An Oral History of Utah Valley University Interview with Dr. Terry

UTAH VALLEY UNIVERSITY Utah Valley University Library George Sutherland Archives & Special Collections Oral History Program Telling Our Story: An Oral History of Utah Valley University Interview with Dr. Terry Hill September 15, 2011 An oral history project directed by Catherine McIntyre, Archivist & Digitization Librarian, UVU Library & George Sutherland Archives Interview with Dr. Terry Hill UVU Library, George Sutherland Archives September 15, 2011 CM: Catherine McIntyre, Archivist MF: Mike Freeman, Director of UVU Library JM: Jeremy Myntti, Archives intern and former student of Dr. Hill TH: Terry Hill, retired professor of music at UVU [Interview begins 00:18.8] CM: Today is September 15, and we're here at the UVU Sutherland Archives with Dr. Terry Hill, who is a retired professor of music at UVU and I have here—I'm Catherine McIntyre and we have Mike Freeman, the library director here and Jeremy Myntti. If you want to tell us a little about yourself first—about your background, your educational background, where you're from, and how you came here, and all that. TH: All that good stuff. I'm from Provo. I was born and raised here. I went to Provo High School, and Dixon Jr. High, where I started playing in the orchestra in seventh grade, and by the time I was in ninth grade I was in the local symphony, the Utah Valley Symphony, the adult orchestra. That proved to be a real advantage. That put me about a decade ahead of most people and their experiences. I can go back to that later. [Then I went to] Brigham Young University [as a] music education major. Is this the time to tell you about the honors? I was the “Outstanding Music Education” major. While I was there, [I earned] a Master's. I was also principal violist in the Philharmonic and we did a world premiere of a Vaughan Williams opera—not a world premiere, a hemisphere premier, out of the Pilgrim's Progress, which I'm sure you know- that story by [John] Bunyan. I also earned a Master's there in music education, at the same time I was trying to teach full-time and stay out of Vietnam. CM: Where were you teaching? TH: I was teaching at Dixon Jr. High School and eventually Provo High, as well as several elementary schools. CM: Your alma mater— TH: I was taking my old teacher's place. He wanted me to come to Dixon. CM: Oh, how nice! TH: He's the fellow who started orchestra string things in Utah Valley, essentially. CM: What was his name? TH: John Hilgendorf. You may not have heard that but many of his children are still around, the Furr family in Orem and Loveless in Salt Lake. He contributed a lot to the Utah Symphony and several of his students taught at BYU. He's an old German fellow who, after his mission in Ostpreussen, in East Prussia, 1 now Poland—they would give you a ticket to go back to your home or to Utah and he didn't go around the corner to his old home-he came to Utah. He had to work as a cowboy. Here's this marvelous violinist working as a cowboy for a long time. And he finally got married to a pianist and they decided to ride the circuit in southern Utah. They went from city to city, trading lessons, violin, viola, cello, and piano lessons, for food and housing and building a clientele and—that's just a little bit more history than you want to know. He was well ahead of his time. CM: Oh, it's interesting. TH: In Richfield back in the 1930s, he had what he called a baby orchestra. He brought in a number of very small violins from Germany. I found a book that he was using, and he had kids playing full orchestra, well, full string instruments sections (Suzuki is all unison playing) and they were just six, seven, and eight. A full string orchestra, five decades before Suzuki? He was doing it with the German method in the middle of Utah. There are newspaper articles about what he did. CM: That's fascinating. TH: And there's another one of his students, who's retired here in Orem, Gordon Childs. Who would you know from BYU, the older days? David Dalton, he would be major force over there. Quentin Nordgren, who wrote their theory book. And then several of them played with Utah Symphony. Provo School District gave him a contract and a scholarship to BYU. Late in his I came through after Gordon Childs. He was retiring about that time and they held the position for two or three years, until I graduated. And I started at Dixon, and then went to Provo High. I taught in every school in the Provo district eventually. CM: Oh, really. TH: In the 1980s I went to the University of Arizona- Tucson to get a doctorate in instrumental conducting. And I spent, what, seventeen years at Timpview High School. I believe I worked for twenty- four years, twenty-six years in Provo School District. During that time, I also was the assistant conductor and principle violist and recording director and string coach and main recruiter for the Mormon Symphony, it started as the Mormon Youth Symphony and Chorus, which was a misnomer, ages eighteen to thirty. That's what a youth symphony was in those days in Europe. Mostly BYU and U of U [University of Utah] students. But as we started getting a lot of adults in and retired members of the Utah Symphony, we kept the youth name on the chorus. It was the only full-time full orchestra with its own chorus in the world! You had some choruses with instruments; they'd have a pickup orchestra. But Mormon Youth Sym. was organized as an orchestra with a chorus by Jay Welch, who was the assistant conductor at the [Mormon] Tabernacle Choir and I was his assistant for five years. At one point we were combined with the Tab Choir. I was offered the assistant conductor post of the orchestra and I declined it. He brought in Bob Bowden, who'd been working with the Boston Symphony, and Jerry [Jerold] Ottley to be the two assistants with the Tab Choir. So it was Tab Choir, Youth Chorus, and an orchestra. Two assistants—and I was the string specialist, the assistant in that area. 2 CM: Wow! TH: And then that went on to—they split that off after a year and it became the—eventually, the Mormon Symphony and Youth Choir. Tabernacle Choir went its own way. In 2000, what, twenty five years later, we'd been pushing all this time to make an adult orchestra, the orchestra was incorporated into the Tab Choir and named the Orchestra at Temple Square. It was needed because you just cannot travel the Tab Choir with an organ or two pianos. They don't carry organs around with them very well. And a piano or two does not accompany that well. It's not the right sound. It's pretty anemic. They had the vision. (Laughs) Not the spiritual vision, but (laughter) got the vision of the idea and created the orchestra at Temple Square and retired Bob Bowden and myself out of the orchestra and youth chorus and made that the training chorus for the Tabernacle Choir, which you don't see very often. They're required to recycle through that training choir on a regular basis—the Tabernacle Choir people are that is. That's a whole other history I don't need to go through. But I spent thirty years there. While I was doing that, I was also doing the Utah Valley Youth Symphony organization, which we inherited. I started with it when I was in ninth grade. When I started teaching in about 1970, we inherited it. BYU no longer wanted it. They needed somebody to take it and we took that from a small group to five orchestras and traveled worldwide with them. We've taken them to Carnegie Hall five, six times. During that time, I took Timpview High School's orchestra to Carnegie Hall and, of course, an orchestra to Eastern Europe. We were the first high school groups behind the Iron Curtain after it fell, in Czechoslovakia and Hungary. And it was during the Gulf War. We were supposed to have gone—no, it was during the Bosnian war. We were supposed to have gone to Yugoslavia and had to cancel that part of the trip. We were the first youth symphony to go to Carnegie Hall from Utah. And that was really my work with Youth Symphony that caught their attention. They got the reputation for the high school orchestra and then I took our orchestra here, which is the first university orchestra, obviously the first from Utah, to Carnegie Hall. And on that day, I had the Youth Symphony there as well, so I did two concerts the same day with two different orchestras, in Carnegie Hall, and that's never been done. So, let's see. I told you my education and my experience, and background. CM: Was your family musical? TH: My mother sang in church very badly. (Laughter) Dad had an ear problem—his ears were damaged. It was very painful for him to come to the concerts but he came to every one of them. His cousin, Chester, was a fine organist and he was a legend in Southern Utah, some inside stories that I found through working in the Tabernacle, through Roy Darley, the Tabernacle organist.

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