• 1853 ~ Percy Goetschius, American music teacher and critic
• 1919 ~ Kitty Wells (Muriel Ellen Deason),‘The Queen of Country Music’, Country Music Hall of Fame, married to Johnny Wright
• 1922 ~ Regina Resnik, American mezzo-soprano
• 1922 ~ The New Orleans Rhythm Kings recorded Tiger Rag, one of the most familiar ragtime jazz tunes ever. It was released on the General record label.
• 1935 ~ John Phillips, Singer with The Mamas & The Papas, actress MacKenzie Phillips’ father
• 1941 ~ John McNally, Singer, guitarist with The Searchers
• 1945 ~ Van Morrison, Irish blues-rock singer, songwriter and instrumentalist
• 1968 ~ The Beatles recorded their first songs for their own Apple label. The initial session included the big hits Revolution and Hey Jude.
• 1968 ~ The stars came out for charity as John and Yoko Lennon hosted the One on One concert in New York’s Madison Square Garden. Among the music greats appearing were Stevie Wonder and Roberta Flack. Over $250,000 was raised to aid mentally retarded children.
• 1984 ~ Beatles fans paid $271,180 dollars for memorabilia at an auction in London, England. An unpublished manuscript by John Lennon brought the largest amount – $23,056. A snare drum belonging to Ringo Starr brought $1,440.
The O’Connor Music Studio features fully functional parent/student portals. These are a great way to share information with you, save time, and add value to your lessons.
The student portal provides you with:
Student’s calendar with upcoming lessons and events
Student’s repertoire
Student’s practice log
Family’s account and invoice information (only visible to parents/adult students)
Access to your download library and a list of borrowed items
View student’s attendance
Track student’s practice time and leave notes or questions from the practice session
Add and track their repertoires
View their email history
View Mrs. O’Connor’s contact information
Keep up-to-date with studio news
Students can also join and cancel lessons based on the OCMS studio cancellation policy.
Using the student portal is completely optional, but highly recommended.
How do I join the Student Portal? To join the student portal your teacher must send you your login information. Once received you will be able to access the student portal and all of its features.
How do I cancel a Lesson? To cancel a scheduled lesson simply click on the lesson or event in your calendar and click “Cancel Attendance”. You can optionally leave your teacher a note about why you are canceling in the provided “Note to Teacher” dialogue box.
How do I register for an Open Lesson Slot? To register for an Open Lesson Slot click on the event or lesson on the calendar as select “Register”. A dialogue box will appear asking you if you “are you sure you want to register for this Open Slot?” Click “Yes”. If the lesson or event you are trying to register for is a recurring event, choose the dates you would like to attend.
Check your email for information about logging in!
• 1942 ~ Sterling Morrison, Bass, guitar, singer with The Velvet Underground
• 1943 ~ Paul Whiteman Presents, a summertime radio replacement show, was heard for the last time. The hostess for the show was Dinah Shore. Whiteman’s 35-piece orchestra serenaded listeners on the NBC radio network. Whiteman’s well~known theme song was Rhapsody in Blue, composed by George Gershwin.
• 1946 ~ Ella Fitzgerald and The Delta Rhythm Boys recorded It’s a Pity to Say Goodnight on Decca Records. The song turned out to be one of Lady Ella’s most popular.
• 1964 ~ Roy Orbison’sOh, Pretty Woman was released. It hit number one (for 3 weeks) on September 26th and became the biggest of his career. The title was inspired by Orbison’s wife Claudette interrupting a conversation to announce she was going out; when Orbison asked if she was okay for cash, his co-writer Bill Dees interjected “A pretty woman never needs any money.” Oh, Pretty Woman was Orbison’s second #1 hit. The other was Running Scared on 6/05/61.
• 1966 ~ The Beatles performed at Candlestick Park in San Francisco, CA. It was the group’s last live appearance before they disbanded in 1970.
