FUNNY ENOUGH , HAMBURG WASN’T FUNNY . Frank Corcoran
Yes, I was highminded.
I was expecing high ethical standards , poor fool, as I slithered up from Stuttgart
to that infamous , unhealthy Milchstrasse Bus-stop !
Yes, my step teetered over the threshold into that Budge Palais.
No welcome! Nobody to shake the hand and mutter “Willkommen !” No one.
Too soon I saw how several colleagues died their too-early cancer-death – and too soon after being pensioned.
( Was it those asbestos blackboards ? Was it their colleagues’ HATE ?
Was it the Hamburg Gestapo Gauleiter who had tortured just there where I had to take my modest lunch in
thebuilding’s bemused bowels ? )
Elsewhere I have written about Werner Kruetzi’s Minor Nobel Prize , Just Missed, for his famous
” The- Distance-From-My-Luebeck-Mistress’s Bed -To -My-Hochschule-Lectures ” Algorhythm.
“THEORY” was largely a bad joke
– Palestrina ( ? ) counterpoint and Bach ( ? ) Chorales and , well, WHAT ?
Not good.
But ” COMPOSITION ” was an even bigger joke.Yes, Werner helped to poach from the (vanishing ) post- Ligeti
pool of students.
And all this from colleagues who had never, never composed a single five thirteenths bar – or its sequences.
Was this good ? For our students ? Intelligent ? Weep, weep.