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,

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.

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. He and Roy were on missions at the same time. One in Washington—I guess they may have replaced each other as organists. They'd send them on music missions and they pulled Ray Darley into the Tabernacle and when my cousin, Chester Hill, came back, they sent him to Ricks College to head up the music department there. I was able to bring him down and have a couple of concerts with him. When Symphony Hall opened in Salt Lake, we'd take the Youth Symphony in yearly and do a concert. Eventually, we sponsored a

worldwide, an international, piano competition for Kawai pianos and he stepped in once when one of our soloists couldn't make it.

[10:04.2]

CM: And this was when you were with the Youth Symphony?

TH: Utah Valley Youth Symphony.

CM: Utah Valley Youth Symphony.

TH: Just before I came here.

CM: When did you start here and how did that come about?

TH: About 1991 or1992. I can't remember, exactly.

CM: So it was still Utah—UVCC?

TH: Technical College, yeah. I think it may have changed just as I got here.

CM: To the community college.

TH: I believe it just moved over to UVCC.

MF: We moved from community college to state college in 1993.

TH: Yes so I was here already for a year or two. I had left the Youth Symphony about 1990 due to health problems, which had been plaguing me for a decade and of course, as soon as I left, I finally got some help. (Laughs) And I was feeling better and Wayne Erikson, the head of the department came and said, "Terry, would you like to come over and start and orchestra program?" Which it was very unique because Wayne and I didn't get along. We'd both been at Provo High and it was very competitive. As it turns out he'd gone to one of my students, Britton Davis, and asked him, and Britton said, "No, go ask Terry." (Laughs). Britton is retired from the Alpine School District. He was at Canyon View Junior High.

CM: The name sounds really familiar.

TH: His wife, Christine—they both play in Utah Valley Symphony. She's been Principle Second of the orchestra at Temple Square.

CM: So what sort of a program was—?

TH: Here when I came?

CM: —was Wayne running. What was here before—?

TH: He had a band.

CM: Just band.

TH: He had a band, concert band, which provided a pep band and that's really, I'm sure, how the whole thing got started, as a pep band for the basketball games. No football games. But they were offering some history and theory classes and a chorus.

CM: Were they transferrable to BYU?

TH: Yes, they were. And they coordinated it with BYU so it worked out. I was talking to President Romesburg—his wife taught with me at Timpview, and they had seen my work there. I did a faculty party one Christmas and brought out the three orchestras I had there at the school, like 120-150 kids and we did a Christmas sing-a-long and then Phantom of the Opera and he was quite impressed with that. So he opened up a position and Wayne felt that position should have a choral man. They could get more students in faster. So, they hired Larry Johnson [Professor, Director of Music Education] and so I went on another year. I was teaching there full-time, running to the Tabernacle evenings and weekends, squeezing in part-time here just to do the orchestra class. For two years, so that put us into the third year and I talked to Mrs. Romesburg one day and said, "Help me. I can't do all of this anymore." There's a miracle and another position opened up, which was rare for two positions in a row, in music and they decided they would advertise, fly it as a string thing. And so, even though I was the orchestra director here, I applied and went through the process and got the position.

CM: Of the string—what did you—?

TH: String position or orchestra director. Head of the string department or director of orchestras. They're kind of interchangeable, those names. And so I left Provo School District and came over full- time. And it was a fun time. It took me three more years. Usually the third year's where it starts to get good—it started falling together. In two more years, it really built into something strong. Were you with us when we were asked to play at the state music convention in St. George? I had started with 9 students and in 5 years were featured at the state Music Ed. Conference.

JM: No, I came in about a year or two after that.

TH: We did that my fifth year, but my third full-time year. And that was a stunning success when we, but I was a little disappointed. When they usually invite the university orchestras in, they usually give them a full concert. They made us share with a jazz band and, of course, we only got a half hour. But we surprised them. We went in with a very large orchestra and played Tchaikovsky. Brought them to tears with Hook [movie]—soundtrack from Hook. (Laughter) And got a standing ovation, it really put us on the map.

Shortly after that, couple of years after that, 2000.I received the first Trustees Award, which was significantly different than what it is now. The stipend was far greater and there were some other benefits to the program, some funding for special projects that aren't offered with that honor now.

CM: You got in there at the right time!

TH: Yeah! That was an interesting year because evidently, that was my golden year.

CM: What year was that, again?

JM: About 2000, 2001?

TH: Yeah, 2000, 2001. The American String Teachers Organization—they honored me as the Outstanding University String Professor that year for Utah. It wasn't national. They invited me to conduct the Utah All State Orchestra and then I received the Ragan Award what do they call that? The Ragan Theater Award? Where they had me do two nights of concerts with my orchestras, so I had my four orchestras there. The Youth Symphonies which I was doing again, and the college orchestras in two nights of concerts and the idea was to honor me but also to raise some funds for something I wanted to do. What I did was buy stand lights for the theater (laughs) so we can do dark things, we were going to do some things with film. I think—I hope they still have the lights down there in the theater. We didn't make a lot of money, but we had a great time. Let's see, this was the flyer on it (papers shuffling) and there's the dinner and the buffet. That's on the back, so you'll have that for your history. That was a picture they took the first time I was in Carnegie Hall.

CM: That's you.

TH: Yes, that's when I was young. When you walk out on stage—if you look at a Carnegie Hall picture, there's a little hole over the door and you have to be careful when you go on stage. They'll put a ladder up, a very tall ladder, and a professional photographer will be up there taking stills. At that time, we paid the guy four hundred dollars for some pictures. When I walked off stage, he handed me the film and said, “Go get it developed.” (Laughs) But I got them all.

CM: How much was that? Probably pretty expensive?

TH: No, it cost about ten bucks to get it developed.

CM: That's not bad.

TH: That's not too bad. Here's another on the other side of the TV from the stage.

CM: Exciting!

TH: Kind of fun. Anyway, we used that for the posters all around campus. It was fun to walk around campus and see that.

CM: I bet. Yeah.

TH: It is four feet by two and a half feet. Anyway—

CM: So, I assume students had to try out for orchestra and all those?

TH: No.

CM: No? They just take your class?

TH: Yeah, I just let them take the class. The winds and brass had to be appointed and approved by the band director.

CM: Oh, okay.

TH: The only time I had any trouble was when a student wouldn't read the description of the class and get the band director's permission.

CM: Okay. But most of them, surely, were music students in high school—

TH: Oh, yeah. Absolutely.

CM: —had previous training—

TH: And a lot of them had come through my Youth Symphony program and Timpview High School.

MF: What year was the bachelor's degree implemented?

TH: Nineteen seventy?

MF: No, here.

TH: Here. That's after I left. I'll tell you about that. They were always promising it.

