Recently Scott and I had a lunch date and we decided to visit the BYU Harris Fine Arts Center before it gets torn down. This is the building otherwise known as the HFAC. Scott and I were both music majors at BYU and we spent many hours there studying music, making friends, and falling in love. (Aaaahhhh.) These days the building is starting to look pretty empty with the semester over and the dismantling beginning.
In the olden days, we rehearsed together in E-250 with the BYU Philharmonic. OK, not so much together but in the same room with about 100 other people. Scott was on one side of the room with the trombones and I was on the other with the violins. Clyn Barrus was our conductor and he had a lot of passion for the music. We also attended our third semester of music theory with Dr. Michael Hicks in a classroom on the third floor. That was a smaller class of about 20 people. One Monday morning at the end of November in 1987, I walked into class with a huge cast on my arm after I broke my wrist the night before, whereupon Dr. Hicks felt compelled to make a joke about it. Thankfully the broken arm didn't disrupt my music plans for more than about two months.
The music students used to hang out together doing homework on the third floor by the stairwell. We spent hours and hours and hours in the practice rooms preparing for private lessons and end of semester juries. We attended music history classes and master classes and practiced in quartets and duets and trios and trombone choirs.
We performed in the de Jong Concert Hall on stage with the Philharmonic. Scott also played with Synthesis there. Sometimes we played in the pit for other shows. Scott got to do a trombone concerto on stage there accompanied by the orchestra during Concerto Night in the fall of 1989. And Scott was even a stagehand one semester! Now the de Jong is full of scaffolding.
We both played in the Madsen Recital Hall for solo recitals or chamber recitals. I played in the Chamber Orchestra and in several different chamber ensembles. We attended countless concerts and recitals for our required 149R class--8 semesters of 15 concerts a semester. One night, the two of us spent so much time talking during a New Music concert that someone sitting in front of us got really mad and stalked out after telling us how rude we had been. After that chastising, we wrote on the backs of our programs to communicate. We learned our lesson! Here was the box where we submitted our signed programs complete with Social Security numbers under our names to identify us so we could get credit for attending. Those were the pre-identity theft days when it never occurred to us that Social Security numbers should be private. Those numbers were also written in our textbooks.
We did homework sitting in the music hall of the second floor. One day, Scott and I sat outside Ray Smith's office working on homework. We decided to ask Ray for help with one of our questions. That was the fateful time when Ray said I was an amazing babysitter for his kids and Scott decided he definitely needed to ask me out!
So many memories in that place. I grew up a lot during my time at BYU and the HFAC was a big part of that. I grew not only in my musical knowledge but also in my knowledge of the gospel and of who I wanted to be. I'm grateful that I got to be there.
I'm grateful some of my children also got to be there. Several children had concerts there, including Susanna, Garrett, Jan, and Lincoln.
Lincoln had a recital in E-400 back in 2014 shortly before his mission:
All things must eventually change and this building is no exception. Now almost 60 years old, it has been inadequate as a facility for the arts for many years and is starting to be dismantled to make room for other things. A new music building is almost finished and the HFAC will be replaced by a new arts building.
So today Scott and I said goodbye to this building full of good memories for us. Now we'll have to rely on pictures and our memory to remember the old HFAC. But we get to keep the most important links to the HFAC. We still use our musical education in lots of ways and we still have friends from our time there. Most importantly, the relationship we formed here will last forever.💖
The original post was written in January of 2015. I wrote an update at the bottom of this post in March 2021. A few months ago, a friend of mine told me about something she was doing in her family to help her family function better. Her teenage autistic son had been struggling a lot so they had been working with behavior therapists to help him and this "Do Dots Family System" had been recommended. As she described it, I was greatly intrigued since it sounded like something I wanted to implement at my own house. I looked into it and decided to purchase it right after Thanksgiving. Here is my review of how it has worked for us over the last six weeks or so. The basic idea of the chart is that children need to take care of their responsibilities before they get any privileges. It strongly reinforces the concept of "Work Before Play" . The chart helps children see in a very visual way that, until they have completed their responsibilities, they are on Le...
For lunch on Thursday, Lauren and Kurt made Cafe Rio which was delicious. On Thursday afternoon, we had free time at the lake. Heidi and Aaron rented a pontoon boat and took people out for rides. This was very popular. Some of us went on the kayaks and/or swimming or just hung out on the beach.
Recently we had another Hansen Family Reunion at Bear Lake. We've been having these destination reunions since 2008. There were about 70 of us in attendance. Bruce and Michelle organized the activities and did a good job. I enjoyed myself! Hopefully lots of other people did too. We showed up on Wednesday afternoon and enjoyed a taco salad dinner, served by Neil and Kristie's family. We also worked on two mixer games: a word search with the names of all 100 Hansen family members as well as a Bingo card that involved finding people with different attributes like recent high school graduation, birthdays in certain months, etc. The word search was definitely the most popular. Also popular was playing Nine-Square and Sandy Pickle (a cross between pickle ball and badminton). Thys and Katrina might have won! After dinner, we had an FHE activity/lesson. Liz had made a book with stories of the first ancestors to join the church. She had selected different stories for us to act out in g...
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