Photo 42a-44K: Back of photo says in Ann's handwriting "Laurette & Joe, June 1942." Note how comfortable Tita is with Joseph Canter compared to 1941. Joseph and Ann Canter were married 16 April 1942.	Photo 42b-48K: Back says in Ann's writing, "Dorothy Heller & Sheila, June 1942." Then added, in Tita's writing, "Left, Tita Larry".

Photo 42c-68K: In Tita's handwriting, "Tita's Grade 5A 10 years old 1942." This is Jefferson Elementary School. Tita is to the right in back, under the arrow.

Photo 43a-24K: Tita and Ann Canter, 16 January 1943, Laurette's eleventh birthday. After Ann died on 19 April 1993 Laurette placed this photo in a prominent place on her desk where it remained for more than twelve years -- until removed by myself two months after Laurette herself died on 3 April 2005.	Photo 43b-28K: The New Canter Family: Ann - Joe - Tita. February 1943. I left a gap at the top to show I was not responsible for Mr. Canter's new haircut! Tita is truly happy with her new life.

Photo 43c-56K: "Laurette Canter & Shirley Shoemaker, July 1943" riding what appears to be a brand new bicycle.	Photo 44a-32K: Rachel Mary with her youngest daughter, Sarah in 1944. Sarah would die young in 1970, always remembered with great fondness by her niece, Laurette.

Photo 44b-28K: Tita holding her brother Harvey Canter, born 6 July 1944, in the summer of 1944.

Photo 44c-24K: Joseph Canter bought this home at 718 N St. Louis Blvd., South Bend for his growing family in the winter of 1944. It was an easy walk for Laurette Canter from here to the campuses of Notre Dame and Saint Mary's College.

Photo 45a-28K: Laurette Canter from a photo booth on 5 February 1945, probably shortly after her Bat Mitzvah. She was the first Bat Mitzvah in her community, according to her Oral History published by UC Berkeley in 1996.

Photo 45b-32K: Harvey Canter aged nine months chatting with his half sister Tita in their home at 718 N St. Louis Boulevard, South Bend, Indiana in April 1945. The back porch has been enclosed.	Photo 45c-40K: In Ann's handwriting: "Mother's Day 1945. Sarah, Larry, Tita, Harvey, Grandpa, South Bend." Larry would be the son of Aunt Sarah and her husband Benjamin Lerner, MD.

You said you started to play chamber music at around eight?

Ten. That was with the students in the high school. There was a singer in what was called "Little Italy", a neighborhood where lots of Italians lived. I was accompanying opera. There was something called the North Central Teachers Association annual event where people prepared solos and ensembles and competed with one another for prizes and ribbons and things. I would sometimes play for fourteen people because I sight-read so fast that I could just about play anything they handed me.

And I loved it. I LOVED it. I loved being an accompanist. I didn't need to be the top dog. I appreciated the joys of the sounds being made together. I especially appreciated the relationships. I hated to practice because it was so lonely, but I loved playing and being of service to another musician. I just loved it. That's what I was going to do when I grew up. I wrote in my career book when I was twelve, like we're always supposed to do in those days, on being a vocal accompanist. I did research on it because I had seen so many operas and concerts. I knew what that was all about.

So you did some chamber music, but mostly it was accompanying singers?

I had a preference. When I was little, and I played for the class, and they weren't very good, so I wasn't so inspired. But when I was twelve and started getting paid fifty cents an hour to accompany the local voice teacher, I fell passionately in love with Italian art songs. I took them to bed and wept and sang all night the first time I heard one. It was very clear what my path was.

Since my mother had never created any intellectual barriers for me -- if I loved singing, then go study singing. She never was directing my passions in that regard. She considered any good education or any art a worthy thing. So I started studying voice and it was clear that I didn't have a gift for singing. Being an accompanist was the closest thing to being a singer. And that was how I figured out what I wanted to be. It was when I was eleven I realized that I liked singing. I didn't fall in love with singing until I was twelve.

In taking some voice lessons -- this must have added to your ability to accompany.

