Stories:Stabs Of Sound

Author: C3PO. Here is a photo of me and Dr. Moss, a professor at the University of Maryland. I have other photos of just him but I like this one the best because of his pose in this one. It looks like he's got his sleeves rolled up, ready to get to work rolling music back to the 1930's. The painting in the background here in his office is also very Dr. Moss. Back in the late 1980's, and early 1990's, I was struggling to wrap up my undergraduate studies with some kind of dignity. In school I have always been a person who was more interested in learning things than getting good grades. At the University of Maryland I had somehow lucked into the now-eliminated "General Honors Program" which encouraged scholarly pursuits outside of a student's major. Such frippery would never be allowed at a corporate university these days. As a General Honor's student, I got to waltz into the fun classes in other majors, completely outside of the regular prerequisites that other students in that major were required to get. The program functioned effectively as a "minor," and successful completion required you to write a "thesis" in a topic outside of your major. My major was electrical engineering, but this program gave me a chance to try composing music for my thesis. I got to attend music theory classes for music majors, and after a few of those I looked around for composition classes. There were three offered, and being an outsider to the department I picked one at random, based on what would fit into my schedule. The professor was this man, and the class was not what I expected. 
It turns out that Dr. Moss liked "Modern" music from the 1930's. He was the stereotypical tenured ivory tower professor, and this composition class was his chance to simply hang around with students without restrictions, curriculum, or syllabus. He had a few suggestions for things to look into, but we were basically to bring our compositions to class and discuss them. It turned out that nobody in the class was actually a music major, we were all just people working on writing music. There was no lecture, or discussion of music theory. We had to produce sheet music on paper, and on our day to present it Dr. Moss would peck it out on the grand piano in the classroom (an agonizing process every time, he was a terrible sight reader) and then everyone would talk about it. I was aghast at the lack of structure, but it turned out to be a benefit in the end because I could just mess around and it reduced the stress of trying to produce the thesis. Dr. Moss only respected plinky weird compositions that were based on any kind of mathematical pattern, so I went with that as much as I could stand, kept some voice leading in it for the other professors on my review team to recognize, and tried to do something that I also could respect. The final thesis was a collection of compositions that was more like an escape parachute that got me out of college finally, I think that my review committee approved it out of pity.
Where does Vygis come into this story, you ask? Well, we both went to the University of Maryland, and he was sort of in the same situation as me academically, trapped in a long undergraduate career and trying to graduate after about 7 years. He needed some credits, and when I told him about this class as I was starting to take it for a second semester, he asked, "Could you get me into that?" So I vouched for Vygis to Dr. Moss and he said "sure." It seemed a natural idea considering how musically gifted Vygis was, but as it turned out the skill set of his that it really matched was bullshitting. It was a class that Vygis had to show up in only once a week, make sage-sounding comments, and a passing grade was simply handed out at the end of the semester! But the best part was how little work he had to put into writing music. He was working at Kinkos' next to campus at the time, and during his shift there he would simply throw some notes down on some blank sheet music pages before coming to class. It sounded exactly like the kind of music Dr. Moss liked. The professor would attempt to play it on the piano, squinting at the pages, and when he asked Vygis what he was getting at with it, Vygis very convincingly said said "I wanted to make stabs of sound." Dr. Moss nodded as if he understood, or perhaps he did, and Vygis was able to get his credits with almost no work at all. We laughed about it for decades afterwords, and "stabs of sound" became one of our phrases.
Category:Stories
Category:Mythologies:Bullshitting
Category:Author:Charles Dickson
Category:People: Dr. Moss