They lie there on the keys waiting for you. When asked how to write a song, Hoagy said, “If you knew how to compose you wouldn’t be a composer. Biographer Richard Sudhalter notes discrepancies in Hoagy’s and other people’s varying accounts of the composition and evolution of “Star Dust,” but he says that the Book Nook piano may well have been one of several Hoagy employed in developing his signature tune. ![]() He ran to the Book Nook to work out the melody on the piano. According to legend, some of his first tunes were composed on it, including “Star Dust.” In his memoir Sometimes I Wonder, Hoagy claims that he was sitting on the “spooning wall” on the edge of campus one night in 1926, nursing a bruised heart after being jilted by Kathryn Moore, when the tune suddenly came to him. Hoagy spent many hours playing the Book Nook piano. Hoagy, wearing a bathrobe and playing the cornet, participated in the “commencement” parade. In June 1928, the Bent Eagles staged a Mock Graduation ceremony at the Book Nook, during which Hoagy was awarded a D.D. Hogwash McCorkle) became a core member of the group, whose home base was the Book Nook. Hot jazz, with its avant-garde, cross-racial overtones, fit in with Moenkhaus’s aesthetic, and Hoagy (a.k.a. He became the leader of a group of like-minded pranksters and rebels against conformity known as the Bent Eagles. Moenkhaus was a serious student of classical music and composition at IU, but outside of his formal studies he wrote whimsical, avant-garde pieces for The Vagabond campus magazine (under the pseudonym Wolfgang Beethoven Bunkhouse). Moenkhaus had spent much of his childhood in Germany and Switzerland where he was exposed to the Dadaist art movement, with its rejection of bourgeois values and embrace of the absurd. One influential friend of these years was William Moenkhaus. He became even more ensconced in the Book Nook community after he enrolled at IU in fall 1920. Hoagy’s performance won Batty’s approval, and he thereafter became an accepted member of the Book Nook inner circle. One night he was invited to play the piano alongside Big Man on Campus Batty DeMarcus on saxophone. When he was still in high school, Hoagy, who was already performing at local dances, began to spend time at the Book Nook as a “townie” outsider. A soda and sandwich shop popular among Indiana University students, the Book Nook was frequented by campus musicians who kept strict control over who was allowed to play the piano on site. The Book Nook played a major role in Hoagy’s social life and musical career.
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