Oh, absolutely. That's why I started coaching when I was twelve also. Of course it was an inspiration for me to study languages because they were singing in foreign languages, and I wanted to know what those words meant. Of course, in Italian, you only need to know twenty five words. After those twenty five, then everything is clear -- core, trattare, petto -- all the love words. So I learned those words, and I picked out things, and I spoke Spanish. Then I was also able to supplement my income in college by coaching because I'd learned something about vocal production. Coaching a singing teacher, I heard some exercises. I think I also realized how needy singers are -- in a way they never grow up, they don't. They have to be accessible emotionally to the world. It's not because they're stupid, it's the nature of their work.

I remember the first opera singer I played for, an Italian -- she used to take her shoes off and take a straight shot of whiskey and belt out all the marvelous Italian opera songs. It blew me away. I understood her -- she was my kind person! I was thirteen or whatever, and she was in her twenties. The first country I wanted to go to when I went to Europe was Italy, not Israel. There was no mistake that it's called the cradle of music and has been since the seventh century. The language also lends itself, and the nature of the people.

Obviously your music career began very early. How much of an impact on your social life did this have?

It WAS my social life, of course. Most kids couldn't understand me because I was speaking in words with three syllables. When I was nine and a half or ten, I met a wonderful girl who was a year or two older than me, an Irish Catholic, a simple person, the highest quality of human being. I used to go and take lessons from her on how to endear myself to regular people. It was a very conscious thing. They didn't even have a refrigerator, they had an icebox. But she was my mentor. I loved her. She was a neighbor girl, and I don't know what became of her.

Do you remember her name? [Dorothy Heller, photo 42b above?]

No, I don't even remember her name. This was after summer camp, and I had a ghastly time in some ways. I had a good time with the older kids, but my own peers couldn't understand me for sour apples. So I was motivated to understand my own peers, and I went to somebody to help me with that, and that was her. She was so dear, such a sweet and fine young person to understand what I needed. She talked to me about telling jokes and having a sense of humor and learning the folk songs that everybody liked to sing, and not making people so uncomfortable with all this intellect that was so big at the time.

So I didn't need to do that anymore. That's how I became the president of the seventh grade class because I was a good pupil. I never bragged -- it wasn't a question of bragging to my peers about that because I knew that wasn't going to get me anywhere anyway. I used to start in the sixth grade helping the kids who were flunking because she made me understand -- she was a truly good person -- that serving is a way to be loved, and it's a way to be happy. I've often wondered what happened to her because she disappeared from my life early. She could not have been in my life for longer than a year and a half. The family maybe ran out of money -- they didn't own the house. She was gone, and I don't know what happened to her. [OH-21,22,23]

Tell me about Bach at eleven.

When I was at St. Mary's, studying with all these wonderful people, the teacher at what was considered an appropriate time gave me one of the Bach Inventions which I hated because I couldn't play it, and I could play so many other things. She persisted, and she gave me another one, "This is good for you." Of course I fell in love with the second one because as soon as I could play it, I realized the monumental mind and the gorgeous music that was coming out of the piano. From then on, that was it. As far as I was concerned, there wasn't anything else in the world that mattered that much. So she just kept giving me music. She gave me all kinds of music, but I was playing Bach probably every week of my life. She didn't tell me much. I figured it out myself because he's so sensible.

He is extraordinary, isn't he? What other music were you attracted to?

It was very interesting. The Beethoven concerto [Piano Concerto No. 1 in C Major] -- I liked the Beethoven concerto, but there were some things that were not being explained to me, and I was very puzzled and upset. One day, they brought a great teacher to the college from Chicago. Of course I got a free lesson with him like everybody else because of their attitude towards me. What he finally said -- you know, I wasn't getting it. He said, "This is like Mozart." I shouted at him, "Why didn't somebody tell me?" Because I understood -- I mean, Mozart wasn't my favorite composer, but I understood more about him. Early Beethoven is very much like Mozart.

