My story begins with my parents. My father was a semi-professional pianist, and my mother, as a little girl, stood at arm's length from the great Ignacy Jan Paderewski as he played his famous Menuet a L'Antique at a concert in San Francisco in the early 1930s. A few years later, she played it herself to a standing ovation at her eighth-grade graduation (there was just grammar school and high school in those days, no middle school or junior high).

My projected career as a concert pianist was thwarted in childhood by a bone disease that stunted my growth. As a result, I reached only five feet in height. In bitter disappointment, I made the mistake of quitting the piano. However, many decades later, I saw a young Japanese girl playing the featured Rigoletto and decided to get back to the piano.

In my search for pianos with smaller keyboards, I found an engineer, David Steinbuhler, who makes custom piano keyboard actions with narrower keys. I have played on one, and I hope one day to own one. Shortly after that, I met Dr. Brian Ciach, who had just moved out from the East. He is currently a lecturer on music theory and composition at San Jose State University in the California Bay Area. He introduced me to music software that enabled me to write and publish music.

That inspired me to write transcriptions of classical music to fit smaller hands. In many cases, my productions of regular editions used as baselines for further editing resulted in a superior product, so I have also published those. You can find them on this website along with the transcriptions.