and heard about me, so he
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auditioned me. That’s how I got in as a first-semester freshman—I was must in the right
place at the right time. It was really a great experience for four years.
Q: Did you play in the marching band in college?
A: If you had a scholarship, you had to be in marching band and you had to be in symphonic
band. Again, the symphonic band was what I wanted to do. The marching was
something I did because I had to do it. I did my student teaching during the fall so I
wouldn’t have to march.
Q: Did you think you might be a high school band director?
A: I never intended to do that. It is the sort of thing where you get the degree in case you
need it, but I never envisioned myself doing that.
Q: When did you get your undergraduate degree?
A: That was 1959.
Q: Did you go directly on for a masters?
A: Yes, I went straight on to the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, which is
part of the University of Rochester. Again, there was a very distinguished teacher there.
The school is very distinguished. It ranks with Julliard and Curtis--Julliard, Curtis, and
Eastman kind of all go together. So that was a fantastic place to be and I loved it there.
Q: Did you have influential teachers there?
A: Stanley Hasty. He was the clarinet teacher and he had formerly been principal clarinetist
of the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra. He has turned out lots and lots of outstanding
students.
Q: I suppose you played in musical groups while you were there too.
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A: Yes, I was a member of the orchestra and a member of the Eastman Wind Ensemble,
which had a very famous conductor by the name of Frederick Fennell. We recorded
several albums that year, which was, again, very lucrative. At the time we were paid, I
think, something like $40 an hour to record, which for us was really big time.
Q: In those days that was a lot of money.
A: You played 20 and you took 10 off. Those were the union regulations. So essentially we
were getting a dollar a minute to record.
Q: Was this classical music?
A: The wind ensemble is a small band, so we were playing band music and some orchestral
transcriptions. The whole wind ensemble concept was started by Frederick Fennell at the
Eastman School. Now everybody, including KU, has a wind ensemble.
Q: You went to the same place for your doctorate. Did you just continue on?
A: No, I didn’t. After my masters, I was drafted. Those were the days of the draft. So I
spent two years defending you all from the godless hoards of Communist invaders as a
member of the Army.
Q: Were you in the band?
A: Actually, it’s a long story. After I finished at Eastman with a master’s, I went on a tour
with a USO show to Europe. While we were in Stuttgart I auditioned for the Seventh
Army Symphony, which was in existence at that time there. They said, “All right, when
you get drafted, let us know and we will requisition you and you will come here.” So I
went through basic training and notified them that I was in. Typical Army, I was
assigned as a clerk typist in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, at a missile site. So I was there for
a while and then I manipulated the system, because I knew as a clerk typist I knew what
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to do, and ended up in the post band at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. Then when things were
really going nicely at Fort Sill—I was going to play in the orchestra, I was in a dance
band, the duty was good—all of a sudden my orders came through for the Seventh Army
Symphony. So off I went to Stuttgart. And right after I got there, they folded the
symphony and assigned me to the Seventh Army Band. All this happened within two
years time. I don’t know what started this question.
Q: I asked you if you were in the band in the Army.
A: Yes, eventually. I was a clerk typist in the first job, then a bandsman in the second job,
and an orchestra player in the third job and a bandsman in the fourth job, all in the space
of two years.
Q: Did you have a chance to see some of Europe while you were there?
A: Yes, I was selected to play in a band that was in Mons, Belgium. It was some kind of
competition, and I was imported as a ringer. I played in the band because they brought in
some players to make it better. Another time the 7 th Army Band spent a week on duty in
Heidelberg. I also got to Paris on leave. I was only there nine months but I got to see a
little of Europe.
Q: You weren’t married at this time were you?
A: No, I was not.
Q: So when you came back, is that when you went back to Eastman?
A: No. I was lucky. I was in Germany applying for jobs in the United States, unavailable
for interviews and unavailable for auditions. But I was hired by reason of my resume and
a tape recording that I sent of my playing. I was hired by East Texas College in
Commerce, Texas, which is now Texas A & M at Commerce, a school of 5,000 in a town
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of 5,000. I was there for two years. That was enough. I was teaching all the woodwinds.
