![]() "Tales of a Musical Journey" by Irina Gorin."Stars on a Summer Night" by William Gillock."Portrait of Lívia Rév pianist / teaching / 90th Birthda."Of Foreign Lands and Peoples" by Schumann."Let's sing a Yiddish Song" by Ruth Rubin."I am the Violin" a documentary about Ida Haendel."How could this happen to my piano?" by Shirley Kirsten."Did Somebody Say Fresno" compiled by Aviva Kirsten."Children Playing" by Daniel Gottlub Turk."Children Playing" by Daniel Gottlob Turk.I’d say, Give beginning students early exposure to sharps and flats, It was time to bring on the Black Notes for a rousing rebellion! “Lil’ Liza Jane,” Level I, RED FABER, Piano Adventures, (Revised?) The pairing smacked of unabashed black-note bigotry! 6) dashing the hopes of blacks for keyboard EQUALITY. They could have stayed in variation form but were mercilessly bumped by “Hot Cross Buns” on the Whites, (p. “Wind in the Trees,” and “The Shepherd’s Flute,” such sweet black-key melodies, wooed newbies, keeping them in the throes of love-sickness through page 5. In the Millennium, enter the Faber Piano Adventures Generation, with a peep-through, veiled relief of black-key associated anxiety.Īt least for the first few pages of Primer Performance Purple, the little ones pleasingly dance on the blacks without a hint of displeasure–an ebony-realized dream that should be FOREVER, according to fairy tales.īut like Cinderella’s fate at the stroke of midnight, Primer page 6, sent the blacks packing– banished from their privileged KINGDOM, restoring WHITE-note supremacy! “I did a double-take because I never considered these keys to be ‘higher.'” “When I performed the Bach F minor Concerto with orchestra during my one year at the Mannes School, the late Leopold Mannes, who was present at the rehearsal, said to me, ‘Isn’t it odd that when we get nervous before a performance, the black notes seem so much higher than the whites?!!’ Seymour Bernstein, pianist and author, added his own black-key anecdote: His reply: “I’m not going to touch those blacks.” In response, a shocked panel of teachers queried him about his new arrangement. Likewise, a candidate for admission to a major East Coast music Conservatory flew in from Mississippi and played a Beethoven sonata, avoiding all black keys. “They always called them ‘accidentals’ because they were accidents waiting to happen.” ![]() Lisa Corcoran, an adult piano student residing in Oregon, seconded the stone age view of “blacks.” ![]() Time marched on with little progress made since Thompson churned out Pixie plus publications. These publications had a profound influence on the teaching of piano….” “For thousands of people who taught or studied piano in the 1930s and later, the name of John Thompson brought immediately to mind the shiny red covers of his “Teaching Little Fingers to Play ” his six-volume series, “Modern Piano Course ” and his three-volume series, “Adult Piano Course.” Using his own original compositions, simplified transcriptions of familiar classics, and actual works by famous composers, Thompson crafted a graded series of piano pieces that allowed students to begin with an introduction to the keyboard and music reading and to progress to a fairly sophisticated performance level. I was fed on John Thompson RED books and he, too, furthered the cause of Whites as a dyed-in-the-wool Yankee from Philadelphia, home of the Liberty Bell. We were so primordially ENSLAVED by the 52s that our DEEP SOUTH-indoctrinated prejudice deterred us from making friends with our NORTHern neighbors.Ģ) Our Southern-biased teachers, may they rest in peace, refused to introduce us to the stigmatized blacks until we had advanced so far along in our primers that we would rather eat spinach than make friends with the dark-colored outcasts. The cold-hearted truth was, beginning piano students were TAUGHT that BLACK NOTES DIDN’T EXIST as EQUALS among whites.Īs a case in point VICTIM of BLACK-NOTE AVOIDANCE SYNDROME, I believed:ġ) That too many of us were glued to the WHITES with our THUMBS stuck on middle C until it hurt. Such riveting words were applicable to piano learning in “traditional” teaching environments around the country. “You’ve Got to Be Taught before it’s too late, Lyrics from South Pacific suddenly popped into my head. “Gosh darn, I see only 36 Blacks, and 52 Whites? That’s a sure-fire case of discrimination.” Such double talk as it applied to keyboard inequality was nipped in the bud by an African American piano student/retired postal worker: To me, this attitude hearkened back to 1960’s Montgomery, Alabama with its apologia about desegregation. Nancy Williams: “Adult students sometimes” have a “bias” about “black notes” and perhaps they’re not white notes “gone wrong.” Nancy strongly interjected when a prior poster had voiced surprise that the blacks were stigmatized:
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