Yes, Michael, there was an Alfred

Thinking about the name Mel Bay got me thinking about the name Alfred, as in Alfred’s Basic Guitar Method, published by the Alfred Music Co. I’m one of the zillion or so people who learned to play by way of Alfred. I went through all six instruction books. After that it was a matter of listening to records and learning how to fingerpick to play what I was hearing. And after that, it was a matter of learning how to play what I wanted to hear.

For anyone who learned to play guitar by way of Alfred: yes, there was an Alfred. But it’s complicated. Here, courtesy of the Internet Archive, is the title page from Book One of the 1959 edition of Alfred’s Basic Guitar Method.

[Same as it ever was. The first three pieces of music: “More,” “Still More,” “No More.” Click for a larger view.]

Here’s where things get strange. Notice the names on the cover: Alfred d’Auberge and Morton Manus. As far as I can tell, there never was an Alfred d’Auberge. I suspect that “he” was just a suave-sounding name to go with the name Alfred Music Co. The real Alfred was Alfred Haase, who sold his music publishing company to Sam Manus in 1930, long before these instruction books were created. Morton Manus was Sam Manus’s son.

Alfred’s Basic Guitar Method lives on, with the first three books now credited to Morty (not Morton) Manus and his son Ron Manus. Books Four, Five, and Six are still credited to Morton Manus and Alfred d’Auberge. Here’s some company history.

[Mel Bay: the lost Spice Guy?]

A Tunes, for beginner violinists

Elaine Fine has a book of violin pieces out from Mel Bay, A Tunes: Capricious Pieces for Beginner Violinists:

Incorporating skills taught in many popular violin methods, these tuneful solo pieces offer a fresh alternative for teachers who would like a stimulating supplement to their usual method. These entertaining and whimsical compositions reinforce and develop violin skills through repetition disguised as lyrical musical phrases. They strengthen the left hand, exercise the fourth finger, and use rests in musically compelling ways that keep the student attentive.

The description continues on the Mel Bay website.

Elaine has written two blog posts — 1, 2 — about how she came to write these pieces.

As a teenager I was baffled by a Mel Bay book of chord progressions for guitar. It was like trying to read cuneiform. And now here I am, married to a Mel Bay author. Life has surprises.

“The Vermeers”

Albertine has been to Amsterdam.

Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah, trans. John Sturrock (New York: Penguin, 2005).

Albertine, alas, thinks that the Vermeers are people. Or at least the narrator thinks that Albertine thinks, &c.

Related reading
All OCA Proust posts (Pinboard)

“As seen in Wal-Mart”

A customer, in her fifties at least, no mask, wearing a sweatshirt with this motto:

I’M JUST WTF-ING MY WAY THROUGH LIFE

You said it, lady.

How to improve writing (no. 91)

Sometimes when I look at an old post, say, this one, a review of Benjamin Dreyer’s Dreyer’s English, I wonder how I could have missed what now seems so obvious.

My original sentence:

It’s ready for the next stage in the publication process.

“The publication process,” like “the writing process,” is a ponderous, empty phrase. Newly revised:

It’s ready for the next step toward publication.

Related reading
All OCA “How to improve writing” posts (Pinboard)

[This post is no. 91 in a series dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose, including my own. The writing process has no necessary end.]

“Commensurate”?

“If they lose a Democrat, they need a commensurate Republican”: Brian Williams, speaking of the Senate, on The 11th Hour just now.

Meaning: they need a Republican, any Republican. But if there’s a more pompous way to say it, Brian Williams will find it.

Other things Brian Williams has said
False drama : A secret whiteboard : A seven-inch business card : A Great Migration

Recently updated

#Sedition3PTruck Now there’s a resolution of condemnation in the Illinois House.

“Effeminate”?

“He was a skinny high school student who had asthma, a high-pitched voice and effeminate mannerisms”: it’s a good story, in The New York Times.

But isn’t characterizing someone’s way of being as “effeminate” part of the problem to begin with?

“A blue-grey bracelet of jetsam”

West London, the early 1960s. A boy who will grow up to write a book about sardines has a first encounter with the small oily fish:

For a six–year-old, tinned sardines in oil squashed onto two slices of toasted white bread were a complete meal. In contrast to any other canned food we ate, they were savoury, not sweet. By the time they arrived on the plate they had been crushed almost beyond recognition. Nevertheless, I was still curious enough to conduct a post-mortem, teasing out the grey flesh and seeking to discover with the patches of varying colour and texture might be in the living fish. The piece I usually extracted was the backbone. The other bones would melt away to the bite, but the backbone would stubbornly maintain its gritty texture. I'd heft it to the side of the plate — a blue-grey bracelet of jetsam on the plate’s shoreline.

Trevor Day, Sardine (London: Reaktion, 2018).

“A blue-grey bracelet of jetsam on the plate’s shoreline”: in its elegance and strangeness, that metaphor is downright Proustian.

Related reading
All OCA sardine posts (Pinboard) : “Sardines are opportunistic” (Also from this book)

Life and arts

Charles Swann is dying. He speaks to the narrator in a private moment at (yet another) soirée.

Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah, trans. John Sturrock (New York: Penguin, 2005).

A hundred-odd pages into this volume, filled with social jabs and slights, I find Swann’s plainspoken emotion deeply moving. O unnamed narrator, likely named Marcel, you are learning a lot.

Related reading
All OCA Proust posts (Pinboard)