By Gary White
When I finished coursework for my doctorate and had the dissertation, which was a Symphony, well underway, I began looking for college-level teaching positions. The year was 1967, which was perhaps the most fortunate year in terms of getting a university position. The baby boomers were beginning to arrive at college age and enrollments were rising rapidly. Colleges and universities all over the U.S. were desperate for new faculty to meet the demand. Young people coming out of PhD programs at that time had many choices of where they would move.After looking over the openings I decided to apply to The University of Michigan and Iowa State University. U. of M. is a major university with graduate degrees in music through the PhD. Locating there would give me a career with potential for national recognition in the field. Iowa State University, on the other hand, was just starting an undergraduate degree in music and they were wanting someone to head up their music theory program. This would give me the opportunity, right out of graduate school, to design and implement my own curriculum. I was offered both positions and decided on Iowa State, mostly due to the exciting opportunity to design my own curriculum. I was not disappointed. Iowa State provided me with leadership opportunities right from the beginning and I enjoyed being a part of a growing music department. I went there thinking that I might spend five or so years and then move on, but I was very quickly tenured and reached full professor in less than ten years. I was priced out of the field and when I looked at positions at other universities they would require a decrease in both academic rank and salary. I was at Iowa State for the long haul.
Once I had the music theory and music composition curricula well established I began to think about the rapidly growing field of electronic music. With my background in computers and an interest in the new synthesizers I began to plan a unique computerized electronic music studio for Iowa State. The National Endowment for the Humanities was offering summer institutes for college professors who wanted to enter the electronic music field and I applied for an institute at Dartmouth College and The University of New Hampshire. This institute, which was held on two successive summers, put me in contact with the leaders in this new field. I came home to Iowa State and put together a research proposal for the establishment of a computerized electronic music studio. The proposal was funded, and I gathered two colleagues, a professor from the Electrical Engineering Department and an assistant professor from the Computer Science Department, and we began planning the Iowa State MUsic Studio (ISMUS), which was housed in the Computer Science building. Undergraduate and graduate students began to flood in, wanting to be a part of this unique opportunity. Over the next few years we graduated electrical engineers, computer scientists, and musicians with background in all three areas.
My career as a researcher lasted about five years. The development of MIDI systems, which led to the domination of the electronic music field by inexpensive Japanese keyboards, put an end to our research. Now one could simply purchase very powerful music synthesis systems at the local WalMart store and larger systems were commercially available for serious musicians.
When we built a new music building at Iowa State I was in charge of working with the architects and acoustic designers for planning the new facility, which included a state-of-the-art electronic music and recording studio. That studio continues in operation to this day and I hope it is serving Iowa State well. After another ten years I moved out of leadership in that area and other younger faculty took over. My long years of combining music and technology were over and I became just a consumer of the technology, much like many others who use the computer every day without thinking of the years and years of development that lay behind it.
What a long road from Cedar Vale, Kansas to my retirement years. Thanks for sticking with me through this personal trip down memory lane.
THE END
3 comments:
Gary, what an outstanding career you established. Cedar Vale should be especially proud of you and other outstanding students of the era.
It is unfortunate that the community has not had the ability to keep more of the outstanding students produced by the school system. Rural communities in Kansas have had a real "brain drain" and I suppose the positive part of this negativity is that so many places are alive and actively planning viable communities for this century.
It is thoughtful of you to provide this venue for past and current residents of Cedar Vale to initiate their stories for at least a few denizens of the future. Hopefully, more of you will take advantage of this opportunity and take the time to record your stories.
Thanks, Phil, for your kind words. Yes, I do hope that more of our readers will share their lives in this way.
Cedar Vale could not have kept many of us there, since we couldn't do what we have done from that location, but I do think that the community was not forward-looking enough to see what was going to be needed to keep the town alive.
Towns that have made an effort at developing a unique quality have stayed alive, even in the face of faster travel, which makes small town businesses uncompetitive. Towns that developed specialized shops or a tourist-attractive ambiance that draw people there as a destination have managed to make it, while others are left in the dust.
As one can see from the quality of the young people who grew up there and left, Cedar Vale provided a wonderful environment for raising children.
Well aren't we lucky--we old Cedar Valeans--that the multi talented and Wizard With Words, author, composer, and historian, Gary White stirred up our memories and established this blog where we could vent.
Post a Comment