{"id":4708,"date":"2025-09-14T15:05:51","date_gmt":"2025-09-14T22:05:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/beitmalkhut.org\/?p=4708"},"modified":"2025-09-14T15:08:51","modified_gmt":"2025-09-14T22:08:51","slug":"a-kaddish-for-the-math-prof-who-taught-me-the-most-important-thing-i-ever-learned-about-music","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/beitmalkhut.org\/?p=4708","title":{"rendered":"a kaddish for the math prof who taught me the most important thing i ever learned about music"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Some years back, I wrote a Facebook post with this tl;dr (“too long, didn’t read”) about a professor in the St Olaf College math department. Yesterday I learned that he died a few weeks ago<\/a>. May his memory be a blessing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

tl;dr for Rebecca Boardman: you don\u2019t lose points for what you get wrong\u2014you gain points for what you get right. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Most of my friends know me either as a musician, a horn player, or as a tech nerd, but I\u2019m both. My degrees are both in music performance, but my Bachelor of Music in horn performance also had a math major\u2014and music history, too, but that was an accident caused by Alice Hanson being the best professor on the planet, and that\u2019s another story entirely. Today\u2019s story is about math. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I got a math major because math is fun. I did give some thought to the possibility that I\u2019d need to earn a living somehow someday, and playing horn is a notoriously poor way to do that, but that was just a bonus. The real value for me of studying math, and the reason I worked really hard long before I arrived on campus my freshman year figuring out how to cram a math major into my schedule, was that I enjoyed it. All those math classes brought incidental benefits, too, including some of my best friendships, having a second home on campus, and getting out of the music building with all its gossip and jealousy. But the best part was the math itself. So fun. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

St Olaf had and still has a great math department, and I got incredibly lucky with my choices of profs. My brother Kevin Vang was also a math (and art) major there, three years ahead of me, and he got me off to a good start. He wisely told me that I should take the honors calc section taught by Cliff Corzatt even though it was someone else\u2019s section that made sense for my schedule. Cliff was fabulous, so I ended up taking my first three semesters of math from him. I then took three semesters from Ted Vessey, had an interim and a semester with Loren Larson, another semester with Cliff, and an unforgettable semester with Laura Chihara. There was one awful semester of probability with a prof better forgotten, and I must be forgetting a couple more semesters (and maybe an interim?), because I\u2019m pretty sure I ended up with 13 math credits. The probability class was the only math class I ever hated, I think in my life\u2026 so yeah, kind of a cruel twist of fate that I\u2019ve ended up spending 30 years and counting in statistical software. All the other classes, and those professors, were variations on wonderful. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And it\u2019s Ted Vessey who is the hero of today\u2019s story. He was an excellent math prof. His lectures were always free-ranging demonstrations of several interrelated concepts, and watching him wing it through 3-4 chalkboards of math in an hour was just a hoot. Like my other math profs, he was known for supremely funny asides, and I became known for collecting them and publishing the best ones at the end of each semester of math. \u201cThe Wit and Witticisms of Uncle Ted Vessey\u201d had three well-loved volumes, and I should probably go dig those up to give you a few examples, but I\u2019m not going to. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I don\u2019t think Ted worked out well as a math prof for everybody. Those wild, improvisatory lectures that accomplished several different ideas at once got some people more confused than enlightened, and sometimes I found that I had to go back over all the material again myself before I could figure out the homework, because the key method for the day had gotten a little lost in fun. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A lot of the time, even I felt like I was hopelessly lost. Sometimes I\u2019d be so stuck and paralyzed with cluelessness about the homework that I couldn\u2019t even start it. One time I gave up and went to the music library to work on Alice\u2019s latest listening assignments, and it was somewhere in the second of many sides of the \u201cEinstein on the Beach\u201d (Phillip Glass) recording that I got so bored, I took my Vessey homework out and magically was able to crank right through it. Something about the hypnotic monotony of Glass\u2019s minimalist phase-shifting and nonsensical lyrics shifted my math brain into gear. I ended up checking out \u201cEinstein on the Beach\u201d to get through math homework quite a few more times before I graduated. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