MF: What year did you leave here?

TH: 2004, 2005?

MF: 2004, 2005. Okay.

TH: Yeah, so that came after. They were always promising. They were giving us little nudges. But I knew nothing was ever going to happen. My uncle had an acquaintance, well, a business partner on the Board of Regents, the governor's committee, and I saw him one day at dinner. And his kid went to Timpview, so he recognized me. And he came over to talk to me and he started talking about, kind of bragging a little bit, about how they get together out on the fishing boat and decide what programs we could have and when. That information never came down through any of the official things. He told about what the timeline was to when we’d get that bachelor's degree. By the way, the University of Utah's music department was fighting it like crazy. Tooth and nail. They thought it would really hurt them. It didn't. BYU would be the one that got hurt and they really never did either because they limited their size. They didn't want a large program.

[19:55.0]

We were getting a lot of students who came here to get married but didn't want to go to BYU or couldn't get in, before they raised the out of state tuition when it was the same as BYU's tuition. I got a lot of fine musicians from back east. Soon after the legislature felt they had to make money off them, we lost most of those students. But, I think they, what did they do? They finally gave us a two-year degree?

And they were inching along. We could piggy-back on somebody else's degree a little bit, for a while, but the four year thing didn't come until they had run the whole plan.

MF: Sometimes, an associate’s degree would band together under Integrated Studies—

TH: That's the one I was talking about, yeah.

MF: And that would be a way to build enrollment and to demonstrate that there is a critical mass of students that would support a four-year program.

TH: Which was good, but it was really hard on our best students. They'd commit to that with a vision of there being something in a couple or three or four years, and some of those students are just graduating now because they had to put it off, and put it off, and put it off. It's the same story with building us a concert hall. This is where it was supposed to be. (Laughs)

MF: Which is a segue into a question I want to ask. Just to get it on the record. We all know the struggles with facilities and space here at UVU, but there’s no department, I don't think, that has suffered more than the music department—

TH: No. Not even close

MF: —in this regard. I'd just like to hear the stories of how you operated and how you made things work under the limited facilities that you had.

TH: Okay. Yes, there's a whole bunch of that. There are a thousand ways I could go. Is that in here? No, I'll find it later. When I started, I could share the band room. Is that the fifth floor?

JM: Yep.

TH: It was just a small classroom. Gunther Trades fifth floor, which is the former Gunther Trades Building. I don't know that was the floor that had the welding on it, or not? Anyway, we had a room over in the corner. And after a couple of years, they decided they could combine two rooms. Tear a wall down and redo it, but they did it all backwards, because they were afraid of leaving the post in the middle, so it didn't get any bigger and our groups had gotten much larger. We couldn't start that year because it wasn't finished so I was holding class out under the walkway and fighting off the mosquitoes. That was kind of fun. Every year, there will be one or two more rooms. (Laughter)

The office was very interesting. You know, when you first come, you get an office. I got a drawer. (Laughter) But the office was the security office and I think it's become that again. I'm not sure. But it had an office with two desks. Our secretary was in another room that was really in an air maintenance room, had these great big—you couldn't hear yourself in there. That was the band director's office, Wayne Erikson, also the department chair. Then the chorus director had a little office in the suite, there were the three. And there was a desk out front. I had one and the adjuncts each got to share my desk, actually. All the drawers were assigned out to the adjuncts. (Laughter)

The second year, they threatened to give me an office and what they did was give me a cubicle next door along with a bunch of Education people and there was no place for me to lock up my instruments. I had to have—and there's no place for any private instruction or to preview and study anything, so I said, "No thanks." So my office was my car. You can't play you violin around them and there was no piano.

I had lived with for twenty-six years in the Provo School District because I had traveled—I had taught elementary, junior high, and high school every day for nearly thirty years. So half the day, I was at a different school so I was used to doing that. So my office was really at home and I worked out of the trunk of my car.

Third year, they found an office for me, I think up in the trailers. Up there, which I found out, was infested with a bunch of hornets, which I'm allergic to, so— (laughter) I finally discovered that I could take the screen off the window and take it down to Jones Paint and Glass and have a new screen put in, and then we could keep them out. And then we—I fumigated it. (Laughs)

CM: Oh, my gosh!

TH: But I couldn't do much volume-wise because there's a conference room next door and a door that went right in. I remember listening one day. I was testing a new system to see what it sounded like and I'd put on the James Bond soundtrack and some lady appeared at the door and said, "You sexist." (Laughter) I said, "Okay, I won't do that again.

CM: From the English department?

TH: Yeah! Yeah, I think she was. (Laughter) You're not from the English department, are you?

CM: No, but I know some of them and it sounds like something they'd say.

TH: It was quite colorful up there at the time. (Laughter)

CM: Funny!

TH: They weren't happy about the noise I was making there, so, I think, the second year of that, they built some even smaller rooms above the Black Box Theater and you'd have to go up a really long staircase and back around. Mine was the furthest away and the smallest one. I could almost pull my chair out (laughter) and hit the wall. That was kind of fun. It was sweet up there. We had a good time. Nobody complained, although I could hear the classroom underneath me, so I had to be careful.

Then the next year, the drafting department moved out. I think they came over here, to the new building, and the fourth floor became available. And there was a room you could open the doors in and I took the ceiling tiles outs so that the sound would mix and you could get a decent rehearsal sound. And they gave me the office right across the hall, which is really a fishbowl. Glass all around. And I finally had an office. And then they started telling me the fumes coming down the hall from the art department was going to kill me. (Laughter) We had a good time with that.

TH: So, I at one point had negotiated for a large room that would have been perfect for what we wanted to do. It would have been great for the band and the orchestra and all, but they came back and said, "Well, would you consider going into this drafting room?" I said, "Well, the ceiling's too low." "Yeah, but we need to do that for pottery and it's too hard to keep it warm. Too hard to heat it and cool it." So, it's still the pottery room, I think. It's where they do all that, in the Gunther Trades.

MF: It's really amazing that the perseverance and the achievement of the students under conditions that were, obviously were far from ideal.

TH: Oh, the kids are great! Yes, they're awesome. We tried to help them out by—you know, we had no concert hall so the first concerts were in the old ballroom, which is now Centre Stage Theater. And you know, it was a ballroom, which is better than a basketball court, but it's about the same thing. I think I had twelve kids my first year. I brought in maybe six, eight kids from Timpview, who volunteered to come and help. Very fine people who now have their own shows and grants. The Lowell family, and the—I think some of the Duttons may have helped me out. They work with Andy Williams and, you know, the Osmonds. And they happened to be in the first one or two concerts. They were my students.

CM: Interesting!

TH: It was kind of fun. The younger ones. The second generation.

