Most of the rooms were long and narrow, having been created by building a wooden closet and bookshelf divider through the middle of a larger room. My first room abutted the boiler room and was nice and cozy for the most part. Unfortunately, the wooden divider between my room and the next did little to muffle sounds.

The guy next door had, like me, transferred from the same party dorm. Brian, was an affable soul-a self-taught polyglot-and so I thought he would be great to have next door. Unfortunately he was also a party animal. One night he stayed up until about two A.M. smoking dope and listening to Frank Zappa. To get back at him, the next morning around nine in the morning, I turned on Beethoven�s Ninth Symphony at full volume and went off to eat breakfast. About a week later, I saw him hoicking boxes out of his room. I asked what he was doing, and he said he was moving back to our old dorm. When I expressed regrets, he mumbled something about the dorm being a boring place. But for me, it will always remain a paradise.

The charm, as I mentioned, lay in the number of really interesting people there. The day I moved in, I was greeted at the door by a tall, gangly kid with a mass of curly black hair rising skyward from his head. Even more striking however, he wore a ski jacket and both his arms were swathed in plaster casts. �I�m Bennett!� he exclaimed. �And I live right here.� He indicated an open door, the large end room. I stuck my head in the door to have look and was horrified by the site. It was an absolute pig sty, with dirty underwear and clothes strewn about the floor, and ever inch of desk and shelf space a riot of paper, music scores, and half-eaten pots of yogurt. �It�s a bit of a mess, I�m afraid,� he said, but I haven�t been able to clean since I got these,� he said holding up his mantis-like appendages.

�Did you break them?� I asked. �Oh, no,� he said. �Tendonitis.� �What�s that,� I asked. �It�s an inflammation of the tendons.� �How did you get it?� I asked. �I practiced too much.� He then told me he had come to I.U. to major in piano, but now, with his problem he was thinking of becoming a conductor. �How much did you practice?� I asked. �Oh, about 8 hours a day.�

Bennett was a year younger than me, and though a slob and an eccentric, he loved music, especially piano music, and we used to tell each other about pieces we liked or had discovered. Like me, he was a big fan of Horowitz, and he loved Chopin as well. One of Bennett�s favorite pieces was today�s work by Chopin, the Scherzo in B Minor, Opus 31. This piece has a certain demonic feel. It starts out with a low series of notes, almost drummed out like a call to attention. After that, there is a small explosion of intensity as Chopin states the them. He returns back to the device used in the opening several times, changing the theme a little bit after each. Chopin then launches into a beautiful little waltz that sounds so sweet, lyrical and seductive. But he never stays with anything for too long. Later he changes to a grand, gushing romantic passage full of fire. Eventually he returns to the opening device a few more times, before restating the lush passage again and then rushes into an abrupt ending.

Bennett will reappear in my descriptions of the French House. He was there because like all musicians, he had an ear for languages as well and spoke French with a flourish. But what I liked best about him, apart from his love of music, was his ability to articulate his neuroses. Now I am as neurotic as the next person, but Bennett had the ability to articulate (or maybe it was just the inability to censor) every obsessive thought that came into his head. He was always ranting about something, a piece of music, a girl, his messy room, some book or score he was studying. It was great. In a funny kind of way, it made me feel less of an oddball than it was my wont to consider myself. Here was a peer who was at least as obsessive about things as I, if not more.

Chopin bio

MIDI (scroll down when you get there)

Recording

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