I was teaching music ed methods courses. I was teaching band and orchestra
organization and administration. I was teaching music appreciation. It was a school in
which a full load was considered five courses. If you were teaching “applied music”, in
other words an instrument, that was equated at two to one. So in order to have a full load
as an applied teacher, you had to teach 30 hours a week. On top of that, the new trumpet
teacher and I were both required to play in the band. I’ve got my old class schedule from
those days, and I can’t believe I went through that. You started at eight in the morning
and you finished at 5:30 at night. There was time for lunch and that was it. Two years of
that was all I could stand. So I applied for a position on the music faculty at Baylor
University and was accepted there. So I spent two years at Baylor and then went back
and got the doctorate at Eastman starting in 1966.
Q: So your schedule was better at Baylor.
A: Oh, much better. I still taught multiple woodwinds, but I didn’t have to teach most of the
other things that I was having to do at East Texas.
Q: Then you went back to Eastman to get your doctorate. Were you in musical groups
during that time?
A: Again, I was in the orchestra and wind ensemble.
Q: I don’t suppose you write a thesis when you are in music performance.
A: Actually, at that school you did. My dissertation topic was A Pedagogical Analysis of
two Approaches to the Rose Thirty-Two Etudes for Clarinet. It’s quite a thick document,
but writing such a paper is quite rare with this degree now. You have the option of
writing a paper or giving a recital and everybody chooses the recital. Almost nobody
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writes a paper any more. Eastman was the birthplace of this degree, the Doctor of
Musical Arts. It was designed specifically for people who were going to teach at the
college level. Obviously, if you are going to play in an orchestra, you don’t need any
degree at all. Being chosen for an orchestra is based strictly on how you play. It’s like
being a baseball player or a soccer player--you don’t need a degree to do that. At
Eastman there was quite a heavy academic component to the D.M.A, but that is less so at
other schools.
Q: Did you have to write something for your master’s too?
A: Yes, I wrote a paper, which was called as “essay”. It amounted to a major research
paper, essentially.
Q: Then you gave recitals too in connection with your degree.
A: Right. And lecture recitals, which were a combination of performance and research and
presentation of your research before you play the piece. I did one on the Copland clarinet
concerto.
Q: Were you married at this time?
A: Yes. Actually, I met Linda on the aforementioned USO show. She was also on that
show.
Q: Playing the marimba?
A: Right. We were touring Europe and getting to know each other. It was just
happenstance. We stayed in contact during the Army years. Then when I took the job at
East Texas, which was right after the Army, she happened to be going to North Texas
State, which was 90 miles away. So we got together on weekends and then when she
graduated, we got married.
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Q: Was she originally from Texas?
A: She was born in Georgia and moved to Texas when she was nine. She graduated from
Longview High School and went to North Texas and got a bachelor’s degree in piano.
When I went to Eastman the second time, she went along, of course, and she got a
master’s degree from Eastman in music theory.
Q: After you got your Ph.D., what did you do?
A: I was hired at Long Beach State College in Long Beach, California, teaching clarinet and
saxophone and some music theory too. Then after one year I got a call from my former
teacher at Michigan State who said, “I am going to take a sabbatical leave. Would you be
willing to come back to Michigan State for a year to fill in for me? I jumped at that
chance. So we went back to East Lansing and spent a year there. Then the job opened up
at KU. I thought, “It is more of a traditional situation than at Long Beach. It’s a big state
school with a woodwind quintet, and it doesn’t involve teaching the saxophone.” It just
looked like a good thing to me. So I applied and came here.
Q: What year was that?
A: 1970
Q: Were you in Murphy? That’s where music is.
A: Right.
Q: What was your title when you came to KU?
A: Assistant professor.
Q: What courses were you teaching?
A: I taught clarinet and music appreciation at the beginning. I didn’t have to do the
classroom teaching, but I really liked classroom. It’s a wonderful balance for the-one-on-
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one that you do with the clarinet. So I taught music appreciation for several years, and
then they trusted me to teach a music history course for music majors. That went well,
and it just kept expanding it. I ended up teaching all three—now it’s four—
undergraduate music major courses in the music history area, then also several graduate
classes, both genre classes like Symphony and Chamber Music and also period classes,
such as classical, romantic, 20 th century.
Q: Was this music appreciation course that you taught for nonmajors?
A: Yes
Q: I took a class something like that in college. It was really interesting. Did you originate
any of the courses that you taught?
A: Yes. I originated a two-semester sequence of graduate seminarw for doctoral candidates
in clarinet performance. As for music history, the chamber music course had probably
been taught it sometime in the past, but it hadn’t been taught recently when I started
offering it. The other courses were pretty much rotated so that all the students had a
chance to take them on a rotational basis.
