Praxiteles Pandel ( Panteleakis)

English
The photo and text below comes from our society's 1954 album .
The text states: Our new Pianist whose musical talent is soon to be discovered.


Απο το πρώτο λεύκωμα του συλλόγου μας το 1954.

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Ο Πραξιτέλης Παντελεάκης  από το McKeesport της Πενσυλβανίας (γιος του Σαράντου και της Θοδώρας από τις Κροκεές Λακωνίας ) αποφοίτησε από τη σχολή καλών τεχνών Τζούλιαρντ στην Νέα Υόρκή.  Έχει δώσει ρεσιτάλ πιάνου στα μεγαλύτερα  μουσικά χολ της Αμερικής όπως το Κάρναγκι  και το Μουσείο του Βρουκλυν στην Νέα Υόρκη, το Τζόρτναν χολ στη Βοστόνη και πολλά άλλα. Επίσης έχει παρουσιαστεί αμέτρητες φορές ως σολίστας πιάνου στα μεγάλα τηλεοπτικά δίκτυα  CBS και NBC της Αμερικής ενώ με την συνοδεία συμφωνικής αρχήστρας εχει ερμηνεύσει εργα μεγάλων κλασικών συνθετών οπως Beethoven, Schumann, Liszt, και Rachmaninoff. Είναι συνιδρυτής της εταιρίας δίσκων Dimension 5, η οποια εκδίδει κυρίως μουσική για παιδιά, καθώς και έχει κάνει πάρα πολλές μαγνητοφωνήσεις. Έχει βραβευθεί πολλαπλώς, τελευταία δε και από την βουλή των αντιπροσώπων της Αγγλίας.

Σήμερα (1-04) είναι καθηγητής / διευθηντής του τμήματος πιάνου στο West Chester University  της Πενσυλβανίας στις Ηνωμένες Πολιτείες

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RAXITELES PANDEL
Department Chairperson

Associate Professor of Keyboard Music

B.M., M.S., The Juilliard School

At the Juilliard School, Ted Pandel was a student of Beveridge Webster and Mieczylaw Munz. His Carnegie Recital Hall debut was followed by a return engagement there and ensuing recitals in Town Hall, Brooklyn Museum, Jordan Hall in Boston, and Carnegie Hall in Pittsburgh. He has been heard in the Philadelphia area on solo recitals at the Balch Institute, Brandywine River Museum, and Delaware County Community College. Professor Pandel has also appeared as piano soloist numerous times on the CBS and NBC television networks. He is musical consultant and co-founder of Dimension 5 Records for children.

Professor Pandel has appeared as soloist on six occasions with the McKeesport Symphony Orchestra, performing concertos of Beethoven, Schumann, Liszt, and Rachmaninoff. In 1987 he was honored as one of the first inductees into the McKeesport area Hall of Fame. Most recently, he was the recipient of a commendation from the Commonwealth's House of Representatives for his contributions in the discipline of music.

http://www.wcupa.edu/_information/official.documents/GRADUATE.CATALOG/MusicKey.htm

Theodora Pandel Memorial - Piano scholaship

http://www.wcupa.edu/_information/official.documents/Undergrad.Catalog/FinanAid.htm

Discography of Esther's "Songbook" cassettes

http://members.tripod.com/laraseven/esthertapes.html

Bruce Haack is perhaps best known for his innovative and engaging (and extremely hard to find) electronic records for children made from the mid/late 60's through the 70's and even into the 80's. Current 'electronic' acts and collectors seek these albums out for their exciting use of homemade synthesizers (homemade because it was difficult to find much else in the mid 60's), all built by Bruce himself to enhance his and his musical cohorts' (dance instructor Esther Nelson, pianist Praxiteles Pandel and numerous children)
Listen to music clips here
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00005Y8JC/ref%3Dnosim/qtvd-20/104-5699022-6793522

Ebenezer Electric [IMPORT]
Bruce Haack, Ted Pandel

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0000DJWO1/qid=1073165626/sr=11-1/ref=sr_11_1/104-5699022-6793522

                                                    Interview on Bruce Haack

Bruce Haack was born in 1931, in a small mining town in rural Alberta, Canada called Nordegg, and raised in another one nearby called Rocky Mountain House. His childhood was, according to Bruce, not a particularly pleasant one. His only friends were the farm animals, Christmas, his already overachieving imagination, and music. By age 3 he was able to play simple melodies on the family piano; he was peddling piano lessons as a pre-teen, and soon after began playing with local hillbilly bands (it wasn't called "country western" just yet).

TED PANDEL: Bruce would tell me horror stories about his childhood. He told me that his father was horribly deformed and his mother was wicked; she was always dying of something or another - cancer, heart conditions, and he always resented her for that. She had to have 17 major operations! Still, she outlived him... I met his parents, and his father was deformed - he was a polio victim, and had the bulging chest and a lump on his back. He was very bright, though - his mother was very strong willed and also quite intelligent. Bruce was an only child, and out where he grew up there was nobody else around. He was very lonely growing up. He would play with the animals and make up these amazing fantasy stories about them. Bruce was a Christmas fanatic. He would tell me that that was the only time that there was any peace in the house.

