Playing the Flute

While I now often express myself musically through singing, that was not always the case. I didn’t learn to sing in parts until I was in college, but my flute playing goes back much further.

I am quite happy to admit that I am not very artistic. As I frequently say to others when I see those who are, “They have more ability in their little finger than I have in my whole body.” But for my appreciation of the artistic side of things, I have to include Mr. Pontecorvo in my list of favorite teachers.

When I started school, it was in first grade at Alcott School. There were no nursery/preschools those days and the only kindergarten was a very small private one at the far end of town. Since the schools were still quite small and there was not yet a high school in town, there was also very limited art/music available. And instrumental music was non-existent.

In 1958, with the new high school being built, the school board hired an instrumental music teacher, Mr. Pontecorvo. He divided his time among the various elementary schools. Because no one owned instruments, they had a plan of “rent to buy” where the family could make payments of so much a month and at the end of the plan they would own the instrument.

Because my mother knew how to play the piano and wanted her children to have some exposure to music, my sister and I had been taking piano lessons from my aunt. But my Aunt Dot was a hard taskmaster and I was not enjoying it at all. I was only at the point of picking out the melody one note at a time with my right hand and trying to play a chord with my left one. This instrumental plan from the school was a way for me to “escape” my aunt and I jumped at it. I chose to play the flute – perhaps because most of the boys went in for things like trumpets and drums and I wanted something different. The other flute player that first year was my classmate, Jeanne Wilson.

Lessons were held weekly by instrument, i.e. all the flutes together, in the only available space in the school – the boiler room. It sometimes got pretty toasty during the winter months. That first year there was only Jeanne and I, then the following year we were joined by Bev Williams who was a year younger than Jeanne and I. We practiced in that boiler room for three years until Jeanne and I moved to the high school in the fall of 1961.

(An interesting historical note about this. Because the instruments that Jeanne and I ordered were obtained together by Mr. Pontecorvo, we had identical flutes with consecutive serial numbers. My mother had saved the receipt for my flute. More than a half-century later I came into possession of the receipt and the warranty when my mother passed away and I discovered that the flute – that I still had – did not match the serial number on the warranty – it was off by one. At some time during the several years that Jeanne and I were both playing the flute and we had them next to each other, we had inadvertently gotten them switched. So, for all those years I was playing her flute and she was playing mine!)

In high school the weekly school lessons were replaced with the opportunity to join the high school band. For the first few years we had no uniforms and just appeared in dress pants/skirts, white shirts, and ties. Later the school got uniforms - gray flannel trousers (for the boys, the girls had gray flannel skirts), white shirts with a skinny black tie and a tie-pin, and scarlet blazers – the school colors were scarlet and gray). We were primarily a concert band as the school was not large enough to have a football team, but we did have a small group that played as a pep band for basketball games, and we also marched in the town’s annual Memorial Day parade.

The band met twice a week during the “activity period” – the last period of the day on Tuesday and Friday. And as it was also for the high school which served the entire town (Alcott only served the kids in the northern tier of town), there were other flute players – some of whom only played for a few years, others who were there every year. The ones I can recall, besides myself, Jeanne, and Bev (a year behind us), were Mike Truziewicz (a year older than myself, Colleen Malloy (a classmate whom I am still in touch with), and Elise Marcil.

Here is a picture from a Memorial Day parade in eighth grade – from left to right are Jeanne, Colleen, Mike, and myself. Elise had leg problems and was not able to march.

 

The friendships made in band made us pretty close. Here is a picture of myself with Colleen, Elise, and Jeanne at our 50^th high school reunion!

 

My senior year I decided to expand a little bit and purchased a piccolo at a music store in New Haven. Our band teacher then featured me in the spring concert by having us play John Philip Sousa’s Stars and Stripes Forever. It was somewhat scary having to stand up by myself and play it from memory with the eyes of the entire audience upon me!

During my high school years, I also private flute lessons for a while. One year I had a music teacher in Waterbury who lived off Long Hill Road. (An interesting event from that year – my mother was driving me to my lesson after school in our 1957 Ford Fairlane station wagon. At the light at Lakewood Rd, the car in front of us stopped quickly and my mother didn’t react in time and rear-ended him. The hood on that car was hinged in the front, so the impact caused the hood to fly open toward the front and blocked our view. This was in the days when the Pine Drive-in was still in operation and there were not many other businesses in the area, so I had to walk/run down the road to the gas station across from the drive-in (it was an ESSO gas station in the years before they became Exxon) and call my dad at work to come out and help. Needless to say, I didn’t make my lesson that day!)

Later on, I was going to a music teacher who lived in Cheshire off of Mountain Road. (Another car-related story – that was the year I was learning how to drive. I had passed my driving test at the high school, but in a car with an automatic transmission. My mother insisted that I had to learn how to drive a stick shift before she would let me get my license. Our car by then was a VW Beetle. My driving lesson each week was driving to/from my flute lesson. The intersection of Mountain Road with the Waterbury-Cheshire Road was the bane of my existence. You had to stop on a slight incline as you waited for traffic to clear and then pull out. And my mother’s requirement was that I be able to stop on that incline, then manage the gas, brake, and clutch with enough skill that I didn’t roll backwards while doing so. It took many weeks to meet her approval!)

As an undergraduate in college at Michigan State University, I wanted to continue my musical exploits. MSU had a well-known marching band, but I was not eligible to play in it as membership was limited to brass and drums (I was a member of the marching band for two years – but one year in their flag unit and one as an assistant manager). So instead I joined the “activity band”. We met three times a week in the Music Building at 8AM. Grading was based on attendance – and the door was locked exactly at 8AM so if you were late your grades suffered. I did make friends with a pretty flute player sitting next to me and we actually dated a couple of times.

One summer I also was invited by a friend from our former high school band to join the pit band for the Waterbury Parks Department musical which they put on each year. The music that we used had been rented from a Broadway show so we couldn’t even put pencil markings in it. And my book was for “first wind”, which meant that some songs were written for flute, some for clarinet and some for alto saxophone. While that may have been fine for the professionals playing on Broadway, it was beyond my expertise as I had no training in other instruments, nor did I own any others. So, because the flute is a C instrument, the clarinet is a B-flat instrument, and the alto sex is an E-flat instrument, that meant playing the flute parts as written, transposing on the fly a full-step in one direction for any clarinet parts and transposing on the fly a step-and-a-half in the other direction for any saxophone parts. It was a real test of my musical abilities to do so, especially when the part went from clarinet to saxophone from one page to the next and you couldn’t even pencil in the key that you were supposed to be playing in!

After college, my playing was somewhat sporadic. I briefly played in a small group at our church. But in my 30s, all that came to an end. I had always had a small jaw and a receding chin. But it, along with the lack of access to fluoride treatments when growing up, meant that I had dental problems. One of the eventual consequences required a jaw operation to cut off my lower jaw, move it forward to correct my bite, and screw it back together. A side effect was that one of the nerves that is connected to my lower lip on one side was stretched and I lost the feeling in part of my lower lip. This meant that I no longer had the necessary embouchure for flute playing and so I had to stop permanently.

By then, I had come to enjoy singing (bass) and still had a musical outlet. But I’m grateful for all the years that I was able to play and enjoy the flute. That introduction to music led to a life-long love of music. Thanks to Mr. Pontecorvo for bringing the instrumental program to the Wolcott school system!