• 1986 ~ The former American Bandstand studio, at the original home of WFIL-TV in Philadelphia, PA, was placed on the National Register of Historic Places. The studio is located at 4548 Market Street. We expect that any day now, Bandstand host Dick Clark will also be placed on the National Register.
Wanted: Temporary space for the world’s largest piano. Must have flat access, as requires forklift.
A piano handcrafted in a garage near Timaru, weighing in at 1.4 tonnes and with a length of 5.7 metres, is rolling through Wellington next month and its maker is hunting for a place to show it off.
It took Adrian Mann, 25, four years to build the piano, and he has spent the past few years giving people around New Zealand a chance to play it – he even tried, unsuccessfully, to get Elton John to give it a tinkle.
It all started when, as a curious 15-year-old, he wanted to see how long a piece of piano wire would be if it were not wrapped in copper.
The answer, according to his garden experiment, was about six metres, but it was the tone of the string that had him captivated.
“The sound I heard from that string was so clear and unique and different that I really, really had to do it. I got it in my mind that I had to build a piano.”
The following year, a neighbour offered a garage and some timber and he got stuck in – despite knowing next to nothing about piano-building.
“I had to learn everything – none of the technicians wanted to be involved because they said it wouldn’t work, so I had to learn how to do everything, from carpentry, welding, right up to the geometry of the action and the string layout.”
As the piano started to take shape, the community got on board with donations of wood, tools, books and cash, and he won a scholarship after he finished high school to allow for a final push.
As well as being the world’s largest piano, it also had the “lowest percentage of inharmonicity”, according to an Australian piano maker, Mann said.
The piano is in Auckland at present, has dates in Hamilton next month, and will be travelling through Wellington about October 22 – but it will stop only if the right venue can be found.
Positively Wellington Venues chief executive Glenys Coughlan said it would be the first time Wellington would have hosted an instrument of that size, but did not see it as an obstacle.
“We would be spoiled for choice here. We could do it on a grand scale, putting it centre court in TSB Bank Arena or inside our newly refurbished Shed 6, which would be fun.
“Or we could have a choice of stages: on stage at the Michael Fowler Centre, the St James Theatre or the Opera House. Or the lobby of the Michael Fowler Centre.”
• 1850 ~ Wagner’s opera, Lohengrin, was performed for the first time.
• 1894 ~ Karl Böhm, Austrian conductor
1913 ~ Richard Tucker, American tenor
More information about Tucker
• 1924 ~ Dinah Washington, American rhythm-and-blues singer. She popularized many, many great songs, including What a Diff’rence a Day Makes, Unforgettable, and several hits with Brook Benton.
• 1925 ~ Billy (William Wayne) Grammer, Singer
• 1931 ~ You Rascal You was recorded by Henry Allen, with the Luis Russell Band, for the Victor label.
• 1939 ~ Clem Cattini, Drummer with Tornados
• 1948 ~ Daniel Seraphine, Drummer with Chicago
• 1951 ~ Wayne Osmond, Singer with The Osmond Brothers
• 1964 ~ The Beatles appeared on the cover of LIFE magazine.
• 1984 ~ The Jacksons’ Victory Tour broke the record for concert ticket sales. The group surpassed the 1.1 million mark in only two months.
• 2002 ~ Kay Gardner, whose last musical work with the Bangor Symphony Orchestra memorialized the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, died of a heart attack. She was in her early 60s.
On hearing of her death, symphony officials scheduled Gardner’s work, “Lament for Thousand,” for the orchestra’s season-opening concert Oct. 13 at the Maine Center for the Arts in Orono.
Gardner was a pianist, flutist and conductor who performed in 46 states and several countries.
More than 20 years ago, she sued the Bangor Symphony, unsuccessfully, for sex discrimination after she had applied for a conducting position and learned that orchestra members had been asked how they felt about working with a female conductor.
In 2000, she was the guest conductor for a 40-member orchestra of women from the Bangor Symphony, playing a repertoire written by women.
