Remembering a Great Musical Mentor

So first things first, if you are a classical musician, you may be asking, you'll hear me talk about Dr. William Shermer.

Is Dr. Shermer related to that Shermer? The G.

Shermer that has done all of the yellow book publications of classical music everywhere that you... can't seem to avoid if you go to any music store at least the few that are still around well i asked him that when i was auditioning to go to ju he said if there was any relationship he had no idea of it so not to say that there is nothing there at all but he wasn't aware of it at the time and i don't know if he ever found it any differently but most likely not So I want to tell you a few things about Dr. Schermer from my observation before I get into some of his lessons.

I want to start off with the fact that he was and is the most prolific composer I have ever met or ever even heard of.

If you have some knowledge of classical music, I just want you to just kind of go through your head, just kind of think, all right, what's the most number of symphonies you think anybody has ever written? Now I don't have encyclopedic knowledge on classical music.

I'm aware of quite a few things, but I couldn't tell you every single obscure composer out there.

But I think a lot of you might say, well, Haydn comes to mind.

That's 104 symphonies.

Well, when I studied under Dr. Shermer, he was in his mid-50s, and he was somewhere around the 250 mark with his symphonies, and he would do probably four or five new ones every year.

Similarly with piano sonatas.

I think Haydn comes in first again.

He has, what, 52 or something like that.

I can't think of anybody who has more.

I'm sure there might be.

Again, Dr. Schirmer was in the, if not in the 200s, he was in the high 100s.

String quartets, again, probably going to give that mark to Haydn.

Beethoven wrote quite a few.

Mozart wrote quite a few.

Again, Dr. Schirmer was in triple digits.

He also wrote tons of pieces that he called ensembles.

Now, I'm going to go ahead and say Dr. Shermer was not the best with titles.

He was a bit of a neoclassicist in that regard.

You got a wide variety of music, but not very interesting titles.

But he had ensemble, and then he would follow with a Roman numeral, and I don't even know how many of those there are.

I'm pretty sure he was in the 300s last time I checked.