You know the concept of degrees of separation — that you can connect any two people in the world through a relatively small number of steps, in which A knows B, and B knows C, and C knows D …
I amuse myself sometimes by playing this game to see who I can connect myself with. Case in point …
I’ve just been asked to play the piano for a flute student who is working on the Flute Sonata by Paul Hindemith, an important 20th-century composer. I have a couple of connections to this piece, the first being that I’ve played it before, when I was at Connecticut College in the 1970s and 1980s, and played for a lot of flute students.
But there’s an even closer connection, to the composer himself. In college, my piano teacher was Lydia Hoffmann-Behrendt. She knew Hindemith — they were both Germans who had fled from the Nazis and wound up in New England. Hindemith taught at Yale, so I assume he was more-or-less settled in New Haven. Mrs. Behrendt (as her students called her) had a studio in the music department at Dartmouth, 200 miles north of Yale, and was the de facto piano instructor, though I’m not sure whether she had any official appointment at the college.
She certainly knew Hindemith well enough to have performed with him in New York in 1939, as this New York Times article demonstrates:
So only two steps separate me from Hindemith.
You can listen to the flute piece here: https://youtu.be/quDiUSgB8x0?list=RDquDiUSgB8x0
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