 The Clarinet BBoard
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Author: DavidBlumberg
Date: 2005-08-08 01:45
Poor guy can't even perform now in his paid trip to Italy!! The Director of the former FAME festival I taught at was just like her. In the last year of it they didn't pay their faculty and ended up in court too.
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Author: bflatclarinetist
Date: 2005-08-08 01:47
Eeek, that woman's crazy. What if yours accosted you and grabbed your barrel and pushed up into your mouth?
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Author: DavidBlumberg
Date: 2005-08-08 02:09
Or ripped it out of your mouth and tried to run away with it.....
It's about equal.
But the part where they won't let him perform in Italy now with the Org is just unbelievable.
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Author: Lelia Loban ★2017
Date: 2005-08-08 12:05
I've never heard of an incident quite as bizarre as this one, but the whole thing is less unbelievable to me (as a former student pianist) than it must be to the clarinet community. There are too many piano students. As of the late 1960s, when I quit, the rivalry between the teachers made the competitions absoutely brutal, even (or maybe especially) at the small town local levels. Cheating on entry trapes was nearly universal (teachers made tapes of their own playing to submit in their students' names--fellow students laughed in my face when I said indignantly and naively that I planned to record my own playing) and preferential treatment by judges was routine as well. When I went to the finals of the International Clarinet Association's high school competition at ClarinetFest 2004, the humane treatment of the contestants impressed me a great deal, because I'd never seen anything quite like that at a piano brawl, back in the day.
My first reaction on reading this article was, "Well, at least the rotten old witch didn't *slam* the lid on the kid's fingers--otherwise he wouldn't have been playing Chopin with them...." I used to have (still occasionally have) a recurring nightmare of "the beast with 88 teeth" slamming its own lid on my fingers and behaving like "The Monster Book of Monsters" in "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban," snap snap snap snap snap, but fortunately I never did run up against a teacher like Lana Ivanov. Good grief. I nominate her for the 2005 Professor Umbridge Award!
Lelia
http://www.scoreexchange.com/profiles/Lelia_Loban
To hear the audio, click on the "Scorch Plug-In" box above the score.
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Author: Ralph G
Date: 2005-08-08 13:06
Since David brought up thesmokinggun.com, be sure to check out their archive of backstage riders for 200 (and growing) performers. Want to know how much beer and aromatherapy candles the Red Hot Chili Peppers require promoters to have waiting for them in their dressing room?
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/backstagetour/index.html
Fun reading.
--Ralph
/sorry for the threadjack
________________
Artistic talent is a gift from God and whoever discovers it in himself has a certain obligation: to know that he cannot waste this talent, but must develop it.
- Pope John Paul II
Post Edited (2005-08-08 13:19)
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Author: elmo lewis
Date: 2005-08-08 20:57
While giving violin lessons to her daughter, a colleague of mine broke two bows hitting the poor girl on the head. She decided not to become a musician.
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Author: Lelia Loban ★2017
Date: 2005-08-09 12:25
As a kid, my husband studied violin with Mischa Mischakoff, who (like Yelena Ivanova) was Russian. He was Toscanini's concertmaster for 17 years--maybe that made him particularly ferocious. He used to whap my husband with a fly swatter, th ough not hard enough to do damage. He certainly wouldn't have whapped anybody with his valuable bow. Kevin's parents, who are also Russian, not only tolerated but encouraged this treatment. They were thrilled when Mischakoff sent home a note from the summer music camp at Chatauqua: "Thank you for the salami. Some day I may teach your stupid son to play the violin." They've still got the note. I'm surprised they didn't frame it. Kevin still speaks of Mischakoff with love and awe.
One must understand that in Slavic families (my mother is mostly Czech), there's a tradition that over-praising ruins a child, and that tradition comes out as a superstition (not that anybody really believes in it, you understand) that if demons hear a child praised, they'll swoop in and kill the baby for spite, or swap it for a changeling so they can ruin it and educate it into a murderous monster. I've heard elderly grannies and aunties in my own family gaze down fondly at a newborn infant and say things like, "Oh, what a pity it's so ugly. A real little gargoyle! That hideous face, ooh, it would make the Devil vomit! Lucky the poor thing looks so feeble it'll probably only live a few hours." Everybody knew what they really meant, of course. As for hitting a music student--if Mischakoff had truly beaten Kevin, hurt him in any way, there would have been immediate riot and disorder from his parents. Whacking him with the fly swatter and calling him stupid was a sign of affection. It was Mischakoff's way of saying he thought Kevin was teachable and worth some trouble.
OTOH, those incidents all happened decades ago, some of them half a century ago. It sounds as if that Ivanova-Umbridge woman must have lived in the USA and in the non-Slavic community long enough to know that shutting the piano lid on a student's fingers, let alone doing it in public in the middle of a competition, is absolutely unacceptable. Doing it to somebody else's student and not to her own--out of the question, even half a century ago. She must be out of her mind.
Lelia
http://www.scoreexchange.com/profiles/Lelia_Loban
To hear the audio, click on the "Scorch Plug-In" box above the score.
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Author: DavidBlumberg
Date: 2005-08-09 12:38
o my god Leila - didn't know that!
Gigliotti's (2nd) wife as a child would get kicked by her teacher when she would make a mistake. She grew up in China and it was a common practice apparently.
But it had a profound effect on her love for music and she almost gave it up completely.
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Author: Tom A
Date: 2005-08-10 01:16
Thank you, Lelia. This is off-topic, but I believe Jewish families (used to?) write a name on a baby's cradle that was not the real name, in order to fool the angel of death if he came for the child in the night. Same aim, different method.
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