I received The Shocker today and immediately turned to the article "Happy 100th, Fiske Hall." I was a freshman music student in 1938 when Fiske Hall was headed by Dean Thurlow Lieurance and populated by the many vocal and instrumental teachers who "held forth" in that building. Fiske was "home base" to us all, and we shall never forget those times.
— L. Kelsey Bodecker '46
Thurlow Lieurance, WU dean of music from 1926-45, was born in Iowa in 1878 and served in the Spanish-American War as a musician.
Due to lack of funds, he never finished a degree at the College of Music in Cincinnati, but enjoyed a long career in music education nonetheless. Interested in Native American music, he collected native flutes, taped native tunes and in 1913 composed "By the Waters of Minnetonka," based on a Sioux song of star-crossed lovers.
About hearing the melody for the first time, he wrote in 1940, "That night marked an epoch in my life, opened to me a new world. What work I have since done has been due chiefly to that song."
"Minnetonka" became his most famous composition. Another of his compositions, "The Ballad of Boeing," is described in the 1943 Parnassus as being based on "the hum and whirr of the machines." During WWII, when asked about the role of music in war, Lieurance reflected, "We must have something beautiful to return to after the war is over." He died in Boulder, Colo., in 1963. The music library in Duerksen Hall is named for him.