Q: You played in musical groups while you were here.
Q: Right. I played in the The Kansas Woodwinds, which used to be called the Kansas
Woodwind Quintet. We added the saxophone professor, so it is now called the Kansas
Woodwinds. It was a standard performing group for my whole career here. Also, when I
came there was a group called the Little Symphony directed by Dean Gorton, which was
disbanded when he retired. Those were the ensembles that were formal. There were lots
of other chamber music combinations that were put together for one reason or another.
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For example, I toured twice in Costa Rica with a clarinet-cello-piano trio composed of
KU faculty.
Q: Then you played solos too.
A: Yes, solo recitals every year.
Q: That’s part of the job and what you do instead of writing books, I suppose.
A: Exactly. In the promotion and tenure guidelines the designation is “research/creative
activity.” So you do either traditional research or some kind of artistic endeavor such as
performance, painting, sculpture, etc.
Q: You played some concerts with your wife, didn’t you?
A: Right. Most faculty recitals I split with her. Linda is a world class marimbist who has an
international reputation. At one time she toured the country for Columbia Artists on the
Community Concert Series. Most recently, she has played in Warsaw , Prague, and
Vilnius, Lithuania. She has that sort of career. I was glad to have her as part of the
recitals.
Q: You have children.
A: Right. Mark is in Washington, D.C., and Kim is in Springfield, Missouri.
Q: Did you ever have sabbaticals?
A: I didn’t miss a sabbatical. Actually, I could have had one more. But I took four. This
gave me the opportunity to really be a professional musician. I didn’t have to meet
classes. I could just go out and perform. So I used the sabbaticals to tour and play
recitals in as many places as I could. It was very rewarding and something I needed to
do. The situation for faculty is more flexible now. It is possible to leave and be gone for
two or three weeks performing, but for most of my career that was not an option.
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Q: Probably not if you are teaching classes. Where did you play recitals? Was this at
colleges?
A: Colleges and universities. This is where my network was. I was programming for
audiences who knew something about music, rather than just general audiences, for
whom you would program quite differently. I was programming really straight classical
concerts and the university was the most logical place to perform.
Q: Was that places in this country?
A: Also I have played in Costa Rica and Lithuania, Portugal, in addition to what I did in the
Army. So I have gotten out of the country some too.
Q: Are those good audiences too?
A: On, yes, wonderful. In Costa Rica they are just hungry for live music. I went down there
as a member of a trio twice and then twice more as a member of the Kansas woodwinds.
Especially when we got out of San Jose and into the countryside, the people flocked to
hear live music. So they were very appreciative.
Q: Has the music department changed during the years you’ve been here?
A: I think the university has changed.
Q: The university has gotten a whole lot bigger.
A: I would say that the music department has gotten somewhat bigger. Structurally, it has
changed a lot. When I came we had a very arcane system in which every little area in
music had its own department. There was a department of music theory, a department of
music history, a department of wind and percussion. They all had two, three, four or five
faculty members in them. It was very unusual and very ineffectual.
Q: I would think so.
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A: In the course of time we tried different things. For one, we combined all the music
performance areas together with voice, piano, winds and strings, all under one rubic. The
remaining little fiefdoms continued because nobody wanted to give up their little sphere
of influence. We finally did the logical thing and united as a department of music under
Stanley Shumway, who was the first chairman under that configuration.
Q: Did that include both vocal and instrumental?
A: Yes, all the musicians then were finally together under one umbrella, which was a much
more logical administrative unit. Later we added what had been the Department of
Dance, so we now have the Department of Music and Dance. The other major change
was that music education used to be in the School of Education before moving to the
School of Fine Arts a few years ago. Now we music and dance and music education all
together in one unit, which makes a whole lot of sense.
Q: Do you have more students now than when you came?
A: Actually, the apex for me was much earlier in my career when there were lots more
instrumental music majors.
Q: Oh, really.
A: There was a time when I could just hardly handle everybody. But then the pendulum
kind of shifted to making more money and fewer instrumentalists wanted to go into
public school music or take a chance on a performance career. Now the pendulum is
swinging back. I think there are more music students than there used to be. It involves a
lot of recruiting. Recruiting is a very big part of any job in the music performance area,
particularly in the winds, where the competition for students is very, very keen. There
seem to be lots and lots of voice and piano students. But particularly with the wind
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instruments and the strings, every school is after the same small number of talented
students, just like in basketball.