CM: The third generation.

TH: Or third generation. Marvelous talents. The next year, I had a clarinet and a harp, which is just—how do you deal with that? So I did every clarinet concerto with strings you could find and every harp concerto. The harpist turned out to be Miss UVSC, Miss Utah, and she went on study at Julliard.

CM: Who's this?

TH: Mittion. Melanie Mittion. Her sister plays harp. They're big harp promoters here in Utah Valley and they are very wealthy, successful people, the Mittions are. She had her own apartment in New York while she was studying there. But she was here and helped me out that first and second year with my little orchestra. It grew much more the second year. The third year it was a good size. I've had a lot of kids come in from Orem High and leave the next week. It would have been great that year, but I had to wait one more year and then it hit, and from then on it was really big. It was—I think the only thing that competed on our level was Ricks. I think we're a little bigger. They weren't happy when I announced we were the biggest in Utah.

[30:00.3]

TH: —the biggest in Utah. They thought they were in Utah. (Laughter) He was a former student of mine.

MF: You mentioned the Osmonds—was there some relationship, or working relationship, with UVSC and Osmond Studios that were here at the time?

TH: Only—during our time we could—the studios were dead. Osmond Studios had died when I got here. But their sound engineer came over. He may yet be here. He's a marvelously talented man. And I can't remember his name right now, but he was their recording specialist and we worked with him on lots of fun things. He'd do the TV stuff. Yeah, they brought him over. We did get—

MF: Was it Tom? Tom Neilson?

TH: Yes.

MF: He's retired now.

TH: He's retired?

MF: I thought it was Tom.

TH: Yes, it was. Great to work with.

MF: Yes.

TH: Yeah. And he really knew his stuff. We had some other people. Wisland? He came down from U of U. I had worked with him on some PBS specials in the Tabernacle.

CM: Mike Wisland?

TH: Mike, yes. We were nominated for a Grammy [Award] for a show. We did the mix down at Burbank Studios and he was there when we did that mix down.

CM: Yeah, we're going to do some things with the wax cylinders with him.

TH: Oh! That should be fun! Is he going to read them with the laser?

CM: Uh-hmm.

TH: Yeah, that's new technology. Should really be really fun.

CM: Yeah, I think so too.

TH: Yeah. And there's another one that came over. I remember the head of that department for a while—gee, I can't remember his name. I decided I wanted to do a Cinderella thing but it wasn't the normal one you hear. It wasn't the music you hear. There's a British pops composer in the '40s and '50s who did some marvelous stuff and he wrote a little Cinderella thing. And I wanted to put some slides to it, and he put together some slides with his own kids and it was really, really cool. I received great cooperation outside of the music department. It was phenomenal.

CM: That's great.

TH: Especially when that new building went up next door. Talk about buildings—that was the big thing I was pushing for so they had a good place to play. When they built the Ragan Theater, we went in,

thought it would be great—turned out to be a lecture hall. Acoustics didn't happen. The worst acoustics in the world. I couldn't make an orchestra sound good in there. They couldn't even hear each other and so the orchestra didn't look good or sound good.

We were invited over to the [LDS] Institute. One of our students was in the orchestra and her dad was the head of the Institute. It developed into a yearly and annual devotional that would be the orchestra at the institute. And that was a good place to play. It's the shoebox style that you get the great concert halls out of. The first concert halls used to be tennis courts. The high ceiling and that square—you either get the fan-shape like Carnegie Hall or you get the shoebox. That's what was over there. They loved having us and we'd do LDS things. The first year, I did all LDS hymns full orchestra. Nobody ever hears that. Got some Crawford Gates stuff and some other things in. The year of the Olympics, we did all the Olympic fanfares and we had the one—what was his name? Blaine? He was—

JM: I can’t remember.

TH: We had one of our students conduct the orchestra, but he'd carried the torch, so he had the outfit and the torch, so he brought it.

JM: It was Burke Jenson.

TH: Yes, Burke. Yes. And he was that missionary in Texas that had been beat up with a baseball bat and wasn't supposed to live and even the Baptists were fasting for him. He was a student here. It was quite a moving experience that day to have him conducting the Olympic fanfares.

CM: Of course.

TH: We did all three of them. That's really hard stuff. The originals. Very few orchestras in the state can play those.

CM: Really?

TH: Yes. We were able to get the real music.

CM: Were you part of that?

JM: Yes, I was there!

TH: Yes. Trumpet parts in C. Four of them. It was hard stuff, wasn't it? (Laughter) But we had a great time with it. We just happened to have a couple of really good trumpets at the time. Anyway, concert halls—back to that. So they remodeled it. It didn't help anything, so we looked around and take them where they could have good concerts. We did a couple of concerts at Sundance up in the, what is it, Rehearsal Hall? And found out you could either have heat or acoustics. (Laughter) The heater was too loud. We did Rhapsody in Blue up there. Had a good time. I took them down to Provo Tabernacle one Christmas. That's the one where we did music from Home Alone. That was a lot of fun. We went to the cathedral in Salt Lake—

CM: It's beautiful.

TH: —and did a concert there, what? We opened up some buildings out at Thanksgiving Point. So, I’d take them out. We even did a couple in the new ballroom that they built next door. That was okay, except they didn't turn the heat on. (Laughter) You know, with woodwinds, you can't. Their instruments won't play. Well, their pitch goes one way and the strings go another and when it gets cold, they really have a hard time. I remember the one at Thanksgiving Point though. The light was on a slider and it was on the other side of the room and somebody's back there playing with it while I was trying to conduct and they turned them off altogether and we couldn't read the music. (Laughter)

CM: Like a little kid back there playing with something.

TH: Somebody was, and the orchestra just got worse and worse and worse. I couldn't figure out—I've only had that experience one other time. That would be the symphony in San Francisco in the cathedral there. And my percussion people—they can't afford to heat it. My percussion people had left the door open and so it just got colder and colder and colder and I thought they'd stop the concert. Their fingers wouldn't move. They couldn't play instruments. (Laughter) All I had to do was close the door. (Laughter) So many things as a conductor. You can't just get up and conduct.

CM: Things you have to be aware of and make sure they're just right.

TH: There's a universe and then you get to do the music.

MF: You wonder how these marching bands ever manage it all!

TH: Well, they don't play in tune. (Laughter) They don't do anything very sophisticated. We now have plastic mouthpieces so they don't freeze to their lips.

MF: Oh boy. I know that when we built the library and we have the lecture auditorium attached, the discussion was, you know, the thought was, it could be acoustical—

TH: I haven't seen that.

MF: —as well as, for speakers and I was quickly informed that they're really contra each other. You either design one way or you have to design it the other because of the reverberations—

TH: Yep.