For the record, I\u2019m not sure I even like \u201cEinstein on the Beach,\u201d or much else of his music, but I quite literally find it good for my brain. Steve Reich\u2019s \u201cTehillim\u201d also proved useful for math homework, for similar reasons I think, during Laura Chihara\u2019s combinatorics class. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Worst, and best, Vessey\u2019s tests were hard. I mean HARD. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sure, there\u2019d always be a few pages of stuff you could more or less rip off, if you\u2019d been keeping up on the homework and had a decent memory (or studied, I guess\u2014that was a skill I never quite acquired). But there\u2019d also be a few pages of stuff that was baffling. Problems of a type you\u2019d never seen before, or a need to prove something new, or an essay question on a new concept. To get those questions right, you\u2019d need to let go of knowing and surrender yourself to discovering. You\u2019d have to sort of poke at them with some of the tools you\u2019d learned, or do pages and pages of brute-force algebra, or just keep drawing stuff until you could finally start to see something you could nibble away at. If you managed to get somewhere with those problems, though, something magical happened. You\u2019d be integrating previously unrelated concepts, or deriving the method for something new, or discovering a whole new thing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was exhausting. I\u2019d leave those tests in a sweaty, tired fog. I could barely even remember what I\u2019d just done, and a few times when I got the papers back, I couldn\u2019t follow my own scratchwork\u2014but I\u2019d always gotten full or nearly full credit for those problems, so I must have been on the right track, even if I couldn\u2019t understand it later. A few hours after the test, though\u2014usually over pizza and beer\u2014my friends and I would talk about the tests we\u2019d just survived, and that\u2019s when I’d suddenly click on what we\u2019d been doing for the last six or eight weeks of class. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

His final<\/em> exams were grueling. I think they lasted 2-3 hours, and other than reviewing a few things I should have memorized, I never did figure out any useful way to study for them on my own. Glenn Elliott and I would often study together, though, and he’d explain to me the things I hadn’t quite figured out, and I’d explain to him the things he hadn’t quite figured out, and teaching each other like that was the closest I ever came to “preparing” effectively. Even so, arrivng at the final having secured our ability to do anything and everything from that semester\u2019s homework did not mean that we\u2019d have any clue what to do with most of the test. Nope, we\u2019d have to flail away at it and just do what we could, and like I mentioned, it would be later that night over pizza and beer before either of us ever understood any of what we\u2019d scribbled on the impossible problems. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A few weeks after each final, though, I\u2019d suddenly have a mathematical insight that would make me realize I had, in fact, learned a whole bunch of math from Ted Vessey. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was eerie, how learning from Ted always took place later, somehow. Not during. I\u2019ve experienced that seldom in life other than from Ted. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

So now we come to the point of my story. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first time I was taking a Ted Vessey test, I along with probably just about everyone else in my class was sitting in a cold sweat, panicking about how few of the problems on the test made any kind of sense to me. I was torn between going back to the few I\u2019d done and slowly triple-checking them to be sure I at least got those right, and forcing myself to find some kind of way into one of the many impossible problems that sat empty before me. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I started to do the thing that in computer science we called \u201cthrashing,\u201d back in the day before we each had a self-contained desktop or laptop to ourselves. Thrashing is when a big time-sharing system, such as UNIX running on a VAX that serves hundreds of students sitting at terminals around campus, gets itself all tied up. It speneds so many of its cycles trying to assign the next cycles to a process (essentially deciding which user\u2019s command to execute next) that it doesn\u2019t have any cycles left to do the process. It\u2019s trying so hard to decide which work to do that it can\u2019t do any work. The only cure is to reboot the whole thing. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s when Ted came back into the room. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

