321 10 9760 https://caspercollege.cvlcollections.org/files/original/545900c879aa2bfc0f6300e90655b930.jpg 7dad52816b2b090ba281001fae3bef3e Still Image A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Photographic print Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Beauty Contest at the "Merry-Whirl" Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/</a> Type The nature or genre of the resource Image Language A language of the resource ENG Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context NCA 01.2024.14_MerryWhirlBeautyContest Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource JPG Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1935 https://caspercollege.cvlcollections.org/files/original/866f77e869ee2e1629c0a437786e8a55.mp3 ce8859695e6b07fa27edee50f092457b https://caspercollege.cvlcollections.org/files/original/771cc76ede80181bfff4dc4fc7472d21.pdf 049a0569ad0b635719c184f3675ef815 PDF Text Text Speaker 1; were doing this just . Speaker 2[rebecca]; okay. okay. Speaker 1; okay Speaker 1;Good… hm so this is for .. hm lets see its february.. Hmm ahh… hmm 8th 2023. Speaker 2 [rebecca]; right. Speaker 1; and were speaking with… oh right its thursday. February 9th 2023 and we are speaking with Rebecca Hein about her families business langes book shop. In casper in the 60s 70s and 80s i think right and how it goot to be there and what her role in it was. .. am i right .. what happened… is that fair . Speaker 2[rebecca]; yeah Speaker 1; and ermm a is this .. are we doing this for the casper college western history center. Speaker 2[rebecca]; yeah we discussed that and also putting it up on wyo history.org that would be your call i guess Speaker 1; yeah right ermmm… okay so becky so how did your family come to be in the book business. Speaker 2 [rebecca]; erm well hm my farther was well my parent were interlectuals and ermm my farther worked as an office manager till i was 5 years old hughes tool company first in billings well probably first in casper before i was born then in billings then in farmington new mexico.and he always said he hated it.what he really wanted to do was run his own independent book shop. Ahh i think that if he could of lived his dream he would of been a shakespearean actor. By the way he behaved what he did was look for the right side of the city or region he or my mother wanted to live in i think he looked at casper and billings and rapid city and made an assessment based on what sort of book sellers were already in those places im not sure why he choose casper over those over places but we moved to casper when i was going into first grade .in the fall of 1962. Speaker 1 okay Speaker 2[rebecca]; yeah i dont think he opened his doors until about 6 month later cause obviously there was alot of preparations .and one of the ones was i distinctly remember this one he took the whole family drafted us all into drawing lines on 3x5 cards he made us a little templet out of 3x5 card which he cut little lines round the template. And that was for his inventory system which he had undoubtedly learned during his time as office manager . so kept our inventory obviously this was way way before computers and stuff on theese 3x5 cards .in a �little file doors cabinet , especially the right size 3x5 cards for every book in the shop that we stocked we had one of these 3x5 cards they were all placed in alphabetical order with quantity of that book. Errm the number of copies we had of that book title so at the end of each day after we had closed for the day . somebody either my farther or mother or their manager or whoever their employes would ermm… update all the inventory cards based on the sales tickets that we had wrote out for books being sold.so it worked very well i dont think we had very many inaccuracies if we did they were occasional . My earliest memories were sitting there and drawing lne on these cards. I was young so i dont have any very many clear memories of the book shop from when i was was in grade school. Well thats not quite true i remember sitting in the children section we had emmm we had the store front in the … building 163 south walcott on im not sure whats there now but erm there were Speaker 1 ; erm excuse me its part of the whats now the front one of the 2 store fronts whats now called the walcott galleria in the odd fellows building on the west side of walcott town casper between first and second street down town casper Speaker 2; right so okay ermm i do remember my farther had the shop partitioned off into two parts and the book selves into various sections and the childrens section was in the north west corner of that shop area building and there was a chair in there that was only for customers that we had. And i remember sitting in that chair curled up in that char in the afternoon reading nancy june and hardy bois hard backs we had shelves of them i had read every nancy jue and hardy bois book at that we had at that point. Ihad probably read othe books but i especially remember reading those nancy jue and hardy bois i was probably about 9 at the time and from a very early age so my sisters cathy was 6 years older than i was and barbara Was 16 months older than i was ermm and we were allowed to bring any book home and read it as long as we kept it in perfect conditions Speaker 1; laughter Speaker 2; and we always did keep them in perfect condition so that rule was always held we had a private library Speaker 1; agreed uh yeah Speaker 2; SO those were my earliest memories then i started to work at the book shop when i was 14 Speaker 1; agreed ah yeah Speaker 2; i have all sorts of recollections of course from that time and then in that time i was trained at that time how to answer the phone take messages to take orders for books if somebody came into the shop i was trained how to wait on. If we didnt have a book lets say they asked for this unless they were browsing and such i would excuse my self and go out back and look it up if we didnt have it then the next thing you would do �Speaker 1; i miss that part why would you go out back to the bathroom. Speaker 2; back room sorry Speaker 1 ;laughs Speaker 2 ; it was the place where work it was partianed off by some floor to ceiling shelves it was a ver small space there was 2 desks and some filing cabinets. err soo i would go back there where we had our inventory records and i would look and see eif we had the book if they ask for a particular title and if they didnt the next words to come out my mouth were always supposed to be very happy to special order it for you. If it wasnt the case of a book that was coming in any way . and that in which case we would say we are expecting a bunch of these we will hold a copy of these and call you when it comes.but if they wanted the special order the n we would look it up in books and prrint and books and print was a 3 volume very large set those books were huge they were like and encylapedia really and there was titles authors and subjects if we couldnt find the book under titles then we would we would be able to determined because they were issued annually so if the book wasnt in print and available then it would be in a current edition of books so if we were able to look it up then if we found it we would go ahead and call the person and order it and i never had alot to do with ordering procedure but i know we had these pieces of paper that were basically well i should back up here my parents never wasted any thing nothing so when we sold a book we would write a sales report On these huge metal tickets they were .. last time i was at lou tarberts in casper they were stil using those things they had smaller ones but they would create a copy for the customer and copy for us and ermm so our copies become obselete as sson as we had posted the sale and updated the inventory record maybe there were some other things that had to be done with it so the my parents would cut these inn half and the back side was blank and that was what we would write down special orders on so we had a a cigar box with a blank pieces of these basically 3 x by 5 pieces of paper that we would pull out a piece of paper and put on title of the book the author name of the persoon that wanted it phone number probably the price that publishers weekly said it would cost and probably weather it was a hard back or paper bound and the date that we had written out the slip so that went through some process that i was never really part of where ermmwhere the book would have ordered then it would arrive and there was a system i aslo dont remember probably because ididnt handle that . where the slip would be matched with the book and then we be taken out and handed to the person that is manning the front counter or that person during slack times to get on the phone and call the customer let them know there book had arrived and then we shelved it until they picked it up back room area we must of shelved them alphabetically other wise i dont know how else we would of been able to find them.but ther was always a fair number of Speaker 1; interrupt we shelved. When i worked there mid 70s ermm i was taught which i thought was quite clever you alphabetised the book by the name of the customer because people would forget the name of the book but would never forget their own names. Speaker 2; oh yeahhh �Speaker 1; so they would come in and yeah i thought that was really cool Speaker 2;i didnt recall that detail so our special order business we made less off of a profit on special orders for the standard books that we got on was called automatic distribution from the publishers they would send out there best books every fall i think we got a 40 % discount on but we typically only got a 20% discount for a special order but it was the back bone of our business people knew they could get any book they wanted from us including out of print books i have that on my list for a little later how that happened so yeah ermm Speaker 1;about special orders and profit also by the time i was working there was S C O P scop single copy order plan which was a form you could ermmm. It was a way to save keep book keeping on the publishers end.so that she would fill out a form that had an address back to you on it and all they had to do was once they got it was stick the book in an envelope and stick your label on it and send it back to you and for that you could maintain a 40% margin.so that might have come in later after you worked there so it was a nice thing for the book seller Speaker 2; yeah definitely thats good soo ermm one of the first things i remember being taught how to answer the phone and wait on people and all that and the procedure on what we had to do and how to find it if we didnt how to find it on the shelf i have avery clear recollection of it would seem like in the fall we would get a rather large boxes of hard back books which my parents explained to me that they had not ordered but publishers set out on automatic distribution which apparently the books where the publishers were willing to take risks on and send out too book sellers assuming they would sell better than others these were always new and those day books came out in hard back books first then a year later in paper back soo tehre was the hard bound book switch i dont remember from when i was 14 how much they sold for but probably never less than 20 dollars so there was quite alot of books that passed through my hands and i kind of got a feel for current authors and where they were and for writing and things like that and that of course books book which were run away best sellers or book that were authors ermm were basically fans of . for example your uncle bart he would would always want the latest jame mitchner book as you know wrote were works of fiction or historical fiction he would go back to the the very beginning of known history for an area like san antonio or hawaii I dont remember the other books but he had quite alot of series and ermm people would come in ask for the latest michener book which hadnet been released yet we would take there name and we would get 20 or so copies and which were nearly all spoken for and we would get them out to the front desk and there was a little desk you would probably remember this behind the counter where we waited on people there was a little desk where we would answer the phone and could sit down where we piled books that we hadnt ermm called people about so we would. So we would call people about there michener books then they would come swarming in on the new hour and by the end of that day there would be no more than one left it was just astonishing and i noticed that and and course i noticed when there was best sellers ermm they were all going to be out of order im sure lets see james herriet herriott he was a large animal well no he wasnt a large animal veterinarian he was a country vet basically in england somewhere and hes started writing about his customers or clients or what ever animals and human personalities that he dealt with regularly he ahd a knack for telling these stories probably that he had good �material all creatures great and small the first one couldnt keep it in te shop we could just not keep it it was a run away best seller and i read it course part of the job was keeping your self ffamilar with the merchandise so i did alot of reading i would of any way i mean my parents raised me and my sisters to be book worms any way all creatures great and small was a deserved run away best seller and the 3 sequels also were lets see all things bright and beautiful, all things wise and wonder full , the lord god made em all i think thats a work from himthey were all equally good which is kind of rare from a series of books my experience is that if somebody writes a really good book has anoth try aat writing another they never really quite make the grade those harriot book every single one of them was a success and then there was the year , it seems like it always happen in the summer im not sure it ddid maybe the wave of sales continued into the summer when i was working full time when it seemed like every second or 3rd person asked for book by cooline coullghr coullgh i dont remember how her name was spelt now but the title of the book thorn bird like thorn on a rose bird i read it it was a very good novel people just we couldnt keep that book in the shop, so very popular okay then ermm we had a book titled jonathan livingstone segal which was a saapy book about life you might say that was another one people i knew before they opened there mouths they would ask for it because it seemed like just about everybody in the shop that summer asked and it spawned a spoof for the authour titied jonathan seageaul chicken but that one never really went any where any way i only have 2 books i remember that were sensation well one was it was a local one called the sand bar walter jones local history that was very popular i dont know how many people brought it the author even came in and signed books for that, i just remember that being tremendously popular and then there was book and then there was an artist a western artistby the name of conrad sch , schweiring he had abig coffe table sort of book with his paintings in it then called schiiring and these book sigings were called autographing parties in those days my parents had an autographing party for conrad schweiring and that book at one of the banks i could not remember if it was first national or wyoming national but i clearly remember being there and seeing this set up wit all these conrad schwiering books him sitting at the table signing autographs and my parents ringing up the sales and so on so that probably was not exactly a run away best seller. But it was pretty popular so from all that i got the idea that people could write a run away best seller because people did so i got the idea that i could so i have there fore then saddled witha life long dream to write a run away best seller . sooo i think i just went with the atmosphere Speaker 1 ; so yeah thats interesting and ermm so did you work there after school every day or during the weeks or saturdays or christmas or all of those Speaker 2; you know i really dont remember from when i was in junior high but i do remember from when i was in highschool ermm after school i would walk down town and work until closing and the i would wiat until close i would sit in the back room reading i dont think i had any particular jobs while my parents posted the books that had been sold posted them to the inventory cards and my farther counted up the money to be sure the balance to see what the difference was to what had been in the cash draw at the beginning. How much we had taken in and what was in it at the end of the day. That all took maybe 45 minutes andthen we would all go home and so seems like it was like my senior year of high school maybe it was my junior �year to i got out a little earlier than the 3;30 or what ever it was and would walk downtown and would work every day except for if i had ochello lessons or something like that i would would still go to the book shop but after my lessons and weekends my parents were ever open on ermm on sundays and saturdays in the summer they started closing at noon so i would work full time every summer and after school durinbg the year and during christmas vacation and typically school would be out a number of days before the holiday so of course im sure you remember in the christmas season erm it was just a mad house soo i worked full time until christmas day and was very necessary as it was needed . so maybe i should say abit about the christmas season my parents always hired extra people they did not scimp and we had routine there were only two ticket writers . only two people could be at the front desk writing tickets but of course people were buying gifts and we always offer gift wrapping and my parents brought a lareg roll un designed gift wrapping paper and they had it on a huge roller that had ermm that had a centerated Edge and then you could measure it out and tear it off neatly so two people would be writing tickets and asking if the customer wanted it gift wrapped and if the answer was yes if it was often a hard back you would take it back to the back room the first thing you would do is get a pair of scissors and snip of the price off of the dust jackets just taking off the corner off the inside front which is where the price was then my parents taught me how to gift wrap quickly neatly very well with out any gaps or anything with the minimum amount of paper and scotch tape and we always had bows or what ever we had to put on we had to do that fast so that the person was out of tehre we tried to make it so that they didnt wait very long Speaker 1; i remember from working there that the gift wrap was plain brown paper and the ribbon was actually a piece of string about and inch wide with with a print design on it and a little erm cerated edges as it had been cut with … scissors that was the ermm so sombody must of cut those out of cloth or fabric or maybe your mum or dad could by it that way Speaker 2; i dont know oh and speaking of christmas on of the things my parents did for years until postage was to expensive they would send out a christmas letter to a list of there customers apparently they had saved evrybodys address oh yeah thats it to the people that ha da charge account tahts how we got the addresses and we had alot of people who ahd charge accounts they would send out a christmas letter recapping the last year and that continued for quite a while but thenn that stopped because postage gootn too expensive. Speaker 1; and then so when did you graduate form NCHS Speaker 2; 1974 Speaker 1 okay, did you continue to work afte that when you was home from school or anything I Speaker 2 i did when i ever i was home, even in the summer some time evenif i was visiting ermm let me think i always worked at christmas that was alot of customers would bring in paper plates with cookies on it fudge or whatever you know how it is so that was nice because there was something to snack on all day and it was just really fun �SPEAKER1; erm yeah yeahermm and do You remember any thing about the different ways your mum an dad ran the shop beacause they were such different people Speaker 2 ; well erm i remember when i was being trained when i was 14 dad took me too the back her is how you i think pack up a book to send out and we had customers customers in state but noyt in casper so wwe would send books out to them i dont remember if it was heres how you pack them or unpack or how you pack a book up he had his way he wanted me to do it and mother had her way and they were different i just had to remember to which m=way each parent wanted it and whenever that parent was in the back room do it that way and ill be okay.i remember mostly that my mum she was as much of a reader as my farther howvere he was the life and sole of the place he had alot of the knowlegdge, � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource WyoHistory.org Wyoming Symphony Orchestra Oral History Project Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC-NC/1.0/">http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC-NC/1.0/</a> Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2022-2023 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource WyoHistory.org; Rebecca Hein Language A language of the resource ENG Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context NCA 01.i.2022.02 Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound; Text Description An account of the resource Audio files and transcripts created and edited by Rebecca Hein and students at Casper College during an oral history project with players of the Wyoming Symphony Orchestra. The oral histories were conducted by Hein between 2022 and 2023 and are a part of Wyohistory.org publishing project. Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data m4a Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Becky Hein Oral History on Lange's Bookshop Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC-NC/1.0/">http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC-NC/1.0/</a> Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2023-02-09 Description An account of the resource Oral History interview with Rebecca (bECKY) Hein and Tom Rae on Hein's business, Lange's Bookshop during the 1960s through the 1980s. This oral history was recorded on February 9, 2023 Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound; Text Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Tom Rae; Becky Hein Language A language of the resource ENG Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. WyoHistory.org Wyoming Symphony Orchestra Oral History Project, NCA 01.i.2022.02 WyCaC US. Casper College Archives and Special Collections. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context NCA 01.i.2022.02_LangesBookShop Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource MP3; PDF https://caspercollege.cvlcollections.org/files/original/f62068f3d3e7d85590b7a54b0438c444.mp3 8665569d0607e672d4600e9b4b2d21ad https://caspercollege.cvlcollections.org/files/original/660ee38e5128d2e1f2e3d0e5c6e0b24f.m4a 1db8c3ca2f56acd6e6c3ddada1a9b937 https://caspercollege.cvlcollections.org/files/original/77e219d941798cb0a86c4e426b4c4c0a.pdf 2bf4166c9c492255be38a5a9bdc40957 PDF Text Text Wyoming Symphony Oral History Project Tom Rea interviewing Rebecca Hein, September 21, 2022 Date transcribed: February 17, 2023 Tom: So, Becky, could you tell us about your, when-when did you first start playing with the with the, was it the Casper Civic Symphony still when you started? Rebecca: Yeah, I had been playing the cello since fourth grade 'cause that was when we had the chance to join orchestra or band and choose our instrument. And, during at least some of that time, I'd been taking private lessons. Tom: Mmhmm. Rebecca: And I guess the the string teachers in town kind of knew who might be ready to play in the Civic Symphony. I'd been playing in the Youth Symphony. Well, I don't know, maybe I joined the same year, my sophomore year? Anyway, I was invited to play in the Civic Symphony, and my interest in the cello and music was at kind of a low point. And what I was really on fire about at the beginning of that year was a possible trip to Spain that my second year Spanish teacher was talking about. So my mother, who of course didn't want to see me quit music, sort of—and I wasn't going to be able to earn enough money for this trip just working at the family business. I was going to have to find some other source of money, so she very casually pointed out, since I had declined to play in the symphony, that they paid. So of course I joined. Tom: (chuckles) Rebecca: And played the first concert, I think it was probably in September. And Rex Eggleston was conducting at that time. He was the conductor, I think Curtis Peacock came to town that year. That would have been the fall of ... 1971? Tom: Uh-huh. Rebecca: And he [Peacock] was, I think the the assistant conductor or something like that. Rex Eggleston, E-G-G-L-E-S-T-O-N, was, at that time, the head of the public school strings in Casper. A really excellent violist, principal viola in the symphony when he wasn't conducting, and a really wonderful guyTom: Yeah. Yeah. �Rebecca: So, I had a really great start, playing under Rex that year. Tom: Oh, okay. And who did you, before we get into the symphony, so who who did you have for a teacher? Before, you know, before then? Who did you take lessons from? Rebecca: Well, I remember studying with Dorotha Becker, who was also concertmaster [first chair, first violin, and also leader of the entire string section] of the Civic Symphony at that time, and kind of the mainstay of string teaching in town. Tom: Mmhmm. Rebecca: I remember she taught orchestra at Grant School when I was in fourth grade, and when it was time for me to take private lessons, that was, I think she was the only person in town who could really do that, until a cello teacher came to town whose name was Rebecca Rennecker. I'm not sure how her last name was spelled. And she became principal cello of the symphony. There was a little bit of trouble over that because the existing principal cellist, who had served long and well and was quite competent, his name was Sidney Wallingford. Was kind of pushed aside, I felt, and he felt, and I think he continued to play for a few years before he quit. Anyway, Rebecca Rennecker was my teacher through the rest of high school until I switched, I must have switched at the beginning of my senior year to driving down to Laramie to study with the cello professor there, David Tomatz T-O-M-A-T-Z. So all through the winter, Sid Wallingford and I drove down to Laramie together, we would take turns driving, to take our lessons. Tom: Did you spend the night down there? Rebecca: No, I think we drove home the same day. Tom: Uh-huh. Rebecca: I'm sure we did. Tom: I remember listening to you play the cello in Barbara Dobos' living room when you were about 18. Rebecca: I remember doing that, yeah. Tom: You were a wonderful cello player for a long time. We'll get to that later, so. Where was, there, when you were in, at Grant School, when you were in the schools in Casper, was there, was there music instruction in the schools? Just orchestra, not private lessons through the �schools, right? But the kids could be in bands and was that part of the instructional day? Or was that like a after school activity like sports? Rebecca: No, that was a class during the day, as I recall. Tom: Right, so you could be in a orchestra class or a band? Yeah, that's sort of the, I guess, when our kids were there, too. And so, you started with Rex and then Curtis comes in when you're still in high school, were there are very many other high school kids? And you were in the cello section. You were not yet principal cellist. Is that right? Rebecca: Correct. Tom: And were there any other high school kids in the symphony then? Rebecca: Yeah, I recall Debbie Johnson, who's now Debbie Bovie. Tom: Oh. Rebecca: She's about my age, and she went to Kelly Walsh [high school in Casper]. Tom: Yeah, I know her, uh-huh. Rebecca: And John Niethamer, N-I-E-T-H-A-M-E-R, he was a year older than I was, but he was in the symphony. Tom: Uh-huh. Rebecca: And I’m trying to think what other cellists, there was a principal bass for a while, a very nice man named Joe Corrigan, and Joe had a younger brother named Gaylen. I think G-AY-L-E-N, who was around my age, and I'm sure Gaylen must have played [cello] in the symphony at some time 'cause I remember playing with him and it wouldn't have been in high school orchestra, I know that. So it had to have been either Youth or Civic Symphony, or, more likely, both. Tom: So these were all cello players or these were a variety of instruments? Rebecca: Cellists. I had plenty of violinist friends as well, whose names I recall, if you want me to mention them. Tom: Sure. �Rebecca: OK, well, there was a student at Casper College whose name was Carol Tumbleson. She was really good. There was a, I don't know if she was a student at Casper College or older, but she wasn't that old. Her name was Lynette Ketcham, K-E-T-C-H-A-M. I'm seeing the photo of the symphony from this time, I think it was from when I was a senior in high school and I'm just seeing their faces. There was Jane Gerberding. Her husband or excuse me, her father was a Lutheran pastor in town, and he used to review symphony performances in the ‘80s [for the Casper Star-Tribune]. That was later on. But Jane was a good friend of mine. She was a year older than me. Susan Cheney, I looked at the math and I figured she must be either a younger sister of Dick Cheney or maybe a cousin. I don't know. Tom: Hm. Rebecca: She went to Kelly Walsh. There was a girl who was really talented; her name was Sharon Street. She was a violist. A really excellent violist, just one of these people, it's like, it seems like they never practice and they're always better than you are. And maybe she did practice and I just didn't know it, but she was extremely talented. And then also in that photo, I saw somebody in the trombone section by the name of Brian Brown, who was my age. And I can't think of who else. Tom: That's a lot. I wonder what they're all doing. That's interesting. And your mom was in the orchestra, right? Rebecca: Correct. She played viola. She took up viola in mid-life because, expressly because, orchestras never have enough violas, and she knew she was not going to be able to get really good if she took up the instrument, you know, not as a child. And so of course, she indeed had the opportunity to play in the symphony, because it's quite true that there's kind of a chronic shortage of good viola players. Tom: And so, had she-she never played strings before taking this instrument up when she was in her mid-life? Rebecca: I don't know. In her late 40s probably. Let me think, she played piano forever. She had played piano since she was a little girl, so she was a musician already. But it's a pretty big jump from piano to a stringed instrument. Tom: Yeah, I'll say wow. When I knew your mom, she was playing in the symphony. So what was it like being in the symphony with your mom? Rebecca: Oh, it was fine. It was great. I was so happy that she had a way to enjoy herself by playing in the orchestra, 'cause she, she and my father were very supportive of the orchestra and �would house import players and sell season tickets at their family business, Lange's Bookshop, and contribute. At least, well, their names in the program are pretty high-up in terms of the list of donors, so they were contributing in that way. At a higher proportion of their income than a lot of people. But you have to remember that a lot of those people that showed up at sort of modest levels of contribution, some of them showed up at the symphony balls and the other fundraisers and spent a lot of money at the auctions and things, and that didn't really show up in the list of contributors in the program, and those lists were sorted according to how much money the people gave. Tom: Yeah, different levels of, yeah, right. That's interesting. And was ... [there] already a symphony ball every year by then? Rebecca: I think probably, yeah. Tom: And were there any other adults in the symphony who you knew through your parents, or who were friends or parents of your friends or anything like that, you know? I'm trying to see if, you know, if it felt like these were people you knew anyway, some of them. You know what I mean? Rebecca: Well, of course I knew Sid Wallingford. Rick Rongstad would come up from Colorado. He wasn't that many years older than me, but I suppose he qualified as an adult. I guess, at that point, there was a woman named Mildred Brehm. B-R-E-H-M, I believe. She, I think, was principal second violin for quite a while. And of course, Rex. When he wasn't conducting, he was right there at the head of the viola section. And I just cannot overemphasize what a wonderful man he was. He was such a good teacher and so encouraging and so goodnatured. He was a real asset to the musical scene in Casper, I think. Tom: That's nice. Yeah. I knew him years later when I was the school's reporter for the [Casper] Star-Tribune and Rex was the head of I think not just music, but all arts stuff for the district, for the school district. Rebecca: Oh. Tom: Yeah, Mildred Brehm. B-R-E-H-M? Rebecca: That's correct. Tom: I wonder if she might have been the husband of the guy that my father-in-law, Derb Scott, worked for in the oil business? The wife? Did I say husband? Okay, that's interesting. Rebecca: Oh, and Rex’s wife, Connie, played principal bassoon for a while. �Tom: Okay. So, you started your sophomore year, junior year, senior year. And then you went to and so, did the orchestra change at all or you did? Were you feeling you were getting better During that time? Rebecca: Well, let me tell you what happened to me at the end of my sophomore year. First of all, throughout the year I became so in love with playing in an orchestra that I pretty much forgot about the trip to Spain. And all year long, every Sunday afternoon, I would play string quartets [two violins, viola and cello] with friends of mine from the Youth Symphony in my parents’ basement. Every Sunday afternoon as I recall, and we would play for hours and hours and hours and we had our fun pieces, our favorite pieces that we played every week, so you can imagine we got pretty good at them. Especially with Susan Cheney on first violin, she was quite good. So there was a particular Mozart quartet, I do not remember which one, but we were playing it one day. We’d been playing it for weeks, and there was a moment at which it was perfect. We-we were all together. There was no effort involved. We were all feeling the beat together and the sound we were putting out was perfectly blended. I swear it just was just one of those moments where everything comes together and and I was, I was struck. I don't know how else to put it. It felt like the sky had opened up, and a beam of light had come down and focused itself on the top of my head. And I was, I was like the Ancient Mariner or something, you know? [Referring to the poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," in which the Ancient Mariner had one story to tell, and had to tell it to everyone he met.] I couldn't think about anything else. Suddenly I had this moment of wanting moments of beauty like that, as many as I could have for the rest of my life. Tom: Yeah. Rebecca: And-and I, and my-my brain put it into a sort of a mathematical statement, like, "Okay, you want more of these beautiful moments? This particular beautiful moment happened because our collective skill had reached a certain point." So the way to predispose or, you know, raise the odds, for more of those beautiful moments is to increase my skill, and the way to increase my skill is to practice as much as I can, and and literally overnight I became a practicing dynamo and I kind of pushed aside my, um, studies. For the next few years of high school, I didn't flunk out, but my grades probably could have been better than they were. And every spare minute I had, I practiced. And that, in practical terms, that meant for my last two years of high school, I would go to school and then I would walk downtown and work at the family business until closing time, come home, eat supper, help with chores, practice the cello till bedtime, not do my homework. Yeah. Because I-I wanted a career in music, in performance, and I knew I was really far behind to have that ambition. You're supposed to start when you're 5 or whatever. Here I was, 17 years old, or 16, I guess, and I knew I had to catch up and so I was both inspired, and I was also, I guess you could say, worried or knew how hard I was going to have to work. So in that �moment of perfection in the string quartets, I think basically I got my vision for my life, even though I hadn't been conscious of being on a vision quest or anything like that. Tom: Uh-huh. Rebecca: So I ... just had to major in cello performance. Tom: Uh-huh. Rebecca: And a lot of people. Not a lot, a few, including my teacher at UW [University of Wyoming], they sort of tried to talk me, not exactly out of majoring in cello performance, but into adding teacher certification. Tom: Mmhmm. Rebecca: So that as my teacher said, "Suppose you get married and your husband moves to a little town and there aren't any playing opportunities, what are you going to do? If you have your teacher certification at least then you'd be able to teach in the schools." Well, I knew I would be miserable teaching in the public schools, so I said no, I want to perform. I held to that for a very long time. Well, and I never did teach in the public schools. And there are very few performers who don't teach, both because they, I think, to some degree get pulled into it 'cause it's interesting and they want to share what they know, and to some degree because it's additional income. Tom: Sure. Ah, that's- thank you for telling me that story. That's how wonderful and so um. You went to UW? Rebecca: That's correct, for three years. And during those three years, I came back to the Civic Symphony as an import for many concerts, maybe all of them. Tom: Mmhmm. Rebecca: That was fun. Tom: And were you majoring in cello performance at UW? Rebecca: I was. Tom: And who was your teacher there? Rebecca: David Tomatz T-O-M-A-T-Z. He was also head of the department. �Tom: Oh yeah, you mean? Yeah, I think you mentioned him in your Casper article, [article published on WyoHistory.org about the history of the symphony]. Was he a conductor in Casper? For a while also? No? Rebecca: No, he was conductor of the University Symphony. Tom: Okay. Rebecca: The main things he did was teach the cello lessons, play in the Western Arts Trio, which was the faculty piano trio at UW, and teach a few students. [a piano trio is piano, violin and cello] Tom: So you were aRebecca: And fair amount-go ahead. Tom: You were a private student of his as well, or you were, or you were, or that was part of your ... regular UW education? Rebecca: Yeah, that was part of my, you could take it as a class, basically. Private lessons, well, they’re one-on-one. I forget what they-applied, that was it, [they called them] applied lessons, for a certain number of credits. Tom: Uh-huh. And was he a good teacher? Rebecca: He was all right. I think his mind was elsewhere than teaching and performing. He was okay, but at the end of three years, I was frustrated by two things. I felt like I wasn't learning enough in my lessons and I was, I think, the only cellist of any ability in the department, so I didn't really have colleagues. Tom: Uh-huh. Rebecca: And I wanted to be in a situation where I was surrounded by student cellists who were better than I was. Tom: Mmhmm. Rebecca: So [that] I had room to learn and a teacher who was a better teacher and a better performer than David Tomatz was. He was really made for schmoozing money out of little, old- �rich, little old ladies. That's really what he was made for. And that's really what he did best. Probably, you know, raised quite a lot of money for the department and the university orchestra. He was a very good looking man and he was charming and you know, I'm sure he knew how to schmooze money out of people. So he was divided. So at at the end of three years I transferred to the University of Oregon. Tom: Uh-huh. Rebecca: Because in the region, I'd been to music camps in Montana, and I'd heard about the cello teacher at Oregon and been impressed with what I'd heard. And actually, I think it was during my sophomore year at UW, that I flew out there, spent my own money to do it. I had a friend that I'd gone to high school with who I’d been corresponding with, who was going to the University of Oregon, who met me at the airport, put me up in her apartment, gave me a ride to the university so I could do my audition to be admitted to the School of Music and so on. Tom: So the man that taught cello out there? Rebecca: Robert Hladky. H-L-A-D-K-Y. (pronounced Lad-kee) Wanted me to be with him for two years. So he admitted me as a junior rather than a senior and I could see his point. He really couldn't do much with me for just one year. So I it took me five years to do my undergraduate degree and I had to finance the last year myself 'cause my parents had told me and my sisters that they would put us through four years of undergrad school and support us during that time. Tom: Mmhmm. Rebecca: So they did that and then I had to finance that last year. But it was a really good move because, um, Dr. Hladky had studied with some really good teachers and had a really organized approach to playing and technique, and that's what I felt like I needed was, how do I play better, not, how do I be a better musician. That didn't worry me so much, it was, how do I get the notes to come out sounding