MF: —that you need or not need.

TH: Salt Lake Tabernacle's great for speaking. It was lousy for orchestras. They raised the stage so high when we were there that people in the audience couldn't hear the orchestra. The organ, it was really—I finally brought in some people from LA. John Neil, who is with Twentieth Century Fox, did the soundtracks, all the board work, recorded the Star Wars, Star Trek, all those movies. He came up one day and we went around the Tabernacle. We ended up dropping plastic shields behind the orchestra so the sound didn't get under the balcony. The reason that hall works is the balcony is a bridge and it's not

13 attached on the back walls. But the apex of the sound is for the speaker and the orchestra is down in front of it. Choir sounds okay. But the orchestra bounces strangely around the room. You can sit in the balcony one place and get a second clarinet and move over here and you get the third trumpet. (Laughter) And it's supposed to blend. And so it's a real challenge. We won't deal with that.

Our concerts in Provo Tabernacle were quite good because that's one of the best concert halls in the world. Mischa Elman, the greatest violinist before Heifetz said that was the number two hall that he loved to play in. I got to do a concert with him when I was in the 11th grade.

CM: Wow!

TH: I'll never forget that concert. José Iturbi-maybe you've seen some of his old Hollywood movies, and Mischa Elman—he did a lot of conducting. Back in the 1940s, if you're looking at any movies during the war, they've got him conducting. He conducted—and this great artist, Mischa Elman, we were playing along accompanying and all of a sudden, I hear this sound, the conductor yelled "Pianissimo!" which means quiet and the whole orchestra finally goes like this (gestures). Then you can hear him. To a musician, that's quite a story. (Laughter)

Oh, so did I finish concert halls? I took them everywhere I could so they could get great experiences. Do you remember what it was like when you played the first note in Carnegie Hall?

JM: Nothing like I'd ever done before.

TH: All of a sudden it was in tune. All of a sudden it blended. There's this great, rich sound. Half an hour later, you're going, Wow! What have I just experienced? Right?

JM: Uh-hmm.

[40:00.0]

CM: That's amazing.

TH: That's what a good hall can do. So, I spent a lot of time trying to get a hall built here. Did you ever see the pictures of the proposed concert hall?

CM: I haven’t.

MF: I've seen the exterior. Just kind of an artist rendering picture.

TH: Yeah, I've got it here on one of the programs. I figure if I put it on all the programs—(Laughter)

MF: Ha-ha, very good!

TH: There it is! And then we did some research. I’d actually have it up in the concerts. I’d do that. But we did some research and found out that—oh, it'll be in here somewhere (shuffling papers.) Oh, I'll look through it. Just for fun. How much square footage we have for the arts compared to other—because they're talking about it. Here's Snow College. Here's us. (Laughter)

MF: Right. That looks like a chart I made for the library before we built the new one.

TH: That’s probably where they got the idea. (Laughter) But that was working for a while. Interesting. I watched it in three universities and also here, they built the music department facilities after they built everything else. Now if you notice the list of what's going to be built here, the Music Department/ Arts thing was always number two and then they build the number one and then there's a new number one, but the arts things is number two and it's stayed that way for two decades. BYU did it. They spent a hundred years until they finally had given up and built the Fine Arts Center. University of Arizona, where I did my degree, they’d get the money raised and the new president would come in and he had a pet project and thanked us for donating our money to the new project. They finally got theirs done. I was conducting summer orchestras at University of Utah one summer while they were using jackhammers in the basement because they had taken the money and they were building their new television facility. (Laughter) It's the way it works. It's how it all happens here. Maybe someday. If somebody steps up and gives twenty-five or forty million [dollars] it'll suddenly be on top!

MF: That's a driving force. (Laughter)

TH: That seems to be it. We played—what else did we do try to make it interesting for you guys? Tried to—

MF: I was trying to think of the—to go back and kind of re-list all the places I heard you say you’ve played: Carnegie Hall, and you went to Europe, to Hungary and to Czechoslovakia; and behind the Iron Curtain.

TH: Yes, that trip I did with the Youth Symphony. Many of those kids are married now.

MF: Okay. So just trying to go back and kind of talk about the places that you've gone with UVU students, and UVSC students.

TH: I listed most of them. The cathedral in Salt Lake. Park City. After we came back from Carnegie Hall, the lady who put us in there, her father had been the promoter of all these soloists around the world and they'd put people in the Provo Tabernacle for years and I can't remember her name right now. And she was on the board at Park City. She held a—between the two concerts in Carnegie Hall, she had a reception for us where we raised funds for the music department. We got some donations. So I ran from concert to reception to concert (laughs.) That's what you do when you're there.

So we did the Eccles Center part of the Park City Fine Arts. Kevin Bacon followed the next week. Arturo Sandoval, the world's greatest trumpeter, was there the week before or close by. So we were part of that. I mentioned the cathedral in Salt Lake, Thanksgiving Point, Sundance, Provo Tabernacle, and St. George for the conference. And then I'd take them out to the schools. We went to Timpview—that was before you were there, Provo High. That's how I do my recruiting. I'd go share their concert with them. And we went into the library. You were very kind to let us do two concerts, I think? A recital, and the acoustics were quite good. I liked it there (laughs.)

CM: In the old building?

TH: The old library.

MF: The old library.

CM: Up on the fourth floor?

MF: Under the rotunda.

TH: It was great. I thought it was in appropriate place too. We were close to the music section-

CM: In the M [call number section.] (Laughter)

TH: —which was fun. We were invited to a thing in the Salt Lake Tabernacle but we couldn't make it work. Scheduling conflicts. Can you think of any other places we went?

JM: We did some high schools throughout the state, like down in Richfield.

TH: Yeah, that was—we did a tour, Richfield and Grand Junction. Not Grand Junction. Durango.

JM: Yeah.

TH: I'd always wanted to ride the train so we went to Durango. (Laughter) And I got to ride the train. Monticello. That was really quite good, in Monticello. Richfield, that little class just went crazy when we did The Firebird there. We started a whole new area of research for them. They discovered Russian literature, and all kinds of fun things.

CM: Oh, neat!

TH: Loa, Utah, you may have been gone when we went to Loa.

JM: I don’t remember that one.

TH: I went to Loa/Bicknell because my best friend in high school and college was from there and he has since passed on but I wanted to go and do something. That was fun for me to go back to Loa.

CM: That's a beautiful area. By Capitol Reef.

TH: Yes, just gorgeous. Kind of fun stuff. Most of the traveling, I could raise funds easier for the Youth Symphony, so we took them to London and Paris and Vienna a couple of times. Salzburg. Oh good grief.

CM: Why was that?

TH: Because it's a private organization. We could just—there's nobody to tell us no.