Rejected by the University of Alberta Music Program, he did end up graduating from the U. of A., Edmonton with a degree in Psychology. A combination of a Canadian Government scholarship and a Juilliard Scholarship led Bruce to New York's famed Juilliard School of Music, where he ran into pianist Ted "Praxiteles" Pandel, who became to Bruce what David Tudor was to John Cage - a lifelong associate and talented musical expositor.

During the 50s, Haack composed everything from Musique Concrete pieces like "Les Etapes"and "Lullabye for a Cat" to pop songs for the likes of Theresa Brewer ("Satellite" & "I Like Christmas"), to theatre productions (including a few corporate musicals) and dance scores. In the early 60s, Bruce (and usually Ted) appeared on various TV shows, including "I've Got A Secret", "The Tonight Show" and "The Gary Moore Show." They often demonstrated the "Dermatron", or "People-odeon", an invention of Bruce's that allowed one to "play" people using the different pressures and other parameters of skin-to-skin contact to control the pitch and ADSR of a number of oscillators.

TED: I had aluminum foil in my shorts, and a wire was coming out of my pants, going to the bank of oscillators, and Bruce had a metal bracelet on with a wire connected to the instrument; I played "Jet, My Love" - a pop song - on the piano, and he played the melody on my forehead. The larger the contact, the lower the note... We were on "I've Got A Secret"; the guest was Victor Borge, and his secret was that he was going to play these 12 girls; Bruce had them hooked up to play a chromatic scale. Right before the taping, the damn thing broke down, and I remember Bruce, who really knew nothing about electronics, with sweat pouring down his brow, somehow managing to fix it just seconds before they rolled the tape! There was a toy company that paid Bruce like $100 every week just to hang on to the idea, but nothing ever came of it. He also had a patent for a Theremin-like thing called "The Magic Wand" that another toy company was interested in, but that never went anywhere either.

Bruce kept on composing during this time; Pandel played his "Mass for Solo Piano" at Carnegie Hall. Unfortunately no one, with the exception of Chris Albertson on WBAI, played one of his favorite compositions, the still unreleased "Garden of Delights", a mixture of synthesized sounds and Gregorian chant.

The early '60s also found Bruce augmenting his income from his job at a peanut store as a dance accompanist. One of the teachers he worked with in this capacity was Esther Nelson, an open minded children1s dance educator with a vaguely bohemian bent.

MISS NELSON: He was a true genius - and he was fabulous with the kids - they adored him! He would actually climb right inside the piano! He'd put all these things into the piano to change the sound - I guess that's called 'preparing' the piano; he also had a million instruments that he would bring to class. He was like a one man band! He'd play piano with one hand, play a drum with another, and play a bird whistle or harmonica or something, all at the same time! He was absolutely amazing! There wasn't a thing he didn't play. he could take a pencil, and on your kitchen table He'd play Beethoven's 9th - and you could hear it!

After a few "open" dance classes (classes the parents would be invited to attend), Miss Nelson and Bruce started receiving requests for "something to use at home" so the children could continue working at the imagination level to which they had become accustomed. This provided the impetus to form a record label, which they called "Dimension 5", that being, appropriately enough, the dimension of imagination.

MISS NELSON: We recorded the first records at Ted and Bruce's place in Manhattan, on 71st St. They lived in an old brownstone; when you'd ring, Bruce would tie the key to a handkerchief, which acted like a parachute, and there it would come, floating down from their window. He built a fountain in the kitchen, how I don't know to this day, but it was incredible! The first records were recorded with a $7 microphone! And I remember we always had to stop at 11:00 when the garbage truck went by, because there was just no soundproofing or insulation! We recorded everything with Bruce's two reel to reel tape recorders and instruments that he made from $1.00 grab-bags of electronic junk that he'd buy on Canal Street. It wasn't just primitive; it was prehistoric!

TED: Esther ran the books, and got the guy that was responsible for the catalogues at FAO Schwartz, to come over to the house and meet with her and Bruce and I - it was very important to have the records in these educational catalogues in order to sell them! And they got lots of great reviews - the New Yorker, the Times...

MISS NELSON: We got this rave review in the Sunday Times, and I took it to this big toy and educational supply house and said "Look at this wonderful review" They said "Big deal! But we'll take five records - send us an invoice." I had no clue what an invoice was! I mean we had no knowledge of any of that! The pressing plant would send me the records, the printing plant would send the sleeves, and my kids and I had to put the records in the covers and then drag them down to the post office to ship them - My kids and I did all that kind of work; that wasn't Bruce's department. Despite these primitive conditions, or perhaps because of them, the records were (as I'm sure you'll soon notice if you haven't already) absolutely unique; strange and wonderful creations all, the Avant Garde elements tempered with a witty, personable and totally un-affected delivery. They displayed a rare and genuine understanding of their target audience - children. Where most kiddie fare will lapse into hideous "pooky-wooky" baby-talk, the Dimension 5 albums speak to kids as if they were, like, human beings or something. Maybe that's why most of the same adults who can't tolerate "Barney" for 5 seconds can listen to the entirety of "The Way Out Record" again and again... TED: Bruce saw himself as a teacher; but he would never be able to hold down a job as a teacher, because he couldn't stand that structure; he would fit in intellectually all right - he could really hold forth with those academic types - but when it came down to the nitty-gritty of having to be evaluated and observed or to be specific and methodical, he would just drop out and disappear.