in tune and on time and so on? Tom: Why isn't that a better musician? Why is? I don't understand the difference. Rebecca: Well, the difference is, you can have, you can know your way around the fingerboard and you can play in tune, and you can play on time, and you can play well with other people, 'cause your sense of rhythm is good and your sound is good and you know how to blend, and so on. But there's this added ingredient of, what would you call it, heart. Tom: Mmhmm. �Rebecca: Soul, swing. Tom: Mmhmm. Rebecca: I know Swing is a Jazz term, but it's been co-opted by classical musicians to mean that little extra special something that makes you want to listen to somebody and they-how they handle the music, like let's say the [Johann Sebastian] Bach unaccompanied suites for cello. There are six of them. Each suite has, let me think, a Prelude and then stylized dances, Allemande, Courante, Sarabande, and then a pair of Minuets, or in some cases a pair of Boureés and then basically uh, a Gigue, G-I-G-G-U-E. Tom: Right. Rebecca: So all six of the Bach Suites have those and Bach, he could do so much with so little. He was all about chords, basically. And he would break up the chords for the cello, which you can't play all four notes at onceTom: Mmhmm. Rebecaa: -like you can on a keyboard or a guitar. Rebecca: And he would write these wonderful, wonderful pieces based on really nothing but-but chord progressions. Tom: Mmhmm. Rebecca: And so, you know, if if you're a good musician, you can play those, conveying to the audience by how you play them, where the important parts are, where the sections begin and end, where the chords change. Well, what's the melodic line and what's the bass line and things like that. And all I can do is share a story about, this was a cello festival I went to in Evanston, Illinois, where I lived for three years, when I went to Northwestern University for one of those years to get my master's in performance. So this cello festival was put on and there was a hotshot guy from Champaign Urbana. I guess that would have been the University of Illinois. And of course, because he was so good, he'd gotten this job, and he played, he performed for us, the attendees, at this little festival. And I had, I was in Evanston, not 'cause I-no, I didn't live there then, I had traveled down, that's right, 'cause I traveled to take a lesson with the new cello instructor at Northwestern. I was up in Wisconsin at that time, teaching at the university and in their Suzuki program. Anyway, I was down there for this-the weekend. So this guy played and he played one of the harder Bach Suites, one of the later ones. And just kind of, you know, knocked out the notes really good and really fast and really clear, but without an iota of �understanding of where the melodic line was, where the bass line was, what the chord progressions were, what-what the music was. He he had technique. He could play all the notes, but-but I just. ... I was kind of offended. I don't know. He was so good and so looked up to and selected to play this solo and I knew I was not his equal as a cellist in terms of getting around the instrument. So when I went to have my lesson with this new teacher at Northwestern, I said, "Was that as bad as I thought it was, musically?" And he shook his head, and he said "There's somebody who had no idea at all what he was doing." Tom: Hm. Rebecca: So, I think non-musicians pick these things up. They know it, whether they can articulate it or not, I don't know. But we all have music in our soul and I think, on some level, we know the difference between somebody who's basically a very good gymnast and somebody who's really taking the music up to the level of music. Music making. I don't know if that clarifies the question at all. Tom: You know, let's say that, that's really, I think I know what you mean. Yeah. Rebecca: It it makes you want to come back and listen to them again and again and again, yeah. Tom: Right. Right. Yeah. Rebecca: No, I had. Even if they miss a few notes, they're still going to call you back by how they play. Tom: Okay. So you went to UW for three years, you went to University of Oregon, Eugene, I guess, right forRebecca: Correct. Yeah. Tom: Two more years, you had a bachelors in music performance and then you went to Northwestern to go to graduate school? Rebecca: Well, something happened in the meantime. Let me look at my notes here. Oh, there was a summer internship orchestra. It wasn't quite the great gig that getting a fellowship to the Aspen Festival, Aspen Music Festival was. [high-powered summer music festival in Aspen, Colorado] If you got a fellowship to the Aspen Music Festival, you got full room and board and a pretty good stipend and you were at the Aspen Music Festival. Which, you know, the luminary musicians that were there and the things that went on, it was just incredible. So I auditioned for the Aspen Music Festival and did not make it. But this other summer internship orchestra, based �in Evergreen, Colorado, was called at that time the Colorado Philharmonic. I think before that, for a while had been called the National Repertory Orchestra. Tom: Mmhmm. Rebecca: Most of the time musicians, when they play auditions, they have to pay the expense of traveling to where the audition is held. So anytime you can drive, you know, 100 miles, or down the street or around the corner or whatever to take an audition, you do it whether you're ready to or not. Tom: Uh-huh. Rebecca: So I knew about the Colorado Philharmonic and I auditioned for it. And I got in. Kind of an interesting, I have always thought it was an interesting story. I was at the audition. There were two people traveling around the country holding auditions. And this-this is kind of a story of getting in over my head musically, which I have a couple of things about that to say, but I-I was sitting there and I played some of the required excerpts that we knew we would have to play, they sent out the list. And I played about two notes of one of them. I'd been working really, really hard on tone production and in this slow excerpt, I think it was the slow movement of Brahms Second Symphony, which is standard, was a standard at that time for a lot of audition lists. [Johannes Brahms, 19th century German composer] And both of them, both of these auditioners did a double take. I started playing, they looked up from their notes and stared at me. So that was interesting. And then when it came to doing the sight reading [playing a piece of music you've never seen before], I was really mentally engaged. I looked very carefully, the way my teachers had told me, to [indistinguishable] the music before I started to play it. I mentally played the first few measures to know what I was about to do. And I noticed that in this particular excerpt there was a a subtle difference in the notation between one phrase and another. And I wanted to make sure to make that difference very, very clear when I played it, so that they would know that I had seen that difference in the printed music. So I did that and got another double take. Tom: Mmhmm. Rebecca: So what happened was, and they based, they seated the sections, the string sections according to the auditions, was that I got fourth chair in this really good orchestra. Which, there was probably a ten-cello section, a very good string section, really excellent, and found myself rehearsing a piece by Claude Debussy, the [19th and 20th century French] Impressionist composer. The piece [was] La Mer, The Sea. It's a beautiful piece and it's got a cello quartet in it, where the rest of the section does not play, and the first four chairs of the cello section do. I had never seen the piece before. I had never heard it before. There I was, having to play the part. Uh, �it was, it was scary. It was stressful. I did okay, but that's sort of a borderline case of having landed myself in hot water. Anyway, that-that was what I did. The summer after my two years at University of Oregon no, wait Tom: Hm. Rebecca: Yeah, I was supposedly going to come back and do a masters. And then I made it [in]to the Colorado Philharmonic. And then we had guest conductors at Colorado Philharmonic. We're going to probably run more than an hour. Is that alright with you? I've got a whole page of notes. Tom: I have somewhere [I] have to be at, I have to leave at about, well, I was thinking maybe we should do a second session. Rebecca: We could. Tom: Let's see where we are by 3:00 and then make sure. Rebecca: Yeah, well, let's see. Colorado Philharmonic, let me think. Tom: So what happened next? Rebecca: Oh, right. We had guest conductors all summer long and and many of them were from professional orchestras. It was just wonderful, and one person got a job offer. Because of how well he played principal viola in the Colorado Philharmonic. Tom: Uh-huh. Rebecca: And they [the guest conductors] would hold audition seminars in the afternoon. See, we had a really compressed schedule. We performed every other night. In Evergreen, Colorado. We had, I think, Sundays off. I can't remember, but the rehearsal schedule was rehearse in the morning, rehearse in the afternoon. And then the day, the concert, rehearsal in the afternoon, perform in the evening. Or it might have been sometimes we did a matinee, in which case we would rehearse in the morning and perform in the afternoon. So, you know, very few rehearsals, very, very hard music, very high powered. So conductors would come through and guest-conduct concerts and hold these audition seminars. On the, in the chunk of time during the concert weekend when we weren't rehearsing and the better players in the orchestra would play their prepared auditions for, they were preparing for professional orchestras, and the conductor would critique. Well, I was never good enough or prepared enough to play these excerpts. So I would listen and, you know, take it all in. But then one conductor, he did not conduct the orchestra, but he was on a tour of the United States, well the upper 48, he had just been hired to conduct the �national symphony of Puerto Rico 'cause they wanted a, basically a European-standard national orchestra, even though they didn't have enough Puerto Ricans, so he was having to come up here and audition people, so I auditioned for him and they offered me a contract. Tom: Okay. Rebecca: As this was my life ambition to play the cello for a living, Tom: Right. Rebecca: I didn't hesitate at all. So that was at the end of the first Colorado Philharmonic season. At the end of that summer, I went down and played for nine months for a season basically in the Colorado or excuse me, the Puerto Rico Symphony in the section. Tom: I remember. I learned that a couple years ago that you had played in the Puerto Rico Symphony, and what was-what was it like there? Rebecca: Well, uhm. Tom: You were there for nine months and then you came back? Rebecca: Yeah, uhm. It was okay. It was well within my ability. It was a lot like playing in the Civic Symphony, although it was a better orchestra, I think, than the Civic Symphony was, somewhat better, good enough to do Beethoven's Ninth. And other Beethoven symphonies. It was fine. I always felt like I was living in a foreign culture. Just because Puerto Rico is part of the United States, politically, they're a commonwealth, I learned, when I lived there, but it's, culturally, of course it's part of Latin America. Tom: Sure, yeah. Rebecca: And I would have experiences, like I would address people on the street for directions or whatever. Or my colleagues in the orchestra. There were some really sweet older men. And I would-I would try my Spanish on them and ... I made such terrible mistakes. And they would, they were so patient. And-and, whimsical with me about it. It was really cool. Uhm, but I had a good stand partner, which is very important in an orchestra. Tom: Ah, and was it a new orchestra? Rebecca: No, I think they'd been going for a while. �Tom: Okay. And did you get a chance to, did you, did you not want to stay a second year, or did they not offer you a job for the second year or? Rebecca: Well, what happened was, I thought for sure I was going to stay more than one year. The money wasn't. It was enough to live on playing in the orchestra, but I also had many opportunities to play in the recording studios in San Juan, and that's where the real money is. I mean, recordings paid pretty well. And then there was the occasional one where it takes you ten minutes to record a jingle for a commercial, and you get paid $200. So that was fine. But then near the end of the year there was a the usual, I found, every year the orchestra as a whole negotiated with management for a better contract. I had learned and observed throughout the year that there were, as a whole in the in the population ... of Puerto Rico, people who wanted to continue as a commonwealth, people who wanted Puerto Rico to become a state, and people who wanted Puerto Rico to be an independent country. Tom: Uh-huh. Rebecca: And I guess there's a lot of history about the commonwealth situation that was quite distasteful to the Independentistas. I never really knew the details or if I did, I've forgotten them. But we had some Independentistas in the orchestra, one man in particular I'm thinking of, who really resented the presence of the ‘gringos.’ Resented us, I mean absolutely could not stand that we were in the orchestra. So when the time came to negotiate, he told us right out - it was a meeting, an orchestra meeting - told all of us 'gringos’ that we had no right to have any voice in this because it was not our orchestra. So, that was the first time in my life had I ever been or felt dismissed and hated and stereotyped because, really, of the color of my skin and where I was from. Tom: Mmhmm. Rebecca: And it was, I didn't think I could work with him. He wasn't the only one. He was just the most outspoken one. And I started feeling like there might be better places for me to be. So I originally spent the whole year thinking I would spend another year there at least, and at the very end of the year I decided, no, I'm gonna go back somewhere, move to a big city where there are many teachers and many orchestras and a good professional orchestra for me to listen to and learn from and so on. So that's what I did. I moved to Evanston, Illinois, to be near the Chicago area. Tom: Okay. And so did you have a job in Evanston or did you go back to school? Rebecca: Uhm, Okay, you've asked me some questions about Evanston. I wanna jump back to high school, �Tom: Okay. Rebecca: 'cause I was in early college 'cause there were some things I wanted to say. Tom: Okay. All right. Rebecca: The first thing I want to say is that as a senior, I competed in a young artist competition in Casper and Cheyenne. And I was beaten by the same person, a pianist, who was pretty good. I was okay too, for my age and my level. And what to me is the interesting thing, and what was the beneficial thing to me about this was that all the string teachers who were concerned, that being the violin professor at University of Wyoming, who was one of the judges in Cheyenne, my teacher at University of Wyoming, uh, Curtis Peacock in Casper, who was not only the conductor of the Civic Symphony, but also the string instructor at Casper College. And maybe some other string teachers that I don't remember, said, they all said the same [thing]: "A pianist at the same level will always sound better than a string player because the string player at that level is still learning to play in tune. Still learning tone production." And while pianists do have to work on tone production, they don't have anything to say about whether they're in tune or not. They don't have to learn that. For obvious reasons. Tom: Right. Rebecca: So they all kind of felt that at least I should have been, should have won, or I don't know how it would have been worked. Anyway, I lost to this person. Curtis said to me, "Uhm, you worked really hard on your concerto. How would you like to play it, perform it with the Casper College Baroque ensemble?", which was really, you know, their chamber orchestra. "Furthermore, how would you like to perform it here in Casper and on tour?" So of course I said yes, I'd love to. And so I got a better deal than the winner. I didn't have the prestige of playing with the symphony, but in terms of practical experience, it's a wonderful opportunity to be able to, if you're being a soloist, to have more than one crack at it. [A concerto is a composition for one or more solo instruments with orchestral accompaniment] Tom: Uh-huh. Rebecca: So, you know, we played on tour and we played in Casper and I still remember playing in some little tiny town up in the northwest part of the state like Frannie or Deaver, or one of those. I just have this very clear memory of sitting on some stage with a tiny handful of people in the audience and-and performing my concerto. So it worked out really well for me. Tom: So the concerto was you and not the whole, and the Casper College orchestra. �Rebecca: Correct. Yeah. Tom: Huh. Great. Rebecca: Yeah, and there was another opportunity I had that I'll just add, many string students [in Casper] also have had. Let me think, Rick Rongstad; cello and bass, Dale Bohren; bass, Andrea Reynolds DiGregorio; cello. And a few violinists, probably, whose names I can't recall now, we all went to this music camp called Congress of Strings. It was a national effort. I think it was probably one string player from each of the 50 states. A huge string orchestra, a really big deal, really very high level of music making. Tom: Where was this? Rebecca: Well, it was held at UCLA for quite a while, and then the year that I went, it was held at the University of Washington in Seattle. Tom: Mmhmm. Rebecca: And it was a full scholarship. And they may also even have paid our transportation. I don't remember. I just know that I got to go and it didn't cost my parents anything. And it was eight weeks long. And it was um, a tremendous opportunity 'cause you're there with some really amazing performers. I remember one of the cellists that was there, he ended up in the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, Saint Paul, Minnesota. That's one of the premiere orchestras in the world. And he ended up in that cello section. So I was of course very low on the totem pole, but I didn't really notice 'cause the music we played was so wonderful. We played, I mean you're restricted as a string orchestra to just a few pieces. And one of them is the [19th century Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich] Tchaikovsky Serenade for Strings, which is just one of the most lush, showy, beautiful pieces in the world. And then Mahler, Gustav Mahler, a German composer of the late 1900s. His Fifth Symphony, the slow movement is for strings and harp. And they dredged up a good harp player from somewhere. At Congress of Strings. And we played that, and there's nothing like Mahler. He's he was just drunk with the beauty of music, and you could tell by the way he composed. Tom: Mmhmm. Rebecca: So I will never forget playing those two pieces. It was really something and the local, there's a Musicians' Union Chapter [in Casper, the American Federation of Musicians] provided the scholarship. So because, as a direct result of my involvement with the symphony as a high school student, although I was at the end of my sophomore year in college, or was a freshmanfreshman year of college when I went, I still got the benefit of that scholarship. �Tom: Uh-huh. Rebecca: So that was-that was something. Tom: When you mentioned, I just wanted to ask, did you ever know John Stovall? Rebecca: Yes, he ended up with the Boston Symphony. Tom: Yeah, right was. He's younger than you probably, right? Rebecca: About a year or two, yeah. Well, let’s see, you wanted to know what I did after Puerto Rico, right? Tom: Yeah. Rebecca: Well, I moved to Evanston, Illinois, so that I could go to the Chicago Symphony [concerts]. And I found out once I moved there that they had what they called was a training orchestra for the Chicago Symphony. It was actually a very excellent youth orchestra. I auditioned and got into that. I got an office job in Evanston part time so that I could work till about 2:00 in the afternoon, take the elevated train that turns into a subway partway there downtown, get to orchestra hall, rehearse, come home, eat supper, practice. Uhm, do it all over again. I did that for a semester till Christmas I think, and then I was just too tired. So I went full time at the office that I was working, and quit the Civic Orchestra and just took lessons and practiced. And then that year I applied for some graduate programs and got into the masters program at Northwestern, right there in Evanston. Tom: Yeah, Okay. Rebecca: Well, that's what I did. The second year I was in Evanston, that would have been, let me think, ’79- ‘80 was Puerto Rico, ‘80- ‘81 was being in Evanston [the] first