The Thumpston legacy

Because MUCM Jim Thumpston, longtime Head of Advanced Courses at the School of Music, is gone now, it was a welcome surprise when his daughters, Laura Ann Thumpston and Charlotte Gomez, stopped by the hotel. Clearly, Jim passed on to his children his high standards of performance and low tolerance for those who fail to follow clear instructions.

Here, Laura Ann and Charlotte chastise me for a harmony assignment I submitted to Master Chief Thumpston in 1978, in which, through a lapse in judgment, I included consecutive fifths, which occur when two voices separated by the interval of a fifth, simple or compound, move in similar motion to another fifth, simple or compound, and one of them is not a perfect fifth, and is acceptable only between inner voices or an outer and inner voice.

In my current state of repentance, I am grateful that my error was not that of paralleI fifths, a sin far more severe and certain to cause an even higher level of Thumpstonion ire.