In 1970 I left the US Armed Services and returned to Peabody.
I had spent 3 years and a few months in the service playing
horn in the Army Bands. I was stationed at Ft.Meade in Maryland for
almost a year and spent the rest of my time
at Ft. Amador CZ, that is the Panama Canal Zone.
.
Harold,
Werner Klemperer, and Danny Kaye in Aspen
(and Werner's girlfriend
Kim)
Harold said "classes" would start on Monday
and that he would start it off and introduce me. When I arrived, much to my
suprise there were about 15 students ageed 18-45 sitting in the blockhouse
control room! Harold gave the "This Recording Business" talk for about an hour,
then introduced me and left to go outside and sit in the sun. To say I was
under a little pressure would be a mild comment.
That afternoon I ran to
my room (a single room in the Continental Inn with a small refrierator and
stove), pulled out my copy of Woram's Recording Studio Handbook and
setup a schedule of lectures (I made outlines in a steno notebook that I
used in class) based on the chapters in the book . For the rest of the three
weeks I stayed about 3 pages ahead of the students I was teaching. So the
students had me lecturing, with an occassional talk from Harold, and were
observing my recordings of the Music Festival. At the end, we gave them all a
fancy certificate of completion. Well, at least that was over and now I could
spend some time jus recording and relaxing. NOT! Seems that Harold had scheduled
and populated 3 three-week sessions for The Aspen Audio Institute. Harold always
billed himself as an Impressario and indeed he was. That first year we had 48
students spread over 9 weeks.
As an aside here, I had met this sweet girl
at Peabody named Anne Mansvetov. After about 6 months we were dating pretty
heavily and when she found out I was disappearing for the summer to Aspen, she
managed to quickly apply to The Aspen Music School (part of the Festival) in
Piano and was accepted by Aube Tzerko (one of Leon Fleisher's teachers). Three
days before I left Baltimore she informed me that swhe was studying Piano
in Aspen and would see me there. I think she had made up her mind that I
was not escaping that easily. We were married in the following March of
1979.
Your Text Here
Harold had made arrangements with several manufacturers to borrow
some equipment for the summer, and so I arrived in Aspen in late May to find
large boxes of equipment and a pile of cables sitting on a loading dock. Bruce
(Harold's son), had come along to "help", and although Bruce didn't know a thing
about professional audio we got the studio set up and ready to go (barely) by
the first Festival Orchestra rehearsal. We ran microphone cables over the roof
of the shell from the blockhouse in the rear using pulleys and hooks that we had
found at the local hardware store. Aspen had no ProAudio dealer and the nearest
source for parts was Denver. Because I insisted that the front mics had to
be in Stereo (as opposed to a single mic) we invented what came to know as the
"Boxer Bar" to fly two Neumann U87's over the conductors head.
BeforeI left Peabody at the end of my
Sophmore year I was involved with the Peabody Audio Visual and Recording
Department as a student technician. So, when I returned, it was logical that I
work there again. At the time, my good friend Chuck was running the new
recording studios that he had established and was building and I helped wire the
installation. About this time Chuck was offered a job at another school and when
he left, in August of 1970, Richard Goldman (Peabody's Director) appointed me as
head of recording and audio visual services.
I finished wiring and
building the studios, adding and upgrading over the next several years. In about
1976 I began teaching a 2-credit course called "Recording Technology." There was
a mix of mostly Peabody students and a few Hopkins students.
Hopkins had a small student run radio station and several of these fellows took
the course. One, Josiah Gluck, became the engineer for GRP Records in NY and
later became a guest lecturer for the RAS Program at
Peabody.
