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OFFICIAL ACT Form Z08 · 2020

Reading

20 questions ~9 min recommended
⏱ 00:00
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=== Unless: A Novel ===
...(passage text omitted for brevity)...

=== Passage A by Stuart Isacoff ===
During the 1960s I had the honor of being Oscar Peterson’s private student. He and some colleagues had started a school for contemporary music, and though there had to be around fifty students, after about two or three weeks he took me under his wing. From that time on, I saw him three or four times a week, instead of the usual once. He gave me the key to his studio so I could practice on his piano. That was necessary, because he had me practicing thirteen hours a day. Yet, as soon as the keyboard was within reach, he thrust out his right arm and grabbed a handful of notes; at that signal, the bass player, drummer, and guitarist launched into their first number. And suddenly there was that sound. He still had it—a musical personality as large as life, steeped in tradition yet recognizably, unmistakably all its own. For dazzling technique, he followed the lessons of the European classical tradition, culled from childhood sessions first with his sister, Daisy, then with local pianist Louis Hooper and the Hungarian teacher Paul de Marky. He was so serious about his lessons as a young boy that he would practice for up to eighteen hours at a time, he said, on days 'when my mother didn’t drag me off the stool.' De Marky was a good model: he had studied in Budapest with Stefan Thomán, who had studied with the great Franz Liszt—a musical titan of his day and the founder of modern piano technique. De Marky trained Peterson in that great tradition, and assigned the pianist other staples of the repertoire, such as Chopin’s treacherously difficult Etudes. And as he taught Peterson, Paul de Marky honed in on Chopin’s most important trait. 'I don’t hear the melody singing,' he would tell his student. 'The melody is choppy. Make it sing.' And so the works of the celebrated classical composers—great improvisers, all—served as his training ground. So Oscar Peterson didn’t let his students play like him—or like anybody else, for that matter. One day I was using chord voicings [particular spatial arrangements of the tones in a harmony] like those of Bill Evans and he yelled: 'You know that’s not you!' He had a formula for achieving beautiful results at the piano. He called it 'the five T’s': touch, time, tone, technique, and taste. Of course, he had them all. Paul de Marky also encouraged Oscar Peterson’s immersion in the jazz canon. Peterson remembered, 'What I loved about him was that he was not short-sighted. He was a fantastic classical pianist. But I would come to him for a lesson, and he’d be playing jazz records'—greats like Teddy Wilson, Nat 'King' Cole, and Duke Ellington. 'Their playing served as my rudiments,' he reported. Oscar Peterson’s rise to the top of the jazz pantheon was based on a formula that merged the classical European tradition and the homespun American one. But he focused especially on a common denominator he had found in the approach of all the greats: their refusal to settle for anything less than a full command of their resources. 'I never tried to sound like a trumpet or a clarinet,' he said. 'I was taught to respect [this instrument.'

1. The point of view from which the passage is narrated is best described as that of:

2. Details in the third paragraph (lines 30–47) serve primarily to develop a contrast between the:

3. It can most reasonably be inferred that the narrator reacted to her father’s patrolling of the garden with:

4. The phrase 'studied and careful program of increments' (lines 7–8) most nearly means that the flowers’ growth was:

5. Which of the following statements best captures the main idea of lines 17–19?

6. The narrator indicates that her mother would have reacted to the news that the narrator scratched the banister with a sense of:

7. Lines 28–29 suggest that the narrator found her parents’ approval to be:

8. As it is used in line 29, the word hard most nearly means:

9. The passage suggests that when the narrator’s father gave books the 'tact and smell of history' (line 69), he was:

10. According to the passage, when the narrator realizes that the moon follows everyone, she feels a little disappointed but primarily:

11. The author of Passage A characterizes Peterson’s musical style as:

12. Beginning with the third paragraph (lines 15–25), the focus of Passage A shifts from a description of one of Peterson’s performances to:

13. The author of Passage A bases the claim that de Marky was a good model for Peterson most directly on the fact that de Marky:

14. Which of the following statements best captures what Peterson loved about de Marky’s habit of playing jazz records?

15. Passage B can best be described as:

16. Passage B indicates that, compared to the author’s prior piano training, Peterson’s training taught the author more about:

17. Peterson’s example regarding jazz organists, as it is presented in Passage B, indicates that piano players who want to develop a personal sound should avoid:

18. Both passages suggest that a key component of Peterson’s musical talent is his:

19. Both passages most strongly suggest that Peterson viewed the piano as an instrument that:

20. Of the musical training experiences described in Passage A, which experience does Passage B seem to suggest Peterson considered important to require of his own students?

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