So I was introduced to Chopin, Brahms, Mozart, Haydn -- there was no lack of quality classical eighteenth and nineteenth century music. I didn't know about performance practice or harpsichords or Telemann and all that, but I got standard repertory all the way. I loved it, and I loved some more than others. But Bach was for me so clearly superior to everything else that ever had been written that I didn't have a problem with it. My teacher didn't mind that I liked to play Bach. She gave me good editions and bad editions. I have my edition from when I was twelve when I was suffering particular adolescent angst. The C minor Partita No. 2 and the C sharp minor Five Voice Triple Fugue were my consolations.

So that was something that I feel that my culture, my mother and my teachers prepared me for so that when I met Bach -- and I didn't meet him when I was six either, thank God for that. Bach didn't even start teaching his kids until they were nine and a half. I do a great deal of instructing of Bach, and I listen to hundreds and hundreds of children because I judge. My initial goal in life is to instruct piano teachers because they are the people that create a musical community because that's where it all begins at some level. My big job is to teach them about Bach so that they won't confuse and disrupt the capacity of the child to love Bach. That's why the Junior Bach Festival is my very special work that I've done for a long, long time because I know what Bach did for me. [OH-24,25]

You had a debut performance at St. Mary's when you were about twelve?

... I played with the college orchestra the Beethoven C Major Concerto when I was twelve. Of course it was the most important moment of my life. I hadn't been bat mitzvahed yet. Those were the two big things in my life. To play with an orchestra when you're twelve is a big deal, and in those days it was an even bigger deal than it is now... I was just at the age where you begin to be scared... usually it's around the age of puberty that the consciousness of being an individual person arises, and you get nervous around performance. [OH-18,19]

So at thirteen, then, you had a bat mitzvah?

Yes, I was the first one in my town [South Bend] to have a bat mitzvah -- bar mitzvahs had been our tradition for all these many centuries. But the girls didn't participate in that sort of thing. I was the first one. I went to a reformed temple because of various problems my family had with the rabbi at the conservative temple, because of course my grandparents were orthodox. My grandmother didn't even go to the bat mitzvah because she thought it was ridiculous.

Were you the one who requested this or was it your mother who desired it?

Since I was bright, I aspired to it. I think it was my idea for two reasons. One, because I didn't have to go to Hebrew school after thirteen, otherwise I'd go until I was fifteen; it was kind of a wimpy education. Two, I knew that bar mitzvahs and bat mitzvahs were serious, and I liked to learn a lot. So, I picked it. I also was a theatrical person. I mean, I wanted to get up there and do my thing in front of everybody. And I loved being Jewish. It was perfectly understandable. It was a new idea among American Jews.

How did that go? What kind of an experience was that?

It was a disappointment to me in only one respect. Because of the circumstances of the arrangements, the original rabbi went away -- thank God, because he was a man who was a little short on spirituality. He was a chaplain for the Navy. This refugee from the Holocaust came, and I loved him. You can imagine his spirituality because with the Holocaust experience you either became an atheist or devoted to being Jewish. He had verities about life that I loved.

My disappointment was that I had to share my bat mitzvah with a boy because of scheduling. And I thought, "I'm supposed to be a soloist, and here I am," you know, so that was my only disappointment. It was just being top dog, like any other theatrical person. He was kind of a wimpy, sweet guy, and he didn't have a chance! [laughs] I treated him kind of like a pet. He was a poet, would you believe it? He wrote poetry. I appreciated that in him very much...

Traditionally -- it's my understanding that this represents an important passage in life.

In orthodox life, technically it means a taking of responsibility for your behavior. According to the Jewish law, when you're thirteen, all the marks against you go toward you in God's eyes; before that, it's your parents' problem. It's a taking of responsibility; it's kind of like baptism by the Anabaptists. It's a very important event.

Did that have an impact on you?

I was delighted. I was delighted to be officially Jewish. I had great disdain for that community, the reformed community, because it wasn't serious enough, and I had a lot of confusion about what kind of Judaism I wanted to practice, but I was very pleased to have done it. And I didn't have to go through the next two years of silly communion which didn't mean much to me because I would rather be practicing or studying or doing something else. I was altogether pleased with that -- it was a good thing. I was a historical traditionalist. [OH-27,28]