Elvina Pearce Retires As Editor-In-Chief, Peter Jutras Named New Editor-In-Chief

Keyboard Companion, the magazine by and for practical piano teachers, was one of the most significant expressions of Richard Chronister’s life work. When Richard died on the eve of the new millennium, it appeared that Keyboard Companion would also come to an end. One person single-handedly stepped forward and made it possible for the Frances Clark Center to continue Richard’s work— Elvina Truman Pearce. She did this by accepting the prodigious task of Editor-in-Chief of Keyboard Companion. Over the last seven years, she has led the magazine and its talented team of Associate Editors with grace, power and precision, ever faithful to Richard’s original vision, never satisfied with anything less than the best it could possibly be. It was with a combination of overflowing gratitude and deep regret that the Board of the Frances Clark Center received Elvina’s notice of her intent to retire as Editor-in-Chief effective following the Winter issue of 2006. The debt the piano teaching community owes Elvina can never be repaid, but your expressions of gratitude and farewell will be welcomed at:

Keyboard Companion
c/o The Frances Clark Center for Keyboard Pedagogy
P.O. Box 651
Kingston NJ 08528

Elvina’s announcement led to a rigorous national search in which over a dozen highly qualified and excellent candidates were considered carefully through several stages. It is now with great pleasure that the Frances Clark Center introduces Dr. Peter Jutras as the new Editor-in-Chief of Keyboard Companion. Dr. Jutras has recently accepted the position of Assistant Professor and Head of Piano Pedagogy and Class Piano at the University of Georgia ( Athens). In addition to maintaining a large and successful private studio in Dallas, Peter has served as an Instructor of Music Education and Piano Pedagogy at Southern Methodist University. A specialist in teaching adults, he has conducted and published research on adult piano students and developed innovative and successful programs of group piano study. Many will recognize Peter from his leadership roles in the National Conference on Keyboard Pedagogy and MTNA. A nationally certified teacher of music, Peter holds a Ph.D. in Music Education from the University of North Texas where he studied under Fred Kern, a M.M. in Piano Performance and Pedagogy from Southern Methodist University under Sam Holland, and a B.M. in Music Education from the Eastman School of Music under Tony Caramia. Peter is married to Kristin, a professional violinist and has two sons, James (age 5) and Andrew (age 3).

Please join with the Frances Clark Center in expressing thanks and congratulations to Elvina Pearce and in extending a warm welcome to Peter Jutras. Under his inspired leadership, the future of Keyboard Companion is both secure and bright.

 

Retrospective on the Keyboard Companion website
by your webmaster Bruce Berr

I bid you adieu as webmaster.

This is the last website edition I'll be creating for KBC, although I will be continuing on as an associate editor for the Rhythm Department in the print magazine. I decided to step down after nine years as webmaster to create additional time for myself to explore other professional interests, including doing more educational composing, something I have had precious little time to do over the past several years. This change will also allow someone else to come on board who will undoubtedly bring other ideas and new powers to the site. It is a full-time job keeping up with new website technologies!

The KBC website's inception dates back to late 1997. I had been with the magazine for less than a year at that point, and was busy presenting many pedagogical workshops throughout the midwest. I remember thinking how useful it would be if written articles about teaching and music could also have some of the essential tools of live clinics: sound and visual demonstrations. Then the obvious solution hit me: USE THE INTERNET! No other piano magazines at that point had used the web to exploit multimedia supplements to print articles (some didn't even have a website yet, and many piano teachers were just discovering the uses of the web themselves) , but it seemed to me to be a natural use of the medium. Because I had designed a wedding website the year before for my wife, Jennifer Merry, and myself, I was already familiar with how to do a number of things in website design, although I certainly was not a technology professional, nor did I have particularly good visual design skills. But the possibility of turning magazine articles into cyber-workshops compelled me to pursue the idea.

I phoned Richard Chronister (the founder of the magazine and then Chief Editor) and shared my ideas with him. At first, he was reticent about it, mainly because he thought that adding an auxiliary arm to the magazine might be complicated and costly. But Richard was always Richard - one of the most open-minded individuals I have ever met - and even with his doubts, suggested that I put together a sample of how a KBC website might look and feel (and sound), and he would give further thought to it. I worked a few weeks on it, and sent him a miniature site, along with instructions on how to view it (web browsers were still quite cranky in those days, especially with audio and video clips). I also submitted some prices for some of the more economical web hosts we could use. He played around with my design for a few days and shared it with his professional and creative partner Marjore (who also happened to be his wife!).

I got a call back within the week from a wildly enthusiastic chief editor! He and Marjore were thrilled with the possibilities that the website presented: musical, pedagogical, visual. We then devised a few strategies on how the website and the print magazine might interact with each other, and gave me the go-ahead to implement that in whatever ways I wished.

I got down to work. More templates, icons, graphics, internal links, structure charts all needed to be created, and then the most fun part: deciding which articles were conducive to multimedia extension. By the summer of 1998, the site was launched with a multimedia article complete with audio, video, and extra photographs. The dream of turning a print article into a workshop was becoming a reality!

