I took music lessons – piano – for several years, beginning when I was quite young, probably seven or eight years old.
My music lessons were given in St. Andrew's Hall which was attached to the United Church at the back and which fronted on Henderson St. in Chatham, NB. You can see a bit of it on the far right in this picture:
Just inside the door were the minister's office and the choir room where the gowns were kept and where members of the choir gathered before each service.
The hall itself was used as a meeting place for youth groups and as a gym – non-regulation size – and kids played basketball, volleyball and badminton there.
On the right-hand side of the hall was an open stairway that led up to a balcony/mezzanine. I remember that whole area – which was in two sections – being used as a storage area for extra chairs and boxes of books.
Through another door at the back of this balcony was a long narrow room with two pianos. This is where the half-hour once-a-week music lessons happened.
In looking back, I can't imagine children today being sent up those stairs into a closed room to spend half an hour alone with the music teacher.
Each of the music teachers – besides doing the private lessons – was organist and choir director at the United Church and also taught music at Chatham Grammar School.
My teachers were, in this order: Pauline Whitman, Jack Armstrong, Vera Zwicker and Professor Moir (who was the younger brother of the legendary Irene Moir, award-winning choir director and voice teacher at St. Michael's Academy.) I think I may be missing a teacher, a less serious, more frivolous young woman who didn't meet with the approval of the ladies of the United Church choir. Or maybe I'm imagining her.
I liked the teachers. Miss Whitman was sweet and appealing. She was very much respected as a musician and the choir ladies loved her. It was hard to take Mr. Armstrong as seriously because he was relaxed and laid-back and didn't seem to take himself very seriously. I'm pretty sure he was also an accomplished musician.
Miss Zwicker was eccentric. She was not comfortable in her own skin and although I don't think anyone ever doubted her musical abilities, she was not as much appreciated as teacher/director because it was hard to feel comfortable with her.
Professor Moir, as far as I know, was taken seriously by everyone, himself included. I remember him as kind of a fussy fellow, almost a caricature of a music teacher. I may be wrong though. I was pretty young.
There was one more teacher. One year – I'm not sure why – I was sent up to St. Michael's Academy, then a Catholic school.
The door nearest to downtown led me into a front hall that passed the auditorium on the left and offices on the right. Straight ahead was another door that led into a long corridor with windows looking into the auditorium on one side and a series of small music rooms – furnished with pianos and other instruments – on the other side.
It was in one of those small rooms where I met Sister Dionne, hands properly out of sight, tucked into the wide sleeves of the full habit of the school's founders, the Religious Hospitallers of St. Joseph. Looking a little like this:
I was a little afraid of Sister Dionne although she was very kind to me. She was a very accomplished musician – she played the piano for me a couple of times – and she could be five feet away with her back to me and "hear" that I was using the wrong fingering for my pieces. If she was near me and my fingering was wrong, she cracked her slender little hard-wood pointer across my knuckles which, I have to say, hurt like hell.
She held my face in her hands and called me her Rose of Sharon. I expect she prayed for me to become Catholic but that was still many years in the future.
I have fairly neutral memories about my music lessons. They didn't make me particularly happy – or unhappy. Like most children, I didn't enjoy practicing and I thought there was entirely too much emphasis placed on scales. I liked some of the work that was more like school-work. I remember a project which involved cutting out information and pictures and putting together little bound booklets on several of the great composers – the story of their lives and families, and how their lives in music developed: Mozart, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky and others. It was a very enjoyable project.
I didn't enjoy the little pieces I had to play over and over. I envied those people who could play "by ear" and I entertained fantasies of playing sing-able songs and being the life of the party. I loved the Mammoth Book and I played some of the songs from it.
I remember playing Aura Lee -- which I was delighted to discover was the same tune as the Elvis Presley hit, Love Me Tender – Silver Threads Among the Gold, Beautiful Dreamer, Down by the Old Mill Stream, When You and I Were Young, Maggie.
I loved music from olden times. I still do.
The focus of all those music lessons was preparing for the annual Miramichi Music Festival. It went on for several days with events held at different schools in both Chatham and Newcastle. Some years, depending on how my birthday related to the festival's dates, I played in more than one age category. For example, when I was nine, I played in both the 10-and-under and the 12-and-under. Most years, I played one or two solo numbers and a duet. I usually played duets with Betty Cameron and at least once, I played with Dawn Williston.
The pianists and vocalists always knew one thing: if we were in the same age category as Doreen Bryenton from Newcastle, we were pretty much aiming for second place, having conceded top spot to her. She was an excellent musician; fortunately, she was a little older than I so I wasn't always up against her in competition. I think maybe I did come out ahead of her one year although I can't remember the details now.
One thing I do remember is that if our competition was in Newcastle, we would be taken there early in the day and have to sit through several other categories, listening to innumerable singers, all singing the same song, of course. To this day, I can hear Who is Sylvia? being sung in my head in many different voices. This one is Dame Janet Baker and I must say, it's lovely.
If you won your category, you got to perform at the Final Concert. One year, when Betty and I won the duet category, the concert was recorded by the local radio station and someone there made each performance into a 78 rpm vinyl record. Yes, I still have it.
While I was growing up, our family had a big upright piano. When we moved to a smaller house, my mother got rid of it and bought a much smaller one – what she always called an "apartment-sized piano." It has one less octave than a regular piano – four keys missing on either end of the keyboard.
The little piano is mine now and many years later, I was living in Ottawa and had a piano tuner come in to take care of it. He was a taciturn fellow but he played it nicely when he was finished – it sounded lovely – and I said, "It's a nice little piano, isn't it?"
"This is not a piano," he muttered. "This is a spinnet."
Well, fancy that. A spinnet. (I borrowed this photo from the Internet but this is the exact model.)
You learn something new every day.
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