PLINCKSTER

Previous:  A Few Brief Digressions    Next:  Promotion After the "Feminine Fancies" appearance, life went back to the usual routines of school and piano, but with less pressure. Mrs. Kent continued to teach, hold studio recitals and stage occasional runout performances involving me and a couple of other ostensible little-boy "prodigies" of hers (said Mom later, a bit disdainfully). This went on for a couple more years before she retired to Joliet IL to live near her daughter. Dad, on his TV-repairing rounds, was teased time and again by customers about my bench-spinning maneuver, which they had all witnessed with hilarity on their now malfunctioning television sets. Years later, as awareness dawned on me that the WKZO appearance hadn't really been much of a coup, I asked Mom why more hadn't come out of it such as, at least, other conspicuous performances. She didn't exactly answer the question as I asked it, but did tell me that the station hadn'...

My sister Kathy of course, took several years of piano as a child, and much later, as her sons were taking lessons, took some again for her self. She said a lot of the skills came back to her, though it was not entirely the same because her memory was of having a smaller hand(!) An interesting thing she said about lessons was that as soon as she could get through the assigned piece, if just barely, her teacher checked it off and replaced it with a new assignment! This was dismaying! And it's true. Contemporary piano methods, like I wrote earlier, are kind of like rolls of musical paper towel, with a large proportion of forgettable music that you use once, tear off (so to speak) and throw out perhaps never to come to mind again. Fortunately the Thompson method, which I started on, is of high quality throughout. Though it doesn't have the musical range of today's methods (there is no "popular" music in it beyond traditional folk tunes), it has hel...

Previous:  Taking It to the Next Level, Same as the Last Level   Next:  A Few Brief Digressions "Feminine Fancies" was the actual name of a long-running, locally produced lunchtime talk and variety show on WKZO TV (some time later it was given the less gender-loaded handle "Accent"), and I was to appear and play piano on it in just a couple of months. Dad made recordings of practice sessions. Mrs. Kent, as ever, just kept asking for more repetitions, though she did not instill good practice habits and accordingly the renditions don't improve much right up to the end. If Mrs. Kent had actual teaching chops, she wasn't applying them. But she did  have older students who played advanced repertoire fluently and decently well, as evidenced by a surviving tape of a studio recital. Perhaps if Mom and I had been an optimal match for a while, then Mrs. Kent and I were… sub-optimal. And yet when it just me playing on my own with the tape still rolling, I would s...

At once, after I rejoined piano, Mrs. Kent put me back on the same pieces that had broken my patience the previous year. They were still too difficult, of course, but in the interim I had somehow acquired greater forbearance and kept at it. It was through her generosity that we had a small selection of classical vinyl LPs from the Basic Library of the World's Greatest Music and The Philharmonic Family Library of Great Music . I was delighted by the Nutcracker Suite (more warm fuzzy Christmas vibes, perhaps), by the Liszt Hungarian Rhapsody #2 in an orchestral arrangement (the Thompson method has a simplified version that at least one of my sisters played), and by two piano concertos, Beethoven's "Emperor" and the second Rachmaninoff. Fascinated by the record player as a machine, I would sometimes crawl face-up on the floor under the turntable mechanism, and watch it from below, back-lit, as it went through the re-cueing process -- at that time the disks were stacked ...