Music teachers

The pianist who plays for the choir I conduct - the Choristers - has been cleaning out her house. She handed me a twenty-six-year-old newspaper cutting today: it was something I'd written for the weekly column, Column 8, back in November 1991. It's a little negative to start with, but improves as it goes on.

Here it is:

A group of heroes work in our city show conditions would make most wharfies pale. I'm talking about music teachers.

And I speak from experience - for a few years I taught piano from three till whenever, after spending a frenetic morning as a postie. I must have been mad.

Utter dedication is required of anyone who decides to take on this job as a permanent career. (I didn't.) The frustrations from pupils who don't work combined with the frustrations from those who do work but will never play anything with the slightest hint of musicality, have to be experienced to be believed.

One in a hundred pupils may have the spark of musical life in them; the sort of spark that makes you think they may achieve something. The other 99, however earnest they may be, will fall by the wayside, and during their mid-life crises will gloomily say, 'I wish I'd carried on playing the piano.'

Or worse, 'Why didn't Mummy and Daddy make me practise?' Have you ever tried to make a child practise? Their attention manages to be focused on everything but the keyboard.

I recommend the 1953 fantasy movie, The 5000 Fingers of Dr T, to anyone who doesn't know what I mean.

Music teachers sit for hours in the same room, often seeing only an endless stream of children. It's like being a solo parent. The occasional adult pupil may or may not be a bonus, depending on their reason for learning.

When everybody else is out socialising in the evening, music teachers are teaching. When other people are having a leisurely meal at home with their family (something we still haven't achieved - the leisurely part, I mean), music teachers are teaching.

When other teachers are enjoying up to eight weeks' paid holiday per annum, music teachers are forced to spend those same weeks unemployed, eking out the income they've earned during the rest of the year.

And in spite of using new material as it appears, the basic details of what they teach hasn't changed much in decades: there is no New Music to go alongside New Maths. Scales are scales are scales. They have to be learned. However much most pupils may dislike them, (I used to enjoy them actually, but then I'm a bit unusual), no musician worth his salt can afford not to learn them.

I write with a sense of awe to think that one of my former music teachers has been teaching for nearly 60 years.

Originally she lived and taught in Sawyers Bay. She commuted to Port Chalmers to teach as well, but being without a car (of course), she had to walk. Usually it only took half an hour. It took somewhat longer in the Big Snow.

Later she rented rooms in town, and still later, during the war, had a room in the Glenpark Presbyterian Hall. When she calls it the 'dug-out' or 'dungeon', you have a pretty good idea of what it was like.

Mice were frequent visitors. Boy pupils had to empty the mousetraps, to their disgust. (I'm pleased to say I was still a twinkle in my father's eye when the war was on.)

By the time I was her pupil, she lived in a pleasant house in Mornington. The comfortable music room was built over the garage; moving the two pianos up there must have been a nightmare.

Sounds like music teaching pays after all, I hear you say. Well, maybe it does, if you're prepared to put in endless hours of dedicated and concentrated work, you only contact with the outside world being your pupils.

So all hail to music teachers - they never go on strike. Many workers who do hardly know they're born.


A few notes: The teacher's name was Olive Perry. She never married, and her mother lived with her until she died. Olive herself has been dead for a number of years. Her house was actually in Maryhill, only two minutes walk away from where I now live. 
The Glenpark Presbyterian Hall was replaced at good while ago, perhaps fifty years. The new one has no dungeon, and probably fewer mice. 
At least one of the two pianos in that upstairs room was a grand. 

A short letter to the Editor was attached to the clipping. Unfortunately there's no indication as to who wrote it. 

In his column today, Mike Crowl has some nice things to say about music teachers and some less kind things to say about the job itself. Perhaps it's not really so bad. The one thing I've noticed over the years is how many music teachers keep on going to a ripe old age, many well into their 80s. Is it a 'soft' lifestyle that allows this, or is it the daily challenge of taking each of their pupils just one stage further that keeps them alert and active?

The pianist who gave me these two clippings commented that she has been teaching for nearly 70 years. Another teacher in the city, a man, has only recently retired: he's in his early 90s. Miss Perry herself certainly taught for a long time. 
I wrote Column 8 for around five years in the early nineties. 

Apostrophizing

Ibanez RG8 review at Musicians Friend. Excuse the lack of an apostrophe in that previous sentence, but I'm just copying what someone else has given me, and the someone else obviously doesn't know about apostrophes...or doesn't care. They're obviously of the grammatical school that goes along with this line:

Use the apostrophe in it’s proper place and omit when its not needed.

Talking of apostrophes, did you know that there's an ebook-selling company called, 'txtr?  The apostrophe is part of their title, weird and all as it seems. Apparently they're a German company originally, but there's even a branch that sells books with NZ prices applied to them. I'd never heard of them until just now...and I've no idea why they'd use the apostrophe in such an odd way.

