A Few Brief Digressions

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 held up well. The selection of repertoire in the aforementioned Suzuki Piano Method is also fine.

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Late in the 1990s, not long after the internet exploded into all our lives, I joined a couple of piano teachers on-line forums and participated in discussions. One of them was moderated by an Australian Suzuki teacher from Adelaide. There were several other Aussie and New Zealand colleagues on the forum, and they had a breezily anarchic attitude that I liked. One of them made the puzzling remark that she doesn't hold recitals in her studio, so I asked her how her students get performing experience. She wasn't concerned about that at all, and said there might be an impromptu rendition of a piece in-between lessons for the next student, and of course in group lessons they play with each other, and sometimes for each other, but not in recitals.

After thinking about this for awhile I don't find it quite so puzzling. For whose benefit are young children put through recitals? How well are the performers typically prepared? Do they tend to invite competition and comparison (not to mention self-flagellation)? Although millions of people, literally, express regret at dropping music lessons, how common is it to have truly fond memories of those performances as children?

The answer to the questions change for older children and teenagers, of course, but as Suzuki teachers we were most concerned with the youngest.

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In the previous post I mentioned a fascination with Channel 3's weather map display. Let me take the trouble to describe it here. It appeared to be made of three large poster-sized regional and national maps, with magnetic appliqués stuck to them representing storms, sunshine, fronts, etc.). The three boards that held the maps were mounted vertically, side edges touching, around a rotating spindle. The whole assembly was hidden in a large casing that showed the camera one map at a time through a frame. The weather reporter advanced through the maps, one by one, deftly spinning the assembly around by its near edge. The routine was the same for every 6 o'clock news broadcast, at the same minute hand position, each day.

I loved this clever low-tech system and the ritualistic use to which it was put, and I looked forward to seeing it up close and in person on our visit to the WKZO studio. But sadly, I didn't get to. I got tongue-tied about it while asking our host about it, and didn't find the words to ask simply to see the "weather maps", which would have done it.

It still pains me a bit to talk about this. I really was disappointed.

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It is well established that childhood memories are terribly undependable, and I keep that in mind on an ongoing basis as I type out what I think I remember. I think the host of Feminine Fancies was a man the day we were there, but the regular host at the time was a woman, Louise Carver. I was sure (but wrong) for most of my adult life that the TV appearance happened in first grade, which was also the first year in our new elementary school building, when our teacher was the beloved Florene Gooding. I was so sure of it that I even thought Mrs. Kent lied about my age to the newspaper, knocking a year off so I would seem like more of a prodigy. But now I've re-checked the date of the story and, no, I was five years old, in Kindergarten, under Mrs. Waugh, in the old school building. The memory is all wrong.

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