Dr. Kooiker

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's tape recording, had improved a lot.

The first new assigned piece was one I've never heard or seen since, but it was a great choice: an Album Leaf, by Charles Martin Loeffler, a composer better known for his chamber music and art songs. It is a short rondo with showy scale work in the right hand and bass and chords in the left. It is not as difficult as it sounds on first hearing. Once you get D major in your fingers, there basically aren't a lot of speed bumps to trip you up.

If you are a piano teacher and you somehow run across this piece, go right ahead and assign it to your intermediate-level students. It's good. But as of this writing it is not for sale anywhere I've looked, even in reprints of old anthologies, nor is yet scanned to imslp.org. Loeffler doesn't even have a composer entry in the exhaustive piano music catalog compiled by Maurice Hinson (at least not the third edition which we own). My hard copy is long gone but I've a mind to transcribe it from the surviving recording. I performed it in my second student recital under Kooiker.

The following year Kooiker assigned another now-obscure piece that featured arpeggios rather than scales: Etude, Op. 22, No. 1 in A-flat major by Hermann Adolf Wollenhaupt. (imslp.org, YouTube). It is a showy, sparkly piece, quite ambitious for this fourth grader, although I doubt that I got the whole thing quite smooth enough for a complete performance.

The first several measures, at least, were put to good use. The fourth grade teachers commandeered me into doing a short theatrical sketch that toured the elementary school's classrooms. The play began with me, playing the beginning of the Etude and being interrupted by another guy in the sketch -- conveniently, before it got to the part I couldn't yet play! The many thank you notes to our class written by these students, virtually every one, raved about the piano playing. What was significant for me was that it was coming from peers, not from self-interested adults, and that was encouraging!

(Alas, though, for the selectivity of attention of memory. Don’t ask me who my fellow troupers were, or what the play was even about. That is long forgotten.)

The same class later put on a more substantial drama about Helen Keller in which I played, not the piano, but the role of Helen's father, Capt. Arthur Keller. I'll call it that the spring semester of fourth grade was a good notch better and more memorable than the preceding year and a half.

Another new musical adventure that year was the beginning "Tonette" ensemble taught by our school's band director. The Tonette is a little toy flute, more specifically a sort of poor man's plastic recorder. The class served as a sort of primer to fifth grade beginning band, which was the next stop on the musical conveyor belt.