Stumbling on melons

First a little background. When I learnt piano as a boy, I did a piano exam each year. This was common and indeed such exams still occur.

Historically, it’s very much a British empire kind of thing, rather on the model of the University of London as an examining body. A number of these bodies are based in London, and there has long been a local outfit, the AMEB (Australian Music Examination Board) which was originally a kind of condominium of the various state conservatoriums and music faculties.

Looking back, it was a funny little world. But with these exams you knew where you stood. I remember looking up in awe at T, the elder sister of a friend of my elder sister, probably aged about eleven or twelve. She was doing fourth grade. Only recently my sister told be that T hated piano lessons and exams and gave them up as soon as she could.

The justifications for exams are many, and not uncontroversial. Some are that this way learners can have a goal to meet, which includes getting a group of pieces up to a reasonable and simultaneous level of finish. They get to play for someone other than their teacher – which is an indirect check on the teacher. The syllabus provides guidance on pieces in a graded sequence and there is a kind of canon-formation project involved. Parents often seem to like exam results as a validation of what they have been paying for.

After a number of grades the whole edifice culminates in a series of diplomas.

In truth, these days, with the proliferation if not over-proliferation and prolongation of tertiary level music study, these diplomas are pretty well meaningless save as badges of honour for talented high school students (or even younger wunderkinder). When standards were lower and playing the piano still had a vestigial life as a (feminine) accomplishment, they probably served as some kind of a distinction/accreditation for suburban and rural piano teachers, though the AMEB always disclaimed that the exams were a test of any teaching ability. (Later it introduced some teaching diplomas but maybe these have fallen away.)

My friend ST, opera- and music-lover, has sent me extracts from the AMEB 1980 and 1985 piano syllabuses for eighth grade and the associate diploma. Below are my rather blurry pictures of the 1980 pages with his annotations, in red.

ST , persisting with or returning to the piano as a kind of unfinished business after he left school and into his twenties, did his 8th grade exam at this time and also tackled pieces for the Associate diploma. I think the latter eventually proved a bridge too far. He explains his annotations as follows:

Crossed items are composers dropped. Some other reductions, & the very few composer additions are marginally noted,

Particularly irksome were are the dropping of whole sets (exclamation marks) like the “Sarcasms” (all five) & the opus 111 Fantasies (all three).

In summary, 15 8th g. composers & 24 Assoc composers dropped with respectively 4 additions & 5 additions. Why so? (Debussy & Ravel go from list C to list D).

Why indeed? I myself played a Prokofiev Sarcasm for my AMusA exam in 1976, so I feel a little wrench – slighted, even, by its banishment from the list.

ST adds:

These changes, notated herewith, made me angry in the early to mid 80s. That emotion was never resolved but by sharing it now, that resolution is thereby achieved.

All good, then.

I picked this up on Christmas Eve. It was the cheapest available.

Our pudding was from Aldi (albeit, just a bit pathetically, their aspirational “curated” range). Why splash out on any of that Napoleon stuff just to make brandy butter/hard sauce and fuel the ritual flambé?

Not that (as you can infer from the level in the bottle) some of it did not also get drunk. My standards are low.

Maybe I’m the last person to notice this, but the piss-take brand name also took my fancy.

This is a kind of double sequel post.

The above picture is from my 2017 post about an unexpected reunion between two of my late father’s paternal cousins. All six cousins (including my father and his brother) are pictured above circa 1932-33.

Yesterday I received a call from Jx, daughter of R (the girl at the front in the photo) to let me know that R died on Saturday.  She also told me that she had just discovered that the other girl in that photo, M, died a few months ago.  They were 93 and 94 respectively. R’s brother, the last surviving of the boys in the photo (the second from the far end), died three years ago aged 92.

I last spoke to R in August and to M (both living in Perth) in July.  Last week I was unable to get though to M when I tried her direct number at the aged care facility – an ominous sign. R’s birthday is in December and I had thought I might follow that up with her when I called her. M never married or had children and her “nok” at the aged care facility were probably her brother’s step-children. I guess they weren’t greatly focussed on M’s blood relatives. Jx said that R had not been told anything.

In a post last December I wrote about two journeys – the proposed trip by YYX, partner of my sister, YY, from London to Lancashire in the then-proposed Christmas “window” to see his parents and D’s longed-for trip to Shanghai to see his mother.

In the end the Christmas “window” was cancelled.

D’s trip never happened.  His mother died mid-October, aged 91.  For hours every day for more than a year leading up to that, D was at her bedside via Wechat facetime-equivalent.  As her condition deteriorated this became more and more fraught and hung heavily over our lockdown life. 

D was eventually able to get permission to leave Australia (just before this restriction was lifted) but a visa to enter China only came through on the day of or the day after his mother’s death. He participated in the funeral via a phone held up by one of his nieces. 

There is one obsequy to come on the winter solstice. For that D would have had to have flown out by the last week of November in order to serve the requisite quarantine/isolation. In the end it was too hard and prohibitively expensive even if he could get one of the very limited tickets.

In mid-November, YYX’s father, J, went into hospital for a major heart operation.  YYX drove up to Lancashire to take J into the hospital and then drive his mother (who no longer drives) every day to visit him.  

Last Friday night YY called.  J had been discharged a couple of days before after 3 weeks in hospital, but over his first day home he deteriorated rapidly.  YYX called an ambulance at 2.30 am which didn’t arrive until about 6 am.  J was taken first to the hospital where the ambulance came from, and then to the more distant hospital where he had previously been.  Along the way, he had a number of heart attacks and was eventually in an induced coma with multiple organ failure.  It was unlikely he would regain brain function. 

When YY rang me (actually she’d spoken to D the night before when I had been out), YYX, his mother and brother were on their way to the hospital. The medical people had prepared them to take the decision to turn the life support off.  As YY was speaking to me, there was a call on her other phone.  “I’d better take that,” said YY.  Next morning I saw an email, sent just after.  That was YYX.  There had been no need to take any decision. J had just died, all by himself.  It was his 81^st birthday.

There’s a lot of it about.