Chapter Forty

Here’s the next Chapter of Lost and Found.

This Chapter gets into some of my early learning about music theory, so I hope you won’t be bored. Perhaps next week I’ll try an experiment with this novel which you can’t do in a “regular book”. We’ll see, I have to do some testing to see how my idea might work.

Meanwhile, I don’t have much of anything to report about life in general — other than the devil called procrastination has entered again as it pertains to doing the writing for this book. I have to get a handle on it — and soon!!

Be well — be in peace,

Ron Rink
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There were a couple of little Bach pieces in the 52 Studies book I had fun learning, but the Prelude and Fugue were an entirely different world for me.

I was enthralled with this music. The Prelude was beautiful. I learned later that Gounod used this Prelude when he wrote the famous Ave Maria. The Fugue was a lot harder to learn, but it was also beautiful.

Right after I got the music and started learning the notes, I went over to Charlie Saunder’s house to see what he was learning. Miss Thomas had asked him to play a Mozart piece, but his audition would not be on the same day as mine. Charlie’s mother, who was an excellent pianist herself, although she readily admitted she didn’t have the patience to be a teacher, took the time to show me how to find the subject in the Fugue.

“Roland, have you ever seen music for a choir at church, where the voices are written on separate lines, the soprano line, the alto line, the tenor and the bass?” she asked.

Although I had only seen choir music when I had tried to play some of it, I said, “Yes, the soprano is on top and it’s usually the melody, right?”

“That’s right. The only difference is with piano fugues, although they also have the different voices, the melody, or the subject, moves around the voices. It doesn’t stay in just the soprano. The trick in playing a fugue is the pianist has to use his fingers to bring out the subject, no matter what voice has it.”

Mrs. Saunders sat down at her piano and played the subject of the fugue I was learning.

“You have to bring the subject out as the predominant part regardless of which voice it’s in,” she explained. “The subject might be in the upper notes of the right hand, in the lower notes of the same hand, or in the upper or lower notes of the left hand. The tricky part is all your fingers are going to be playing other notes at the same time as the subject. You have to make sure the listener can hear the subject over the other notes. This means the fingers that are playing the subject have to be working harder than the fingers playing the other notes. Do you understand?”

She played the first part of the fugue and explained what was happening as she played. Even though there were a lot of notes being played at once, I could hear the subject moving around to the different voices.

When I got home and started to practice the fugue, I learned right away how challenging it would be. After a couple of hours I was starting to get the hang of it. It was fun and exciting to be playing more difficult music.

The day of the audition with Miss Thomas finally arrived. Although I had enjoyed learning the Bach pieces, the idea of having a teacher again was still bothering me a great deal. I liked learning music on my own and loved the sense of freedom which came with not having to worry about a teacher’s approval.

My mother made me wear my Sunday suit to the audition. I hated wearing it. I looked like Little Lord Fauntleroy in it. I would much rather be wearing peg pants, loose shirts and the State Fair Dukes black jacket.

About a week after I had the two fights and was a member of the Dukes, Billy took me downtown and showed me how to panhandle. We went downtown on three different afternoons. We both wore our worst looking overalls, torn old shirts, made sure we had dirty hands and faces, then walked along Woodward Avenue where the big stores were located. We walked back and forth in front of the J. L. Hudson Company’s front entrances and asked people going in and out of the store if they could loan us ten cents for some food.

Over the course of the three days, I managed to accumulate almost twelve dollars in nickels, dimes and quarters. I even got a couple of people to give me dollar bills. We took the money, went to another store in the area, and bought my first pair of peg pants, a green shirt, a black jacket and a pair of square-toed shoes—the stompers. I was a couple of dollars short, but Billy loaned me the money. The mother of one of the Duchesses would sew on the letters, “S. F. D.” and the emblem of the skull and crossbones.

I didn’t dare keep those clothes at home, so I stashed them at Freddie Shaw’s house. His parents didn’t seem to have a problem with his being in the gang. Every morning on my way to school I would stop at Freddie’s house and change into my gang clothes.
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http://www.buddhistbelief.com
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