A Boston University professor of music is about to retire.
From BU Today:
… [Joel Sheveloff] reflects on nearly half a century as not just a teacher, but a thorn in the side of the administration and a beloved but incorrigible nudge. With his gravelly, Mailer-esque voice and old-fashioned suspenders, Sheveloff has a way of wresting control of a room and holding forth on just about anything. He may grouse about everything from his department’s curriculum to the traffic on the BU Bridge, but if he criticizes his students at all, it is with affectionate bemusement. He likes them.
They like him back: “I was in Dr. Sheveloff’s class in 1973, and I remember him to this day as one of those rare people who inspire your life on all levels,” writes an alum on Ratemyprofessors.com. “Of course his knowledge is awesome,” writes a student, “but what makes Dr. Shev one of the best is his insight. He understands the paradoxes of the human condition and how music expresses the full range of this experience.” And from another student: “Professor Sheveloff is hilarious. He makes each lecture immensely enjoyable by joking, dancing around, and just creating a pleasant class atmosphere.”
… All of Sheveloff’s complaints are major, from whether BU’s orchestra and choir directors should be full-time (they are now, he says, thanks to him) to an increase in course credits from three to four (“they make the candy bar smaller and charge you more for it”) to what he believes is the pandemic misinterpretation of Bach’s Musical Offering.
… His passion for, and encyclopedic knowledge of, the Cole Porter, Duke Ellington, and Rogers and Hart songbooks are part of what fueled his friendship with John Daverio (CFA’75,’76, GRS’83), a CFA music professor and renowned Schumann expert, who drowned in the Charles River in 2003, at the age of 48. The loss devastated Sheveloff, who spoke in a eulogy for Daverio of how “for more than a quarter of a century, John and I discussed issues, shared intimacies, and otherwise interacted by employing strategically placed song lines in our dialogue. We both enjoyed finding relevant lines — this game belonged to the two of us.”
… When it comes to J. S. Bach, Sheveloff serves up a feast of superlatives. Bach, he asserts, is “our Shakespeare, our Pushkin, the greatest mind ever to write music.”
As he expounds on a quirky meter in a passage from Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6, the Pathetique, an assistant pops her head in the room to tell Sheveloff he has a phone call from his wife, whom he refers to as “She who must be obeyed.” He’s been married 48 years. “Feels like 75,” he says.
… Where they once scrawled in spiral notebooks, students now sit in class tapping away at laptops. “Students think they can get anything they need from Google,” he says, an arm swiping the air in the universal sign for oy vey. “My colleagues are concerned about kids sitting in class e-mailing and looking at Facebook. In my class I say, go ahead — I’m not your mother.” …
June 20th, 2010 at 1:32PM
“She who must be obeyed.”
Rumpole…