Gardner studied music at the University of Michigan and at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. In 1972, she helped found a feminist and openly lesbian women’s band, Lavender Jane.
By the 1990s she was serving as music director at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Bangor.
It will be fun watching your child improve their piano skills all while having fun using Piano Maestro in lessons each week!
As your child’s teacher (or YOUR teacher!), I’m looking forward to seeing the progress they will make when they start using it at home each day. This guide will help you understand how this app will benefit your child and how to get it set up on your own iPad.
Overview What is Piano Maestro?
Piano Maestro is the ultimate piano practice tool that will have students quickly playing their favorite classical, pop, rock, TV and video game songs and themes. It is available in the App Store and works on the iPad.
What skills does it improve?
• Note reading
• Sight reading
• Rhythm
• Inner pulse
• Confidence
What makes it so fun?
• Upbeat background tracks
• Stunning graphics
• Instant rewards and feed back
• Satisfaction of playing REAL music
It works with an acoustic piano?
Yes! Your child practices on your real acoustic or digital piano. Piano Maestro listens from the iPad’s built in microphone. No wires needed.
I’m already paying for lessons and books. What value does this add?
Sometimes I wish I could be there with your child to encourage them to keep practicing daily. I’m sure it’s not always easy, as unforeseen challenges will arise.
Since our time each week is just too short, this app will give me eyes on the ground and it will keep them practicing longer and improving more quickly.
How will it be used in lessons?
I will spend a few minutes of each lesson helping your child master a couple of new songs all while having fun! I will also teach them how to use the practice options at home.
At the end of the lesson, we will choose Home Challenge assignments within the app that will show up in your account at home. I’ll get updates when progress is made.
Getting Started
Wow, this sounds awesome. Now, how do I get started?
1) Download Piano Maestro on your iPad from the AppStore
2) Create a JoyTunes account with a parent’s email, under which, you can have multiple profiles for each member of the family.
3) Create a profile for each family member (that means you too Mom and Dad!) inside the Parent/Teacher zone (top right hand corner of main screen)
4) Connect to your teacher, me! After creating a profile in the “profiles” tab of the parent/teacher zone, select the student’s profile and click “connect to teacher.” Once I approve connection to your child, they will receive full access to all content for FREE! I will then also begin receiving weekly progress reports.
5) Start Playing – I will now start assigning you homework, meanwhile get started on Journey Mode.
When you connect to the O’Connor Music Studio, Piano Maestro is free for as long as you study here.
• 1521 ~ Josquin Desprez, French/Franco-Flemish composer, died. Generally acknowledged as the greatest composer of the High Renaissance.
More information about Desprez
1886 ~ Eric Coates, British composer and violist
More information about Coates
• 1889 ~ Charles G. Conn of Elkhart, IN patented the metal clarinet. More than 100 years later the name, Conn, still represents one of the most popular musical instrument names, especially for clarinets.
• 1909 ~ Lester Willis “Prez” Young, American jazz tenor and saxophonist
• 1927 ~ Jimmy ‘Cajun’ Newman, Singer
• 1937 ~ Tommy (Adrian) Sands, Singer
• 1939 ~ Singer Allan Jones recorded I’m Falling in Love with Someone on Victor Records.
• 1942 ~ Daryl Dragon, Grammy Award-winning musician, songwriter, duo in The Captain and Tennille
• 1944 ~ Barry Conyngham, Australian composer
• 1944 ~ Tim Bogert, Bass with these groups: Showmen, Cactus, Vanilla Fudge
• 1949 ~ Jeff Cook, Singer, guitar with Alabama
• 1953 ~ Alex Lifeson, Guitarist with Rush
• 1970 ~ The Troubadour in Los Angeles, CA was the venue of singer Elton John’s first concert appearance in America and a record company executive for UNI records (a division of MCA) signed Elton to a recording contract.
