Old piano books

Down in the basement we have a trunk full of old piano books.  While Moira was away in the Dominican Republic, I decided to bring them up and have a look through them. (I think they got put away while I was living in England almost twenty years ago.) I believed there'd be some books I want to play now.

As it turned out, there weren't that many I wanted to play:  some of what I wanted to play I couldn't find there.  But I sorted them into different piles for the next time we look at them.  There was a pile for series books like John Thompson and Leila Fletcher.  There was one for study pieces.  There was one for duets, of which we had more than I expected.  There was one for non-piano music:  in our family, among several instruments, Margaret played the violin and John played the trombone.  And there was a pretty big pile of stuff that wasn't music related, including a couple of Dalhousie University yearbooks.  There was also a fancy calendar on the bottom that the damp got into, so we may as well throw it away.

I'd played the piano in my early and mid-teens, and I took the time to look through some piano books I remembered.  My memory turned out to be imperfect:  for example, that piano study they kept playing in that play Two Pianos, Four Hands turned out to be by Duvernoy, not Burgmueller.  I was a long time getting around to putting them back.

Our Yamaha piano is forty years old, but we've been keeping it tuned.  What music did I end up keeping upstairs?  There are a couple of pieces that I recall playing very well, and I want to play them again:  "The Policeman," from Healey Willan's Character Sketches of Old London, and the Arab Dance from a piano arrangement of Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite.  I also held on to an old songbook which Mother's family probably got when she was a girl around 1930. (Or it might have been Father's family.) It has songs like "She Was Happy Till She Met You" and "She May Have Seen Better Days."