Musical memories

  It all started with her. Mary Przypyszny was a fabulous pianist and also happened to be a member of Gamma Phi Beta sorority, of which I was a big brother. Anyway, Mary played not only Chopin's Nocturne on several occasions my sophomore year of college but also Debussy's first book of  Images,  including what would become one of my favorite pieces, "Reflets dans l'eau."  I do have a way of jumping from one topic to the next, but that just shows how so many of my musical experiences arise from one source and are often interconnected. Enough about me - now Chopin!  At our college the music department scheduled a student recital nearly every Friday noon in Ewell Hall. This forum provided the mature players an opportunity to play in front of audiences and to get feedback or simply to gain experience on stage. Mary played this Nocturne at one of these recitals and I swore I'd never heard anything so beautiful before. A month later she played it in a master class g...

The joy I experienced while singing Schubert this morning was a long time coming. My memories of Schubert stretch from Stuttgart to my college days in Williamsburg and back again. Schubert's G-Major Mass with the Untertürkheimer Kantorei at the Wallmerkirche My first introduction to Franz Schubert's vocal music was through the recordings of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. I had probably first read about him in the Guinness Book of World Records, he being the recording artist (in 1980) with the most LPs on the market. In addition, our music library at William & Mary had a good number of his recordings and I found them very interesting. After failing my audition for the college choir the first week at college - and rightly so because I couldn't sing in tune - I began taking voice lessons. My elder sister sang in the renowned choir there and thought I would also enjoy singing. Our father sang Gilbert & Sullivan operettas, so she probably thought it was in our g...

After two years of piano lessons with a nice old lady, I could read music and play pretty well, apparently, though I never practiced and eventually gave up at 10 because I enjoyed baseball, football and basketball better. Then in 1978 for Christmas I was given three books of Genesis sheet music and couldn't wait to get home every day and play the songs I loved so well. " Squonk " became my favorite piece and even my nickname among some friends. While I was at it, though, I would look through the piano bench for other music. I discovered Beethoven's "Moonlight" Sonata and played the first movement of that before I went off to college. At William and Mary I began lessons for a year with a man who started me over, so to speak, with the Bach Inventions and bits of Haydn sonatas (because I had books of those pieces already). He set me onto the Invention #8 in E Major "because it was jazzy". I guess I had played him some of my Genesis and he thought...