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There were a number of mysteries for alumni from the 1970s, like this picture taken at a NJ MEC competition where Jim Correnti (French School) is shaking hands with another first prize winner, with a young Van Cliburn looking on.

There were a number of mysteries for alumni from the 1970s, like this picture taken at a NJ MEC competition where Jim Correnti (French School) is shaking hands with another first prize winner, with a young Van Cliburn looking on.

BACKGROUND

Growing up in the 1970s, I studied piano and solfege (singing named pitches using “do re mi”) with a French woman named Mlle. Yvonne Combe, who was a student at Paris Conservatory from 1905 - 1908 when four famous French composers were alive and Fauré was director of the conservatoire. She emigrated to America and founded The French School of Music (Facebook page) in Plainfield, NJ in 1927. Many alumni performed in Carnegie Recital Hall as children, attended top notch conservatories, became professional artists / composers, taught in conservatories, and sang in blockbuster films, cultivating a lifelong relationship of joy with music.

It took us decades to grasp how powerful her teaching methodology was and why, and this methodology is now available online.

While professional musicians generally focus on their conservatory work and not their early educational history, The French School of Music made conservatory access possible, by giving students a solid foundation in practical music fundamentals, as well as both technical skill and musicality.

The 1974 Carnegie Recital Hall program pictured above has six French School students on the front cover - Kyoko Utsumi, Liz Du Four, Eileen Chang Sauer, Karen Rispoli, Vincent Di Mura, and Todd Weiss. These were the first prize gold cup winners. Inside the program are eight other students who won Summa cum laude, and of those eight students six were French School - Cindy de Vine, Edwin Tsuzuki, Karen Marcus, Mayo Tsuzuki, Wendy Jaffe, and Kyoko Misawa.

Here is a recording of one alumna performing Saint-Saëns second piano concerto in 1980 at age 17. The cassette tape was a little warped by the time this was digitized. This is what happens when you can focus on technique and musicality in your instrument lessons.

While those of us from the 1970s can’t tell you what Debussy would have wanted, every single one of us can tell you when Yvonne Combe would have stopped someone during a piano lesson and said: “no… Debussy / Fauré / Saint-Saëns / Ravel wouldn’t have wanted it this way…” This is an intriguing comment. She wasn’t saying what we did was non-musical, but that these composers were specific about how their music was to be interpreted. And in many places, I hear people who play musically, and yet I can hear Mlle. Combe over my shoulder saying that.

Below is another old, warped recording of a toccata my sister composed and performed at age 16. While Yvonne Combe didn’t coach us in music composition, our solfege and music dictation classes made it practically inevitable that many alumni would gravitate in that direction.