Eastman gave me music. Music gave me life. And with that love of music, I never did a day’s work in my life. I never felt happier in my life than when I connected two or three or six or ten notes in a way that surprised me, and might have pleased Miss [Elvira] Wonderlich and Dr. [Charles Warren] Fox; L. Burrill Phillips and Bernard Rogers (two of my beginning-composition teachers); [Eastman Director] Howard Hanson and even my friend Jim Brown, who, by the way, had been a composition major and whom I always remember as the fellow who, after I played a particularly deep and complicated piece for him (we often played our new compositions for fellow composers), would sit back and think while I waited hungrily for his praise. He’d rub his chin, and then say: “Charles, that’s a six-four bar there, but you only have five beats in it.”

Charles Strouse ’47, composer and lyricist, Alumni Achievement Award (Eastman School ceremony)