Suite Notes Mark 20th Anniversary With Bugbee Performance (Video)

White River Junction — Back when Jo Tansey was in her 80s and was, as she puts it, “early retired,” her friend Judy Hunter asked her if she would like to learn to play the recorder.

Tansey, of Canaan, had only played the violin a bit in her youth, but “I had to have something to do,” she said.

Hunter, the program director for the Bugbee Senior Center, knew where Tansey could find an ensemble: Damaris Tyler, a longtime music teacher for schoolchildren in the Upper Valley, would be directing a new recorder group, the Suite Notes, for seniors at Bugbee.

That was 1997.

Twenty years later — Hunter’s now 80, Tyler is 68 and Tansey, mum on the exact number, has passed 100 — the Suite Notes are still performing at such venues as community centers, retirement homes and public meals throughout the Upper Valley.

On Friday morning, they celebrated their 20th anniversary with a performance at Bugbee, in part to honor Hunter, who they say brought them together to keep their minds and fingers sharp while making new friendships.

“It’s filled out my life very well,” Tansey, the group’s longest-standing active performer, in addition to Tyler, said after the performance. “You’re always learning something, and that’s what I need.”

Tansey said there is a social benefit that comes with being a part of a musical ensemble, as well.

“Although we don’t have much time for that,” she noted, acknowledging that Tyler keeps the group on track during practices. “Look at her, she’s so young, and has so much energy.”

Indeed, during a brief practice session before the show, an animated Tyler alternated between playing a keyboard and several different recorders as she led the group — almost all bespectacled and decked in white blouses, red bow ties and black-and-white vests featuring a pattern of musical instruments — through tricky spots of their 10-song set.

“Long, short, short,” Tyler called out to the group at one point, and she asked them to pause after a string of six notes: “There’s a breath if I ever saw one.”

She elicited chuckles when she at once applauded and jested them after their test run of Though Philomela Lost Her Love: “Terrific, it’s a good opener — if you do it like that!”

Tyler, of Wilder, who previously taught school bands throughout the region and now does private one-on-one lessons, said that after working with children all week, teaching seniors is her reward.

“We do it to enjoy the other people,” she said.

After the seven women and two men shuttled their musical stands and recorders into the main room for the performances, Tyler asked Hunter, who retired as Bugbee’s program director in the early 2000s, to sit up front.

“We want you on display,” Tyler told Hunter. “This is all your doing.”

Hunter said she was pleased to see the group perform so long after she thought of the idea as a simple way for seniors to spend some time.

“In thinking of things that older people could do, I thought of the recorder,” she said.

After playing Though Philomela for the audience, the mix of bass recorders, tenors, altos and sopranos — recognizable as the recorder most often taught in schools — took on an arrangement that showed the range and variety of songs that they pursue, from Maple Sugar Time to the Tennessee Waltz. Their rendition of In The Garden had a number of attendees singing along in their seats.

Tyler said the group was averaging as many as 20 concerts a year a few years ago. Emily Santaw, administrative assistant at Bugbee, said that while they now do many of their practices at the Upper Valley Senior Center in Lebanon, “they wanted to keep their Bugbee roots.”

“It’s a positive-aging thing,” she said.

Participation swells during the summertime when retirees return from wintering in the south, leaders said, and players come to the group with a range of musical abilities, from folks such as Tansey, who had limited experience, to others, including Earl North, 88, a Suite Notes member since 2004 whose musical career dates back to joining the Army Band in 1945.

North was formerly the bassoonist for a woodwind group called the Sunflower Quartet that rehearsed in his home in Canaan, but stepped away from that group in 2013 because of arthritis in his hands. While he does not play the bassoon very often anymore, he has found playing the recorder in Suite Notes to be a good way to stay involved with music.

He chuckled as he listed the benefits of playing with Suite Notes: “Comradeship,” he said, “and a chance to show off.”

Maggie Cassidy can be reached at 603-727-3220 or mcassidy@vnews.com.