year, ‘81- ‘82 was the year I did my masters. Tom: Mmhmm. Rebecca: That was great. Tom: So you got a masters in cello performance at Northwestern? Rebecca: Correct. �Tom: That’s a one year program? Rebecca: Right. They had, they were so expensive they had to do something. So that's what they did. They reduced their requirements to the scope of a year. Tom: And then you spent another year in Chicago? Rebecca: I did. Um, I have to tell a story about my masters degree recital. I had a really fun teacher at Northwestern and he and I both knew that some of the music I was going to perform at my recital was a little beyond me, so I was lamenting to him, you know, everybody’s gonna hear that it was, uh, by Tchaikovsky, the Rococo Variations, this very showy, highly difficult piece. I said, "They're going to hear that my technique is not up to this piece. It's not going to be a perfect, note perfect recital." And he agreed. No, not quite. But yeah, you're here to learn. He tried. And I said, "Okay, as long as it's not boring, you know, it can be anything. I can miss some notes. Not many, but as many as I'm going to. It can't be boring." So then, I don't remember if he told me this before or after my recital, but he told me he had a terrible tussle with himself how he was going to break it to me that my playing was boring. (laughs) Tom: Really? Rebecca: I have always been glad that he was honest with me. Because one does not want to be a boring performer. So now I have to jump ahead. Now let's see the third one. I'm not going to jump ahead. There's just a continuation of this "boring" story. So then I completed my master's degree and the office that I'd been working at, I ended up working there during spring break and summer and things like that. So they were-they found room for me when I graduated and I went part-time. The year after my masters. Thinking I'd wasted time and money, 'cause I all I had was two little tiny teaching jobs at community schools of music in the area. And I was sure neither of them would ever go anywhere. One of them was a Suzuki teaching job. And one of them was a regular, just regular non-Suzuki, and the Dean of the School of Music at Northwestern had said to me, when I had started there, that my chances of getting a college teaching job were greatly increased if I had some Suzuki experience, because at that time the Suzuki movement was really taking off. Tom: Uh-huh. Rebecca: So, you know, I took this little dinky job that had like three students for which I had to drive an hour one way. Figuring it would never go anywhere, and also feeling like I didn't know enough, so I took a Suzuki pedagogy class on my own initiative, paying out of my own pocket, down at DePaul University, which I had to take the El, [elevated train] I don't know, 45 minutes �south to Loyola University. It wasn't that far, I guess, but a fair way to take part in a Suzuki pedagogy class. Which, to make a long story short, I ended up with a job at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh teaching University students and Suzuki students combined to make a full time position for me because I took that said ... pedagogy course. And the other community school of music, for which I traveled an hour one way and taught a few more students. It turns out that that was a very respected community school. It was called the Jack Benny Center for the Arts and about more than 50 percent of the music faculty at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh Music Department - when I went up there to audition and interview for the job - more than 50 percent of them had first of all, gone to Northwestern. Had nostalgic feelings about that. Second of all, had taught at the Jack Benny Center, and also had nostalgic feelings about that, which certainly didn't hurt me. Tom: Yeah. Rebecca: At this interview. So it was great. I spent that whole year feeling like a failure and like I'd wasted my time and was I ever going to be any sort of professional. I dropped the idea of trying to play in an orchestra because, there were kind of two reasons. Playing in an orchestra as a string player, it's kind of bad for your playing as a as a rule, if you do too much of it, 'cause you can't hear yourself the way you can if you're playing chamber music, for example, or playing as a soloist. And I discovered that, playing in the Colorado Philharmonic after University of Oregon, then in the Puerto Rico Symphony. And then again in the Colorado Philharmonic before I moved to Evanston. So more than a year of playing just in an orchestra or mostly in an orchestra. I could tell it was starting to hurt my playing, but the real reason was, to audition for orchestras you have to practice certain orchestral excerpts, just like you would practice a concerto until you have every single note perfect. Well, that's not so bad for excerpts from Beethoven's Ninth, excerpts from Brahms symphonies and things like that. [Johannes Brahms, 19th century German composer] But when it comes to tone poems by Richard Strauss, those things, it's not just that they're hard, they're just not very rewarding musically. [Richard Strauss, 19th and 20th century German composer and conductor (son of Johann Strauss of “Blue Danube” fame.)]The cello parts that you have to learn, at least I found them not rewarding, and I discovered that I just didn't have the motivation to spend the hours and hours and hours and hours preparing those kinds of excerpts and, I don't know, I noticed that it was a really competitive thing. I mean, I always knew it was, but I had a friend in the Puerto Rico Symphony. She was a gringo. She had been in the orchestra for quite a while and she had been trying to get back to the upper 48 for quite a while and she was really good and she was one of these people that could make herself practice these excerpts and she flew, of course, at her own expense, to Texas. I forget, to audition for which major professional orchestra there, and she told me she played a note perfect audition. I mean, she didn't miss a single note, and did not get the job, and that was when she learned that something more was needed. So that, I think that gave me pause, along with the fact that what I really wanted to play was Beethoven quartets and, I don't know. Chamber music was very �attractive to me, and the only way you can really play chamber music is if you're part of a university faculty. Tom: Uh-huh. Rebecca: Unless you get really lucky and you're really, really, really good and you get a place in a professional string quartet. But they often also have teaching positions somewhere. So I applied for this, well, the person that was in this Suzuki pedagogy course that I got to know, was commuting up to Oshkosh to teach in their brand new [Suzuki] cello program. They were paying for her to rent a car and drive up on Saturday morning, teach all day Saturday, and then drive home. Well, I just wasn't going to do that. I just, was not going to do that. And she was thinking of stopping. And I contacted them and I said, you know, I know this woman who's been coming up to teach your students. If you can offer me a full-time job where I can become a resident of the community and live on what you pay me, I'm interested. Well, lo and behold, there was a fireball up there. Who was in charge of the Suzuki program, who went to the university people, who [the Suzuki program] ... was housed in the university music department at that point, and said let's get together. You guys need a cello professor, and you don't have enough students. And we need a cello teacher and we don't have enough students. But together, can we put together a position? And they did. They came up with the money, they came up with, it was a University of Wisconsin system faculty job I had. They had to advertise it. And I had to audition and interview. And there was one other person who was also selected to audition and interview, and I got the job. Tom: And that's in Oshkosh, not Madison, right? Rebecca: That was. There are so many campuses of the University of Wisconsin. It was just incredible [to me at the time], how many. There are little centers all throughout the state in little areas and four-year branches. Many in many places. I told that to my mother, she said, Yeah, Wisconsin is a very progressive state. Tom: Yeah, that's true. That's been. I hope it gets back to that. Okay. So you were in. So how long did you have? Maybe we should. Let's see. How much notes do you have left there, Becky? I got somewhere I need to be about 3:30. Rebecca: Oh, we might be able to wrap up by 3:15 maybe? Tom: Okay, alright. Rebecca: Should we try? �Tom: Yeah, let's. Okay, so where did you go after that? Rebecca: Well, let's, I want to tell one story about being at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh. Tom: Okay. Rebecca: Well, it was, I began playing regular faculty recitals. I'd been doing this for a few years and people always come backstage afterwards, and congratulate you and so on, and tell you how much they enjoyed it. Well, one person said, "There are two kinds of recitals, one where you're sitting there looking at your watch, wishing it would be over, and another one where you don't want it to end. And your performance was the second kind." Tom: That's nice. Rebecca: So I knew that the practicing I had been doing in the interim had been working. Tom: So not boring? Rebecca: Evidently not. I mean, that person had no reason to schmooze me. No reason at all. Tom: Good. Rebecca: Okay. Tom: I'm sorry to interrupt you. Go ahead. Rebecca: No. So we're done with University of Wisconsin Oshkosh. Uhm, I want to say yeah, go ahead. Tom: How long were you there? Rebecca: Seven years. Tom: Oh, I didn't know that, okay. Rebecca: So yeah. Tom: And did you work that? Was it a tenure track position? �Rebecca: No, no. It was a one year renewable contract. It was adjunct. Well, I don't know. I guess I was an adjunct faculty. I don't know what they called it because I was a hybrid. I was, the Suzuki program was not part of the university, administratively. They just used their offices. So I don't [know]. All I know is my contract ran a year and then was renewed. Tom: Been talking a lot there. Do you need to get a drink of water or something? Rebecca: I don't know. I'll try to manage, I can. I want to say something about, something I faced as principal cellist of the Wyoming Symphony Orchestra. I became principal cellist in the fall of 1992. And what I faced, of course, was having to share the stage with Mark O'Connor, playing a piece that I'd never seen before and it was really hard. Tom: Right. Rebecca: -but I want to go back to something that I did, I'm not sure what year it would have been. I got married and my husband got teacher certification in natural science. And we ended up in Tecumseh, Nebraska. He was teaching science at their combined middle school and high school. ... So it's not that far from Lincoln and Omaha. I decided I would try to get into some of those orchestras that were up there. So I got some audition music and I looked at the deadline and started learning it, and we decided that I if I did any work outside the home, it would be playing the cello. So, I got this audition music and I ran into a piece that I'd never seen before on an audition list. And it was unbelievably hard. And there are two ways of tackling something like that. One is, you learn the notes and then you sort of beat it up to tempo. You set the metronome at the tempo you can play it at and you play it, then you up the metronome one click which is, I don't know ... but it's a few more beats per second [indistinguishable]. Yeah, and you play it again, and then you up the metronome again. You play [it] again. You work it up to speed as best you can that way or you change your technique so that you can play better and more easily. And that changing of technique is a long process, long and intensive. And I looked at the deadline for that audition and I decided I would rather change my technique than play that audition. So I did. I engaged in some very focused, very intensive practicing. One of the things I worked on was my sitting posture where, you know, you sit, you pick up the cello. Your back might be really good, your back muscles might be great, you know, and you start to play and everything starts twisting up and tightening up in bad ways. You have to have some muscle support when you play, so you can't talk about being completely relaxed 'cause then you wouldn't even be able to push the strings down or hold the bow, but managing your muscles so you don't distort what they're best for. That's what I tackled in that practice session with no knowledge of the future, you understand? No, no crystal ball that told me I was going to be onstage with Mark O'Connor about, I don't know, eight years later or something. Facing a piece that was nearly too hard for me. So that was very satisfying practicing and it really put my playing- headed me in a different direction. So that I was a much better player. And playing was much more easy, and my sound �was better, and a whole bunch of other things were better. Playing fast was easier. So that when I landed in Casper as the principal cellist of the symphony, I was ready for it. The principal cello ... solos that you have to play, things like the William Tell Overture by Rossini. [19th century Italian composer Gioachino Rossini's Overture to his opera, William Tell] That's best known, of course, as The Lone Ranger theme. But the opening is slow and it's a cello quartet, and the principal cello has the most wonderful and hardest part of the four cellos. I enjoyed that so much. I enjoyed playing that solo and I did it really well and I know I did. So I wasn't in over my head at all. It was comfortable, it was a comfortable job and we did a Brahms Piano Concerto. I ... [think] the second one? John Browning, who is a world class pianist, was our soloist. We played that in Oshkosh too. I was principal of the Oshkosh Symphony. And there's a very, very beautiful principal cello solo in the slow movement of that piece, I'd played it before. There is an easy part of it and then there's a harder part of it and it's just gorgeous and I played it. And then you sort of hand over to the piano after you play the second part of the solo. So I looked at John Browning when I was done, and he nodded at me and smiled, when he started playing, so I knew I had done a really good job. That, moments like that, were just wonderful and I never felt like I was over my head. Okay, so. Are we going till 3:15 'cause I think, probably, we can finish up in that time. Tom: What? Okay. Ah, alright, I have someRebecca: Will that work for you? Tom: Some, I'll have some questions, but maybe we could have a second session for those. I don't know that they'll take much time. So how did you end up? Are you going to tell me how it is you came to leave Nebraska and come back to Casper? Rebecca: Oh yeah, well, so my husband, Ellis, was teaching science and there were some unbelievable behavior problems in his classroom. You wouldn't think of it in a little town, but it was the case. And he had a very unsupportive principal who just didn't back him up in discipline. So he quit. He-he burned out faster than I've ever seen anybody burn out on teaching. He quit in March of that year, just broke his contract, and we moved. I'd been in touch with my father. My mother had died in ‘84, and this was ‘92, spring of 1992, and he told me they didn't have a principal cellist in the symphony, and that they were paying more or less a professional rate they'd had to cut down on what they were paying, but it was sort of our only safety net because Ellis was not going to teach school again. That was a very bad experience. He lost thirty pounds. He had insomnia for the only time he's ever in his life had insomnia. It was just terrible so we couldn't wait to get away. So we moved to Casper and I auditioned for the principal cello position and got it. And Ellis started remodeling houses and all that. Being a former farmer, he had a lot of carpenter skills and things like that. Maybe your questions are more important than what I have in my notes, except about O'Connor. �Tom: Do that. Yeah, no. Okay, tell me about Mark O'Connor. Rebecca: May of 1997, I had never heard of Mark O'Connor. I just knew he was our guest artist, and the music librarian whose job it was to get our music into our folders and let us know when we could come to the symphony office to pick them up, said, “Guess what? You're playing a duo with this guy, just you and him. And he supplied a tape recording.” Okay well, shrug. I was conscientious so I always picked up my folder as soon as it was ready and got busy on the music. So I got my music and I looked at this part and I played through it and it didn't look so bad. And I played the tape, and the tempo was so fast on the tape that I didn't recognize it, didn't realize it was the piece until I did, suddenly realize how fast I was going to have to play this piece. And the problem of course, which I couldn't help but notice [was] the length of the fiddle fingerboard, or the violin, is about half the length of the cello fingerboard. And I pretty much had to match Mark O'Connor note-for-note in this piece, "Limerock" was the name of the piece. So it's like he had to run the 50 yard dash and I had to run the 100 yard dash, and I had to come to the finish line at the same time that he got to the finish line. Tom: Right. Rebecca: -and he was by far the better player, in addition. ... and I had, the style was alien. So we get to the dress rehearsal. Tom: Had he, had he never performed this before with a cello, did he? Rebecca: Oh, many times. He had performed it with Yo-Yo Ma. They often programmed it. Tom: Okay. Rebecca: So we played it at the dress rehearsal and I was sweating. Of course, I was just sweating it because it was so hard. I was pushing to the very outer limits of what I could do. So I played it note-for-note at the dress rehearsal. He stopped and he looked at me, looked kind of puzzled and said, "you know, Yo-Yo had trouble with this piece." And my reaction was, well, as if I didn't. Just 'cause you can't see it. So Holly Turner was the manager, the executive director of the orchestra at that time, and it was her job to make sure that the guest artist got where he or she needed to go at the right time, so she was driving him around and taking him out for meals and things like that. And he told her a bunch of stories about past performances of this piece, or past attempted performances, including somebody, some principal cellist somewhere, who had been unable to play the piece and had - they had to take it off the program. And I think it must have been a case of not practicing it hard enough. �Tom: Uh-huh. Rebecca: As this person was way above me in the profession, and you don't get to the point that she was at without being really good and auditioning successfully, and a bunch of other things. So sort of a case of the tortoise and the hare. Tom: Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Rebecca: So that was, that was not comfortable. It was too scary, too stressful, [to be comfortable] but it was worth doing. Tom: Yeah, yeah. ... That's great. [indistinguishable] Rebecca: Now I have a couple of associated stories, but I don't know if I try to tell them now, should I? They're short. Tom: Yeah, sure. Okay. Rebecca: After I was done, that is, had played "Limerock," there was more of the concert, including Mark O'Connor's Fiddle Concerto for Fiddle and Orchestra. And in that, the last movement of the concerto, there was a cadenza. And for the non musicians, I'll just say that the cadenza is the part where in a concerto where everything stops and the soloist has a chance to show off, and in the 19th century, cadenzas were improvised. Classical soloists improvised cadenzas. But then that got out of fashion and cadenzas started being written out, and the soloists just played the cadenza that was written into the music. Well, Mark O'Connor, of course he improvised his cadenza. And of course I could enjoy it completely because I was done with the hot-water part of it and it was one of the most memorable musical experiences of my life to sit, what, ten feet away from him, and watch him, and listen to him improvise this amazing cadenza. So one more O'Connor story, if you have time. And then a couple of post-concert, post-Mark O'Connor's concert stories could have stayed with me. First of all, Mark O'Connor was in Laramie, oh four, five, six, years after he was in Casper, and of course I went down to hear him, took my children. And he takes care of his fans. He sits out in the lobby after the concert and signs CDS, signs programs, and so on. For as long a line as there is. So I got in line. I didn't want a signature, but I wanted to ask him what he was thinking, programming "Limerock" in a community orchestra. What was he thinking that he did that to me? That was sort of the