{"id":20427,"date":"2012-02-07T02:02:32","date_gmt":"2012-02-07T02:02:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=20427"},"modified":"2012-09-15T21:46:12","modified_gmt":"2012-09-15T21:46:12","slug":"ad","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=20427","title":{"rendered":"A Philippa Schuyler moment"},"content":{"rendered":"

A Philippa Schuyler moment<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

On an Overgrown Path<\/a>
\n2011-08-02<\/p>\n

John McLaughlin Williams<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Philippa Schuyler<\/a>. Just hearing the name takes me back to a place in my childhood I have not revisited in memory more than a couple of times in decades. Philippa Schuyler\u2019s name was but one of dozens lodged in my parent\u2019s large sheet music library, occupying shelf space alongside the giants and talented lesser lights of our canonic music literature. Even among those lesser lights Schuyler seemed to me an odd duck a the time, for here peering at me from the cover of the sole piece of music by her in our possession was a picture of a seven year old girl of mixed race, rather than an aged, wizened and likely bearded Caucasian man. Wasn\u2019t that what a composer was supposed to look like?<\/strong><\/p>\n

My being a beginning pianist of about ten or eleven at the time caused me to be extremely curious about the yellowed sheets containing nine pieces of progressive difficulty penned by Schuyler between the ages of four to nine. The fact that she was considered to be an exemplar of mid-twentieth century black achievement added to her music\u2019s mystique. My parents played piano music of timeless worth; my dad enamored of Beethoven<\/a> and Brahms<\/a>, my mom all quicksilver and light in Chopin<\/a> and Mozart<\/a>. I was learning to play Scarlatti<\/a> sonatas, my mind filled with the melody and counterpoint by masters of compositional craft. I sat down to play Schuyler\u2019s music and was immediately filled with disappointment. \u201cThis is bad\u201d, I thought to myself! It didn\u2019t sound like what my parents played, much less like the music I was studying. Compared with the masters Schuyler\u2019s work seemed trite, short breathed, and to my young mind, immature. (In retrospect and in defense of Schuyler\u2019s work, because of the unusual way in which I began to play the piano, the valuable didactic nature of these pieces eluded me completely.) I played through the music, put it away and never looked at it again. Until last week.<\/p>\n

When Bob Shingleton<\/a> asked me if I knew anything about Philippa Schuyler, I said I knew a little. That little bit comprised my early impressions of her music coupled with knowledge acquired later of her reputation as a racial role model. (I was given Kathryn Talalay\u2019s biography of Schuyler<\/a> a few years ago, but I considered her such a marginal figure that to this day I have not read it.) Remembering dimly that my mother (Mrs. Norma McLaughlin Nelson) had some sheet music by Schuyler as well as her autograph (acquired at a concert my mom attended as a child in Greensboro, North Carolina<\/a>), I offered to ask my mom if she still had these items in her possession, and if so would she share them with us. Mom looked and confirmed that indeed she did, and she would. Mom sent me scans of the material that I soon forwarded to Bob. After perusing the music he asked if I might consider making an informal recording of the little pieces, and that is when my trip down memory lane began…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article and listen to a performance of one of Schuyler’s compositions here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A Philippa Schuyler moment On an Overgrown Path 2011-08-02 John McLaughlin Williams Philippa Schuyler. Just hearing the name takes me back to a place in my childhood I have not revisited in memory more than a couple of times in decades. Philippa Schuyler\u2019s name was but one of dozens lodged in my parent\u2019s large sheet […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,1196,8,25],"tags":[9553,1392,9552,1755],"class_list":["post-20427","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-literary-criticism","category-media-archive","category-women","tag-john-mclaughlin-williams","tag-music","tag-on-an-overgrown-path","tag-philippa-schuyler"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20427","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20427"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20427\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20427"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20427"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20427"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}