Summer Music Education
While it may seem that winter is still in full swing, summer
will be upon us in no time, and with it a host of music education
opportunities. Now is the time to start planning summer activities, and we hope
the listings that following will assist you in choosing the appropriate program
for yourself or your children.
There are programs to suit all ages, levels and interests, from
toddler-oriented to advanced professional training. In the latter category for
example, the Banff Centre, Domaine Forget, the National Academy Orchestra,
Orford, Silver Creek Summer Music, Summer Opera Lyric Theatre, Tafelmusik
Baroque Summer Institute, the Violin and Chamber Music Master Course and
Westben Arts Festival offer private instruction, master classes or
orchestral/chamber training geared toward the emerging professional musician.
Amateurs of all ages can enjoy a range of music-making opportunities and
instruction at two CAMMAC locations: Lake MacDonald in Quebec, and Lakefield
College in Lakefield Ontario. Kids and teenagers can explore their musical
interests and develop their skills at the Addison Music Learning Centre (you
can record a demo CD here!), DownTown Summer Strings, Huckle-berry Music Camp,
the Interprovincial Music Camp (which in addition to classical also offers
programs in Jazz and Rock), Music at Port Milford (for more advanced teens),
Showtime Music Theatre Daycamp, the Royal Conservatory of Music (which also
offers classes for adults and teachers), and Yamaha Superstars. There are
several Suzuki camps, which offer teacher training as well. And new this year,
for those seeking adventure and refinement, French Farmhouse Holidays presents
choral workshops led by two of Canada’s foremost choral conductors (Diane
Loomer and Tafelmusik’s Ivars Taurins) in the heart of the French countryside!
Please see the listings below for more summer music camps.
Karen Ages
PROGRAMS AND
COURSES LISTED IN THIS SUMMER MUSIC SPECIAL
Addison Music Learning Centre
Banff Centre, Music & Sound
CAMMAC Lake MacDonald
CAMMAC Ontario Music Centre
Centauri Summer Arts Camp
Classical Pursuits
Domaine Forget
DownTown Summer Strings
French Farmhouse Holidays
Guitar Workshop Plus . . .
Huckleberry Music Camp
Interprovincial Music Camp
Kincardine Summer Music Festival
Kingsway Conservatory of Music
Mount Royal College Organ Academy
Music at Port Milford
National Academy Orchestra
Orford Arts Centre
Royal Conservatory of Music
Showtime Music Theatre Daycamp
Silver Creek Summer Music
Southern Ontario Chamber Music Institute
Southwestern Ontario Suzuki Institute
Summer Music Festival ~ Suzuki Kingston
Summer Opera Lyric Theatre
Tafelmusik Baroque Summer Institute
Thornhill Chamber Music Institute
Thunder Bay Suzuki Music Camp
TrypTych Summer Musical Theatre Workshop
Violin and Chamber Music Master Course
Westben Arts Festival Theatre
Yamaha Superstars
Piano Man Remains Anonymous
by
Jim Tennyson
Remember
when you were a child, raising your eyes from
your Classics Illustrated comic book version of H.G. Wells’ The
Invisible Man and thinking how utterly cool it would be to have the
power of being invisible?
I
wonder how much that desire influenced my decision to become a piano
tuner-technician. Remember that line from Thomas Gray about the lone flower
that “is born to blush unseen and
waste its fragrance on the desert air”?
Being a piano technician is uncannily
like that. One of the European
piano firms, trying to redress that fact, featured an ad campaign featuring a
piano tuner under the heading “Without Dieter there is no Beethoven.” Wise
words indeed, but think when the last time you saw the technician’s name on a
concert programme?
And
yet as you sit transported by the artistry of someone like Thibaudet … or
Brendel … or Hewitt… in a 20 minute concerto, you are hearing their
playing underpinned by two hours of intense work by the piano technician who
has pounded and cajoled twelve thousand or so parts and one recalcitrant ton of
metal, felt and wood to be responsive to the demands of the artist that sits
before it. And not a word on the programme!
At
Roy Thomson Hall you are hearing the
work of Ted Campbell, the technician of the Toronto Symphony… anonymously of
course.
You
can hear mine when you switch on the CBC, and in innumerable productions of
musical theatre over the years.
And
when I look through those programmes, the credits of which list everyone
associated with the production from the Director down to
the Second Assistant in Charge of the Bagels for the Coffee Break, there is nary a word about the piano
technician.
This
isn’t a new phenomenon. I have read the
autobiographies of numerous pianists, and the only performer that mentions his
tuner at any length is the superb English pianist Harold Bauer. (1873-1951).
The omission becomes even more odd when one thinks that in those halcyon days
the manufacturer that provided the
instrument also supplied a technician
who often travelled with the pianist
and acted as tuner, factotum and fourth for bridge. (And, if my own
experience is correct, resident psychotherapist , but more of that later.)
Bauer
was an interesting man and a wonderful
player who made many recordings. Claude Debussy in fact dedicated the Ondine
movement in Gaspard de La Nuit to him. His
professional career began as a
violinist and I often feel that string players make some of the best clients:
they deal with pitch and tuning every time they pick up their instruments,
which makes them responsive to my work as a tuner per se. There are
certain pianists who in my darker moments I suspect are tone deaf, given the
state of their home instruments, but again they may have developed that in
self-defence.