purport, and he looked kind of blank. He said, "Well, community musicians play well." I said, "yeah, but do we play that well?" That was his firm belief that in spite of having, not having every cellist that he played with be able to play it. I mean, Yo-Yo Ma could play it. He just had a little trouble with one section. When I saw the YouTube uhm, video of them, I saw what he did to to solve that problem. And it made sense. So I was invited to the reception after the concert. �Tom: Okay. Rebecca: Yeah, and somebody at that reception said something. Maybe it was a board member that said it, I don't know. I didn't know the members of the board, and they didn't hold receptions for the whole orchestra at that point. I was invited at the last minute 'cause I was a kind of soloist at that concert. Anyway, uhm, this person said "You know, I noticed that you didn't smile until it was all over." And I didn't say it, but I thought, "it's not my job to smile." (laughs) "It's my job to play the cello. Don't expect me to smile" 'Cause it was scary and stressful. Tom: Yeah. Rebecca: I was thrilled that I had done it, but I can't say that it was fun like playing [the] William Tell solo or something like that. Tom: Mmhmm. Mmhmm. Rebecca: So the other thing, I'll be quick 'cause I know you have to go. Somebody at that reception congratulated me and said I had really, distinguished the whole symphony and the whole city and so on. And I said, "Well, great, how about, how about a raise? How about hazardous duty pay for work dangerous to my ego and reputation?" Yeah, I thought it was a harmless quip. Well, you never experienced such a chilly tide of disapproval as swept that room. Tom: So this was, this was after you played the "Limerock" or this was six years later in Laramie? Rebecca: No, it was after, was at the reception Tom: Uh-huh. Rebecca: -for that concert. It-it was a joke, I thought a harmless little quip. Tom: Mmhmm. Rebecca: But apparently to some people money is so important that you do not joke about it. Tom: Yeah. Rebecca: I don't know. It was a major social gaffe, that I just did not see coming and didn't understand after it had happened. �Tom: Well, that's really interesting. I'd like to, maybe if we could have another conversation, ask you some more about your departure from the symphony, and about your feeling of the symphony as an organ, as a institution over all that time. I mean, you were connected with it off and on for a long time. And that's really, that's rare. Rebecca: Sure. Tom: So if we could maybe talk more about some of those things. Rebecca: That’d be fine. Tom: Other time I don't 'cause I don't want to squish them up now and I know you have a lot more stories you could tell me too. So this stuff is really interesting. Thank you so much, and I'm learning so much that I didn't know, which is always fun. So thanks. Maybe off the tape we can talk about another time when we can both do this again. Rebecca: Yeah, I don't know how to end the meeting and keep us talking. I suppose you could call me. Tom: Yeah, why don't we? Or maybe just? Rebecca: To end the recording. I'm not sure how to stop the recording and continue the meeting. You want me to try? Alright, let me see. Recording… � https://caspercollege.cvlcollections.org/files/original/0499323f738a300f1bd6afb34e5cb214.pdf 2a0a1e7efe0914bfd045dc0f3e83283f PDF Text Text Wyoming Symphony Oral History Project Tom Rea interviewing Rebecca Hein, September 21, 2022 Date transcribed: February 17, 2023 Tom: So, Becky, could you tell us about your, when-when did you first start playing with the with the, was it the Casper Civic Symphony still when you started? Rebecca: Yeah, I had been playing the cello since fourth grade 'cause that was when we had the chance to join orchestra or band and choose our instrument. And, during at least some of that time, I'd been taking private lessons. Tom: Mmhmm. Rebecca: And I guess the the string teachers in town kind of knew who might be ready to play in the Civic Symphony. I'd been playing in the Youth Symphony. Well, I don't know, maybe I joined the same year, my sophomore year? Anyway, I was invited to play in the Civic Symphony, and my interest in the cello and music was at kind of a low point. And what I was really on fire about at the beginning of that year was a possible trip to Spain that my second year Spanish teacher was talking about. So my mother, who of course didn't want to see me quit music, sort of—and I wasn't going to be able to earn enough money for this trip just working at the family business. I was going to have to find some other source of money, so she very casually pointed out, since I had declined to play in the symphony, that they paid. So of course I joined. Tom: (chuckles) Rebecca: And played the first concert, I think it was probably in September. And Rex Eggleston was conducting at that time. He was the conductor, I think Curtis Peacock came to town that year. That would have been the fall of ... 1971? Tom: Uh-huh. Rebecca: And he [Peacock] was, I think the the assistant conductor or something like that. Rex Eggleston, E-G-G-L-E-S-T-O-N, was, at that time, the head of the public school strings in Casper. A really excellent violist, principal viola in the symphony when he wasn't conducting, and a really wonderful guyTom: Yeah. Yeah. �Rebecca: So, I had a really great start, playing under Rex that year. Tom: Oh, okay. And who did you, before we get into the symphony, so who who did you have for a teacher? Before, you know, before then? Who did you take lessons from? Rebecca: Well, I remember studying with Dorotha Becker, who was also concertmaster [first chair, first violin, and also leader of the entire string section] of the Civic Symphony at that time, and kind of the mainstay of string teaching in town. Tom: Mmhmm. Rebecca: I remember she taught orchestra at Grant School when I was in fourth grade, and when it was time for me to take private lessons, that was, I think she was the only person in town who could really do that, until a cello teacher came to town whose name was Rebecca Rennecker. I'm not sure how her last name was spelled. And she became principal cello of the symphony. There was a little bit of trouble over that because the existing principal cellist, who had served long and well and was quite competent, his name was Sidney Wallingford. Was kind of pushed aside, I felt, and he felt, and I think he continued to play for a few years before he quit. Anyway, Rebecca Rennecker was my teacher through the rest of high school until I switched, I must have switched at the beginning of my senior year to driving down to Laramie to study with the cello professor there, David Tomatz T-O-M-A-T-Z. So all through the winter, Sid Wallingford and I drove down to Laramie together, we would take turns driving, to take our lessons. Tom: Did you spend the night down there? Rebecca: No, I think we drove home the same day. Tom: Uh-huh. Rebecca: I'm sure we did. Tom: I remember listening to you play the cello in Barbara Dobos' living room when you were about 18. Rebecca: I remember doing that, yeah. Tom: You were a wonderful cello player for a long time. We'll get to that later, so. Where was, there, when you were in, at Grant School, when you were in the schools in Casper, was there, was there music instruction in the schools? Just orchestra, not private lessons through the �schools, right? But the kids could be in bands and was that part of the instructional day? Or was that like a after school activity like sports? Rebecca: No, that was a class during the day, as I recall. Tom: Right, so you could be in a orchestra class or a band? Yeah, that's sort of the, I guess, when our kids were there, too. And so, you started with Rex and then Curtis comes in when you're still in high school, were there are very many other high school kids? And you were in the cello section. You were not yet principal cellist. Is that right? Rebecca: Correct. Tom: And were there any other high school kids in the symphony then? Rebecca: Yeah, I recall Debbie Johnson, who's now Debbie Bovie. Tom: Oh. Rebecca: She's about my age, and she went to Kelly Walsh [high school in Casper]. Tom: Yeah, I know her, uh-huh. Rebecca: And John Niethamer, N-I-E-T-H-A-M-E-R, he was a year older than I was, but he was in the symphony. Tom: Uh-huh. Rebecca: And I’m trying to think what other cellists, there was a principal bass for a while, a very nice man named Joe Corrigan, and Joe had a younger brother named Gaylen. I think G-AY-L-E-N, who was around my age, and I'm sure Gaylen must have played [cello] in the symphony at some time 'cause I remember playing with him and it wouldn't have been in high school orchestra, I know that. So it had to have been either Youth or Civic Symphony, or, more likely, both. Tom: So these were all cello players or these were a variety of instruments? Rebecca: Cellists. I had plenty of violinist friends as well, whose names I recall, if you want me to mention them. Tom: Sure. �Rebecca: OK, well, there was a student at Casper College whose name was Carol Tumbleson. She was really good. There was a, I don't know if she was a student at Casper College or older, but she wasn't that old. Her name was Lynette Ketcham, K-E-T-C-H-A-M. I'm seeing the photo of the symphony from this time, I think it was from when I was a senior in high school and I'm just seeing their faces. There was Jane Gerberding. Her husband or excuse me, her father was a Lutheran pastor in town, and he used to review symphony performances in the ‘80s [for the Casper Star-Tribune]. That was later on. But Jane was a good friend of mine. She was a year older than me. Susan Cheney, I looked at the math and I figured she must be either a younger sister of Dick Cheney or maybe a cousin. I don't know. Tom: Hm. Rebecca: She went to Kelly Walsh. There was a girl who was really talented; her name was Sharon Street. She was a violist. A really excellent violist, just one of these people, it's like, it seems like they never practice and they're always better than you are. And maybe she did practice and I just didn't know it, but she was extremely talented. And then also in that photo, I saw somebody in the trombone section by the name of Brian Brown, who was my age. And I can't think of who else. Tom: That's a lot. I wonder what they're all doing. That's interesting. And your mom was in the orchestra, right? Rebecca: Correct. She played viola. She took up viola in mid-life because, expressly because, orchestras never have enough violas, and she knew she was not going to be able to get really good if she took up the instrument, you know, not as a child. And so of course, she indeed had the opportunity to play in the symphony, because it's quite true that there's kind of a chronic shortage of good viola players. Tom: And so, had she-she never played strings before taking this instrument up when she was in her mid-life? Rebecca: I don't know. In her late 40s probably. Let me think, she played piano forever. She had played piano since she was a little girl, so she was a musician already. But it's a pretty big jump from piano to a stringed instrument. Tom: Yeah, I'll say wow. When I knew your mom, she was playing in the symphony. So what was it like being in the symphony with your mom? Rebecca: Oh, it was fine. It was great. I was so happy that she had a way to enjoy herself by playing in the orchestra, 'cause she, she and my father were very supportive of the orchestra and �would house import players and sell season tickets at their family business, Lange's Bookshop, and contribute. At least, well, their names in the program are pretty high-up in terms of the list of donors, so they were contributing in that way. At a higher proportion of their income than a lot of people. But you have to remember that a lot of those people that showed up at sort of modest levels of contribution, some of them showed up at the symphony balls and the other fundraisers and spent a lot of money at the auctions and things, and that didn't really show up in the list of contributors in the program, and those lists were sorted according to how much money the people gave. Tom: Yeah, different levels of, yeah, right. That's interesting. And was ... [there] already a symphony ball every year by then? Rebecca: I think probably, yeah. Tom: And were there any other adults in the symphony who you knew through your parents, or who were friends or parents of your friends or anything like that, you know? I'm trying to see if, you know, if it felt like these were people you knew anyway, some of them. You know what I mean? Rebecca: Well, of course I knew Sid Wallingford. Rick Rongstad would come up from Colorado. He wasn't that many years older than me, but I suppose he qualified as an adult. I guess, at that point, there was a woman named Mildred Brehm. B-R-E-H-M, I believe. She, I think, was principal second violin for quite a while. And of course, Rex. When he wasn't conducting, he was right there at the head of the viola section. And I just cannot overemphasize what a wonderful man he was. He was such a good teacher and so encouraging and so goodnatured. He was a real asset to the musical scene in Casper, I think. Tom: That's nice. Yeah. I knew him years later when I was the school's reporter for the [Casper] Star-Tribune and Rex was the head of I think not just music, but all arts stuff for the district, for the school district. Rebecca: Oh. Tom: Yeah, Mildred Brehm. B-R-E-H-M? Rebecca: That's correct. Tom: I wonder if she might have been the husband of the guy that my father-in-law, Derb Scott, worked for in the oil business? The wife? Did I say husband? Okay, that's interesting. Rebecca: Oh, and Rex’s wife, Connie, played principal bassoon for a while. �Tom: Okay. So, you started your sophomore year, junior year, senior year. And then you went to and so, did the orchestra change at all or you did? Were you feeling you were getting better During that time? Rebecca: Well, let me tell you what happened to me at the end of my sophomore year. First of all, throughout the year I became so in love with playing in an orchestra that I pretty much forgot about the trip to Spain. And all year long, every Sunday afternoon, I would play string quartets [two violins, viola and cello] with friends of mine from the Youth Symphony in my parents’ basement. Every Sunday afternoon as I recall, and we would play for hours and hours and hours and we had our fun pieces, our favorite pieces that we played every week, so you can imagine we got pretty good at them. Especially with Susan Cheney on first violin, she was quite good. So there was a particular Mozart quartet, I do not remember which one, but we were playing it one day. We’d been playing it for weeks, and there was a moment at which it was perfect. We-we were all together. There was no effort involved. We were all feeling the beat together and the sound we were putting out was perfectly blended. I swear it just was just one of those moments where everything comes together and and I was, I was struck. I don't know how else to put it. It felt like the sky had opened up, and a beam of light had come down and focused itself on the top of my head. And I was, I was like the Ancient Mariner or something, you know? [Referring to the poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," in which the Ancient Mariner had one story to tell, and had to tell it to everyone he met.] I couldn't think about anything else. Suddenly I had this moment of wanting moments of beauty like that, as many as I could have for the rest of my life. Tom: Yeah. Rebecca: And-and I, and my-my brain put it into a sort of a mathematical statement, like, "Okay, you want more of these beautiful moments? This particular beautiful moment happened because our collective skill had reached a certain point." So the way to predispose or, you know, raise the odds, for more of those beautiful moments is to increase my skill, and the way to increase my skill is to practice as much as I can, and and literally overnight I became a practicing dynamo and I kind of pushed aside my, um, studies. For the next few years of high school, I didn't flunk out, but my grades probably could have been better than they were. And every spare minute I had, I practiced. And that, in practical terms, that meant for my last two years of high school, I would go to school and then I would walk downtown and work at the family business until closing time, come home, eat supper, help with chores, practice the cello till bedtime, not do my homework. Yeah. Because I-I wanted a career in music, in performance, and I knew I was really far behind to have that ambition. You're supposed to start when you're 5 or whatever. Here I was, 17 years old, or 16, I guess, and I knew I had to catch up and so I was both inspired, and I was also, I guess you could say, worried or knew how hard I was going to have to work. So in that �moment of perfection in the string quartets, I think basically I got my vision for my life, even though I hadn't been conscious of being on a vision quest or anything like that. Tom: Uh-huh. Rebecca: So I ... just had to major in cello performance. Tom: Uh-huh. Rebecca: And a lot of people. Not a lot, a few, including my teacher at UW [University of Wyoming], they sort of tried to talk me, not exactly out of majoring in cello performance, but into adding teacher certification. Tom: Mmhmm. Rebecca: So that as my teacher said, "Suppose you get married and your husband moves to a little town and there aren't any playing opportunities, what are you going to do? If you have your teacher certification at least then you'd be able to teach in the schools." Well, I knew I would be miserable teaching in the public schools, so I said no, I want to perform. I held to that for a very long time. Well, and I never did teach in the public schools. And there are very few performers who don't teach, both because they, I think, to some degree get pulled into it 'cause it's interesting and they want to share what they know, and to some degree because it's additional income. Tom: Sure. Ah, that's- thank you for telling me that story. That's how wonderful and so um. You went to UW? Rebecca: That's correct, for three years. And during those three years, I came back to the Civic Symphony as an import for many concerts, maybe all of them. Tom: Mmhmm. Rebecca: That was fun. Tom: And were you majoring in cello performance at UW? Rebecca: I was. Tom: And who was your teacher there? Rebecca: David Tomatz T-O-M-A-T-Z. He was also head of the department. �Tom: Oh yeah, you mean? Yeah, I think you mentioned him in your Casper article, [article published on WyoHistory.org about the history of the symphony]. Was he a conductor in Casper? For a while also? No? Rebecca: No, he was conductor of the University Symphony. Tom: Okay. Rebecca: The main things he did was teach the cello lessons, play in the Western Arts Trio, which was the faculty piano trio at UW, and teach a few students. [a piano trio is piano, violin and cello] Tom: So you were aRebecca: And fair amount-go ahead. Tom: You were a private student of his as well, or you were, or you were, or that was part of your ... regular UW education? Rebecca: Yeah, that was part of my, you could take it as a class, basically. Private lessons, well, they’re one-on-one. I forget what they-applied, that was it, [they called them] applied lessons, for a certain number of credits. Tom: Uh-huh. And was he a good teacher? Rebecca: He was all right. I think his mind was elsewhere than teaching and performing. He was okay, but at the end of three years, I was frustrated by two things. I felt like I wasn't learning enough in my lessons and I was, I think, the only cellist of any ability in the department, so I didn't really have colleagues. Tom: Uh-huh. Rebecca: And I wanted to be in a situation where I was surrounded by student cellists who were better than I was. Tom: Mmhmm. Rebecca: So [that] I had room to learn and a teacher who was a better teacher and a better performer than David Tomatz was. He was really made for schmoozing money out of little, old- �rich, little old ladies. That's really what he was made for. And that's really what he did best. Probably, you know, raised quite a lot of money for the department and the university orchestra. He was a very good looking man and he was charming and you know, I'm sure he knew how to schmooze money out of people. So he was divided. So at at the end of three years I transferred to the University of Oregon. Tom: Uh-huh. Rebecca: Because in the region, I'd been to music camps in Montana, and I'd heard about the cello teacher at Oregon and been impressed with what I'd heard. And actually, I think it was during my sophomore year at UW, that I flew out there, spent my own money to do it. I had a friend that I'd gone to high school with who I’d been corresponding with, who was going to the University of Oregon, who met me at the airport, put me up in her apartment, gave me a ride to the university so I could