Oops! Thursday

Wayyy back in 1969, PianoLady and I were freshmen music majors at Florida Technological University. Yes, I know, not the expected place to go for a music degree, but it was a brand new university and it was on the east side of Orlando, convenient for Orlando residents. (It is now known as University of Central Florida.)

I believe there were four piano majors at the time, plus a handful of other musicians who took private lessons, sang in the choir, or played in the orchestra. On a lightning-striking kind of day, PianoLady and I sat down at side-by-side pianos and started playing "If Ever I Would Leave You", from the then-in-theatres movie Camelot (which she adored!). As fate would have it, we played the exact same arrangement with the exact same timing and the exact same tag on the end. We just looked at each other and grinned. A musical match made in heaven had been formed.

We each took private lessons from Dr. Leonidas Sarakatsannis, and we took a duo-piano lesson each week, as I recall. That fall, we were to perform in one of the marathon concerts that the FTU music department was known for. You know the kind—every music student performs something and the concert lasts for about two-and-a-half hours. It was held in the "Multi-Purpose Room" (i.e. cafeteria during the day, dance venue on Saturday nights, concert hall for the fledgling university). We were playing the third and fourth movements, "Tears" and "Russian Easter" from the Rachmaninoff Fantaisie-tableaux, Op. 5.

The audience at FTU was no more well-versed in the ways of classical music than many concertgoers of the present day. Looking at the program to determine how many movements were in a work was an unknown practice.

PianoLady and I played the third movement impeccably, then paused for a moment to gather our fingers before diving into the next movement. Alas, the audience started clapping. Dr. Sarakatsannis had not instructed us on what to do if this occurred. I think he assumed the audience would not be that ignorant (or that Cheryl and I would be less ignorant!). The applause continued. We looked at each other, got up from our twin piano benches, met on the audience side of the front piano, and bowed, then returned to our benches and sat down to start again.

That was forty years ago, and I still can feel the embarrassment when I realized what we had done wrong and how we should have handled the situation.

Lesson learned: turn your head to look at the audience, smile and nod in acknowledgement, and turn back to your keyboard. Wait for them to stop clapping. Start the next movement.

Isn't hindsight wonderful?