After
all, pianists have to make use of the instrument that is thrown at them … as do
I. And let me say, sometimes the going is a little rough on both
of us before the lights lower and a hush comes over the audience. Some pianos
are the beasts of nightmare: instruments brought that morning from a year spent in storage … instruments that
are verging on a semi-tone flat … instruments loaned by the chair of the Music
Committee (“Mother’s tuner always looked after it so well….He’s dead now…”) ...
the list is endless. The violin player
on the other hand, takes his familiar friend from the case, still warm
from practise and walks confidently on stage. I on the other hand lurk at the back of the
hall in agony lest the treble start to drift under the heat of the lights and
the stress of Bartok.
It can and it will! I often think that the piano is nothing more than a large musical
thermometer/hygrometer combination sent
by a cruel deity to try my
soul. They are perverse beasts: I have seen them dropped off a dolly and
remain in acceptable tune. I have seen a piano laugh off the fact that much of
its veneer is still hanging from a
narrow doorframe,... but change the temperature or humidity by more than a
point or two, and there is hell to pay. There is no more subtle form of torture
than being a tuner sitting in a concert hall watching an artist grimace as your
tuning sinks slowly in the west.
My
first experience of this was 20 years ago. The piano was a wretched small grand
that lurked unloved in the downstairs bar at the Hummingbird Centre. For
reasons probably known only to the budget chief it was being used to accompany
the finalists of the Canadian Opera Company’s young talent search on a
live-to-air national broadcast. I was called in at the last moment to tune. I
was rather pleased. I was a very green young tuner and there I was with my first association with the big names
“… COC … CBC….Stuart Hamilton at the
keyboard”.
On
the way to Front Street I ran into a friend and I rather boasted a bit (“Me and Joan Sutherland used to take baths
together ….” that sort of thing). Arriving,
I found a piano more suited to a dive in Parkdale than to the National Network,
and, fool that I was, I raised it a full semitone and prayed to Saint Cecilia.
That evening I sat at home listening to
the live broadcast. And as my
tuning vanished as the snows of spring, I got to taste humiliation on a truly
national scale. Moreover, the next day my friend called saying “Well, you
were so puffed up about that gig that I taped that concert for
you.”
There
are times tuner anonymity isn’t such a bad thing.
(Ernst
Kochsiek, by the way, a German
technician with a legendary status among performers … Alfred Brendel thinks
he’s god …. says the piano in order to be stable needs one tuning for every
“cent” flat that it is raised. Since a semitone consists of fifty “cents”, had
the COC taken that to heart I’d just be finishing that gig now!)
But
back to Bauer and his tuner. The Mason and Hamlin Piano
Company supplied Mr. Bauer with Mr. Bacon, whom Bauer called Pop.
“We
always travelled together and became close friends. I am sure I was closer to
the heart of Pop Bacon than anyone or anything else except his pianos which
were like children to him.”
Mr.
Bacon also looked after Mr. Bauer, and,
trust me, if my experience is correct, pianos aren’t the only things that can
be like children. Being British, Bauer had a bent for sarcastic humour that, by
Bauer’s own account, drove poor Pop to distraction.
“He
felt personally responsible for my comfort and health. He also liked to advise
me occasionally as to my relations with other people and he was greatly
concerned by my habit of making the occasional satiric remarks ‘You ought to be
careful, Mr. Bauer,’ he used to growl
at me amiably but apprehensible. ‘These people don’t understand sarcasm and
they don’t like it. You can’t tell what may happen. Supposing some big
husky chap were to haul off and land you one, where would you be? You aren’t in
any kind of physical training and I’m sure I don’t know’ … and so his voice would trail off rather
miserably.”
The
sarcastic mouth of Harold Bauer came to the fore in an unnamed western US
mining town which from his description could have been Dodge City in its prime:
rough, gun toting and ready for a
concert which the audience approached in the manner of an entertainment billed
“Girls !Girls! Girls!” with latecomers
banging down seats and calling to the ushers for peanuts.
Bauer
soldiered on. “I went on again and
started (I think) the Moonlight Sonata.
In the middle of the first movement I heard the cry: ‘Chewing gum!
Candy! Peanuts!’ and the ushers banging
down the seats.”
This
was too much and Bauer came to his own defence: he strode to the footlights and
in tones dripping with sarcasm gave a long diatribe ending “I must humbly beg
your pardon for having forgot the arrangements to your comfort this evening. I
quite forgot! I should have personally made sure the seats were turned down,
and personally distributed those refreshments which are needed outside!!”
After
the concert Pop Bacon was having his usual conniptions! “You shouldn’t have
been so sarcastic Mr. Bauer! They don’t like it and they don’t understand it!
Some fellow will haul off and land you one … my Lord, there they are!!”
At this moment a solemn faced group had
arrived! Bacon beat a hasty
trembling retreat as a spokesman who had taken Bauer literally, thanked him for
his speech from the platform and “for
your generous gesture, but we cannot allow you to assume the
blame!”
Bauer
for once swallowed the remarks that were doubtless springing to mind. “We shook
hands all round and I said: ‘You were right Pop.’”
Poor
old Pop died in harness the following year, probably from one too many janitors raising the steam heat
at the last moment, and one too many incidents caused by Bauer himself. And his
last words? “The piano will be all right this evening, Mr. Bauer”.
Just
call us tuners handmaidens to the arts, always at your service! Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak thrown in free,
of course.
