An Intern's Adventures: Mystery Solving!

An intern takes on many different tasks, and is thus required to wear many different hats. On one particular day, this intern had to put on her Mystery Solver hat! 
 I was working on cataloging all of the recordings in our PMF archives. When we are in the middle of our 59th season, we have a lot of different recordings in a lot of different formats.You would think that in this advanced day and age, we would have most of our stuff on CD's. 

  But...Since CD's have not been around as long as we have...most of our records are actually records. And cassette tapes, beta max tapes (I barely know what those are!!!) mini CD's (I definitely don't know what those are...) and VHS tapes. 

Luckily for me, it seemed as thought most of records (in whatever form they may have come in) were neatly labeled with the concert year, number and even some of the pieces*. *The pieces were of course labeled in teeny, tiny writing in order for all of them to fit on those smaller than necessary scraps of paper included in a cassette tape.* However, at the end of organizing the stacks of recordings, I came across 4 CD's that were labeled "Concert #8" and "C0ncert #9" (two CD's per concert) -- but no year! No track names. No nothing, except what number the concerts were. 

Now, it's easy enough to rule out what years they did not come from, because I'm pretty sure Thor Johnson did not have access to that kind of technology. But! They could be from the last ten years, or so, when we were using them. So, my first thought was find out what was on the CD's. With any luck, it would be something very easy to recognize, like the William Tell Overture, Beethoven's 9th, Happy Birthday etc. No such luck. The first piece on the #9 Concert did sound familiar, but not close enough to put a name to it. After 6 semesters of music theory, though, I felt like I well prepared to solve this mystery! I listened to the beginning of the piece a few times, and concluded it was something on the modern* side. *By "modern" I mean in the last 125 years, of course.* So I start looking through our programs, trying to find pieces on our 9th concert that would fit. When I found something that I thought matched, I'd pull up a reference with some other new technology: Youtube! Eventually, I went through seasons 2000-2010, with no luck. Finally, I had the thought to go back another year and BINGO! There is was. Concerts 8 and 9 from our 1999 season. In the flesh (or, plastic and shiny bits, rather).  

The moral of this story is: label your CD's thoroughly! However, this story has a happy ending: for us, we now have a nicely organized recordings archives. For you, mention the word "Mystery" while ordering tickets and you will receive $5 off each ticket!!