Week 1 of school has been quite a trip but I’m loving every minute of it so far, and in fact after spending a few minutes on the phone this week with my successor at work I am more convinced than ever that I waited too long to leave my old job. And as well the course itself has met my expectations. Certainly I have found the experience of being on a university campus at my age to be quite interesting to say the least, but there are so many things that strike me that are not just due to me being 20 years older than just about everyone else on the campus. Nearly everyone on campus is white or east Asian, especially in the music school where there seem to be a lot of Chinese students. This ‘whiteness’ is a far cry from Mississauga to be sure. Having lived in or around Toronto for such a long time time I actually am starting to think that all white people look the same, especially the little boppers at university. The campus itself is beautiful but it does suffer from that affliction that London also has of being a little too pleased with itself. The other thing is how all the young ones smile at me. No doubt they think I am an instructor and might be important, not unlike getting smiles from all the hotties at my old job.
The class is really cool - it’s really a big beautiful workshop full of old and new pianos, tools of all varieties and lots of other things I love. A couple of key things are standing out for me so far, and when I put these into the context of my corporate life for the past year the contrast is startling. The instructor is Anne Fleming Read; she has a handshake that will rattle your bones and is all of five foot three. Her words in the first lesson were that studying books and taking notes and the like were not important now - we are to learn how to ‘feel’. I put away my notebook and have not opened it since. Don Stephenson is there to teach us a lot about tuning and regulation of the pianos and he’s quite a character and peppers many of his lessons with really entertaining stories. Now, when you tune a piano what you are trying to do is listens for beats or waves that occur when strings are not in tune. Any guitarist will understand this. As Don was taking through one of his lectures, he was demonstrating some techniques to us but more of a way of thinking about the work that would help us ‘become the wave’.
I can see now that I will soon hate the hard metal barstool that will be my only seat for the next 8 months. It has been quite demanding physically so far, partly just from being my feet almost all day but also due to the physical nature of the work. Pianos are really beasts and they must be handled accordingly. Speaking of handling, day 3 was quite interesting as 7 new pianos arrived to be un-crated and taken by dolly up to the third floor practice rooms. A couple of the boys got a bit careless and a brand new $8000 Kawai upright piano crashed to the floor in the lobby of the music school. You never saw so many faces go white at one time. But to their enormous credit the instructors didn’t bat an eyelash and basically said the good news was that now we got a great opportunity to see how to fix a piano that fell on its face.
Classmates seem pretty good so far with a broad range of personalities and age groups as well as diverse nationalities - 1 German, 4 Americans, 9 Canadians. 11 male, 3 female. Some of these guys have great stories of their own that I will record at a later time.
Right now it’s off to apply some A535 to the aching shoulders and get some sleep!