CM: Okay. (Laughter)

TH: That's why we incorporated it. Because the music isn't extrinsically rewarding-especially orchestra. What extrinsic rewards do they ever get? You know, the marching band can go to a parade somewhere and spend a lot of money to be cold, which the local people haven't figured out that it is winter here yet.

(Laughter) That's a little sarcastic. But they just don't get anything, you know. The string kids, they don't—when we do the chorus and orchestra in Salt Lake, the chorus wanted to have parties all the time. They'd have the party and invite the orchestra and they'd stay home and practice. It's a different kind of animal, an orchestra person is. It's a different thing and you treat them differently.

00:47:28

But boy, when we'd do those tours, we'd take them to a concert- the LA Phil [harmonic] or the London Symphony- and then do concerts in the same places they did concerts. And then we'd do the LDS things too. We'd go play at the temple in London, or whatever. And in Cadiz, Spain we did a fundraiser for the Red Cross in—I've got a little story I'll have to tell you about that. In Innsbruck, Austria, the Swarovski Crystal Factory had converted part of their outlet into-which is really a museum-into a concert hall. And we'd called a friend of ours who came here—and that's another story I need to tell you, about what I did for the kids to make it interesting. We called up our friend who had been here and done some things on campus and said, "Could you help us?" This is the Youth Symphony we're doing. She said, "Yes, you've been to Carnegie Hall. I'll help you out." So she called up the city government—

CM: In Innsbruck?

TH: In Innsbruck. She lives there and in Vienna, and she arranged for us to do the inaugural concert in their concert hall as a fundraiser with the city Chamber of Commerce and the fathers, city fathers, and we raised eighteen thousand dollars to buy a tractor for a poor family in Romania.

CM: Wow!

TH: And that's the kind of things we were doing. But I've got to get back to Cadiz, because you need this story somewhere (laughs.) We were doing a concert in the courtyard of a monastery, and it was supposed to be televised nationally and the wind came up and just blew the music everywhere. We finally had somebody standing at each stand holding the music up. The TV cameras went away-that wasn't interesting. But after the concert- Cadiz is built on kind of an island. You go over a hill to the other side, the kids were invited over there to an LDS chapel for some refreshments and dinner so we packed up, went over the hill, went to the chapel, the chapel room we had was about this size, it was four rooms separated by curtains and one of them was this size and they have the food spread out for us and they had done something really, really special for us, which you can't get in Europe, they had located green Jell-O. (Laughter) And so we had the green Jell-O recipe.

MF: Just what you wanted.

CM: A little bit of home in Spain. (Laughter) Oh, that's sweet!

TH: Yeah, I thought you'd enjoy that.

[50:00.5]

TH: Talking about this lady from Vienna, Margaret Runez—in 1998? Gordon Childs, the other student of John Hilgendorf, is living here. He has become, we're both violists, but we can do violin and the others, but he had become big in viole d’amore. I'm sure that's a big one on your list. A viole d’amore is a Renaissance instrument that has thirteen strings, or something? And has a cupid on the head instead of a scroll. It isn't very loud. Were you here when they did the viole d’amore conference?

JM: No, I wasn't.

TH: He came to me and said, "This is how you get your tenure." I said, "Okay, I'm interested." (Laughter) "We want to have the Ninth Annual International Viole d’amore Conference here." I said, "Okay, how much does it cost?" And so we got together and put it together. We had people from nine or ten foreign countries, people from New York. About twenty-seven people came here for four days and we did all the viole d’amore literature, we commissioned a new piece, a new concerto, by a local composer, Rob Millett, who has recently had a stroke, unfortunately. He used to be a program director at KBYU, a programming director, a fine composer, too. I had him write it so he could use modern viola too. So he did. Did all of those concerts and we had hardly anybody show up. Nobody in Utah Valley's going to come to a—they don't even know what it is-a Viole d’amore Festival. I see their names of some of the performers on films when they film operas. Madam Butterfly has a big viole d’amore part—

CM: When was this?

TH: Nineteen-ninety-eight. We did it in the summer and it was a big success. Now Margaret, her husband teaches the Mozarteum [Mozarteum Conservatory] in Salzburg. He's also an organist at a chapel in Innsbruck and they have a home in Vienna. He just keeps on the train and they spend half the week in Vienna and half the week in Innsbruck. That was nice.

CM: Yeah. Not bad. Tough gig.

TH: Nice life. And for a vacation, they just get on the train and go through the Simplon Tunnel to Venice. (Laughter) We had her here and she did some concerts with us and showed the kids the old baroque violins that Mozart wrote music for and what the difference is, how to play the baroque music with a special bow. That's quite a specialty.

CM: Delightful!

TH: That's quite a unique experience for the kids. A major international artist. Plus, we brought in a string quartet from New York. This lady who got us into Park City, she was sponsoring a string quartet. Actually two different ones and we did recitals here, at Sundance, and they coach our own kids and they did a recital at—so a great opportunity! It's what Utah State had in residence. That was their big call and we were doing it here too. And then we'd take them out for fundraisers and we put them over at— what's Bruce's last name? Invented WordPerfect?

CM: Oh, Bastian.

TH: Yes, Bruce Bastian, his wife's home over here. She has a music room and they did a recital in there and we did one in a nice home up in the River Bottoms. We were getting some real interest. But we changed deans and there was a different thrust after that. So they didn't want the more high-brow stuff after that.

CM: And so now it's more—it became more—

TH: It became more pop LDS things. I don't know. After I left, I don't know where it went. We also played in the Scholarship Ball each year. Now there's a fun story there. Since you get the money after you succeed, (laughter) right? When I came on, we had no instruments. Had a one string bass. It was army surplus. And what else? Contrabassoon? No stringed instruments. So, I brought all my own instruments—cellos and a couple from Timpview High School, the string bass and went to the dean and said, "If you give us a viola, I could get a string quartet together. We could play for functions." So, they bought me a viola and I got the quartet together and they were supposed to play for the President's Ball and they didn't show up. Showed up the next night. They thought it was the next night.

CM: Oh dear!

TH: Oops! The next year, we were a lot bigger and we put in an orchestra and they did pretty good. The next year, we were huge and they featured us and we rented some original Disney stuff—

MF: Beauty and the Beast.

TH: Beauty and the Beast. It was actually the score from the opening six minutes of the movie.

CM: Wow!

TH: You can't get it anymore. And we brought in two soloist, one was our bass player. She sang the Beauty's part and I brought in a tenor from the Tabernacle. And that was hard. The trombones really had to struggle to do it. But they had a great time. From then on, we were a featured thing at the—

CM: At the Ball?

TH: Yes. It was that year. The next year, there's—somebody donated a million bucks after they heard us.