Q: How do you find the good students?
A: They are in high school all-state bands. You can get rosters of all-state bands in Kansas
and surrounding states. They pretty much tell you who the cream of the crop is in any
given state.
Q: Were you ever involved with the music camps here?
A: When I came the music camp was a tremendous recruiting tool. It was six weeks long,
and in those six weeks you got to know those kids really well. You able to make a real
impact on them, and they also learned about you and how you played and taught. It used
to be that you could walk into any music classroom and say, “How many of you kids
came here because of the camp?” and about half of the hands would go up. Well, that
began to change. It went from being a six-week camp to being, I think, a four-week
camp.
Q: I think when Rachel went it was four weeks.
A: Then it became two two-week camps and then it became two one-week camps and now it
is a one-week camp. It has just shriveled over the years. So it is no longer much of a
recruiting tool.
Q: Why do you think that happened?
A: I’d rather not say.
Q: Okay. Do you think students are as good now in music as they used to be?
A: Yes, I would say so. The expectations are different. This is something I was going to get
into. Probably you are going to address it later on. Grade inflation thing has altered
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student expectations. I think this came about at the same time that we instituted
formalized student evaluations of teaching. I am a very big supporter of student
evaluations, by the way, but it did change the dynamics. When I was in school, you
respected the professor and you had no idea of being any kind of a friend or having any
sort of a relationship with them at all. You never questioned the grade, because that’s the
way it was. Nowadays, I think professors not only want to be respected, they want to be
loved and are deathly afraid of what students might say on the student evaluations. I
think it has had a real effect on the grading scale. When I came as a new faculty member,
I remember going into a music history meeting and saying, “Tell me about grading here.”
For the most distinguished professor in the group, the grade point average for his classes
was 2.0, meaning he gave an equal amount of As and Bs and Ds and Fs. The other
professors in the department had class grade averages of 2.2 to 2.4. Nowadays if you
graded like that you would just be crucified by the students. Even though the students are
still very good, they really are used to being treated with kid gloves when it comes to
evaluation. So nowadays in an academic class, what used to be a C is now a B, I think.
Q: Have you been on university committees?
A: Yes, I’ve been active on all levels of committees, the department, EPPC, (Education
Policies and Procedures) and Promotion and Tenure, Faculty Evaluation, Faculty
Executive Committee, ,etc. At the School level, I have been on Promotion and Tenure
and the committee which evaluates summer research grant proposals. At the university
level, I was on Promotion and Tenure for one year filling in for someone, as well as
Academic Policies and Procedures. I was on the University Council at one point, and I
was on the Calendar Committee for a number of years.
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Q: Have you had outstanding former students who have gone on to greater things?
A: Yes, I’ve had some good students. One is playing associate principal clarinet in the
Dallas Symphony, one is in the Tucson Symphony, and another had a successful
freelance career in Houston. One has had a very distinguished career as a band and wind
ensemble conductor. He’s now at North Texas, which has one of the biggest band
programs in the country. Some students have been successful in the military bands, such
as the Air Force band, for example. One of my former students is general manager of the
Minnesota Symphony, which is a big job. All these people are making more money than
I ever did. So I don’t know whether that makes me a success or a failure as a teacher.
I’ve had some kids who have really done very well.
Q: Have you belonged to professional organizations?
A: International Clarinet Society and similar groups. The Music Educators National
Conference, the Music Teachers National Association, etc.
Q; Have you held offices in any of these?
A: I’ve been the state coordinator for a couple of them. I’ve never wanted to take on a
national office.
Q: Have you been involved in community activities?
A: Yes, through church work particularly, doing various and sundry charitable sorts of
things. I’m on the family selection committee for Habitat for Humanity, for example.
Q: I believe you and Linda were founding members of the Lawrence Youth Symphony.
A: That was founded by the Lawrence Friends of Music and was going strong before we
came to Lawrence. But we were active in the Friends of Music for quite some time, and I
was heavily involved with the Youth Symphony for a number of years.
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Q: Does this take kids from different schools in the city and put them together in an
orchestra?
A: String instrument are difficult to play, and the result is that the bands at the junior high
schools normally sound better than the orchestras at the same school. Besides which, the
orchestras are smaller and it is not possible to have wind players in them. Consequently,
we were losing string players at the junior high level. The Youth Symphony, which
combined students from all the junior high schools, provided these students with the
experience of hearing what a full orchestra with a large string and wind section could
really sound like. All of sudden they found out, “Oh, this is what orchestra is all about. I
guess I’ll stick with it.” So I think we saved a lot of string players through that.
