A Rare Teaching Opportunity

Yesterday I was working on a minuet with a beginning student, and when she came upon one of these



her immediate response was, "What is THAT?"

[The student's name is a diminutive of Grace, and I knew that this was a rare and golden opportunity.]

I told her what it was, and she laughed. She suggested that maybe I told her older brother, who also studies with me, that that kind of note had his name on it. We consulted the dictionary, and she knew that I was not fooling with her.

I told her that since it had her name on it she could play it as long or briefly as she liked, as long as the combination of the grace note and the main note added up to the value of the main note. She liked that.