do my audition to be admitted to the School of Music and so on. Tom: So the man that taught cello out there? Rebecca: Robert Hladky. H-L-A-D-K-Y. (pronounced Lad-kee) Wanted me to be with him for two years. So he admitted me as a junior rather than a senior and I could see his point. He really couldn't do much with me for just one year. So I it took me five years to do my undergraduate degree and I had to finance the last year myself 'cause my parents had told me and my sisters that they would put us through four years of undergrad school and support us during that time. Tom: Mmhmm. Rebecca: So they did that and then I had to finance that last year. But it was a really good move because, um, Dr. Hladky had studied with some really good teachers and had a really organized approach to playing and technique, and that's what I felt like I needed was, how do I play better, not, how do I be a better musician. That didn't worry me so much, it was, how do I get the notes to come out sounding in tune and on time and so on? Tom: Why isn't that a better musician? Why is? I don't understand the difference. Rebecca: Well, the difference is, you can have, you can know your way around the fingerboard and you can play in tune, and you can play on time, and you can play well with other people, 'cause your sense of rhythm is good and your sound is good and you know how to blend, and so on. But there's this added ingredient of, what would you call it, heart. Tom: Mmhmm. �Rebecca: Soul, swing. Tom: Mmhmm. Rebecca: I know Swing is a Jazz term, but it's been co-opted by classical musicians to mean that little extra special something that makes you want to listen to somebody and they-how they handle the music, like let's say the [Johann Sebastian] Bach unaccompanied suites for cello. There are six of them. Each suite has, let me think, a Prelude and then stylized dances, Allemande, Courante, Sarabande, and then a pair of Minuets, or in some cases a pair of Boureés and then basically uh, a Gigue, G-I-G-G-U-E. Tom: Right. Rebecca: So all six of the Bach Suites have those and Bach, he could do so much with so little. He was all about chords, basically. And he would break up the chords for the cello, which you can't play all four notes at onceTom: Mmhmm. Rebecaa: -like you can on a keyboard or a guitar. Rebecca: And he would write these wonderful, wonderful pieces based on really nothing but-but chord progressions. Tom: Mmhmm. Rebecca: And so, you know, if if you're a good musician, you can play those, conveying to the audience by how you play them, where the important parts are, where the sections begin and end, where the chords change. Well, what's the melodic line and what's the bass line and things like that. And all I can do is share a story about, this was a cello festival I went to in Evanston, Illinois, where I lived for three years, when I went to Northwestern University for one of those years to get my master's in performance. So this cello festival was put on and there was a hotshot guy from Champaign Urbana. I guess that would have been the University of Illinois. And of course, because he was so good, he'd gotten this job, and he played, he performed for us, the attendees, at this little festival. And I had, I was in Evanston, not 'cause I-no, I didn't live there then, I had traveled down, that's right, 'cause I traveled to take a lesson with the new cello instructor at Northwestern. I was up in Wisconsin at that time, teaching at the university and in their Suzuki program. Anyway, I was down there for this-the weekend. So this guy played and he played one of the harder Bach Suites, one of the later ones. And just kind of, you know, knocked out the notes really good and really fast and really clear, but without an iota of �understanding of where the melodic line was, where the bass line was, what the chord progressions were, what-what the music was. He he had technique. He could play all the notes, but-but I just. ... I was kind of offended. I don't know. He was so good and so looked up to and selected to play this solo and I knew I was not his equal as a cellist in terms of getting around the instrument. So when I went to have my lesson with this new teacher at Northwestern, I said, "Was that as bad as I thought it was, musically?" And he shook his head, and he said "There's somebody who had no idea at all what he was doing." Tom: Hm. Rebecca: So, I think non-musicians pick these things up. They know it, whether they can articulate it or not, I don't know. But we all have music in our soul and I think, on some level, we know the difference between somebody who's basically a very good gymnast and somebody who's really taking the music up to the level of music. Music making. I don't know if that clarifies the question at all. Tom: You know, let's say that, that's really, I think I know what you mean. Yeah. Rebecca: It it makes you want to come back and listen to them again and again and again, yeah. Tom: Right. Right. Yeah. Rebecca: No, I had. Even if they miss a few notes, they're still going to call you back by how they play. Tom: Okay. So you went to UW for three years, you went to University of Oregon, Eugene, I guess, right forRebecca: Correct. Yeah. Tom: Two more years, you had a bachelors in music performance and then you went to Northwestern to go to graduate school? Rebecca: Well, something happened in the meantime. Let me look at my notes here. Oh, there was a summer internship orchestra. It wasn't quite the great gig that getting a fellowship to the Aspen Festival, Aspen Music Festival was. [high-powered summer music festival in Aspen, Colorado] If you got a fellowship to the Aspen Music Festival, you got full room and board and a pretty good stipend and you were at the Aspen Music Festival. Which, you know, the luminary musicians that were there and the things that went on, it was just incredible. So I auditioned for the Aspen Music Festival and did not make it. But this other summer internship orchestra, based �in Evergreen, Colorado, was called at that time the Colorado Philharmonic. I think before that, for a while had been called the National Repertory Orchestra. Tom: Mmhmm. Rebecca: Most of the time musicians, when they play auditions, they have to pay the expense of traveling to where the audition is held. So anytime you can drive, you know, 100 miles, or down the street or around the corner or whatever to take an audition, you do it whether you're ready to or not. Tom: Uh-huh. Rebecca: So I knew about the Colorado Philharmonic and I auditioned for it. And I got in. Kind of an interesting, I have always thought it was an interesting story. I was at the audition. There were two people traveling around the country holding auditions. And this-this is kind of a story of getting in over my head musically, which I have a couple of things about that to say, but I-I was sitting there and I played some of the required excerpts that we knew we would have to play, they sent out the list. And I played about two notes of one of them. I'd been working really, really hard on tone production and in this slow excerpt, I think it was the slow movement of Brahms Second Symphony, which is standard, was a standard at that time for a lot of audition lists. [Johannes Brahms, 19th century German composer] And both of them, both of these auditioners did a double take. I started playing, they looked up from their notes and stared at me. So that was interesting. And then when it came to doing the sight reading [playing a piece of music you've never seen before], I was really mentally engaged. I looked very carefully, the way my teachers had told me, to [indistinguishable] the music before I started to play it. I mentally played the first few measures to know what I was about to do. And I noticed that in this particular excerpt there was a a subtle difference in the notation between one phrase and another. And I wanted to make sure to make that difference very, very clear when I played it, so that they would know that I had seen that difference in the printed music. So I did that and got another double take. Tom: Mmhmm. Rebecca: So what happened was, and they based, they seated the sections, the string sections according to the auditions, was that I got fourth chair in this really good orchestra. Which, there was probably a ten-cello section, a very good string section, really excellent, and found myself rehearsing a piece by Claude Debussy, the [19th and 20th century French] Impressionist composer. The piece [was] La Mer, The Sea. It's a beautiful piece and it's got a cello quartet in it, where the rest of the section does not play, and the first four chairs of the cello section do. I had never seen the piece before. I had never heard it before. There I was, having to play the part. Uh, �it was, it was scary. It was stressful. I did okay, but that's sort of a borderline case of having landed myself in hot water. Anyway, that-that was what I did. The summer after my two years at University of Oregon no, wait Tom: Hm. Rebecca: Yeah, I was supposedly going to come back and do a masters. And then I made it [in]to the Colorado Philharmonic. And then we had guest conductors at Colorado Philharmonic. We're going to probably run more than an hour. Is that alright with you? I've got a whole page of notes. Tom: I have somewhere [I] have to be at, I have to leave at about, well, I was thinking maybe we should do a second session. Rebecca: We could. Tom: Let's see where we are by 3:00 and then make sure. Rebecca: Yeah, well, let's see. Colorado Philharmonic, let me think. Tom: So what happened next? Rebecca: Oh, right. We had guest conductors all summer long and and many of them were from professional orchestras. It was just wonderful, and one person got a job offer. Because of how well he played principal viola in the Colorado Philharmonic. Tom: Uh-huh. Rebecca: And they [the guest conductors] would hold audition seminars in the afternoon. See, we had a really compressed schedule. We performed every other night. In Evergreen, Colorado. We had, I think, Sundays off. I can't remember, but the rehearsal schedule was rehearse in the morning, rehearse in the afternoon. And then the day, the concert, rehearsal in the afternoon, perform in the evening. Or it might have been sometimes we did a matinee, in which case we would rehearse in the morning and perform in the afternoon. So, you know, very few rehearsals, very, very hard music, very high powered. So conductors would come through and guest-conduct concerts and hold these audition seminars. On the, in the chunk of time during the concert weekend when we weren't rehearsing and the better players in the orchestra would play their prepared auditions for, they were preparing for professional orchestras, and the conductor would critique. Well, I was never good enough or prepared enough to play these excerpts. So I would listen and, you know, take it all in. But then one conductor, he did not conduct the orchestra, but he was on a tour of the United States, well the upper 48, he had just been hired to conduct the �national symphony of Puerto Rico 'cause they wanted a, basically a European-standard national orchestra, even though they didn't have enough Puerto Ricans, so he was having to come up here and audition people, so I auditioned for him and they offered me a contract. Tom: Okay. Rebecca: As this was my life ambition to play the cello for a living, Tom: Right. Rebecca: I didn't hesitate at all. So that was at the end of the first Colorado Philharmonic season. At the end of that summer, I went down and played for nine months for a season basically in the Colorado or excuse me, the Puerto Rico Symphony in the section. Tom: I remember. I learned that a couple years ago that you had played in the Puerto Rico Symphony, and what was-what was it like there? Rebecca: Well, uhm. Tom: You were there for nine months and then you came back? Rebecca: Yeah, uhm. It was okay. It was well within my ability. It was a lot like playing in the Civic Symphony, although it was a better orchestra, I think, than the Civic Symphony was, somewhat better, good enough to do Beethoven's Ninth. And other Beethoven symphonies. It was fine. I always felt like I was living in a foreign culture. Just because Puerto Rico is part of the United States, politically, they're a commonwealth, I learned, when I lived there, but it's, culturally, of course it's part of Latin America. Tom: Sure, yeah. Rebecca: And I would have experiences, like I would address people on the street for directions or whatever. Or my colleagues in the orchestra. There were some really sweet older men. And I would-I would try my Spanish on them and ... I made such terrible mistakes. And they would, they were so patient. And-and, whimsical with me about it. It was really cool. Uhm, but I had a good stand partner, which is very important in an orchestra. Tom: Ah, and was it a new orchestra? Rebecca: No, I think they'd been going for a while. �Tom: Okay. And did you get a chance to, did you, did you not want to stay a second year, or did they not offer you a job for the second year or? Rebecca: Well, what happened was, I thought for sure I was going to stay more than one year. The money wasn't. It was enough to live on playing in the orchestra, but I also had many opportunities to play in the recording studios in San Juan, and that's where the real money is. I mean, recordings paid pretty well. And then there was the occasional one where it takes you ten minutes to record a jingle for a commercial, and you get paid $200. So that was fine. But then near the end of the year there was a the usual, I found, every year the orchestra as a whole negotiated with management for a better contract. I had learned and observed throughout the year that there were, as a whole in the in the population ... of Puerto Rico, people who wanted to continue as a commonwealth, people who wanted Puerto Rico to become a state, and people who wanted Puerto Rico to be an independent country. Tom: Uh-huh. Rebecca: And I guess there's a lot of history about the commonwealth situation that was quite distasteful to the Independentistas. I never really knew the details or if I did, I've forgotten them. But we had some Independentistas in the orchestra, one man in particular I'm thinking of, who really resented the presence of the ‘gringos.’ Resented us, I mean absolutely could not stand that we were in the orchestra. So when the time came to negotiate, he told us right out - it was a meeting, an orchestra meeting - told all of us 'gringos’ that we had no right to have any voice in this because it was not our orchestra. So, that was the first time in my life had I ever been or felt dismissed and hated and stereotyped because, really, of the color of my skin and where I was from. Tom: Mmhmm. Rebecca: And it was, I didn't think I could work with him. He wasn't the only one. He was just the most outspoken one. And I started feeling like there might be better places for me to be. So I originally spent the whole year thinking I would spend another year there at least, and at the very end of the year I decided, no, I'm gonna go back somewhere, move to a big city where there are many teachers and many orchestras and a good professional orchestra for me to listen to and learn from and so on. So that's what I did. I moved to Evanston, Illinois, to be near the Chicago area. Tom: Okay. And so did you have a job in Evanston or did you go back to school? Rebecca: Uhm, Okay, you've asked me some questions about Evanston. I wanna jump back to high school, �Tom: Okay. Rebecca: 'cause I was in early college 'cause there were some things I wanted to say. Tom: Okay. All right. Rebecca: The first thing I want to say is that as a senior, I competed in a young artist competition in Casper and Cheyenne. And I was beaten by the same person, a pianist, who was pretty good. I was okay too, for my age and my level. And what to me is the interesting thing, and what was the beneficial thing to me about this was that all the string teachers who were concerned, that being the violin professor at University of Wyoming, who was one of the judges in Cheyenne, my teacher at University of Wyoming, uh, Curtis Peacock in Casper, who was not only the conductor of the Civic Symphony, but also the string instructor at Casper College. And maybe some other string teachers that I don't remember, said, they all said the same [thing]: "A pianist at the same level will always sound better than a string player because the string player at that level is still learning to play in tune. Still learning tone production." And while pianists do have to work on tone production, they don't have anything to say about whether they're in tune or not. They don't have to learn that. For obvious reasons. Tom: Right. Rebecca: So they all kind of felt that at least I should have been, should have won, or I don't know how it would have been worked. Anyway, I lost to this person. Curtis said to me, "Uhm, you worked really hard on your concerto. How would you like to play it, perform it with the Casper College Baroque ensemble?", which was really, you know, their chamber orchestra. "Furthermore, how would you like to perform it here in Casper and on tour?" So of course I said yes, I'd love to. And so I got a better deal than the winner. I didn't have the prestige of playing with the symphony, but in terms of practical experience, it's a wonderful opportunity to be able to, if you're being a soloist, to have more than one crack at it. [A concerto is a composition for one or more solo instruments with orchestral accompaniment] Tom: Uh-huh. Rebecca: So, you know, we played on tour and we played in Casper and I still remember playing in some little tiny town up in the northwest part of the state like Frannie or Deaver, or one of those. I just have this very clear memory of sitting on some stage with a tiny handful of people in the audience and-and performing my concerto. So it worked out really well for me. Tom: So the concerto was you and not the whole, and the Casper College orchestra. �Rebecca: Correct. Yeah. Tom: Huh. Great. Rebecca: Yeah, and there was another opportunity I had that I'll just add, many string students [in Casper] also have had. Let me think, Rick Rongstad; cello and bass, Dale Bohren; bass, Andrea Reynolds DiGregorio; cello. And a few violinists, probably, whose names I can't recall now, we all went to this music camp called Congress of Strings. It was a national effort. I think it was probably one string player from each of the 50 states. A huge string orchestra, a really big deal, really very high level of music making. Tom: Where was this? Rebecca: Well, it was held at UCLA for quite a while, and then the year that I went, it was held at the University of Washington in Seattle. Tom: Mmhmm. Rebecca: And it was a full scholarship. And they may also even have paid our transportation. I don't remember. I just know that I got to go and it didn't cost my parents anything. And it was eight weeks long. And it was um, a tremendous opportunity 'cause you're there with some really amazing performers. I remember one of the cellists that was there, he ended up in the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, Saint Paul, Minnesota. That's one of the premiere orchestras in the world. And he ended up in that cello section. So I was of course very low on the totem pole, but I didn't really notice 'cause the music we played was so wonderful. We played, I mean you're restricted as a string orchestra to just a few pieces. And one of them is the [19th century Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich] Tchaikovsky Serenade for Strings, which is just one of the most lush, showy, beautiful pieces in the world. And then Mahler, Gustav Mahler, a German composer of the late 1900s. His Fifth Symphony, the slow movement is for strings and harp. And they dredged up a good harp player from somewhere. At Congress of Strings. And we played that, and there's nothing like Mahler. He's he was just drunk with the beauty of music, and you could tell by the way he composed. Tom: Mmhmm. Rebecca: So I will never forget playing those two pieces. It was really something and the local, there's a Musicians' Union Chapter [in Casper, the American Federation of Musicians] provided the scholarship. So because, as a direct result of my involvement with the symphony as a high school student, although I was at the end of my sophomore year in college, or was a freshmanfreshman year of college when I went, I still got the benefit of that scholarship. �Tom: Uh-huh. Rebecca: So that was-that was something. Tom: When you mentioned, I just wanted to ask, did you ever know John Stovall? Rebecca: Yes, he ended up with the Boston Symphony. Tom: Yeah, right was. He's younger than you probably, right? Rebecca: About a year or two, yeah. Well, let’s see, you wanted to know what I did after Puerto Rico, right? Tom: Yeah. Rebecca: Well, I moved to Evanston, Illinois, so that I could go to the Chicago Symphony [concerts]. And I found out once I moved there that they had what they called was a training orchestra for the Chicago Symphony. It was actually a very excellent youth orchestra. I auditioned and got into that. I got an office job in Evanston part time so that I could work till about 2:00 in the afternoon, take the elevated train that turns into a subway partway there downtown, get to orchestra hall, rehearse, come home, eat supper, practice. Uhm, do it all over again. I did that for a semester till Christmas I think, and then I was just too tired. So I went full time at the office that I was working, and quit the Civic Orchestra and just took lessons and practiced. And then that year I applied for some graduate programs and got into the masters program at Northwestern, right there in Evanston. Tom: Yeah, Okay. Rebecca: Well, that's what I did. The second year I was in Evanston, that would have been, let me think, ’79- ‘80 was Puerto Rico, ‘80- ‘81 was being in Evanston [the] first year, ‘81- ‘82 was the year I did my masters. Tom: Mmhmm. Rebecca: That was great. Tom: So you got a masters in cello performance at Northwestern? Rebecca: Correct. �Tom: That’s a one year program? Rebecca: Right. They had, they were so expensive they had to do something. So that's what they did. They reduced their requirements to the scope of a year. Tom: And then you spent another year in Chicago? Rebecca: I did. Um, I have to tell a story about my masters degree recital. I had a really fun teacher at Northwestern and he and I both knew that some of the music I was going to perform at my recital was a little beyond me, so I was lamenting to him, you know, everybody’s gonna hear that it was, uh, by Tchaikovsky, the Rococo Variations, this very showy, highly difficult piece. I said, "They're going to hear that my technique is not up to this piece. It's not going to be a perfect, note perfect recital." And he agreed. No, not quite. But yeah, you're here to learn. He tried. And I said, "Okay, as long as it's not boring, you know, it can be anything. I can miss some notes. Not many, but as many as I'm going to. It can't be boring." So then, I don't remember if he told me this before or after my recital, but he told me he had a terrible tussle with himself how he was going to break it to me that my playing was boring. (laughs) Tom: Really? Rebecca: I have always been glad that he was honest with me. Because one does not want to be a boring performer. So now I have to jump ahead. Now let's see the third one. I'm not going to jump ahead. There's just a continuation of this "boring" story. So then I completed my master's degree and the office that I'd been working at, I ended up working there during spring break and summer and things like that. So they were-they found room for me when I graduated and I went part-time. The year after my masters. Thinking I'd wasted time and money, 'cause I all I had was two little tiny teaching jobs at community schools of music in the area. And I was sure neither of them would ever go anywhere. One of them was a Suzuki teaching job. And one of them was a regular, just regular non-Suzuki, and the Dean of the School of Music at Northwestern had said to me, when I had started there, that my chances of getting a college teaching job were greatly increased if I had some Suzuki experience, because at that time the Suzuki movement was really taking off. Tom: Uh-huh. Rebecca: So, you know, I took this little dinky job that had like three students for which I had to drive an hour one way. Figuring it would never go anywhere, and also feeling like I didn't know enough, so I took a Suzuki pedagogy class on my own initiative, paying out of my own pocket, down at DePaul University, which I had to take the El, [elevated train] I don't know, 45 minutes �south to Loyola University. It wasn't that far, I guess, but a fair way to take part in a Suzuki pedagogy class. Which, to make a long story short, I ended up with a job at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh teaching University students and Suzuki students combined to make a full time position for me because I took that said ... pedagogy course. And the other community school of music, for which I traveled an hour one way and taught a few more students. It turns out that that was a very respected community school. It was called the Jack Benny Center for the Arts and about more than 50 percent of the music faculty at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh Music Department - when I went up there to audition and interview for the job - more than 50 percent of them had first of all, gone to Northwestern. Had nostalgic feelings about that. Second of all, had taught at the Jack Benny Center, and also had nostalgic feelings about that, which certainly didn't hurt me. Tom: Yeah. Rebecca: At this interview. So it was great. I spent that whole year feeling like a failure and like I'd wasted my time and was I ever going to be any sort of professional. I dropped the idea of trying to play in an orchestra because, there were kind of two reasons. Playing in an orchestra as a string player, it's kind of bad for your playing as a as a rule, if you do too much of it, 'cause you can't hear yourself the way you can if you're playing chamber music, for example, or playing as a soloist. And I discovered that, playing in the Colorado Philharmonic after University of Oregon, then in the Puerto Rico Symphony. And then again in the Colorado Philharmonic before I moved to Evanston. So more than a year of playing just in an orchestra or mostly in an orchestra. I could tell it was starting to hurt my playing, but the real reason was, to audition for orchestras you have to practice certain orchestral excerpts, just like you would practice a concerto until you have every single note perfect. Well, that's not so bad for excerpts from Beethoven's Ninth, excerpts from Brahms symphonies and things like that. [Johannes Brahms, 19th century German composer] But when it comes to tone poems by Richard Strauss, those things, it's not just that they're hard, they're just not very rewarding musically. [Richard Strauss, 19th and 20th century German composer and conductor (son of Johann Strauss of “Blue Danube” fame.)]The cello parts that you have to learn, at least I found them not rewarding, and I discovered that I just didn't have the motivation to spend the hours and hours and hours and hours preparing those kinds of excerpts and, I don't know, I noticed that it was a really competitive thing. I mean, I always knew it was, but I had a friend in the Puerto Rico Symphony. She was a gringo. She had been in the orchestra for quite a while and she had been trying to get back to the upper 48 for quite a while and she was really good and she was one of these people that could make herself practice these excerpts and she flew, of course, at her own expense, to Texas. I forget, to audition for which major professional orchestra there, and she told me she played a note perfect audition. I mean, she didn't miss a single note, and did not get the job, and that was when she learned that something more was needed. So that, I think that gave me pause, along with the fact that what I really wanted to play was Beethoven quartets and, I don't know. Chamber music was very �attractive to me, and the only way you can really play chamber music is if you're part of a university faculty. Tom: Uh-huh. Rebecca: Unless you get really lucky and you're really, really, really good and you get a place in a professional string quartet. But they often also have teaching positions somewhere. So I applied for this, well, the person that was in this Suzuki pedagogy course that I got to know, was commuting up to Oshkosh to teach in their brand new [Suzuki] cello program. They were paying for her to rent a car and drive up on Saturday morning, teach all day Saturday, and then drive home. Well, I just wasn't going to do that. I just, was not going to do that. And she was thinking of stopping. And I contacted them and I said, you know, I know this woman who's been coming up to teach your students. If you can offer me a full-time job where I can become a resident of the community and live on what you pay me, I'm interested. Well, lo and behold, there was a fireball up there. Who was in charge of the Suzuki program, who went to the university people, who [the Suzuki program] ... was housed in the university music department at that point, and said let's get together. You guys need a cello professor, and you don't have enough students. And we need a cello teacher and we don't have enough students. But together, can we put together a position? And they did. They came up with the money, they came up with, it was a University of Wisconsin system faculty job I had. They had to advertise it. And I had to audition and interview. And there was one other person who was also selected to audition and interview, and I got the job. Tom: And that's in Oshkosh, not Madison, right? Rebecca: That was. There are so many campuses of the University of Wisconsin. It was just incredible [to me at the time], how many. There are little centers all throughout the state in little areas and four-year branches. Many in many places. I told that to my mother, she said, Yeah, Wisconsin is a very progressive state. Tom: Yeah, that's true. That's been. I hope it gets back to that. Okay. So you were in. So how long did you have? Maybe we should. Let's see. How much notes do you have left there, Becky? I got somewhere I need to be about 3:30. Rebecca: Oh, we might be able to wrap up by 3:15 maybe? Tom: Okay, alright. Rebecca: Should we try? �Tom: Yeah, let's. Okay, so where did you go after that? Rebecca: Well, let's, I want to tell one story about being at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh. Tom: Okay. Rebecca: Well, it was, I began playing regular faculty recitals. I'd been doing this for a few years and people always come backstage afterwards, and congratulate you and so on, and tell you how much they enjoyed it. Well, one person said, "There are two kinds of recitals, one where you're sitting there looking at your watch, wishing it would be over, and another one where you don't want it to end. And your performance was the second kind." Tom: That's nice. Rebecca: So I knew that the practicing I had been doing in the interim had been working. Tom: So not boring? Rebecca: Evidently not. I mean, that person had no reason to schmooze me. No reason at all. Tom: Good. Rebecca: Okay. Tom: I'm sorry to interrupt you. Go ahead. Rebecca: No. So we're done with University of Wisconsin Oshkosh. Uhm, I want to say yeah, go ahead. Tom: How long were you there? Rebecca: Seven years. Tom: Oh, I didn't know that, okay. Rebecca: So yeah. Tom: And did you work that? Was it a tenure track position? �Rebecca: No, no. It was a one year renewable contract. It was adjunct. Well, I don't know. I guess I was an adjunct faculty. I don't know what they called it because I was a hybrid. I was, the Suzuki program was not part of the university, administratively. They just used their offices. So I don't [know]. All I know is my contract ran a year and then was renewed. Tom: Been talking a lot there. Do you need to get a drink of water or something? Rebecca: I don't know. I'll try to manage, I can. I want to say something about, something I faced as principal cellist of the Wyoming Symphony Orchestra. I became principal cellist in the fall of 1992. And what I faced, of course, was having to share the stage with Mark O'Connor, playing a piece that I'd never seen before and it was really hard. Tom: Right. Rebecca: -but I want to go back to something that I did, I'm not sure what year it would have been. I got married and my husband got teacher certification in natural science. And we ended up in Tecumseh, Nebraska. He was teaching science at their combined middle school and high school. ... So it's not that far from Lincoln and Omaha. I decided I would try to get into some of those orchestras that were up there. So I got some audition music and I looked at the deadline and started learning it, and we decided that I if I did any work outside the home, it would be playing the cello. So, I got this audition music and I ran into a piece that I'd never seen before on an audition list. And it was unbelievably hard. And there are two ways of tackling something like that. One is, you learn the notes and then you sort of beat it up to tempo. You set the metronome at the tempo you can play it at and you play it, then you up the metronome one click which is, I don't know ... but it's a few more beats per second [indistinguishable]. Yeah, and you play it again, and then you up the metronome again. You play [it] again. You work it up to speed as best you can that way or you change your technique so that you can play better and more easily. And that changing of technique is a long process, long and intensive. And I looked at the deadline for that audition and I decided I would rather change my technique than play that audition. So I did. I engaged in some very focused, very intensive practicing. One of the things I worked on was my sitting posture where, you know, you sit, you pick up the cello. Your back might be really good, your back muscles might be great, you know, and you start to play and everything starts twisting up and tightening up in bad ways. You have to have some muscle support when you play, so you can't talk about being completely relaxed 'cause then you wouldn't even be able to push the strings down or hold the bow, but managing your muscles so you don't distort what they're best for. That's what I tackled in that practice session with no knowledge of the future, you understand? No, no crystal ball that told me I was going to be onstage with Mark O'Connor about, I don't know, eight years later or something. Facing a piece that was nearly too hard for me. So that was very satisfying practicing and it really put my playing- headed me in a different direction. So that I was a much better player. And playing was much more easy, and my sound �was better, and a whole bunch of other things were better. Playing fast was easier. So that when I landed in Casper as the principal cellist of the symphony, I was ready for it. The principal cello ... solos that you have to play, things like the William Tell Overture by Rossini. [19th century Italian composer Gioachino Rossini's Overture to his opera, William Tell] That's best known, of course, as The Lone Ranger theme. But the opening is slow and it's a cello quartet, and the principal cello has the most wonderful and hardest part of the four cellos. I enjoyed that so much. I enjoyed playing that solo and I did it really well and I know I did. So I wasn't in over my head at all. It was comfortable, it was a comfortable job and we did a Brahms Piano Concerto. I ... [think] the second one? John Browning, who is a world class pianist, was our soloist. We played that in Oshkosh too. I was principal of the Oshkosh Symphony. And there's a very, very beautiful principal cello solo in the slow movement of that piece, I'd played it before. There is an easy part of it and then there's a harder part of it and it's just gorgeous and I played it. And then you sort of hand over to the piano after you play the second part of the solo. So I looked at John Browning when I was done, and he nodded at me and smiled, when he started playing, so I knew I had done a really good job. That, moments like that, were just wonderful and I never felt like I was over my head. Okay, so. Are we going till 3:15 'cause I think, probably, we can finish up in that time. Tom: What? Okay. Ah, alright, I have someRebecca: Will that work for you? Tom: Some, I'll have some questions, but maybe we could have a second session for those. I don't know that they'll take much time. So how did you end up? Are you going to tell me how it is you came to leave Nebraska and come back to Casper? Rebecca: Oh yeah, well, so my husband, Ellis, was teaching science and there were some unbelievable behavior problems in his classroom. You wouldn't think of it in a little town, but it was the case. And he had a very unsupportive principal who just didn't back him up in discipline. So he quit. He-he burned out faster than I've ever seen anybody burn out on teaching. He quit in March of that year, just broke his contract, and we moved. I'd been in touch with my father. My mother had died in ‘84, and this was ‘92, spring of 1992, and he told me they didn't have a principal cellist in the symphony, and that they were paying more or less a professional rate they'd had to cut down on what they were paying, but it was sort of our only safety net because Ellis was not going to teach school again. That was a very bad experience. He lost thirty pounds. He had insomnia for the only time he's ever in his life had insomnia. It was just terrible so we couldn't wait to get away. So we moved to Casper and I auditioned for the principal cello position and got it. And Ellis started remodeling houses and all that. Being a former farmer, he had a lot of carpenter skills and things like that. Maybe your questions are more important than what I have in my notes, except about O'Connor. �Tom: Do that. Yeah, no. Okay, tell me about Mark O'Connor. Rebecca: May of 1997, I had never heard of Mark O'Connor. I just knew he was our guest artist, and the music librarian whose job it was to get our music into our folders and let us know when we could come to the symphony office to pick them up, said, “Guess what? You're playing a duo with this guy, just you and him. And he supplied a tape recording.” Okay well, shrug. I was conscientious so I always picked up my folder as soon as it was ready and got busy on the music. So I got my music and I looked at this part and I played through it and it didn't look so bad. And I played the tape, and the tempo was so fast on the tape that I didn't recognize it, didn't realize it was the piece until I did, suddenly realize how fast I was going to have to play this piece. And the problem of course, which I couldn't help but notice [was] the length of the fiddle fingerboard, or the violin, is about half the length of the cello fingerboard. And I pretty much had to match Mark O'Connor note-for-note in this piece, "Limerock" was the name of the piece. So it's like he had to run the 50 yard dash and I had to run the 100 yard dash, and I had to come to the finish line at the same time that he got to the finish line. Tom: Right. Rebecca: -and he was by far the better player, in addition. ... and I had, the style was alien. So we get to the dress rehearsal. Tom: Had he, had he never performed this before with a cello, did he? Rebecca: Oh, many times. He had performed it with Yo-Yo Ma. They often programmed it. Tom: Okay. Rebecca: So we played it at the dress rehearsal and I was sweating. Of course, I was just sweating it because it was so hard. I was pushing to the very outer limits of what I could do. So I played it note-for-note at the dress rehearsal. He stopped and he looked at me, looked kind of puzzled and said, "you know, Yo-Yo had trouble with this piece." And my reaction was, well, as if I didn't. Just 'cause you can't see it. So Holly Turner was the manager, the executive director of the orchestra at that time, and it was her job to make sure that the guest artist got where he or she needed to go at the right time, so she was driving him around and taking him out for meals and things like that. And he told her a bunch of stories about past performances of this piece, or past attempted performances, including somebody, some principal cellist somewhere, who had been unable to play the piece and had - they had to take it off the program. And I think it must have been a case of not practicing it hard enough. �Tom: Uh-huh. Rebecca: As this person was way above me in the profession, and you don't get to the point that she was at without being really good and auditioning successfully, and a bunch of other things. So sort of a case of the tortoise and the hare. Tom: Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Rebecca: So that was, that was not comfortable. It was too scary, too stressful, [to be comfortable] but it was worth doing. Tom: Yeah, yeah. ... That's great. [indistinguishable] Rebecca: Now I have a couple of associated stories, but I don't know if I try to tell them now, should I? They're short. Tom: Yeah, sure. Okay. Rebecca: After I was done, that is, had played "Limerock," there was more of the concert, including Mark O'Connor's Fiddle Concerto for Fiddle and Orchestra. And in that, the last movement of the concerto, there was a cadenza. And for the non musicians, I'll just say that the cadenza is the part where in a concerto where everything stops and the soloist has a chance to show off, and in the 19th century, cadenzas were improvised. Classical soloists improvised cadenzas. But then that got out of fashion and cadenzas started being written out, and the soloists just played the cadenza that was