manners, please!

im posting an article of Julie Yap-Daza on today's issue of panorama magazine. to the other pianist, the soprano and the tenor julie was refering too, i do hope you all get to read the article and learn from it. your talent will go to waste if you lack manners. talent alone won't bring you anywhere.

to my dearest tita nora, you are the best pianist for me and you rock!

medium rare: manners,please!

Since the event that I am about to narrate transpired two months ago, my anger has subsided and I am now able to recollect what happened with less emotion. A warning, though: Readers who don’t practice good manners or expect them from the people around them will only be wasting their time if they continue reading this piece.

It was a multimedia event. An exhibit of big paintings in free style, exploding in exuberant colors suggesting the likeness of amoeba, cells and other otherwise microscopic forms that we take for granted. A musical soiree featuring pianists and singers. And of course, fingerfoods matched with cocktails.

The program was held at the Podium, the second floor of which offers an appropriate size for such exhibits and musical fare. The repertoire included solo piano pieces rendered by Elnora Halili, spanning Broadway and standards plus beloved Philippine melodies. It was Elnora’s pianistic skills and arrangements of popular songs that I came for, but I was delighted to learn that there would be arias to be rendered by a soprano and a tenor (both of whom I shall not name), plus a guest performer, the painter Alan Cosio, tonight performing as a tenor, too.

The first part of the program sailed off to a melodious conclusion. The soprano, I noticed, had done her part: she had changed from her long gown into a casual white shirt and blue jeans; she was ready to exit the program after performing her share.

The second part was just starting, with Ms. Halili captivating her audience with original arrangements of song hits from yesterday. But in the middle of "The Prayer" as her fingers traveled up and down the keyboard, another pianist, the woman who had accompanied the soprano and the tenor when they sang their numbers in Part One, went up the stage. This accompanist practically shoved the petite and demure Ms. Halili off the bench, forcing her to stop in her tracks and end "The Prayer" without ending it.

Ms. Halili demurely collected her music sheets and calmly left the stage while the big pianist, the one who had just evicted her summarily from the piano, took over and began playing the introductory chords for her accompanist’s version of The Prayer. That was when the soprano stood up from her seat and began singing The Prayer with the tenor! The soprano’s desire to sing The Prayer, no doubt provoked by Ms. Halili’s beautiful piano solo, must have been so overwhelming that she lost her manners and felt compelled to grab the spotlight again, at the expense of removing a fellow artist from the stage in the middle of a pianistic moment!

So soprano and tenor sang, and accompanist played, as if they had not committed any breach of etiquette, as if the world belonged to them. By this time, I was seething in anger for the petite and demure Elnora, so as she left the stage to take her chair with the rest of the audience, I stood up from my chair, grabbed her hand, and told her, "We are walking out of here, Miss Halili! We are not letting them do this to you!"

Only a handful of people in the audience realized what was going on – an indication of how low we have sunk in practicing good manners and right conduct? But the few who did notice followed Elnora out of the hall to commiserate with her. One of them said she was shocked at how musicians and so-called "cultured people" behave like "uncivilized people." Another, a mother with her 10-year-old son in tow, a budding pianist, said: "They wouldn’t have done that to Cecile Licad or to a foreigner! I’m so sorry it had to happen to you, Miss Halili. And I don’t think they are going to apologize to you, because they don’t seem to understand that what they have done is wrong. How sad."

She said it was all the more sad because her son had witnessed it.

Am I making a mountain out of a molehill? Two months after that unpardonable breach of good manners, I’m still very angry, though no longer explosively so. I’m angry on behalf of the pianist Elnora and I’m angry that the fellow musicians who’ve done her wrong go about their merry way with no one calling their attention to their insensitivity and lack of manners. Maybe I should also be angry at the petite and demure Ms. Halili, because as she told me, "I’m not angry, I’m not crying."

Okay, so let me do the angry part. As for crying, I hope she will allow me the luxury of pretending that she has a few drops of hot tears inside her brave heart struggling to be shed – at least during those times when she’s playing music that requires pathos and sorrow.