Music and Technology, Part II—KU Undergrad Years

By Gary White

When I began work at the University of Kansas it was as a Music Education major. The deal I made with my parents for majoring in such an impractical area as music was that I would take a degree where I could get a job after four years and the Mus. Ed. degree would allow me to teach in the public schools. Once at the university my interests quickly shifted toward composition and I declared myself a double major. My interest in science and technology seemed to have faded into the background, but the composition major was just another expression of it. The composer is a programmer who writes a program in an esoteric code called music notation and the performers are the computers who realize the composer’s program.

I was finding less and less of interest in the performing areas, in spite of the fact that I was advised that I could have a career as an opera singer if I would give up all my various interests and concentrate on training my voice. By that time, the lure of being a composer had already taken hold and I had to keep my Mus. Ed. degree going for the sake of my parents. There simply wasn’t time, or inclination, to give it all up for opera.

To pursue a double major and finish in four years would require enrolling in summer school. I financed summer session by hiring on as a dorm counsellor at Midwestern Music and Art Camp and taking a part time job with the Registrar’s office at the university. I was assigned to the transcript department and I quickly developed a skill that made me a very attractive employee. The transcripts were printed using a photostatic process. This was in the days before photocopy machines and laser printers. A huge “Rube Goldberg” of a machine approximately 6 feet by 5 feet by 10 feet in size in the back of the Registrar’s office produced the photostats. These were reverse (black became white and white became black) images of the hand written permanent records that were stored in dark basement areas of Strong Hall. My early training in taking alarm clocks apart and reassembling them came to my aid in this job. I quickly learned how to keep that horrible beast of a machine that combined a photo enlarger with a wet process photo developing and drying process in operation. I was able to save the office from most of the frequent calls for repair that had plagued them up to that time. I understood photo processing because I had a small photo darkroom in a closet off my bedroom in Cedar Vale. I soon had a job where I could work as many hours as I wanted both summer and winter.

I was on the staff at the Registrar’s office when the first 914 Xerox copier (see photo above) was installed and the photostat machine was phased out. The 914, which was named because it would print on plain paper up to 9 inches by 14 inches (legal size with 1/2 inch margin to spare), was a most wonderful innovation. Suddenly transcripts could be produced in a few seconds and the result looked very much like the original black on white permanent records. As the resident “techie” I was assigned the task of getting the new machine up and running and figuring out how to produce transcripts on it. So, while I was pursuing high art in my life as a student, I was making a living as a technologist for the Registrar. The twin interests continued.