JM: Yeah, something like that.

CM: No kidding!

TH: We didn't get any of it. (Laughter)

CM: That doesn't seem fair!

TH: That was fun stuff.

CM: I'm sure the library did.

TH: It did. (Laughter) I hope so.

CM: That was my salary, right? (Laughter)

TH: Oh, we won't talk about salaries. (Laughter)

CM: No, we won't.

TH: That's no good. Let's see—what else? We commissioned—this-- --Rob Millett, who did the viole d’amore concerto? We commissioned him to do a set of LDS hymns that we could play at the Institute. One of them turned out to be quite good—Nearer My God to Thee and its story with the, what President? Cleveland, was it?

JM: Can't remember.

TH: The one that died after a week in office and Teddy Roosevelt took over. When the train moved with his [funeral bier] on it—when the train moved from city to city, they'd all be singing Nearer My God to Thee. It was really a big thing, big new hymn. So he took that and he set it to train music, which was really interesting. He did a couple of other hymns that I'd always wanted. That worked very well. And did we have him—? We had him do another thing.

JM: Yeah, I worked with him a couple of times.

TH: Yeah. Then Crawford Gates—don't know if you know Crawford Gates, he was the premier LDS composer during the '60s and '70s. Wrote Book of Mormon Symphony, wrote the music for the Cumorah Pageant. He was BYU's Department Chair when I was there. PI played in his orchestra and I'd not been in touch, but retired Judge Paxman came to me and said, "There's something we want to do." And I'd been to school with his daughter and they've been real supporters.

CM: They have been.

TH: Big time.

CM: Yeah, Shirley and Monroe.

TH: Yeah, yeah, Monroe and Shirley. They used to have a little ice cream parlor on the top floor in their house.

CM: I didn't know that (laughs.)

TH: When we were in high school, we could go there, with the black and white squares on the floor, and the bar—

CM: Why am I not surprised? (Laughter)

TH: —and a harp inside the doorway as you entered the house.

CM: Wonderful!

TH: His daughter played [the harp], Carolyn. Anyway, he came to us and said, "We’ve got this thing about, oh, Deacon—what's his name? This fellow who went in and befriended the lepers in Hawaii. Duncan [Father Damien]. And Crawford has written this piece about him, and we'd like to do the premier." And so we learned it and had Crawford come and do the premier. Did we do that in Salt Lake too?

JM: Yeah, we did that at the Cathedral of the Madeleine.

TH: That's right. We did it at the Cathedral. Not bad!

CM: That's terrific! Great opportunities and connections with people that—you know?

TH: That's the idea.

CM: That's fascinating.

TH: Rhoda Von Young, we'd bring her in. She was a Steinway artist and lived here in Provo, so we had her do a concerto with the group. We brought over Diane Baker from BYU and just to have fun, we did Mozart's first piano concerto that he wrote when he was nine. (Laughter) So, just fun things. We tried to get all the basic literature. We figured the literature was the really fun thing for the students.

CM: Yes, makes the connection.

TH: So we tried to get—we did the John Williams, the fun stuff, but we also did most of the Beethoven symphonies. We did get the Utah Symphony's harpist, one of the top ten in the world. He had gotten himself into medical trouble and had to retire and he was fighting his way back. And he came here as a student, and gee, we did all the harp things we could find with him, and he taught me how to do them, since he'd studied in Russia and New York. He had his own Carnegie Hall debut. That was a real treat. We did the Gliere Harp Concerto. I think Dances Sacred and Profane—the Debussy, was the best.

CM: Do you know Helen Weeks, by any chance?

TH: Yes! I grew up with—well, she was a—was she your mother?

CM: No, no! Her family owned that little adobe house that's on campus. That pioneer house.

[1:00:06.1]

TH: Oh, was that hers?

CM: Uh-huh, and so we've interviewed her.

TH: Her husband was the postmaster.

CM: Right.

TH: He played in the Utah Valley Symphony with me when I was in ninth grade.

CM: Oh!

TH: And that same year, we did Madame Butterfly and I think, Faust,

CM: And she sang.

TH: -with Utah Valley Opera, and she sang Cho Cho San. No, I think she was the maid. But, oh, yes, I know Helen. I grew up with her son.

CM: Okay, uh-hmm. I just know her from-

TH: Yeah. So that's her house?

CM: Yeah, that's her family's house and so we kind of-

TH: So you know about the Weeks—

CM: —met with her a lot and talked with her and she let us take some of her things and make copies of them—

TH: Oh, they were always so good to me. Just tremendous people.

CM: Yeah, really interesting people. But yeah, I knew she was very proud of her singing days, her—the local operas and—

TH: Yeah, I'll never forget it.

CM: —and Tabernacle Choir.

TH: Can you imagine growing up and through high school and instead of doing your homework, going to opera rehearsal? (Laugher) I never practiced. I just went to rehearsals, but when you're in rehearsal four or five hours a day you learn to play. I remember we did, that same year, the Merry Widow? No, it was Faust. Gounod's Faust. And I showed up to the first performance and the conductor passed out three new pieces of music and said, "Okay, we're going to do these. The ballet's here tonight." We weren't expecting them. So, well, now the ballet's in. (Laughter) and I started playing and playing. I couldn't make one note sound good. And I didn't go back the next night and they called me up and said, "You’ve got to come back." So I went back and they showed me, Okay now, this is what the flats do. I'd never seen four flats or five flats (laughter) and to sight read it in the middle of an opera. But they were kind. (Laughter) I learned to play it, then took it to my lesson and my teacher would tell me what I'd learned and make it work. I was doing it all backwards.

But it helped me a lot because it gave me a different philosophy on what the kids could do. I threw it out there and they grab it and ran—they grab it and do it and they could do it much faster than if I had to teach it to them.

CM: Had to—yeah, learning the notes and all that.

TH: I gave them the great music that was fun to do. The idea was to keep it magical. Make it into an adventure. Every day was kind of an adventure. It was unique, another new thing. It wasn't, Well, okay, we’ve got to go fix the intonation again. And I'd leave a lot of things up to them. I respected them a lot that way. It got a little hard at Carnegie Hall because we wanted to do that same system and I had to break it down and fix every little thing anyway. But I had some great help. Some ladies that were teaching private lessons here stepped up and took the string players aside and said, "No, you can't hide anymore." (Laughter) But I took them and let them play in Carnegie Hall too.

CM: What a great experience.

TH: And that was a real treat for them. You just don't get in.

CM: So, have you kept up with, I mean, I know you've kept up with Jeremy, but some of the others? Has anyone gone on to a great musical career that you know of?

TH: Let's see—as I look over the years, I've had one of the oboe players from the Youth Symphony went to the Madrid Symphony.

