Sunday, June 22, 2003

Today, I received in the mail a rather thick manila envelope from my aunt. I would have thought it was from my mother because of the handwriting, but I guess it makes sense that her handwriting is exactly like my mom's because they took the same Calvert School correspondence/home school lessons when they were children, and thus had Calvert script beat into them. Anyway, in the envelope was a photocopy of this totally fascinating piano book, A Simplified Method of Sacred Piano Playing, Evangelistic Style. Who knew there was an Evangelistic Style of playing the piano? No note or anything else from my aunt, just this copy of Leenetta Scott's piano book, copyright 1945. I'm kind of thinking this might be the book my mom and aunt had to use for piano lessons when they were kids, but I can't get through on the phone to ask my mom.

Even setting the evangelist hymn part of it aside, this is the strangest book I've ever seen. It makes no sense whatsoever. I play the piano passably well, and I can't figure out what the heck the author is taking about. This is some whacked out teaching method, that's for sure. I've been sitting here studying the introduction, and I do understand how her notation works now, but geez, wouldn't it have been easier to buy some staff paper and just teach the kids to read standard notation?

All I know is that I sure wouldn't want to play this during church.

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