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.💖
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