Dec

11

Just about the finest man that has ever lived, the modern reincarnation of Father Bach in the 20th century, is the great piano player and teacher Robert Schrade, the founder of the Sevenars Concert Series in Worthington, Massachusetts. He was a frequent soloist at Carnegie Hall and other great venues before he gave up the life for teaching, giving in home lessons to kids learning to play, and doing numerous other jobs that only a musician could appreciate.

We have a tradition of meeting to see how each other is doing over a game of Laskers which he likes to play. Laskers is an early 20th century checkers-like game, except the rule is that when you jump a piece you only take the top man. You do not remove any checkers from the board, and while you jump pieces, you stack them on top of each other. The kings get turned over so that when you have four men on top of each other you have to remember if the ones below are kings or not. I cannot ever remember the rules or visualize what happens when you jump, but I am a good checkers player, and yesterday when we played I was up about nine checkers to three.

We had previously spoken about the five levels of species counterpoint, and in honor of David Bronstein’s life, I told him that I was going to try to win the game a la Bronstein by displaying a few species of counterpoint. While I was expanding on this to his family, I found that all the sudden he had eight checkers on top of each other on one square. The next thing I knew, he followed me with this one unit into his side of the board, where I had kings, and I resigned. The moral of the story is never to be over confident, never to talk during a game, never try to win with a flourish, and never forget about mopping up — never skin the bear until it is caught. I profited enormously from this loss, and will have to make a suitable contribution to his festival in the Rockefeller spirit based on the lessons I learned.


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