I had originally volunteered to do the website gratis, since it was an experiment and it wasn't clear yet whether magazines would even retain websites as permanent adjuncts. But after the first issue in the summer of 1998, Richard must have realized that this was indeed a necessary appendage for a forward-looking publication. He and Marjore generously offered me financial compensation for producing a website for subsequent issues. This not only encouraged me to continue the work (and to buy some new audiovisual hardware), but also made it possible for me to spend more time teaching myself about the science and art of website design. This in turn allowed me to add additional features and capabilities as we went ahead.

It was an exciting time. There were few or no precedents so new ones needed to be invented. Visual features from the magazine needed to be translated into forms that would work on the web (a much different medium), yet look similar. The best translations from one language to another are not always literal ones, so a lot of creative thinking and experimenting was required.

The website featured current articles and features, but also past ones. How would a visitor to the site always know with ease where they were in that maze of possibilities? One solution was that anything current would show up in the window to the right of the keyboard, whereas anything from a past issue would be in a separate window that would pop up in front of the current one. Also, past issues' content had a yellowish background, whereas current material was surrounded by a bluish metallic color. These invented conventions helped readers unconsciously know where they were in the site, and thus made it conducive to creating an ongoing accumulating site. These structures are still in place, so you can still easily view almost everything that has been posted on the site since 1998.

Other formatting conventions needed to be invented to get around technology limitations at the time. Even little things needed to be handled differently. For instance, in the late 1990s text in italics still looked dreadful on most web browsers, so it was best avoided. We instead used bold in place of italics, and in turn used color where bold might be used in a print magazine. This enabled us to follow normal writing conventions while working around the limitations of (and at the same time exploiting the advantages of) the technology at the time.

Video, by its very nature, takes up huge amounts of memory in a computer. During the first several years of the website's operation, the vast majority of our readers still accessed the internet through dial-up modems that were very slow compared to today's broadband connections. Therefore, the video clips that we posted for the first few years needed to be highly compressed and also sparse in the number of frames per second that comprised them. Although the resultant quality was grainy and almost Charlie Chaplin-esque, it still allowed us to show activities (such as aspects of technique and even figure-skating) that would have taken hundreds of words to begin to describe.

Richard Chronister died on the last day of 1999, a very sad event touching many people and an entire field. He and I had only a few years to work together on the website. During that time, we reflected ideas off each other, and we kept trying to find new ways for the print magazine and the website to cross-reference once another, realizing that they both became more powerful to the reader that way. New features appeared - some were trials and faded, others remained permanent fixtures. It was a wonderful time of experimentation and - if I may use what now sounds like an old-fashioned cliche - synergy!

The Frances Clark Center enthusiastically supported the continuation of the website after it took over magazine operations in 2000. The number of multimedia articles per issue started to grow as more authors began to think of magazine articles as having more than just text and pictures. The print magazine underwent a major visual rebirth in 2003, and thus so did the website. I enlisted the help of a professional design artist, Cathy Miller of Lunchmedia Designs (who at the time was one of my adult leisure piano students; I now have the privilege of also teaching her young son Greyson). Cathy created a beautiful and clean new visual plan for the site, including the structure and color schemes you see here now.

In the website's last three years, more high resolution video (created by authors themselves) was able to be posted. We were also able to start offering longer audio clips, since a majority of our readers could now easily make use of an industry-wide compressed audio format - mp3. Web visitors also made continual use of the parts of the website that were not multimedia. For instance, pedagogy professors and piano teachers communicated how helpful they found the ever-growing online index of all past articles in Keyboard Companion. The Excel file of this index has been downloaded by thousands, making pedagogical searches through past issues of the magazine a snap. Readers have kept abreast of editor workshops and clinics through the Bulletin Board, which is able to offer more up-to-date information than can the print magazine. Readers also made extensive use of the links to our advertisers' websites.

This website will continue of course. My predecessor as webmaster for the next issue and beyond has not yet been officially announced, although that should be taking place sometime soon. That person will also be taking over the job of engraving and editing music excerpts and photos for the print magazine, something I have been doing since 2000.

I want to thank the Board of the Frances Clark Center for their continuing support of my work on the website during these past seven years. I also wish to express my gratitude to my fellow associate editors, all of whom have contributed increasing amounts of superb material to the website over the years (check out the past multimedia articles on this site, and you'll see and hear what I mean). A special thanks goes to Marjore Chronister; if it weren't for her and Richard's foresight and support, the website would not have blossomed and grown as quickly as it did.

Finally, I wish to thank you the readers and my colleagues from all over the nation (and beyond) who have e-mailed over the years, communicating your suggestions, as well as how much you have enjoyed the website and how useful you have found it. I am gratified that what started out as simply an experiment by a technology amateur has borne so much fruit.

Sincerely,

Bruce Berr