Q: Do they still have that?
A: Yes, the Youth Symphony is still going on.
Q: You played in the Lawrence City Band also.
A: I was in the Lawrence Symphony Orchestra, when that existed, and the Lawrence
Chamber Players for a long time and the Lawrence City Band for a long time.
Q: I like to go and listen to that.
A: And I’ve played in the Kansas City Chamber Orchestra for a number of years, have
played often with the Topeka Symphony and I will play with them again this fall.
Q: With all these things that you do, how much do you practice?
A: I’ve always practiced almost every day, and I continue to do so because I would like to
keep playing. There are things that come along, and I would like to be in shape when
they come along. I practiced for a couple of hours before I came here today to talk with
you. I’ll continue to do that.
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Q: What do you plan to do in retirement?
A: We will travel more. I will go to Europe with Linda this summer.
Q: Is this to play?
A: No, this will just be to see what I want to see. I like history and would like to see Greece
and Rome. I am able to finally read things that I have not had a chance to read. So
there’s now free time for me to do that. We have a summer cottage in Michigan, where
we spent half the summer and all the fall. We just got back to town a couple weeks ago.
We have the option to stay up there for an extended period of time if we would like. I do
want to do some volunteer things.
Q: Do you have grandchildren?
A: Four grandchildren.
Q: What is you assessment of KU or the Music Department, past, present, hopes for the
future, that kind of thing?
A: Well, I think KU is a very good school. I think that the national rankings that it gets are
probably appropriate. I don’t feel that it’s being slighted. I think it is where it belongs,
as far as the national rankings. Some schools have a whole lot more money than we
have, the University of Texas being a classical example. Money gets results. Money
buys faculty, money buys equipment, money implements and supports programs. Kansas
is not a state where the average citizen is particularly supportive of higher education, in
my opinion. I think a lot of Kansans have only high school diplomas or less. It’s an
agrarian, rural state. It’s not a state that places a high emphasis on research and higher
education. I think that’s a weakness. I don’t think we are ever going to have the
financial resources that some states provide.
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The music department is also very, very good. There are a lot of wonderfully
talented people there. We tend to lose some of them. We have lost a couple to Florida
and to other places, one recently to Indiana University. These are the schools that are a
step up from us, Florida State, Indiana, Michigan. So that’s where our really talented
faculty tend to go, unless they decide they really like Lawrence and want to stay here.
Fortunately, this has been the case, and there are some great faculty in Music and Dance.
Q: Is there anything else you’d like to add?
A: I feel like when I came here there was a little more family feeling among the faculty.
Now many faculty are very, very focused on achieving what they need to achieve in order
to get promotion and tenure. I think the P & T requirements are more rigorous than they
used to be. It takes a tremendous amount of effort to meet those requirements, which
leaves less time for interacting with your colleagues.
I think one of the major changes in the university in my time here has been a
much greater emphasis on teaching in promotion and tenure decisions. When I came,
teaching received lip service, but research was the dominant factor.
Q: But you don’t really do much research in your field.
A: In the case of musicology and in the case of music education and music theory, research
is very important, just as it is university wide. When I was on UCPT a number of years
ago, it was evident that research was far more important than teaching in those
discussions. In those days we didn’t even have people do any teaching when they came
to interview for a job. They didn’t teach. They interviewed, they performed, they left.
Nowadays we get them in the classroom, we get them in the studio. We watch them
teach live on the spot.
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Q: Oh, really? Before they are hired?
A: No question. The advent of the Center for Teaching Excellence and all their great
programs is indicative of the new emphasis that we are placing on teaching. The
teaching, I think, is better than it’s ever been at this university, and that is probably true
nationwide. Then on the other side of the coin, evaluation of learning is probably less
rigorous than it has ever been, due to grade inflation. The teaching is outstanding, but
are the students learning more? When students tell me that they already have a very good
idea of what the questions on the exam will be, I wonder how much diligent study is
necessary to prepare for it. Great teaching is taking place. Is great levning going on? I
don’t know the answer to that question.
Q: Do you think students are less prepared for college than they used to be?
A: Not is music. Probably in English and anything involving writing skills, communications
skills, I would guess that they are probably less well prepared.
Q: Thank you very much.
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