CM: Oh, wow!

TH: One of my viola players from Timpview is in the Los Angeles Philharmonic. One of my French horn players from the Tabernacle is in the Boston Symphony. Another French horn player from the Tabernacle is in Hollywood and plays all the big French horn parts for the films. Our soloist from the Tabernacle is the trumpet soloist. From Provo High, one of my concert masters—she was concert master at the Atlanta [Symphony Orchestra] and now she's playing first violin in the Chicago Symphony. My first concert master at Provo High replaced me and taught there for many years. The college students here haven't had enough time. It's only been about six years for them to get pro things.

CM: Yeah, that's a good point.

TH: Can you think of any that have gone on?

JM: I can think of several that are teaching now, but—

TH: Of course, that was our—that's probably why. We wanted to make teachers.

CM: It's true.

TH: I’ve been in Las Vegas the last six years. When I retired here, I spent a year and went crazy so they wanted me down there so I went down, taught at two high schools—

CM: Oh, you're kidding!

TH: —opened a new one. Revived one that had won a Grammy Award.

CM: Wow!

TH: And we took them to London and took them to Carnegie Hall too.

CM: That's tremendous.

TH: And now a couple of those kids are moving in to the professional—do I have any teachers? A couple have tried. So I haven't been able to—people haven't been able to find me. I've seen some of my old Timpview kids down there in Vegas. Many of the same families, which is interesting.

CM: That's interesting.

TH: Who else? A lot of them—where they moved from here was in to the military band, which is kind of professional. They went to the National Guard band up here. And they're doing quite well.

CM: That's great! It's got to make you feel really proud and an accomplishment.

TH: Feels like maybe I've done something. Haven't wasted my time (laughs.) You don't choose music. It chooses you.

CM: I guess so.

TH: And, as Beethoven said, "Music is a severe mistress." It demands all day and all night and all your time and all your dedication. My girlfriends didn't like that. (Laughter) They didn't like sitting in the audience while I was on the stage.

CM: Oh yeah. Now if you had been in a rock band, maybe (laughs.)

TH: Yeah, they would have liked that. (Laughter) Well, I tried. I grew my hair out long for a while. (Laughter) Didn't help.

CM: Yeah, that's why I never became a pianist. (Laughter) My mom would have to hunt me down and force me to practice. I'd hide from her. I remember hiding. (Laughter)

TH: Your practicing's the hard part. That's why I did it with the orchestra so they didn't have to go home.

CM: Yeah. That's smart. (Laughter) Well, I wondered if you'd mind telling that story you were telling at the beginning about the land, and Mr. Kofford.

TH: Oh, Lou Kofford?

CM: Yes.

TH: Working in the Tabernacle in Salt Lake, we started recording with Covenant Records and so I got to know Lou Kofford and his wife somewhat, and we were at dinner one night and he said, "Okay, you're teaching at UVSC. Did you know I put that land deal together for them?" I said, "Tell me about it." He said, "Well, I was looking through Provo. I wanted to find a place for a mall and I bought some options. I was looking at downtown where the old Sears is—where RC Willey is- and a couple of blocks around there and some local businessmen in the area and they got word of it and they went out and picked up

options on all the houses and then drove the prices out of sight. So he said he was looking around for another thing and found the property up here where University Mall is, but in the process, he had looked at this area where we are, here, and he bought the options and put it together and went to Wilson Sorensen and said, "How about it?"

CM: Oh, okay.

TH: And Wilson went for it. Now his wife later came on board here to help us put together the Art Smart program, which was a foundation to fund education for elementary kids in the arts. It may have gone away because the dean’s office change it may still be around. I hope it is.

CM: That's neat. I hadn't heard that name before.

TH: Lou Kofford? Now it's kind of hidden out there because he was the realtor or something behind it.

CM: It's really interesting. And so he had bought up all the little farms and things like that?

TH: Or at least the options on them.

CM: The options on them. Okay.

TH: He put together the deal and here we are.

CM: The farms and the orchards. Yeah. Nobody's mentioned his name yet.

TH: He had the vision.

CM: That's great.

TH: Which it takes a bit of. Let's see, is there anything I need to go through here to show you?

CM: Do you have any questions, comments?

JM: Covered what I was thinking of.

TH: And more. (Laughs)

JM: Yeah. (Laughter)

TH: I did sponsor the Bass Festival. We try to do more things for the education thing. We never have enough string basses so I sponsored a string bass festival every year for several years. It's kind of fun to see twenty-five string bass kids standing on your stage rumbling away. Now these are articles about Carnegie. Programs. Programs. There's the viole d’amore. Think I've covered nearly all of that stuff. I tried to use faculty soloists too and we used our piano soloist a lot. She liked that, and her son. We had them.

CM: What was the size of the faculty when you retired here?

TH: What did we have, five? Five, four full-time? We have Bryce and Larry and Wayne and myself.

JM: It was Diane, actually.

TH: And Diane was almost full time—it was a quasi-full-time.

JM: Yeah.

TH: Yeah.

CM: And Larry just passed away, you said?

TH: Which is really sad. Yeah, I would like to have talked to him a little bit more. He was really a fun guy. We had a large adjunct faculty.

[1:10:05.1]

CM: Oh, okay.

TH: It was interesting. When I was here around 2000, we'd have the faculty meetings in the fall. They'd all fit in the Ragan theater, about a hundred and twenty-five of us, full-time faculty. Remember that?

MF: Uh-hmm.

TH: Those two high schools I went to in Vegas, they had three thousand kids in each school. One hundred and fifty full-time faculty each. Half of which were coaches. (Laughter) ...that was about the same number of fulltime faculty as UVCC had each fall...

CM: Who doubled as English teachers (laughs.)

TH: And math teachers. What else was I going to tell you about that faculty? That floated past. I guess you weren't supposed to get it. (Laughter)

CM: If it's meant to be, it'll come back (laughs.)

TH: It'll come back out in a minute, right? Used the faculty members as the soloists—

CM: About adjuncts?

TH: Adjuncts.

CM: Larry Johnson?

TH: Yeah, so it's just not coming. Larry did take the chorus to Europe.

MF: You probably had some really interesting adjuncts, I'd imagine.

TH: Oh my! Yes.

MF: Some high quality people, I would—I suspect.

TH: Yes. We had Marden Pond, who had the doctorate and good in composition. Couldn't work his schedule we never were able to bring him in. I guess after I left, and Wayne was no longer department chair, he came on board to do some things. Rob Millett, who is finishing his doctorate in composition, he came on for a while then moved over to Humanities and did a lot of fine humanities stuff. What's Judy's last name?

JM: Charles.

