The following program notes are from an unidentified piano recital.

   Tonight's page turner, Ruth Spelke, studied under Ivan Schmertnick
   at the Boris Nitsky School of Page Turning in Philadelphia.  She has
   been turning pages here and abroad for many years for some of the
   world's leading pianists.

   In 1988, Ms. Spelke won the Wilson Page Turning Scholarship, which
   sent her to Israel to study page turning from left to right.  She is
   winner of the

   1984 Rimsky Korsakov Flight of the Bumblebee Prestissimo Medal,
   having turned 47 pages in an unprecedented 32 seconds.  She was also
   a 1983 silver medalist at the Klutz Musical Page Pickup Competition:
   contestants retrieve and rearrange a musical score dropped from a
   Yamaha.  Ms. Spelke excelled in "grace, swiftness, and especially
   poise."

   For techniques, Ms. Spelke performs both the finger-licking and
   the bent-page corner methods.  She works from a standard left bench
   position, and is the originator of the dipped-elbow page snatch, a
   style used to avoid obscuring the pianist's view of the music.  She
   is page turner in residence in Fairfield Iowa, where she occupies
   the coveted Alfred Hitchcock Chair at the Fairfield Page Turning
   Institute.

   Ms. Spelke is married, and has a nice house on a lake.

Tom Godell                                      e-mail: [log in to unmask]
General Manager, WSIU-FM                                web: www.wsiu.org
Southern Illinois University at Carbondale