PLINCKSTER

Previous:   Starting and Stopping Composing     Next:  Record Collecting During junior high school I learned a few of the easier Mozart and Haydn sonatas and some introductory pieces of Bach, Beethoven and Schumann. In among all these Germanic masterpieces, Dr. Kooiker interspersed “contemporary” pieces by Bartok, Tcherepnin, Sowerby and others, published by Frances Clarke. The graded anthology books are still available in updated editions. I found the pieces were odd but kind of interesting and I grew to like them. On a couple of occasions I showed them to friends as curiosities. I didn’t do that with Mozart and Haydn. I’m sure that this music was partly basis for a renewed interest in writing. Kooiker had me attend a recital of a graduating piano major at Hope College (Dec '70) that included a piano sonata that he had written. I don't know who this person was nor do I remember anything about the piece, but it was enough to get me started on writing m...

Previous: Perfect Pitch     Next: Composing and Record Collecting    My urge to deconstruct and reconstruct the things I loved doing has been a guiding force. I read comic books, and inevitably wrote my own as soon as I was reading (although I didn't follow through and really develop that skill as an adult). I played board games and made up elaborate new ones on poster board, with no great regret even if they were played only once. (Johnny noted this with perplexity). I played chess and built chess sets out of nuts and bolts. Sometime in 6th grade I got ahold of a couple of notebooks of six-staff music paper, and started filling them up with notes. Mostly it wasn’t really composing, but more like musical doodling, copying and sketching. There were bits of music theory, medleys of familiar tunes strung together crudely (as was sometimes done in published band scores, perhaps no less crudely in some cases), and two short original melodies with accompanime...

Previous:  Band    Next: Starting and Stopping Composing Most people can keep a pitch in short-term memory, for five or fifteen seconds, long enough to reproduce it accurately after a conductor's prep beat. "Perfect pitch" is just long-term memory for pitch. People who "have it" have a permanent memory bank by which pitches are recognized and reproduced without constant refreshers, and people with this mysterious-seeming gift are valuable in choruses as human pitch pipes. I noticed that I had it, and that others didn't, some time after starting elementary school band. Even playing on a transposing instrument didn't make it obvious. The notes of an alto saxophone on its staff with a treble clef are on the same lines and spaces as the notes on the bass clef in concert pitch (though down an octave). So it seemed as though was I reading bass clef when playing sax. Eventually I realized that the note I was calling F by this mistaken method the band direct...

Previous:  Church    Next:  "Perfect Pitch" Large urban school districts in the '60s and '70s offered several choices of music ensembles. They might have one band for concert music, another for football games and parades. They might even boast a "wind ensemble" leaning towards classical music, and too dignified to include my instrument, the saxophone. Only a small number of schools went so far as to have an orchestra program, and even fewer (until later) had a jazz program. Saugatuck, however, was a small village with about 60 kids per grade (in the generation before mine some classes had fewer than a dozen). Besides a little general music, that afforded us basically just "band" and "chorus". In fifth grade the kids interested in band were briefly interviewed and outfitted with instruments. I was deemed a saxophonist and was soon the owner of a used alto that was my companion for the next eight years, excluding summers. During tha...

Previous: Dr. Kooiker   Next: Band Dad had mentioned there had been some deliberation, early on in the marriage, about which in church in town they should go to -- it hadn't been a slam-dunk decision and after the fact he was still second-guessing it a bit. I can see how it might have been an issue, both for them and for Dad's parents who were alive and living close by in the early '50s. They were stern Calvinists, but Mom was not particularly religious – the few things she said on the subject sounded barely Christian. The churches in town tended to be theologically liberal, befitting a free-wheeling beach resort that liked to party a lot on summer weekends and was even a gay haven back when that was still a scandal all over southwestern Michigan. I'm guessing that our family wasn't quite posh for the Episcopalians, and that the Congregationalists were a bit too liberal for Dad. The Catholics and Christian Science were out totally. That Methodists sometimes had li...

Dr. Anthony Kooiker,  a professor of piano at Hope College in Holland MI who had toured and made recordings with the violinist  Albert Spalding , was my piano teacher from the winter of third grade until I went to college. From what I've gathered, Mrs. Kent made a plea to him to take me on, but instead of communicating it directly, it was made via a friend common to both of them who was a priest (I don't happen to remember which denomination). Finding a college professor to teach me was not quite as easy as landing a spot on TV had been two years earlier, but it succeeded. Holland was an eight mile commute down the two-lane highway, and piano lessons could easily be combined with shopping. Kooiker's studio had two grand pianos, not just one old upright, so he could conveniently demonstrate the music on the second piano. I finished the Mozart Sonata K. 545 started under Kent, and performed it in the spring (May of '66). The results, judging from Dad...