 The Clarinet BBoard
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Author: mrn
Date: 2010-11-26 16:50
Just curious to see if anyone on here can fill in any details to my story...
My elementary school Spanish teacher was from Barcelona. One day when I was in the 4th grade, I brought my clarinet in to show the class. Being 9 years old and naturally proud of my new instrument, I had to show my Spanish teacher as well. She seemed genuinely pleased to see that I had taken up the clarinet, and she told me that her father had been a clarinetist.
Now she was not one to talk at great length about her life or about her family, but what she did mention on another occasion was that her husband worked at NASA studying moon rocks. (I grew up in Houston.) I didn't know his first name, just their surname.
She passed away in 1990 from cancer.
Well, a couple decades go by and I'm looking for a technical paper on the NASA website and decide, on a whim, to see if there are any papers by my Spanish teacher's husband on the site. Turns out there were some by him, and his first name was Joan....Joan Oró. And, after looking a little further, I discovered he wasn't just any old scientist, either, but one of the most important scientists of his era working in the area of the origin of life on Earth. (See the Wikipedia article on him, for instance.) The Spanish government even put his picture on a postage stamp. He passed away about 6 years ago.
Anyway, I started perusing a biography of him I downloaded from the Internet (it's all in Catalan, so understanding it requires a combination of Google Translate and educated guessing), and during one of the early chapters it talks about his meeting and marrying my future Spanish teacher, Francesca Forteza. It also mentions her father, Jaume Forteza i Aguiló, who it says came from Mallorca. It doesn't mention anything about his playing the clarinet, however.
The present 2nd clarinet player in the NY Philharmonic, Pascual Martinez Forteza, also hails from Mallorca and has the surname Forteza as well (from his mother, apparently, as the Spanish custom is to take surnames from both parents, with the father's name first). Also, he studied clarinet with his father, Pascual Martinez, so it seems that clarinet playing runs in the family.
So that got me to wondering if maybe somebody on here might know a little about Jaume Forteza, if he played with an orchestra, taught at a conservatory, etc. Also I was curious if Pascual Martinez Forteza might be related to Francesca Forteza, my Spanish teacher. Does anybody know? Just curious....
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