TH: Judy Charles, piano. Brilliant group piano teacher. Set up BYU's front program for the young kids and did great piano here.

JM: There was Kira, the other Russian piano teacher.

TH: Yeah, Kira. Kira [Kira Merzhevskaya Tolstik] was a very interesting story. I used her, and her husband—Kira's Russian. Her husband [Vladimir Tolstik] was one of her students. He's Russian and much younger than her. And then she had two sons. Her one son was a violinist. Anyway, Kira came to the governor. She's a very fine pianist, taught in Russia. She had grown up in Stalingrad, is that the name of it? St. Petersburg? During the war—

CM: It's Leningrad.

TH: Is it Leningrad?

CM: I think it is Leningrad.

TH: Yeah, Leningrad, during the war. She was four or five years old and she wanted to be a ballet dancer, but since there's no food, the bones had grown like this, you know, they'd eaten saw dust during the German siege. She lived through that, and they got to know the great composer Shostakovich and all these other great musician at the time.

She became pianist, taught in Moscow and her son is a violinist, and her husband was a conductor. Well, they moved here and they were starving. She was actually out fishing to eat. The governor called UVSC and said, "Hire her. Give her a job." So, we brought her on to teach private lessons as much as we could. So I used her. I did some concerts with her. Took her to Park City. And that character—she had been in an accident, and hurt her hand. Tolstik. I have one of the programs here (shuffling papers.) And she wasn't able to play for most of the year. She finally got it back to do the Beethoven with us in Park City in the Eccles. It was not great but it was okay. But I had no idea that she had lost it. That made it a difficult concert that night.

Now we did a thing with her son. And I had her husband conduct. He was a very fine professional conductor who couldn't get a job around here and so I let the kids see what a pro conductor looked like. So they got Crawford Gates and they got the Tolstiks and there were a couple of others we threw in there. I wasn't afraid to share the podium. I figured I was strong enough, I didn't have to compete.

CM: That's good. How do you spell that? Tolstik?

TH: Tolstik?

CM: T-o-l—

TH: Tolstik? I’ve got to look it up (shuffling papers.) I can give it to you in a program here.

CM: Well, probably c-i-k. Something like that.

TH: Yes, I don’t really know.

CM: That's okay. I'll find it in there. That's fascinating.

TH: See, and we just had fun.

CM: Uh-hmm.

TH: Can you imagine? One year we had our UVSC Witch Project, like The Blair Witch Project. (Laughter) It was big.

CM: Does it have the theme from, what was it, The Alfred Hitchcock Show?

TH: Yes.

CM: Who was that-Gounod?

TH: That was Funeral March of the Marionette.

CM: Yeah, yeah, Gounod.

TH: We got to do that. Which is a great piece of music. Then we also did the masterpieces.

CM: Respighi.

TH: Respighi? Yes, that was the stretch that I didn't quite like. It just pushed it a little too far.

CM: Oh yeah?

TH: The Pines of Rome?

CM: Yeah, I remember that from my music appreciation class in high school.

TH: Yes, The Pines of Rome.

CM: Yeah.

TH: Well, this Respighi was Ancient Airs and Dances. That wasn't too bad. Then Tolstik, I've got to—there was one more I wanted to share with you. I would let the students conduct too. We did one night with

student artists. Let them do the concertos and then let the students conduct their concertos-conduct their peers.

CM: Great experience. It can go on their resumes.

TH: It really does help and some would find out. I had one tuba player at the Youth Symphony. He used to drive in from Carbon County, beyond Price, to rehearsals here every week, if you can imagine that? And he was Japanese. He was a tuba player and I let him conduct one night, one piece, and he decided that's what he wanted to be. So he went to UCLA and studied conducting and they made him give up the tuba and take up cello so he'd understand how it all worked. And he started his own professional orchestra, chamber orchestra in L.A.-Otani Chamber Orchestra. I remember getting a phone call one night, at midnight, in a blizzard. "Dr. Hill, I'm stuck in American Fork. Can you come get me?" (Laughter) He gave me a pearl. A black pearl because of that night. I didn't expect anything like that.

CM: Fascinating.

TH: One last thing with him, which helped me in my rehearsals a lot. He said that he hadn't—Christopher Hogwood, who had the chamber orchestras in London—he went to lunch with him one day and he said, "Okay now, what do you do to get your orchestra to work? And I'm paying these guys.” He said, "The first thing I do is fire somebody. The first rehearsal, I fire somebody and then everybody works really hard after that." (Laughter)

CM: That's stringent (laughs.)

TH: Just like junior high school, the teacher kicks one kid out of band and everybody's great from then on.

CM: Yeah, that's the example.

TH: Well, have I—let me look through here quickly and see if there's anything specially you need to know about. Just basic concerts. There's the program for the international viole d’amore conference. That two nights of concerts here. We played for the music—that's one thing I did want to mention to you. I did take the college orchestra to play for the Midwinter Conference in St. George for all the music educators. But I'd had my junior high group play for the National Conference of Music Educators in Salt Lake and I had my Youth Symphony play for the national conference in Disneyland at the Disneyland Hotel so we really did, over the thirty years, everything and got all the top honors.

But I had to give up one thing when I came here and that was an invitation to take my orchestra to the Midwinter Conference in Chicago, which all the music educators go to. They had like ten thousand teachers there, at the Hilton in Chicago. And I had the invitation to apply, but had to turn it down when I came here. I turned it over to the band director and he took the band. So we were able to do everything that was important.

CM: That's terrific.

TH: All over the country. Internationally, too. Now that's bragging.

CM: Good for you!

TH: But the kids worked that hard and the kids paid for it. Oh yeah! They were invited to play for the Olympics in Athens.

CM: Oh!

TH: But they weren't able to get the money together. Carnegie Hall's a big enough stretch. Devotionals. Yeah, I think I've covered almost all of it.

CM: Wasn't there a trip just this past summer?

JM: Yeah, the band here will be going next summer to the London Olympics.

CM: Okay.

TH: Great!

CM: So they have been able to get—?

TH: They're going to do it.

CM: Maybe they're still working on it.

[1:20:00.3]

JM: I haven't heard more. They were still working on it, but they're planning on it.

TH: They'll have a great time.

CM: That's fantastic!

TH: Yeah. I'm glad to see that happen. When Romesburg left, the one who replaced him—

CM: Sederberg.

TH: He was very different, he didn't think Carnegie Hall was very impressive, so (laughs) so I knew I wasn't going to get anywhere for several years, so I didn't (laughs.)

CM: That's too bad.

TH: Yeah. Well, have I answered all your questions? I think I've run out.

CM: It's been great! Thank you very much for spending your time with us and we appreciate this interview.

[End of interview 1:20:44.7]