written into the music. Well, Mark O'Connor, of course he improvised his cadenza. And of course I could enjoy it completely because I was done with the hot-water part of it and it was one of the most memorable musical experiences of my life to sit, what, ten feet away from him, and watch him, and listen to him improvise this amazing cadenza. So one more O'Connor story, if you have time. And then a couple of post-concert, post-Mark O'Connor's concert stories could have stayed with me. First of all, Mark O'Connor was in Laramie, oh four, five, six, years after he was in Casper, and of course I went down to hear him, took my children. And he takes care of his fans. He sits out in the lobby after the concert and signs CDS, signs programs, and so on. For as long a line as there is. So I got in line. I didn't want a signature, but I wanted to ask him what he was thinking, programming "Limerock" in a community orchestra. What was he thinking that he did that to me? That was sort of the purport, and he looked kind of blank. He said, "Well, community musicians play well." I said, "yeah, but do we play that well?" That was his firm belief that in spite of having, not having every cellist that he played with be able to play it. I mean, Yo-Yo Ma could play it. He just had a little trouble with one section. When I saw the YouTube uhm, video of them, I saw what he did to to solve that problem. And it made sense. So I was invited to the reception after the concert. �Tom: Okay. Rebecca: Yeah, and somebody at that reception said something. Maybe it was a board member that said it, I don't know. I didn't know the members of the board, and they didn't hold receptions for the whole orchestra at that point. I was invited at the last minute 'cause I was a kind of soloist at that concert. Anyway, uhm, this person said "You know, I noticed that you didn't smile until it was all over." And I didn't say it, but I thought, "it's not my job to smile." (laughs) "It's my job to play the cello. Don't expect me to smile" 'Cause it was scary and stressful. Tom: Yeah. Rebecca: I was thrilled that I had done it, but I can't say that it was fun like playing [the] William Tell solo or something like that. Tom: Mmhmm. Mmhmm. Rebecca: So the other thing, I'll be quick 'cause I know you have to go. Somebody at that reception congratulated me and said I had really, distinguished the whole symphony and the whole city and so on. And I said, "Well, great, how about, how about a raise? How about hazardous duty pay for work dangerous to my ego and reputation?" Yeah, I thought it was a harmless quip. Well, you never experienced such a chilly tide of disapproval as swept that room. Tom: So this was, this was after you played the "Limerock" or this was six years later in Laramie? Rebecca: No, it was after, was at the reception Tom: Uh-huh. Rebecca: -for that concert. It-it was a joke, I thought a harmless little quip. Tom: Mmhmm. Rebecca: But apparently to some people money is so important that you do not joke about it. Tom: Yeah. Rebecca: I don't know. It was a major social gaffe, that I just did not see coming and didn't understand after it had happened. �Tom: Well, that's really interesting. I'd like to, maybe if we could have another conversation, ask you some more about your departure from the symphony, and about your feeling of the symphony as an organ, as a institution over all that time. I mean, you were connected with it off and on for a long time. And that's really, that's rare. Rebecca: Sure. Tom: So if we could maybe talk more about some of those things. Rebecca: That’d be fine. Tom: Other time I don't 'cause I don't want to squish them up now and I know you have a lot more stories you could tell me too. So this stuff is really interesting. Thank you so much, and I'm learning so much that I didn't know, which is always fun. So thanks. Maybe off the tape we can talk about another time when we can both do this again. Rebecca: Yeah, I don't know how to end the meeting and keep us talking. I suppose you could call me. Tom: Yeah, why don't we? Or maybe just? Rebecca: To end the recording. I'm not sure how to stop the recording and continue the meeting. You want me to try? Alright, let me see. Recording… � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource WyoHistory.org Wyoming Symphony Orchestra Oral History Project Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC-NC/1.0/">http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC-NC/1.0/</a> Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2022-2023 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource WyoHistory.org; Rebecca Hein Language A language of the resource ENG Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context NCA 01.i.2022.02 Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound; Text Description An account of the resource Audio files and transcripts created and edited by Rebecca Hein and students at Casper College during an oral history project with players of the Wyoming Symphony Orchestra. The oral histories were conducted by Hein between 2022 and 2023 and are a part of Wyohistory.org publishing project. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Becky Hein Wyoming Symphony Orchestra Oral History Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC-NC/1.0/">http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC-NC/1.0/</a> Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2022-09-21 and 2022-09-26 Description An account of the resource Audio files and transcripts for oral history interview with Wyoming Symphony Orchestra player Becky Hein. These interviews were conducted on September 21 and September 26 or 2022. Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound; Text Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Becky Hein Language A language of the resource ENG Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. WyoHistory.org Wyoming Symphony Orchestra Oral History Project, NCA 01.i.2022.02 WyCaC US. Casper College Archives and Special Collections. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context NCA 01.i.2022.02_RebeccaHein Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource M4A; MP3; PDF https://caspercollege.cvlcollections.org/files/original/5ff2af0175f45ff69152453f0cc830e3.jpeg 6b54d4aa3be3e34a3139c091891dda30 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Wyoming Symphony Orchestra Posters Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/</a> Description An account of the resource This collection consists of digitized Wyoming Symphony Orchestra posters available for research use through the Goodstein Foundation Library. The archives of the Orchestra consist of programs, posters, photographs, scrapbooks, notebooks, records, and ephemera produced by the Wyoming Symphony Orchestra. Language A language of the resource ENG Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. Wyoming Symphony Orchestra Archives, NCA 01.i.2024.01 WyCaC US. Casper College Archives and Special Collections. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context NCA 01.i.2024.01_WyomingSymphony_Posters Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Wyoming Symphony Orchestra Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Print Poster Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Beethoven's 4ths with Pianist Ian Hobson Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ Description An account of the resource Poster in which the Wyoming Symphony Orchestra Presents Beethoven's 4ths with Pianist Ian Hobson, at John F. Welsh Auditorium, NCHS, Saturday, January 19th. This poster is a part of the Wyoming Symphony Orchestra Archives made available for research use by the Goodstein Foundation Library Special Collections. The archives of the Orchestra consist of programs, posters, photographs, scrapbooks, notebooks, records, and ephemera produced by the Wyoming Symphony Orchestra. Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Wyoming Symphony Orchestra Language A language of the resource ENG Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. Wyoming Symphony Orchestra Archives, NCA 01.i.2024.01 WyCaC US. Casper College Archives and Special Collections. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context NCA 01.i.2024.01_Posters, Beethoven's4ths Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource Text https://caspercollege.cvlcollections.org/files/original/affdf678901fa9db3017126d998581c7.tif 4628e33e254d188c4a9a9777ec591514 Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Print Magazine Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Behind My Eyes Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <div class="element-text"> <div class="element-text"> <div class="element-text"> <div class="element-text five columns omega"> <div class="element-text five columns omega"> <div class="element-text five columns omega"> <div class="element-text"><a href="http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/</a></div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> <div id="dublin-core-rights" class="element"> <div class="element-text"> <div id="dublin-core-rights" class="element"> <div class="element-text"> <div id="dublin-core-rights" class="element"> <div class="element-text"> <div id="dublin-core-rights" class="element"> <div class="element-text five columns offset-by-two"> <div id="dublin-core-rights" class="element"> <div class="element-text five columns offset-by-two"> <div id="dublin-core-rights" class="element"> <div class="element-text five columns offset-by-two"> <div id="dublin-core-rights" class="element"> <div class="element-text"><em>Expression</em><span>&nbsp;</span>claims first North American rights to submissions selected for publication. All rights revert back to the author/artist after publication.</div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2023 Type The nature or genre of the resource Image Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Rhynne Zmiewski Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. Expression Literary and Arts Magazine, CCA 04.ii.c.2022.01 WyCaC US. Casper College Archives and Special Collections. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context CCA 04.ii.c.2022.01_Exp_2023_Art_96 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource TIF Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Casper College https://caspercollege.cvlcollections.org/files/original/5482140ea00cae1f596cc8e6a97adba8.jpeg e26c3e171d243cc8854a1016814243a6 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Wyoming Mountaineers at Casper College Collection Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 1954-1959 Description An account of the resource Photographs and newspaper articles from the Wyoming Mountaineers at Casper College Collection. Some are used in the WMCC Timeline collection, and the rest will be featured in the 2026 Humanities Festival Exhibt. Type The nature or genre of the resource Image and Text Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Wyoming Mountaineers at Casper College, Albert Walter "Walt" Bailey Language A language of the resource ENG Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. Wyoming Mountaineers at Casper College Collection Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context CCA 11.vi.1989.01 References A related resource that is referenced, cited, or otherwise pointed to by the described resource. Check out the WMCC Timeline here by clicking the link! <a href="https://cdn.knightlab.com/libs/timeline3/latest/embed/index.html?source=v2%3A2PACX-1vR4kBKQBUzb4cnvPOyrF54lC5xFZlrZI43LDJ55Dnw7xe8T_UV-qSVwlB1z-29SBMFMPhE7KYiXjN1l&amp;font=Default&amp;lang=en&amp;initial_zoom=2&amp;width=100%25&amp;height=650">https://cdn.knightlab.com/libs/timeline3/latest/embed/index.html?source=v2%3A2PACX-1vR4kBKQBUzb4cnvPOyrF54lC5xFZlrZI43LDJ55Dnw7xe8T_UV-qSVwlB1z-29SBMFMPhE7KYiXjN1l&amp;font=Default&amp;lang=en&amp;initial_zoom=2&amp;width=100%25&amp;height=650</a> Still Image A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Photograph Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Belay Practice Tower 01 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ Date Created Date of creation of the resource. April 12, 1957 Description An account of the resource Photo of the WMCC Belay Practice Tower on CC Campus: Climbers include Karen King (Bottom Left), Ray Jacquot (Top Left), Gary Cole (Top Right), and Don Stout (Bottom Right); photo by Walt Bailey Type The nature or genre of the resource Image Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Walt Bailey, WMCC Language A language of the resource ENG Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. Wyoming Mountaineers at Casper College Collection; CCA 11.vi.1989.01 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context CCA 11.iv.1989.01_WMCC_Belay_Practice_Tower_01 https://caspercollege.cvlcollections.org/files/original/2000cd53caba56bd0b79e110b5ce19e7.m4a 783a2026026ea40f2ab214b8966cba82 https://caspercollege.cvlcollections.org/files/original/2d3504b05d9dcb116964680bb1056c4b.pdf 9f15302bd6b33c147797bc211cfc0ab2 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource WyoHistory.org Wyoming Symphony Orchestra Oral History Project Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC-NC/1.0/">http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC-NC/1.0/</a> Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2022-2023 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource WyoHistory.org; Rebecca Hein Language A language of the resource ENG Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context NCA 01.i.2022.02 Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound; Text Description An account of the resource Audio files and transcripts created and edited by Rebecca Hein and students at Casper College during an oral history project with players of the Wyoming Symphony Orchestra. The oral histories were conducted by Hein between 2022 and 2023 and are a part of Wyohistory.org publishing project. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Belinda Waldron Wyoming Symphony Orchestra Oral History Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2023-03-21 Description An account of the resource Audio file and transcript for oral interview with Wyoming Symphony Orchestra player Belinda Waldron. This is interview was conducted by Rebecca Hein for Wyohistory.org on March 21, 2023. Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Rebecca Hein; Belinda Waldron Language A language of the resource ENG Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. WyoHistory.org Wyoming Symphony Orchestra Oral History Project Files, NCA 01.i.2022.02 WyCaC US. Casper College Archives and Special Collections. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context NCA 01.i.2022.02_BelindaWaldron Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource M4A; PDF Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC-NC/1.0/">http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC-NC/1.0/</a> https://caspercollege.cvlcollections.org/files/original/958944206d1c18e98249cf39514dc1f8.tiff 5e9218c9d5512b6d47ab95fbeee2c8b1 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Frances Seely Webb Collection Access Rights Information about who can access the resource or an indication of its security status. Access Rights may include information regarding access or restrictions based on privacy, security, or other policies. The material in this collection may be reused so long as attribution is provided to its original source. Description An account of the resource The Frances Seely Webb Collection contains over 1,400 photographs, correspondence, handwritten research notes, the proof copy of Webb's book, Casper's First Homes, and a series of scrapbooks. Materials documents Casper buildings, cultural institutions, homes, and society from 1890-1978. Also included are photographs of individuals and groups visually documenting Casper society. In addition are items originally collected by Boney Earnest, a frontiersman and former member of the Natrona County Historical Society. Subjects documented in Webb’s correspondence, notebooks, and scrapbooks include things related to her ongoing research, obituaries, Casper and Natrona County homes, businesses, and cultural institutions. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Frances Seely Webb Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Casper College Archives and Special Collections (Western History Center) Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/NKC/1.0/">http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/NKC/1.0/</a> Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context NCA 01.v.1985.02 Still Image A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Bell Theatre after the Fire Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/NKC/1.0/">http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/NKC/1.0/</a> Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Casper College Archives and Special Collections (Western History Center) Type The nature or genre of the resource IMG Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource TIFF Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. Frances Seely Webb Collection. Goodstein Foundation Library, Archives and Special Collections (Western History Center), Casper College, Casper, WY, 82601. Access Rights Information about who can access the resource or an indication of its security status. Access Rights may include information regarding access or restrictions based on privacy, security, or other policies. This item may be used so long as attribution is made to its original source. Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 1912 https://caspercollege.cvlcollections.org/files/original/4d63a8370f90db55e8efa1f9f57a1273.jpg 688b8aa2f974cb8e7ea1264effd714cb Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Long and Sanford Family Ranches Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/NKC/1.0/">http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/NKC/1.0/</a> Type The nature or genre of the resource Image Language A language of the resource ENG Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context NCA 01.2024.18 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource JPG Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1904-1917 Still Image A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Photographic print Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Ben Long and Crew Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/NKC/1.0/">http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/NKC/1.0/</a> Access Rights Information about who can access the resource or an indication of its security status. Access Rights may include information regarding access or restrictions based on privacy, security, or other policies. The material in this collection may be reused so long as attribution is provided to its original source. Type The nature or genre of the resource Image Language A language of the resource ENG Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context NCA 01.2024.18_BenLongAndCrew Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource JPG Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Casper College Archives and Special Collections (Western History Center) https://caspercollege.cvlcollections.org/files/original/dc90ae2e9f194350ecea6157845822d0.jpg 0ba04865e1392525950a34c1a2fd498b Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Long and Sanford Family Ranches Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/NKC/1.0/">http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/NKC/1.0/</a> Type The nature or genre of the resource Image Language A language of the resource ENG Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context NCA 01.2024.18 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource JPG Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1904-1917 Still Image A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Photographic print Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Ben Long's Family at Nowood River Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/NKC/1.0/">http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/NKC/1.0/</a> Access Rights Information about who can access the resource or an indication of its security status. Access Rights may include information regarding access or restrictions based on privacy, security, or other policies. The material in this collection may be reused so long as attribution is provided to its original source. Type The nature or genre of the resource Image Language A language of the resource ENG Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context NCA 01.2024.18_BenLongFamilyAtNowoodRiver Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource JPG Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Casper College Archives and Special Collections (Western History Center) Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource approximately 1904-1907