Summer – like any season, really – brings back a flood of memories.<\/p>\n
When I think hot, dry humidity, I remember most summers in North Dakota, and being dry and hot – at baseball practice, caddying for my dad, sitting in the stands at baseball games craving a Coke.<\/p>\n
But when it’s hot and the humidity is up near tropical, I think first about my time at International Music Camp, back in seventh and eighth grade.<\/p>\n
Both years, I won scholarships to go to the camp, up at the International Peace Gardens, on the boarder between North Dakota and Manitoba. \u00a0The camp – about half a mile on the US side – was a summer program teaching a variety of genres of music in one-week chunks throughout the summer. \u00a0Being a cello player, I went for Orchestra both years. \u00a0It was a high-speed week, spent intensely rehearsing for a concert held every Sunday. \u00a0There were two full-group rehearsals a day, along with sectionals and small-group clinics to try to improve on the instrument.<\/p>\n
Not being an especially good cellist at the time, I was in the “lower” of the two orchestras. \u00a0Both orchestras had guest directors brought in from hither and yon. \u00a0Both years, my director was a guy named Howard Leyton-Brown, an Australian native who was a violinist and conductor at the Regina Conservatory in Saskatechewan. \u00a0On the program, I noted that among his credits he listed having flown in the Royal Air Force during the war.<\/p>\n
One day after a late rehearsal, I approached him, and asked what kind of plane he’d flown. \u00a0“I flew a Handley-Page Halifax”, he replied, seeming\u00a0astonished that a bobble-headed American junior-high kid would ask – and moreso that I knew what he was talking about.<\/p>\n
And apropos not much, it occurred to me to test the miracle of Google, and see if I could find any reference to Mr. Leyton-Brown.<\/p>\n