Wednesday, March 15, 2017

A conductor's odd request for clarity

A finishing-the-sentence memory from high school: Almost always, when I asked someone to complete one of the unfinished sentences I created for my notebook, the person was in my general age bracket.  Once in a great while, I'd make an exception.  Each time, however, I'd write the sentence at the top of the page and create two columns with the labels of Name and Response.  Once, when I asked the conductor of one of my after school orchestras if he'd like to finish a sentence, he looked at the page and asked, "By 'Name,' you mean what I call myself?"

Well...yes.  That was what I meant.  No one had ever asked that before, nor has anyone asked it since then.  As I've mentioned before, conductors sometimes think differently than the rest of us.