(At St Olaf, all tests are administered on an honor system, without proctors. The prof comes in a few times during the test period to take questions, and occasionally they end up fixing a typo or a thinko that that had slipped past them when they were writing the test, but for the most part it\u2019s a courtesy that they check in, just in case. Otherwise, it\u2019s just the students in the room, and you police yourselves. The last thing you do before you hand your test in is sign \u201cthe pledge,\u201d which states, \u201cI pledge my honor as a lady\/gentleman that during this examination I have neither given nor received assistance and that I have seen no dishonest work.\u201d Violations of the honor code are taken quite seriously. If any test\u2019s pledge is not signed, it\u2019s a whole Megillah for the prestigious student honor council to sort it all out. We took it so seriously that once, when I was stuck and panicking in a music history test, I spent a long moment considering the possibility of glancing over at someone else\u2019s blue book, which I could see quite easily, and then rebuking myself with the fact that I wouldn\u2019t be able to sign the pledge if I did. I thought that was just me being a nutjob, but it turns out a lot of StO students have stories like that.) <\/p>\n\n\n\n

When Ted came back into the classroom and saw us panicking, instead of following the usual script and asking if there were any questions, Ted launched into a rant that made very little sense at the time. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cFriends, you\u2019ve got it all wrong. You think you\u2019ve got a hundred points and anything you mess up, you\u2019re going to lose points over it.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Well, duh. That\u2019s exactly the situation. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cBut you\u2019ve got it wrong. You all have zero points<\/em> right now.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gee, thanks. We\u2019re already sitting here white with terror because we know that, you jerk! <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cYou don\u2019t have any points at all right now. Your job isn\u2019t to lose points from a hundred, it\u2019s to start earning points, because you\u2019re at zero.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Again, not helpful to be reminded we\u2019re failing this test, dude. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cYou all have nothing. So start earning points. Do what you can. Double-check what you\u2019ve done to be sure you get all the points for it. And then start tackling the stuff you don\u2019t know how to do, so you can try to get at least SOME points for it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cYou\u2019re not here to avoid losing points. You\u2019re here to do as much as you can and get as many points as you can, and every little thing you manage to do is better than the zero you started with. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI\u2019ll be back again in about ten minutes.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I only barely understood this at the time\u2014just like most of the math I learned from Ted, it came later. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was on stage with the St Olaf Orchestra. I think we were on tour, and I think it was the year we did \u201dTill Eulenspiegel\u201d and Tchaikovsky 5, both huge huge works for principal horn, my seat. I was getting nervous about how many things could go wrong on the concert, and how many notes I\u2019d miss, and how much I\u2019d disappoint my colleagues and our extraordinary conductor, Steven Amundson, also known as “SMA” because of the way he initialed memos on the orchestra bulletin board.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Friends, I had it all wrong. I thought I had a perfect concert ahead of me, which I was going to screw up. I was going to be losing points left and right. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But I had it wrong. I had zero points.<\/em>  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

There was no<\/em> concert ahead of me, waiting for me to screw it up. There was nothing at all happening. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

There was NO SOUND. We had to start making some sound. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Every sound we made was a sound that didn\u2019t exist until we made it. We were starting with silence. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

We weren\u2019t there to avoid missing notes. We were there to play as many notes as we could, as well as we could, and to listen as hard as we could to everyone else, and to play with them better and to hold it all together tighter, and to watch SMA as closely as we could, to try to play it as much in the way he was leading it as we could. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And that, my friends, has made all the difference. We don\u2019t avoid screwing concerts up. That\u2019s inevitable. We are going<\/em> to mess them up, all over the place. But that\u2019s not what we\u2019re doing. What we\u2019re doing is creating as much beautiful sound as we can, and giving the audience as much music as we can, because otherwise it\u2019s just silence. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s the most important thing I ever learned about performing music. And it\u2019s not just about music, or math tests. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thanks, Uncle Ted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Some years back, I wrote a Facebook post with this tl;dr (“too long, didn’t read”) about a professor in the St Olaf College math department. Yesterday I learned that he died a few weeks ago. May his memory be a blessing. tl;dr for Rebecca Boardman: you don\u2019t lose points for what you get wrong\u2014you gain…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[250],"tags":[1025,9],"class_list":["post-4708","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-essays","tag-math","tag-music"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/beitmalkhut.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4708","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/beitmalkhut.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/beitmalkhut.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beitmalkhut.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beitmalkhut.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4708"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/beitmalkhut.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4708\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4710,"href":"https:\/\/beitmalkhut.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4708\/revisions\/4710"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/beitmalkhut.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4708"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beitmalkhut.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4708"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beitmalkhut.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4708"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}