notes from grace college...

Didn't initially expect much to come from my contacts with Grace College, (email exchange in June "I'm coming to Warsaw! Would love to make/teach music in the community! Need help?"...then dropping off resume when we arrived in August...). But it certainly has blossomed into something in between keeping me from looking for a real, full-time job and surprisingly reinforcing the musical life I love. I sometimes find renewed musical strength and resources with in me through this work and am grateful for that. In somewhat chronological order:

• They need a second rehearsal/performance pianist for the Symphonic Chorus (a combination of students, alums and community folks that is still rather small and cries out for more tenors to augment the section of one male, one female) which is doing Brahms Liebeslieder Waltzes this semester -- described sometimes as being written for 'two pianos with optional embellishing singers'. Easy and pleasurable work on Monday evenings. Next semester I'll have that night off.
• Voice lessons need accompanying. Keeps multiplying, but we're still in single digits. Five one-hour lessons (including a post-grad student who pays her own way and so I voluntarily play for next-to-nothing), one half-hour lesson. They prefer to give their own students this kind of work and experience, which is a good idea.
  
• A Hindemith piano concerto with trombone accompaniment. Just kidding...sort of. This trombone sonata is a killer for me. But practicing it incessantly is doing more for getting me back in physical shape than anything else. Unsure how this will be paid. Most likely by the student...
• Their pre-college fine arts academy has lost their advanced piano teacher. I have three students -- one aged thirteen and another who is fifteen are college level. A third one reminds me of a niece of mine -- both in her looks and in her gracefulness (no pun intended there!). Downside: as most of the academy teachers are Grace students, it is tied to the college semester. I only have 12 lessons with them per semester, instead of the 18 in my own studio. Plus, I'm not sure that I can put my foot down and say 'College-level students must take at least a 45-minute lesson and preferably an hour!'. I have to force myself to cut the lesson off at a half hour...and usually I'm not successful.
• Retired St Annes' parishioner signs up for piano lessons. She is a complete joy to work with!!! Rediscovering the piano after working through John Thompson Book Four as a youth (those who have used/played this series know that his five books take a student practically up to a basic college level) and being an avid reader, The Piano Shop on the Left Bank is something she would surely enjoy. (The son of new parishioners begins lessons next week. I would like to end up with 25 or 30 students. Not sure that's realistic. My total of five students is more than I usually have when we've moved to a new place.)
  
• Awesome Grace vocal prof Don Bernadini needs accompaniment for rehearsing music for upcoming auditions. This tenor is amazing. Accompanying in his studio reminds me of UOP conservatory days in the studios of the likes of Lynelle Wiens, David Brock. I realize how much the very creative vocal studio work has impacted my perception of things vocal...choral...and even piano. Unfortunately, vocal accompanying includes 'icky'...technical musical term, here...but mandatory orchestral reductions of opera arias. Some are better than others. Personally, I hate it when a reduction that is impossible to play has added-in teeny orchestra notes that you really can't reach...just to remind you of how inadequate a pianist is and how it really should be done by an orchestra (just kidding...).
  
• Violin student needs accompaniment for a senior recital. Oops -- two selections (Mozart Rondo - yup, another orchestral reduction, wherein my fingers have to pretend they can do violin I & II, viola, and cello runs all at the same time...and Bartok Roumanian Dances) must be ready for a general student recital in a few weeks. Again, not sure how to charge for this. I wish Grace College would create an accompanist position with a 'Hey, we expect you to do anything and everything for any and every body' kind of salary so I wouldn't have to ask poor students for $$.
• An adjunct voice teacher began telling a student this week about the tone of an amazing vocal ensemble that was based in Minneapolis. She turned to me and asked if I had ever heard of the Dale Warland Singers!!!!!!!!! Gosh, she even traveled to their final concert before the group disbanded -- they couldn't fathom being under a successor's baton upon his retirement. I mentioned their December Stillness CD, which she of course knows well. And it conjured up in my mind and heart and ears Stravinsky's Ave Maria... Kverno's Corpus Christi Carol... Messiaen's O Sacrum Convivium... and Hess's The Oxen... all on this CD, which served as inspiration for the 'going to the next level' that the St. John's Choir & Choir Friends embraced for Lessons & Carols and Holy Week.

Pardon me while my heart sheds tears of gratitude and amazement for the unexpected gift of that journey...and looks forward to whatever else unexpected might come my way here in lovely Warsaw.