The following program notes are from an unidentified piano recital.
Tonight's page turner, Ruth Spelke, studied under Ivan Schmertnick at the Boris Nitsky School of Page Turning in Philadelphia. She has been turning pages here and abroad for many years for some of the world's leading pianists.
In 1988, Ms. Spelke won the Wilson Page Turning Scholarship, which sent her to Israel to study page turning from left to right. She is winner of the 1984 Rimsky Korsakov Flight of the Bumblebee Prestissimo Medal, having turned 47 pages in an unprecedented 32 seconds. She was also a 1983 silver medalist at the Klutz Musical Page Pickup Competition: contestants retrieve and rearrange a musical score dropped from a Yamaha. Ms. Spelke excelled in "grace, swiftness, and especially poise."
For techniques, Ms. Spelke performs both the finger-licking and the bent-page corner methods. She works from a standard left bench position, and is the originator of the dipped-elbow page snatch, a style used to avoid obscuring the pianist's view of the music. She is page turner in residence in Fairfield Iowa, where she occupies the coveted Alfred Hitchcock Chair at the Fairfield Page Turning Institute.
Ms. Spelke is married, and has a nice house on a lake.
"I always make sure that the lid over the keyboard is open before I start to play." -Artur Schnabel, Australian pianist, asked the secret of piano playing.
Mrs. Smith needed to have her piano tuned so she asked a friend for a recommendation. She then made an appointment with the piano tuner, Mr. Oppernockity. He arrived 2 days later,tuned the piano satisfactorily, and left. Several days later Mrs. Smith noticed that the piano was terribly out of tune again. She called the tuner to complain about the tuning and to ask for a return visit to solve the problem. However, the tuner replied, "I'm sorry ma'am, but Oppernockity only tunes once!"
A young boy went to his father and said, "Father, when I grow up, I want to be a professional piano player." His father replied, "Son, you can't have it both ways."
For you jazz lovers:
It's New Years eve and a bandleader's pianist is taken ill and he's got to find someome fast. As he goes through the Union book, he slowly realizes that everyone either has a gig that night or is out of town for the holidays! He's starting to sweat bullets as he comes to
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