• 1984 ~ The Menetta Lane Theatre in Greenwich Village opened. It was the first new off-Broadway theatre to be built in 50 years in New York City. The ribbon cutting was done by “America’s First Lady of the Stage”, Helen Hayes.
1873 ~ Lee DeForest, Inventor of the triode vacuum tube, possibly the most significant invention that made radio possible.
Lee DeForest was born in 1873 in Council Bluffs, Iowa. We’re sure his parents had big plans for him; but they could never have realized how their son, Lee, would change the world.
DeForest seemed to be a born inventor. He held patents for hundreds of different items including the photoelectric cell and the surgical radio knife. But none had as much impact on the world as his invention of the electron tube, specifically the triode, a three element vacuum tube, which later became the audion tube ~~ possibly the most significant invention that made radio possible.
Wireless radio broadcasting was unthinkable in the early 1900s and DeForest was considered a fraud. He was arrested for selling stock to underwrite the development of his invention, which no one believed would work. He was forced into selling the rights to his patent to American Telephone and Telegraph for $500,000; considered by most to be foolish of AT&T. The rest is history.
Lee DeForest’s 1950 autobiography is called “Father of Radio”.
• 1873 ~ Lee DeForest, Inventor of the triode vacuum tube, possibly the most significant invention that made radio possible.
More information about DeForest
• 1894 ~ Arthur Loesser, American pianist and writer
• 1915 ~ Humphrey Searle, British composer and writer
• 1928 ~ Peter Appleyard, British jazz vibraphonist and drummer
• 1939 ~ The radio program Arch Oboler’s Plays presented the NBC Symphony, for the first time, as the musical backdrop for the drama, This Lonely Heart.
• 1942 ~ Vic Dana, Singer
• 1949 ~ Bob Cowsill, Singer with The Cowsills
• 1957 ~ John O’Neill, Musician, guitar with That Petrol Emotion
• 1970 ~ Jimi Hendrix opened his recording studio in New York City. Because of its state-of-the-art 36-track recording capability, it attracted many top rock groups.
• 2000 ~ George Edmund Sandell, a noted violin and viola player, teacher and inventor died at the age of 88.
Sandell studied in New York under the viola virtuoso William Primrose and on scholarship at the Royal Swedish Conservatory in Stockholm.
Sandell moved to Los Angeles in 1938, where he played with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Pasadena and Santa Monica Symphonies.
Along with classical music, he performed pop, swing and Latin music, and played with the string sections of big band luminaries Harry James, Jimmy Dorsey and Xavier Cugat.
Sandell also played on some of Frank Sinatra’s recordings and worked for most of the big Hollywood studios on orchestral sound tracks, including the sound track for the movie Citizen Kane.
In 1947, he invented the Gee-Bee, a kitchen sponge with a plastic handle for washing dishes. He sold the company to DuPont in 1953.
• 2001 ~ Alix Williamson, the classical music publicist who suggested to Baroness Maria von Trapp that she write a book about her family’s experiences, died at the age of 85.
Williamson’s suggestion resulted in the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical “The Sound of Music.”
She represented artists such as André Watts and Frederica von Stade and helped the New York Grand Opera get a citation in the Guinness Book of World Records for its performances of a complete cycle of Verdi’s operas in Central Park. Williamson also ghostwrote books.
Life very often throws some curious coincidences my way. Just as I was preparing a presentation for architecture students at the Goa College of Architecture on ‘Architecture and Music’ and looking at the relationship of the Fibonacci sequence to music, what should appear in my newsfeed but the announcement of the famed piano firm Steinway and Sons unveiling its 600,000th piano, incorporating the iconic Fibonacci spiral in its design.
The veneer of the “Fibonacci” piano features the eponymous spiral made from six individual logs of Macassar Ebony, “creating a fluid design that represents the geometric harmony found in nature.”
