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Thursday, July 26, 1973
University Daily Kansan
Here's How the Music Camp Band Looked in 1946 Before a Concert in the Outdoor Bandstand east of Hoch Auditorium
37 Years and Countless Campers
Camp Director Russell Wiley: 'Kids Haven't Changed'
By MONROE DODD
It was 37 years ago and Russell Wiley remembers it well. He remembers the kids.
There were 25 of them in 1938, all of them campers. They were all there at Camp Music. We had to go to it Today, the kids number 1200 and more girls than boys are enrolled. Those original campers
Instead of one small band of 25, there are three bands, two orchestras, two choirs and a multitude of other ensembles. There's an art camp and a speech camp and a journalism camp, too. Now, Wiley's camp is an adventure, the Midwestern Music and Art Camp.
And the kids?
"BASICALLY, kids have not changed," Wiley says. They're great kids who are not only talented and gifted, but also come from intelligent, well-disciplined homes.
"The only way is the real high-class kids have changed in their hair and clothes," he says. "All they've got to learn is that we're here to do business."
"We just put good music in front of them
we've got. We've got a concert this Sunday;
let's see it."
That first year, 1936, there weren't many concerts. The camp only lasted a couple of weeks. But in 1937, Wiley expanded the length of the camp to six weeks, charged the campers $11 a week and scheduled a concert every Sunday.
WHICH ISN'T to say that all has been a bed of roses for Wile's camp.
By the '40s, Wiley was sending letters about the camp all over the country. In the early 1950s, enrollment shot over the 1,000 students that come from all 50 states of the union.
Enrollment boomed until 1968, when it dropped off from the previous year's rate of enrollment in protest, at KU, parents started keeping their sons and daughters home in droses. Since then, enrollment has steadied at about 1,200, and according to Wiley, the camp's population is still below 500.
The problem is that parents are cutting
out any kind of camp for their children.
Camp fees reflect that. In 1937 the camp's second year, campers paid $6 for six weeks. Ten years ago, they paid up to $250. Camp fees are $86 and the camp is five weeks long.
Many don't pay the full fee, anyway. Wiley sends scholarships of varying amounts to prospective campers. The most talented and the most needed get the most
WILEY HAS A staff that takes care of week-to-week business and he brings in conductors from elsewhere to direct the band bands and orchestras.
He remembers most fondly Percy Grainger, an Australian pianist and composer, who arranged "Ihne Tune from the Songs of Elijah," based on the folk tune, "Londonair Air."
Grainger came to Lawrence from his New
residence 10 straight summers in the
40s.
"He was a personality all his own," Wiley
Teenage Musician Plays In 3 Music Camp Bands
Billy Jackson is a in 13-year-old from uton, Mo. who will be in the ninth grade this fall.
Billy Jackson at Practice
school division of the Midwestern Music Camp.
He plays third-chair clarinet in the Blue Band, fourth-chair saxophone in the Concert Band and second aloft saxophone in one of the camp's three stage bands. Practice for the three bands adds up to six hours a week with hour and a half more of section rehearsal time, for example, all members of a band's saxophone section rehearse together).
says, "He had a lot of antics the kids would laugh at. For instance, he'd come running down the ditch in Hoch Auditorium and jump up on the stage, which was four feet high. He was in his 78s to And, And, and so on, he'd come very close to slouching off."
Coming from a family with a piano, organ, flute, banjo, guitar and bongos, Jackson was musically aware at an early age. At two he learned to play the saxophone and, at nine, the clarinet. He owns four clarinets and four saxophones.
THE CAMP gets its students from the recommendations of teachers around the country; Wiley's mailing list to teachers has 38,000 names.
"That was in the Depression, when nobody had any money," he said. "But we grew, even then. We could buy food we needed, and could rent fraternity houses reasonably."
Rock music, says Jackson, is in some cases made up of music that doesn't fit together. The Allman Brothers are okay, he says, but he definitely dislikes Alice Cooper. Music has to have a definite beat, or order, for him to like it. He is a purrist.
"Time and Space" is the name of a jazz band back home in Fulton of which Jackson is the leader. He says that he became interested in jazz when he tried to improvise. What he "did just seemed to fit into the music."
The concerts were in Hoch Auditorium,
here, one Sunday afternoon, the tempi-
nary day.
The ability to learn from other people better than himself is a big plus for the band.
In the old days, they came mostly from Kansas and western Missouri.
Doc Deversilon, Bruce Randolph and
Tracy Holmes are the jazz artists
from whom he gets ideas.
"I fool around until I get a tune," Jackson said. "I tell it up in the rest of the song."
"It was bad, but we weren't accustomed to air conditioning in those days," Wiley says.
IN THE mid-'40s, the concerts were moved outdoors to a bandstand between Hoch and old Haworth Hall (the site of which is now covered by Wescos Hall). Building and Grounds workers constructed it each summer.
Jackson says he wants to become a professional jazz artist. Until then, he says, "I am a musician."
But if lost something in its effect. Until the musicians moved inside, howtwers had to come up with new ways of playing the cannon effect" in Teakovsky's "1812 Overture"—the traditional final to music
"We called it the outdoor theater." Wiley says. "A bandstand is what it was, but we were not in a bandstand."
In the mid-1964, the camp gave up the bandstand for the air-conditioned confines of a suburban home.
"Those cannons were terribly percussive." Wiley saves.
But, in Murpighy Hall, the booms had to be created some other way. Wiley tried large brushes and a few other tools.
ago, one of his assistants had an idea.
"THE CAME TO ME and said, Mr. Wiley.
I can borrow a horse trough from the Co-Op,
get some shotgun shells loaded with paper,
and fire the gun into the trough," "Wiley
calls."
"What'll it cost? I asked. 'They'll loan it to us,' he said."
But, Wiley continued, the shells were loaded with cork instead of paper.
Came the day of the final rehearsal and in point in the music score calling for incarnations.
"It certainly made a big sound," Wiley recalls.
"The young man was watching the score closely and he got every shot right. But when he looked at the trough, once it was all over, he found six big holes in it.
'He came to me, looking very sober, after the concert. He kept saying, 'You won't believe this; you won't believe this. I shot six holes in the tank.'
"That cost us $150," Wiley said. How much did it cost?
And the tank?
"When the concert came the next afternoon, he told him to go ahead and shoot. We waited."
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