AN INTERVIEW WITH LARRY MAXEY Interviewer: Jewell Willhite Oral History Project Endacott Society University of Kansas 1 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 2 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? 3 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 4 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? 5 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? 6 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 7 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.