It’s the time of the year when I re-connect with Ellen Sulkis James, an old friend, going back to the early 1960s, when we were both on the staff of the Reading Eagle newspaper in Reading PA, an old friend whose birthday (on 8/30) is just a week before mine, a fact we play with annually. (As it happens, this year I’m also in almost daily contact with Ellen M. Kaisse, another old friend — and linguistics colleague, now retired from the University of Washington in Seattle — going back to the early 1970s, who is now plotting a possible visit to me here in Palo Alto; for the record, my other old friends named Ellen, Ellen Evans and Ellen Seebacher, who came to me through the newsgroup soc.motss in the late 1980s, are also a regular presence in my life. Yes, this is all very confusing.)
Back then, ESJ and I were college students who did not go into the newspaper business — she went on to become a professor of art history, I went on to become a professor of linguistics — but it turned out that we shared an enthusiasm for classical music (we still exchange discoveries of new performers and performances), and we were both pianists. So in my visits to her house, we ended up playing together, including what she remembers as a 1 piano 4 hand version of Mozart’s Rondo alla turca, originally written for solo piano. For complex reasons I’ll eventually explain to you, I wasn’t so sure it was the Mozart, but might have been a 1 piano 4 hand version of what is known as the “Turkish March” (by Beethoven, from his incidental music for the play The Ruins of Athens), originally written for symphony orchestra.
Now, EMK is also a musician (an accomplished singer) with an enthusiasm for classical music (we exchange discoveries of new performers and performances). You can see that at the moment I tend to suffer from Ellen Blending. At least neither of the Turkish pieces seems to have been supplied with a vocal line.
In any case, I’m now convinced that ESJ is right about our having played the Mozart, not the Beethoven, those 60 years ago. I just wasn’t used to the Rondo alla turca being called a “Turkish March”. But Wikipedia reports this alternative name, and ESJ unearthed this performance of the (solo) Rondo alla turca (by Ronald Brautigam) recorded under the title “Turkish March”. So there.
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