Paul Henry Smith Case Study Answers

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Who would be crazy enough to leave college in the middle of a semester just to try to attend a class you weren’t even invited to be a student in? The answer is Paul Henry Smith. In his second year at Oberlin College & Conservatory he and his friend made the spontaneous decision to drive the long trip from Oberlin Ohio to Philadelphia and stay there for a month without any money for housing or food. He would not be able to do the work from most of his classes and his grades would lower by many points. But all that would be worth it because what he learned in that short four weeks would mean more to him than any of his learnings of music in his whole entire college life. It was all thanks to the famous german conductor; Sergiu Celibidache. …show more content…

His voice was booming and Smith was slightly alarmed by his strong tone. “You know this guy grew up in Germany so he could be very intimidating. He was 33 when the Nazis took over in Berlin, where he lived. So his way of talking sounded like those old Nazi movies. And he had a German accent. So I was scared.” Celibidache was so strict that if you were attempting to get in a question, one stutter or ‘um’ would not be tolerated and you would never be answered. “So I never got to ask my question. But, I shortly realized that all I had to do was not say um and know what my question was and then I’ll be fine. And then by the next day or two I wasn’t intimidated because if you just asked your question then he would answer it or ask you a question and you would have a discussion about it,” Smith tells …show more content…

Here Smith tells us how he landed himself in a never ending pit of plight which started with learning conducting techniques in class. “He came to me and he said something like ‘Very good. Well, I'm going to leave now and Paul will take over this class and teach conducting technique.’ And I was very surprised and happy to hear that because it meant that I somehow learned how to do it. I was a lot nicer to the other students that he was he was pretty mean and criticizing. I remember he told one woman that she looked like King Kong and then another conductor who came from Canada that he looked like a ballerina. You know, these were not very helpful and I was not like that. I just said ‘I think you better put your elbows down and relax’. Anyway, I let it go to my head and the next part of the day was, after lunch, orchestra rehearsal time. I went to the rehearsal like I always did and all of the students would either sit out in the audience or behind the orchestra where we could see the conductor. This day I sat behind the percussion section in a little gallery that had a railing in front of my chair and I was listening, and every now then he would stop the orchestra and ask one of the students why he stopped, which was a very interesting way to teach because before he said something like ‘Trombones, you didn't come in there.’ or ‘Clarinets, you’re flat.’ He would ask us why he stopped so you

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