The Ritornello was the bi-annual newsletter produced from 1978-2015.

The first issue was printed in the spring of 1978. Dr. Matilda Gaume had retired as the music history/piano teacher in 1976, and Dr. Harry Haines, department head, asked her to start a newsletter. He came to WT in the fall of 1977 and wanted to keep in touch with the alumni. Ritornello was that vehicle.

The idea was to print a fall and a spring edition, and to mail it at the beginning of the semester to inform everyone of the events in the near future. It turned out that one thing led to another and it was always after the semester ended that we could assemble the articles and then mail it. We wanted to look through the windshield, but were always using the rear-view mirror.

A few years passed and Dr. Gaume retired from Ritornello. (By the way, children, we didn't have computers until the mid 1980s, so the text had to be sent to the print shop on campus, which no longer exists, to lay it out in columns, called typesetting, like they used to put together newspapers in the 1950s and 1960s.) I remember using PageMaker--"those were the days, my friends!"--in 1985 for a couple of years, then switched to Word so that we could send it to the print shop camera-ready. Mrs. Martha Morris, music librarian for so many years, assumed the role of "information gatherer" for us in the '80s and '90s. She kept up with alumni and contributed the majority of the alumni notes.

Dr. Tina Carpenter, our bassoon teacher, took over sometime in the 2000s. There were changes in department leadership in 2008, 2010, and 2012, and Ritornello disappeared for a while, as you will see below. In 2013, Dr. Robert Krause, our oboe teacher, picked it up again and issued spring editions as PDFs.

Media communication has changed in the last 40 years, but it's still nice to go back and remember the good old days. Enjoy.