Shows 216 and 217: Sorrow and Joy

Show 216: In memory of Robert J. B. Maples

Part A    Part B    Part C    Part D

Bob Maples was one of the earliest friends I made outside the Mathematics Department at Lycoming.  He was a professor of French with a degree from Yale University, but his avocation was computer programming!  He started coding in BASIC, which was built-in into the operating system of the tiny little "mainframe" we used back then (a PDP-11 running RSTS-E, or something like that).  He first wrote a program that would keep track of his grades, using as a model something that was written by one of my colleagues, Rick Troxel (or it might have been the other way round: Rick may have developed the simple program that Bob had written first; I'm not sure).  When we got a new mainframe that did not have BASIC, Bob had to learn Pascal, a more modern language, and then FORTRAN, and so on and so forth.  He went as far as writing a word-processor that would fill and justify a page of text, which is pretty sophisticated.

I learned quite by accident that Bob liked music, but he preferred the German Romantic composers: Wagner, Mahler, and so on, to the French composers I expected him to like.  But when I went to his funeral on Friday, Feb 12th, his son, who had led the appreciations, said that he and his father had settled on, of all things, music from Bach, and Samuel Barber.

Show 217: Waltzes!

Part A     Part B      Part C     Part D

I had played the occasional waltz, either in connection with dances, in the program all about dance, or in connection with Spring, in a program about the Spring Equinox, which coincided with the day on which I celebrate J. S. Bach's birthday.  But I had never made an entire program with Waltzes, and this was it.  We had four sorts of waltzes: Strauss Waltzes, which started out being music for dancing, but has evolved into light concert music; Tchaikovski Waltzes, which are ballet waltzes, which is a genre that is a little different from simple concert waltzes, though of course they're played as concert waltzes.  Then there are Chopin Waltzes, and waltzes by other composers, e.g. Brahms, Scriabin, and so on, which are effectively a new genre: the Piano Waltz.  We rotate through all these types, for the sake of variety.  We also feature a waltz by Leroy Anderson: the Waltzing Cat.