Reminiscences

About Le Pont Mirabeau

You might notice in the first one that the piano part is periodically unplayable. The answer is to get your page-turner to ping the top notes, as was (almost) beautifully executed by James Weeks’s page turner at the first performance (was it the first?).

Ah yes, it was during those rehearsals that R dropped his characteristically tiny pencil into the piano, and I bravely fished it out, almost causing long-term injury to my hand. And it was after this event that I invented the fishing-pencil-out-of-piano-innards device, from a clothes hanger and one of those little squongley things for attaching pencils to music stands.

Some advice: don’t put your pencil on the music stand of a grand piano. Don’t. Not ever. Not even if you think you’ll never knock the pencil in. Because one day, even if you don’t knock the pencil in, someone else will, and you won’t have a coat-hanger and a squongle handy.

E

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Last updated 2004/01/01