During the latter part of the '60s, Bruce's friend Chris Kachulis (who would later bring Haack's "Electric Lucifer" project to Columbia) helped him find work scoring commercials for such illustrious products as Kraft Cheese, Goodyear Tires, Lincoln Life Insurance, and Parker Bros. Games. It was around this time that he and Miss Nelson appeared on the Mister Rogers' Neighborhood show on PBS, demonstrating how this new-fangled thing called a "synthesizer" worked.

After the release of "The Electric Lucifer" in 1970, Bruce became friends with electronic music pioneer, composer, and fellow Canal Street bargain hunter Raymond Scott. They worked together with some of Scott's recent inventions - the "Electronium" and the "Clavivox." Scott actually gave Bruce a Clavivox, but unfortunately Bruce never recorded with it himself (although a tape of Bruce Haack Electronium demos is rumored to exist). Still, Haack remained focused on doing things for that group to which so many Rock jerks only paid lip service: the kids.

MISS NELSON: Like I said, children just adored Bruce! When my youngest daughter was 5 she said to Bruce one day "Bruce, how come you can play such beautiful music?" And he said, "Risa, how come you are so beautiful?" And she said "I just am;" Bruce said "And I just can..."

His next Dimension 5 album, "Together", was credited to Jackpine Savage, a pseudonym he had wanted to use since hanging with the Native Canadians near Rocky Mountain House. This LP was sort of a bridge that connected the Rock vibe of "Lucifer" with his children's records to come. After 1972's "Dance To the Music", Bruce followed Ted Pandel to Westchester, PA., where Ted's new teaching job brought in enough money for the both of them.

MISS NELSON: There are some geniuses, and Bruce was a genius, who are like natural and national treasures, and need to be protected. Bruce was that sort...

TED: There wasn't a Casio in the place that hadn't been rewired and hotrodded!

In Westchester, Bruce was free to concentrate on making music, so make it he did, albeit without Miss Nelson. "Captain Entropy" and "This Old Man" were created there, as were various non-Dimension 5 children1s projects, like "The Witches Vacation" and "Clifford the Small Red Puppy" which he did for Scholastic Magazine Records (collectors take note!). Bruce and Miss Nelson collaborated once more, on an LP of futuristic square dances called "Funky Doodle", before he again went "solo", recording three more LPs worth of material in a harsher, more "Luciferian" vein: the still unreleased (as of this writing) "Haackula", "Electric Lucifer Book II", and the non-Dim. 5 "Bite." It was during this time that "Lucifer"'s advocate, Chris Kachulis, brought one of 20th century music's most important figures to Bruce's lair...

TED: John Cage came to the house, and Bruce played him "Electric Lucifer Book 2". Afterwards, there was dead silence (for 4' and 33''?)Cage was such a minimalist, and Bruce's stuff was so full of words and music - I think he finally said something like "Oh, that's very interesting", but that was the end of that visit.

Kachulis, who, incidentally, sang on "Electric Lucifer" and "Together," also brought the other most important figure of 20th century music to Stately Pandel Manor in Westchester: Tiny Tim! Tiny and Bruce hit it off much better than Bruce had with Mr. Cage, and this legendary meeting yielded a wondrous, though scarce, LP called "Zoot Zoot Zoot- Here Comes Santa In His New Space Suit", with Tiny Tim doing the title track - the rest being Christmas songs lovingly written and/or rendered by Bruce, many from "Ebenezer Electric," his ultra-modern take on Dickens' "hristmas Carol."

Bruce's interests drifted away from Dimension 5 in the early '80s, but like Pink Floyd after Syd Barrett left, Dimension 5 kept on. Ted and Miss Nelson released various songbooks and sing-along tapes, and began switching most of the back catalogue from LP to cassette.

After a bout with diabetes and a short hospitalization for a heart condition, Bruce departed spaceship Earth for good on September 26th, 1988, dying in his sleep of apparent heart failure. I guess not even a fellow of Bruce Haack's stature can ignore a direct order from Captain Entropy.

MISS NELSON: Bruce was a true renaissance man... he was a poet, a writer, a composer par excellance. He called himself a "musical dyslexic", but he was the essence of music itself. He was a flowing fountain of creativity. There was no end to his imagination, and he gave it all unstintedly as his gift to the universe.

TED: What can I say about Bruce? Well, in a way, he was kind of like an Orson Welles - without the fame.           
 From http://www.emperornorton.com/mod/artistpage.php3?artist=bruce_haack