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Cleaning out some old boxes from the garage today I discovered this signature from Philip Farkas!
Farkas should need no introduction to regular readers of Horn Matters. When I was a Doctoral student at Indiana University in the late 1980s he was retired but still living in Bloomington, and I took several lessons with him. I remember working on excerpts and talking about my embouchure and warm-up, and just to take in his teaching studio in the basement was a treat. After one of these lessons, on June 16, 1989 specifically, he gave me this signature.
As you might have already guessed, the signature is on a cancelled check.
And how much would you have guessed Farkas would have charged? I know there were big name players back then that charged over $100 an hour, but Philip Farkas charged me only $50 a lesson. For a long time as a younger professional I struggled in fact to charge more than that — how could I charge more than Mr. Farkas charged me?
Eventually I got past that hurdle (inflation helped me out a bit, too), and it was neat to stumble upon this item today. Who knows, I might even frame it, a neat memory of the brief contact I had with one of the great horn teachers.
