HARVEY SCHMIDT

Harvey's primary musical influences as a child were the Methodist hymnal, Toscanini's NBC Symphony Orchestra, and especially the MGM movie musicals, which he saw at the local theatres in the four small towns around Houston where his father served successively as Methodist minister. Decades later, he created an homage to those movie songs with his arrangements for solo piano, recorded on a series of four LPs that he sent out as Christmas cards. The LPs covered the years from 1937, when Harvey was 8 years old, to 1948, the year he went off to college. For the album covers, he created a portrait of each theatre, a reminder that his actual major at UT Austin was Fine Arts.