Teacher/Student/Parent
Barbara Kreader, Editor
As I sit down to write this column, troops are amassing themselves near Iraq, winter presses its frosty face against my windows, and a pesky, four-week old virus shows no sign of leaving my late-middle-aged body. In addition, my piano students' families, facing reduced employment and various challenges of their own, struggle to keep up their lessons and my income.
These fallow periods provide necessary time for reflection and renewal. Or so I keep reminding myself. I have filled my living room with forced bulbsdaffodils, tulips, and amaryllisand near my piano, I have placed a picture of my beloved crabapple tree in full bloom. At the moment, it, like me, looks like a few sticks with arms raised toward the clouded winter sun, searching for the warmth that will enable its sleeping blossoms to manifest themselves.
In this fragile frame of mind, I began trying to answer this issue's question: "What makes summer music camp a worthwhile experience?" and found I couldn't. I kept being interrupted by a personal question that filled my fevered brain: How, with the world becoming ever more unstable since the events of September 11, 2001, does a late-middle-aged piano teacher find the energy and inspiration to go on about his or her life and work in a way that can make a difference in world events, whichever way they go? As it happened I received an answer to my own question and to this issue's question at the same time. It appeared in the following newsletter article from "The Adamanter," Vol. VII, No 2, December 2002, published by the Adamant Music School, which has graciously allowed us to reprint it in this issue's column. . .
from In the Midst of War, Finding Peace at Adamant
Researched and Written by Andrew Christensen
1944
Edwine has been teaching in New York for 25 years now; she turned 60 just before heading to Louisiana to conduct piano clinics for teachers and players. The first clinic, the flyer says, "will be in New Orleans, April 15, the second in Baton Rouge, April 22 . . .A rare teacher's talent for clear, vivid explanation, a sympathetic insight into artistic and human problems, and a profound musicianship brings a succession of interesting pupils to Miss Behre's studio. The list has included the composer, Abram Chasins, Ethel Chasins, Nora Norman, Nora Stirling of NBC; Mrs. Eva Davis of Baton Rouge; Gilbert Seldes, critic and author; and Bernard Gabriel, pianist and lecturer, whose original method of reducing stage fright has been the subject of articles in The New Yorker, Reader's Digest, Life, and other magazines."
We are seeing rapid advances by the Allies in the war. General
MacArthur is taking back islands in the Pacific; American forces
are pushing back the Germans in Italy; and the Russians are now
inside of Poland. As a measure of desperation, the Gestapo randomly
arrested and shot Italians in Rome in reprisal for a bomb attack,
and in France, all 642 inhabitants of Oradour-sur-Glane were executed
to avenge the death of an SS officer killed by the Resistance.
Meanwhile, American and British air forces are pounding Germany
with bombs, including the capital, Berlin. . .
For the other Samplers from this issue
