by Elizabeth Gardner

The final meeting of the Foothills Music Club (FMC) took place at the home of Mimi Child Traxler on Thursday, May 12. President Jeanette Shackelford presided at the brief business meeting, during which club members voted unanimously to designate the first-place award in each year’s FMC scholarship competition as the Lesley Oakes scholarship, in honor of the club’s founder. The FMC was organized in 1988 and since then has provided regular performance opportunities for local musicians and scholarships to help local youth pursue their musical interests.

The afternoon’s musical program, titled “Musical Mélange,” was organized by Amy Brucksch, who introduced the performers.

The Harvey Girls, singers Ann Harvey Morgan and her daughter Ellen Harvey Zipf in look-alike outfits, drew the audience into their singing of echo songs and rounds. Both of the Harvey girls have extensive experience singing in women’s a cappella ensembles and have done music therapy for the ill, elderly and infirm.

Lesley Oakes and Mimi Child Traxler played “Polonaise and Badinerie” from J.S. Bach’s “Second Suite for orchestra,” as arranged for flute and piano. Oakes shared her story of an audition which she scheduled during her Easter break a couple of months before her graduation from college, when she realized that she would be out on the street without a job unless she took action. When she arrived for her scheduled audition she encountered a gruff, somewhat disheveled man in the hallway who asked her, “Who are you and what are you doing here?” When she told him that she had an appointment for an audition, he said, “Play.” She did and he responded, “I’ll call you.”

Several months later, he called her for another audition, which turned out to be a carbon copy of the first one. When he called again, she was determined to make sure that the result would be different, so she showed up in extremely high heels, her mother’s fur coat and a piled-to-the-sky hairdo. He hired her on the spot and she has been playing her flute ever since.

Elizabeth Gardner, who had previously appeared on FMC programs as a singer, made her debut as a classical guitarist. She played “Espanoleta” by Gaspar Sanz and “Gymnopédie No. 1,” a famous piano piece by Eric Satie, in a guitar transcription. Gardner studies with Amy Brucksch.

Troy Brooks, first prize winner in this year’s FMC scholarship competition, played the second movement of Paul Creston’s “Sonata for Alto Saxophone,” without piano accompaniment. Brooks played this lyrical piece with a great deal of musicality, unusual in someone so young. He will be attending Appalachian State University, where he plans to study all the way to a doctorate in musical performance. Club members said it was a pleasure to meet and hear this gifted young man.

Rita Stobbe then shifted the program into a lighter vein by performing three songs by Milton Schafer, a practically unknown composer of children’s songs, which were made famous by Danny Kaye in the 40s and 50s. The audience enjoyed them greatly and encouraged Rita to continue singing these songs.

The program concluded on a fully ridiculous note, with the “Improvisational Counterpoint of the Animals” by seventeenth-century composer Adriano Banchieri. After an opening passage of fa-la-las, a song was sung by John Gardner, bass, accompanied by a quartet of “animals” – Elaine Jenkins, soprano, as the cuckoo, Rita Stobbe, soprano, as the owl, Jeanette Shackelford, alto, as the cat, and Richard Kennedy, tenor, as the dog – followed by more fa-la-las, providing a most fitting end to the FMC’s “Merry Month of Maying.”