THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, February 26, 1995 TAG: 9502240145
SECTION: CHESAPEAKE CLIPPER PAGE: 02 EDITION: FINAL
COLUMN: Random Rambles
SOURCE: Tony Stein
LENGTH: Medium: 85 lines
Britain's royal House of Windsor is so full of disharmony that sour notes of castle clashes are practically a second national anthem.
On the other hand, the harmonic sounds to be found at Chesapeake's house of Winsors lightly lay on the ear-bones and merrily mollify the heart. We are talking about the good music performed by father John Winsor, mother Jeanette Winsor and daughter Jenny Winsor. John plays the clarinet, Jeanette plays the piano and Jenny plays the viola, which looks like a violin that needs to sign with Weight Watchers.
If you are smarter than a rutabaga, you can quickly figure out that classical music is central to the Winsors' lives. There are busts of Mozart and his sister on a living room shelf. There are a couple of medieval music manuscripts on the wall. And there are two grand pianos nestled together like 176-note Siamese twins.
One of the pianos has a history. Josef Hoffman, who was once to piano-playing what Joe DiMaggio was to baseball, gave a piano to a friend in 1924. Hoffman signed it inside. That friend bequeathed the piano to pianist and teacher Clifford Herzer of Norfolk, who bequeathed it to Winsor. The Hoffman signature is still there, like a seal of approval from the master.
One other Winsor decorative touch I enjoyed was a variation on the famous old Army recruiting poster that has Uncle Sam pointing a stern finger in your face and saying ``I want you.'' Only the Winsor poster says ``I want you to practice.''
An Ohio native, Jeanette was born into a family of amateur musicians and hit the keyboard by the time she was 7 years old. ``Even if I'm tired or in a bad mood,'' she says, ``music will rid me of both those feelings and elevate me. That's true whether I'm playing or listening.''
She studied music at Heidelberg College in Ohio. Or tried to. There was this lean, 6-foot-4 guy who hung around. ``He kept coming to my practices and bothering me,'' Jeanette says. That was John Winsor. He grins when Jeanette tells about him bothering her and says, ``She wasn't going to get any work done until she married me.'' They've been a matrimonial duet for 22 years.
John tuned in to the clarinet when he was 12. ``My next door neighbor was in the school band and he sat on my front porch and played `Do, a deer,'' from ``Sound of Music.' I was awe-struck, and I wanted to do it myself.''
Both Winsors went on to collect master's degrees from Kent State University. Then John joined the Army, which eventually brought him to the Armed Forces School of Music here in Tidewater. He spent six years in the Army, with one year out to earn a doctorate degree.
The Army also led him down his full-time career path. He was asked to do a survey for a musician training program, so he called for help from some computer whizzes. He was impressed enough to become a computer programmer himself.
Jeanette teaches piano and performs, including service as accompanist for the Virginia Beach Chorale. Both she and John play with the Hardwick Chamber Ensemble. He also composes, but if you have an image of eccentric, frazzled-haired composer huddled over piano waiting for inspiration to smack him upside the head, forget it.
John laughs and says that when he talks about music, it's not what people expect to hear. He calls music ``a symbolic re-creation of biological rhythms.'' He sees himself as a kind of architect of music, dealing with component parts. He composes on an electronic keyboard and uses computer software. ``Mozart could hear the music in his head,'' John says, ``but I have to get physically on the instrument. I'm nuts and bolts as a composer.
``I try to schedule 20 hours a week of composing, and I work very slowly and painstakingly. It takes me about 20 hours of labor for one minute of music.''
What he writes are chamber works 10 or 12 minutes long. ``What is really exciting,'' he says, ``is to hear it played, to hear it happen. It's even better to hear musicians say they enjoyed playing it.''
(Yo, John, Jeanette played one of your pieces at my church a couple of weeks ago, and I can tell you it was a graceful and interesting piece that I certainly enjoyed hearing.)
The love of music and the skill in performing it has obviously been passed on to the Winsors' daughter, Jenny, a senior at Indian River High School. But then Jeanette claims Jenny had musical preferences before she was born.
``She would kick me if I played Bela Bartok's music,'' Jeanette vows. ``She liked Chopin, Haydn and Bach, and she would kick if I stopped playing them.''
If Jenny becomes a professional musician, I hope she doesn't lose the theme of that pre-natal memory. It may eventually come in very handy when she'd like to kick a critic. Some of them deserve it. by CNB