Roger's Reflections
Musical Talent—Or Lack of It
Mother was a good piano player and both Mother and Dad had fine singing voices. They were often asked to sing a hymn as a duet at funerals at our church and they sometimes sang a love song duet at church weddings. However, their “musical genes” were not very evenly divided among their children. John and Mary Grace inherited lots of musical talent. Donald, Paul and I must have been off somewhere else when musical aptitude was being handed out.
When I was twelve or so Paul and I took piano lessons from Rosemary Stewart for two summers—at a cost of fifty cents a week. But somehow these lessons just didn’t “take” very well. Neither of us liked practicing the “dumb drills”. Mother made a weekly schedule and we seriously tried to keep up. But there were so many other things that we liked so much better that it was really hard to put in the allotted hours for practice.
In the second summer Rosemary assigned Paul and me a snappy little duet that we really liked called Johnny Jump-up. I pounded out simple base chords and Paul hammered out a simple melody. We loved it and played it over and over--all sixteen bars of it. We got so good at it that we could almost play it in our sleep. This was the absolute pinnacle of our musical careers; for both of us it was downhill all the way from that rousing Johnny Jump-up duet.
Despite my lack of musical ability I always liked to “play around” on the piano and could pick out the melody of most simple tunes by ear. One summer I put in hours practicing on my own and finally learned to play all parts to the hymn What a Friend without making any mistakes. But when I tried to show off my new accomplishment to Aunt Mary, she gently informed me that my sense of timing left a lot to be desired.
Since I found it so difficult to play three or four notes at a time on the piano, I figured it would be a lot simpler to just play one note at a time on a band instrument and took up the clarinet when I got to high school. However, this didn’t work out well either. I was slow at reading music and had trouble keeping up with the band. Our band leader, Mr. Bonvalet, saw that I wasn’t making it on the clarinet and he needed a tuba player, so he put me on the tuba for a few weeks--but (surprise, surprise!) that didn’t work, so I gave up on band.
While I was in the “clarinet stage” I got my one and only chance to be an instrumental soloist! In high school we rehearsed a Christmas pageant that was presented at the Christian Church in Bethany. I was cast as a shepherd “piper” with a short solo backstage and another short solo as we shepherds came onstage. On the backstage part I somehow got started off with the wrong note, got flustered and just tried to improvise as best I could--which was pretty far out, at least for a shepherd. Then we three shepherds marched onstage, with me carrying the clarinet. But the piano accompanist was so upset with my behind-the-scenes improvising that she never gave me the cue for my onstage solo. And my family was so tickled by my performance that it was reported that their pew shook a little as they tried to hide their laughter. I never played the clarinet much after that episode.
Mary Grace did much, much better with piano lessons than Paul and I ever did. I still have a mimeographed program from a piano recital held in
August, 1940, where Mary Grace did a fine job playing Song of Mexico. But the highlight of that evening for me was one of the funniest musical moments I ever heard. Another young girl, Ethel McWaite, played Nola and did quite well except that she became so tense that she couldn’t remember how to get into the ending--so she just kept repeating the chorus, going ‘round, and ‘round, and ‘round, for what seemed like ten minutes. She finally got into the ending and everyone cheered the finale.