I made a fuss in the first paragraph about the lack of an apostrophe, but it seems there's an ongoing push  to get rid of the thing entirely, partly on the basis that in speech we don't make any indication that we're using apostrophes at all. (Perhaps we should 'click' our tongues?) I remember writing a column about this years ago: it certainly makes reading more difficult, however, because certain words, such as cant have a different pronunciation when the apostrophe is removed - on the page - though context will usually tell you what word is intended. And the idea that the apostrophe is a waste of time isn't new.  Way back in 1902 George Bernard Shaw (who always considered himself a forward thinker in terms of spelling) wrote: "There is not the faintest reason for persisting in the ugly and silly trick of peppering pages with these uncouth bacilli." As forthright as Shaw's statement is, I'm not sure that apostrophes can really be classified as bacteria, and who would regard the use of apostrophes as a 'trick?'  There's an interesting article in Slate magazine giving some background to the ongoing debate about, and the history of, apostrophes. Seems they're not as longstanding a fixture of the English language as we thought.

Apostrophe, as a word, has often been used in a different sense entirely, one that we now consider archaic.  Here's Charles Spurgeon writing, and using its different meaning: "Thrusting, thou hast thrust at me." It is a vigorous apostrophe, in which the enemy is described as concentrating all his thrusting power into the thrusts which he gave to the man of God. According to one online dictionary, Spurgeon is using the word in this sense: The direct address of an absent or imaginary person or of a personified abstraction, especially as a digression in the course of a speech or composition. I've come across this usage regularly in Gilbert and Sullivan's operas, but here's another example of just such a usage, which was common in the 19th century: On finishing school at 16,in spite of a threat of disinheritance from her grandfather, a state senator, Antoinette joined her uncle's stock company, billed as "The youngest female star in America." When the company played New York in 1906, she [was]called "the sweetest, most piquant ingenue Broadway has seen for many long months." Her stage personality was "distinct," her acting "clever and winsome," and her beauty "such as the poets apostrophize."

Anyway, to get back to the contemporary meaning of apostrophe, here's an example of its complete misuse from the NZ Herald. This advertisement was the subject of much rubbishing on Twitter back on the 18th of August this year. 

Keen-eyed readers will note four incorrect uses of the apostrophe. There's also a word missing in the first sentence, a stylistic misuse of the number five, and, according to Vaughn Davis, @vaughndavis, one questionable sentence. I'm not sure which one he's referring to, however. 

Oh, for the days of proofreaders!  [Yeah, go on, I bet you can find a misuse of something in this post too!]

Defend and Betray

Having found that the various non-fiction books I've got on hand at the moment aren't inspiring me to read them, for a bit of a change I decided to grab something off the Public Library's fiction shelves. Wound up with Anne Perry's Defend and Betray, written back in 1992, and one of the earlier books involving her detective, Inspector Monk.

It has the benefit of being written by someone who knows how to use language, which is a plus - there are plenty of thrillers/detective stories out there that are abominably written. (Interestingly enough on page 138 of this copy some person has corrected Perry's - or the editor's - 'bare' to 'bear' in the sentence '...bear the social shame of it.')

But after a good start, the book has bogged down a bit in the middle as the three investigating characters, Hester, who worked in the Crimea with Florence Nightingale; Rathbone the lawyer, and Monk keep going over the same ground trying to find out why the character who has confessed to the murder either couldn't have done it or, if she did, must have had some so far unexplained motive.

Hopefully things will start to move forward again or it'll join the League of Books I've-read-quite-a-bit-of-but-never-finished.

Anne Perry, it turns out, is actually Juliet Hulme, who with her friend Pauline Parker, murdered Parker's mother in Christchurch in 1954. I find it a little odd while reading the book that Perry should write about murder, murderers and victims with an objectivity that must have been difficult to achieve after her notorious act as a teenager. Still, given the chance to move on in life, I guess she had to do something, and she's certainly been very successful as a novelist.

Update, 20.3.11.
I've now finished the book, and yes, it does pick up on page 252, when the trial of the woman who's murdered her husband starts. From this point on it moves forward at a good pace, and the trial scenes are well written.
Some of the character drawing throughout, however, is a bit puzzling. Her detective, Monk, and Hester and Rathbone are constantly portrayed in ways that seem to show them being in conflict with themselves, so that we never quite get to grips with them. The three get on well, and yet, Perry is always telling us something that makes it seem that they don't. This character approach is a bit odd, to me.
The sub-plot concerning Monk's previous murder investigations and his gradually recovery of memories about them is just annoying. It interrupts the flow of the main story, rather than adding to it, and I found myself skimming these sections again and again, because they broke into the forward movement. Further, in the end they contribute nothing to the main plot, and merely show more of Monk's seeming conflicts in himself. Since these aren't terribly relevant to what else goes on, they were another irritant for me.
I think Perry overwrites: in building up the 19th century London world around her characters she often adds two or three paragraphs of detail. Yes, it reminds us that these people exist in a time different to our own, but it's extraneous to the book's basic intention. We don't need to know about the hansom cabs and vehicles in the streets, just because someone is crossing a well-known London square. We don't need to know how the various jams and stuff were made. And so on. These things need to be integrated into the book more.
Further, she's always giving us characters' feelings, and yet these are often out of tune somehow with the mood of the scene, as though she wants us to know that none of the main characters is really the same underneath as they are on the surface. For a mystery, these are just excess.
IMHO.