inkscar's bits & pieces

A few days ago I learned that my favorite teacher, my music teacher in fourth grade, has passed away about two years ago. I have been thinking about him a number of times in the past years but didn’t think he would be alive. He was a heavy smoker. A thin, stern man with glasses, that most kids feared. I wasn’t among them. When I first landed in that school, I was coming from the big city where music class was roughly as important as arts or sports, which was close to none. All of a sudden I saw kids entering the music class room with that particular sense of anxiety that one has before going to a test, and this looked unusual. So unusual to me that the first moment I saw my new music teacher I was the only kid sitting and trying to play a tune at his open piano, while everybody has promptly ran to their places awaiting the imminent punishment. I was caught but saw it senseless to run. Only waited. He came up and asked me what was I playing and I told him it was a small 14 century French canon I taught myself in my childhood. So, since it was a canon, he suggested we play it on four hands, and sat and played with me.

His were not easy classes. We were tested regularily on both notation and recognising works and authors often in lists of 30 or 40, and I was promptly enlisted in the choir and asked to come several times a week on rehearsal. This man took his work serious and it was as serious as I took music.

Tonight I frantically tried to find something about him online and there is none (as expected), but at least I heard about him from someone who knew him and it was reassuring in a way. Fortunately someone other than me has not forgotten him.