People Stories


People Stories
RFT Music Stories
58
People Stories
There are so many musician stories that I tell my students, it was difficult to choose the most appropriate ones. Some of the stories I finally picked have no point to them—they're just fun—but all of them do say something about the people aspect of being an artist. It's not all inspiration and sacred vibes, there's a lot of McDonald's food and "Who's going to drive us to the gig?" involved in pro playing.
It will not escape your notice that many of the stories are about me. They are about pivotal events in my career, all from my California days, when I was considered one of the top players in a large metropolitan area. It was fun going back over some of these memories, I admit, but there is a larger point—using myself as an example, I have alsways sought to demonstrate how the experience of music is character building. I am not, nor never will be a saint, but I feel somehow, that every time I play music I get a little closer. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Table of Contents

RFT Music Stories Stories, Parables, and Essays About the Transforming Power of Music  by Richard Freeman-Toole  Table of Contents  Introduction......................................................1 General Musicianship .....................................3  $100 Music Lesson ..................................... . 4 The Land Where Everybody Walked with a Cane .......9 The Village Idiot and the Band Leader .............................12  Hit on Head with Hammer ............................15 The Sick Soprano's High Note ................................16  Massive Doses and Quantum Leaps ...............17 A Sad Time Leads to Breakthrough .........................20  Bunger/Prodigy/Fingering .............................22 Don't Pound on the Piano .......................................23  UCLA Audition ......................................
Read more

Bunger Prodigy/Fingering

Bunger Prodigy/Fingering RFT Music Stories 22 Bunger Prodigy/Fingering My piano teacher, Richard Bunger, was a child prodigy; when he was 9 years old he could play the Chopin Revolutionary Etude—he said, "I was the only kid on my block who could play that piece." "The thing is," he said, "I can't play the piece now; if I try to play now I remember all the childish bad habits, tensing, and stretching, and straining, that I had when I was nine, my brain reads back to the program of that piece that was put in when I was a kid. The only way I could play the piece now, is if I completely re-fingered it and made a completely new memory of it." My teacher made a big deal about putting the programming for a new piece into your brain perfectly the first time, so you wouldn't have alternate versions running around in your memory waiting to mess you up in a performance. This is why...
Read more

Handel and Corelli

Handel and Corelli RFT Music Stories 63 Handel and Corelli History is filled with stories of conflict between great musicians. The distinctly defined, often quite egocentric, personalities of truly great artists, may easily come to grate against each other, since these people are often socially abrasive, and hypersensitive at the same time. Well, to set the scene for this story, we have to first give some background on Corelli. Arcangelo Corelli's traveling band of violin virtuosi were spending a year in London, performing for the king etc. Correlli's music, through publication, had been exerting an influence on the baroque musical scene all over Europe; and his chamber orchestra was one of the hottest performing groups of the time, and did very well financially. So, it was natural that they should spend some time in London; London was not really the Big Apple of the period, and the English elite were all...
Read more