In the words of designer Frank Pollaro, who spent over 6000 work-hours over four years in its creation: “Designing Steinway & Sons’ 600,000th piano was an honour and a challenge. To me, knowing that this piano would become part of history meant that it had to be more than just a beautiful design, but also needed to visually convey a deeper message…as I considered the number 600,000, the Fibonacci spiral came to mind. The way in which it continues to grow but stay true to its form is very much like Steinway and Sons over these many years. Combining the universal languages of music and mathematics suddenly made perfect sense.”
Mind you, 600,000 is not a number in the Fibonacci sequence; I checked. 600,000 is between the 29th and 30th numbers in the Fibonacci series, which are 514,229 and 832,040 respectively. But Pollaro was nevertheless highlighting an interesting relationship between music and mathematics.
Named after the Italian mathematician Leonardo Fibonacci (c. 1170- c. 1250) who brought the Indian-Arabic numeral system to Europe, the Fibonacci series appear in nature and in music, and finds application in architecture and in instrument design, much before the Fibonacci Steinway.
The basic ideas of the Fibonacci progression are contained in the writings of Indian scholar Pingala (300-200 BC) in his treatise on Sanskrit prosody.
The Fibonacci numbers have the following integer sequence: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233, 377, 610, 987 and onward. Each added number is the sum of two previous numbers before it.
In nature, the Fibonacci sequence underpins phyllotaxis (arrangement of leaves on a stem), branching in trees, fruit sprouts of a pineapple among many other examples, and even the shape of the human external ear, and the cochlear apparatus of the inner ear.
It can be applied to the western musical scale as well, with the caveat that the starting note one makes the measurement from (or the ‘root’ note) is designated as 1 and not 0. By this token, there are 13 notes in a scale through its octave. There are 8 notes in a diatonic scale (hence the top note is called an ‘oct’ave). The 5th and 3rd notes create the basic foundation of musical chords. All these are Fibonacci numbers.
The very notes in the scale are based on natural harmonics created by ratios of frequencies. Ratios found in the first seven numbers of the Fibonacci series (0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8) are related to key frequencies of musical notes. Thus if we take an arbitrary frequency of 440 Hz, the root note has a ratio of 1/1, but the octave above it has a frequency of 880 Hz (2/1 of 440); a fifth above has a frequency of 660 Hz (3/2 of 440), and so on for other notes in the scale.
In last Sunday’s article, I had mentioned the ‘golden proportion’ or phi, which underpins the proportions of the Parthenon temple in the Acropolis in Athens, Greece. This ‘golden ratio’ (also called the ‘golden section’, ‘golden mean’ or the ‘divine proportion’) of 1:1618 or 0.618 has influenced composition in painting and photography, prompting the notion of dividing a canvas into thirds vertically and horizontally, and to position a subject of interest ‘about one-third’ of the way across instead of in the centre.
This ‘golden ratio’ can be obtained by dividing a Fibonacci number (in the higher reaches, not the first few) by its immediate predecessor. The quotient approximates phi (φ). Thus 987/610= 1.61803, and its inverse is 0.618.
The climax or high point of many songs and other compositions is often found at the ‘phi’ (φ) point (61.8 per cent) of the work. We have seen this to be true in the first movement of
S. Bach’s G minor sonata for solo violin.
In many compositions in sonata form, the addition of a coda causes the recapitulation (the return of the original idea that started the work) to begin at the 61.8 per cent point.
The legendary violin maker Antonio Stradivari seemed to be aware of the ‘golden section’ and used it in the placement of the f-holes on his violins. The proportions of the violin conform to the ratios of ‘phi’ (φ). The spiral of a violin scroll also obeys the Fibonacci progression.
Isn’t it amazing, how the visual and aural world, indeed nature itself can all be unified by the same mathematical sequence?[NT]
1913 ~ Richard Tucker, American tenor
Lee DeForest was born in 1873 in Council Bluffs, Iowa. We’re sure his parents had big plans for him; but they could never have realized how their son, Lee, would change the world.
MaryO'Studio 