I started taking piano lessons the year I began Kindergarten, when I was four. I lived in a small town of perhaps five thousand people, and it’s likely my teacher was the only piano teacher in town. I don’t remember her name, only that she lived up a hill around the corner from my house, and that she had a book showing that whole notes, half notes, middle C and F and G were all big circles with lines through them. What I don’t remember is how I felt — did I enjoy the lessons, talk about them? The memory that stands out is this: one day while walking to my lesson, another young girl speeding down the hill on her bicycle struck me from behind. I was hurt, but continued walking to my teacher’s house without saying a word. My mother didn’t find the blood until after.
My family moved a few times to different cities, and each time I needed a new teacher. The teachers were always women, friends of my mother’s. They taught out of their living rooms and spare rooms, with folded laundry and smells of cooking. They corrected my wrong notes, put stickers on my sheet music, and wrote notes in my dictation book that I never read. With them I learned all the Clementi sonatinas, which are still a lot of fun to play.
Each summer during family visits to grandparents in Victoria I attended a three-week summer program at the Victoria Conservatory of Music. It was intensive and serious. There was a daily masterclass, specialized group classes, private lessons twice a week, hours of scheduled practice, and multiple performances (including a duet). The two principal teachers were Susan and Arne: Susan wore paisley, was kind and sensible, and had a long thick braid of grey hair down her back. Arne was a showman. I was a little afraid of him at first, the way a little girl is afraid of men not in her family who try to talk to her. But he gave me my most memorable lessons.
Arne kept a mop in his studio, flopping it around to demonstrate how flexible my wrist should be, and showed me how to attack a key like a cobra, curling and then suddenly striking out his pinky finger, shouting “POW!” He made up words for the music to teach the rhythms and emphasis. I remember him as always pacing around the room, making jokes, scolding me for not clipping my nails. When he performed for the students, often ragtime classics, I thought he was the best pianist I had ever heard.
I spent a few years away from the Victoria summer program, and came back later as a fifteen year old who had just gotten her Grade Ten piano certificate and thought she could play anything. When I saw Arne again he had grown a long beard “in the style of Brahms” and told me that my facial expressions and mannerisms were just the same as they were when I was eight.
At the summer program I took private lessons from a man who I remember mostly as younger than the other teachers, and sullen. He wasn’t the kind of man who used props to teach, or who made up songs or silly jokes. We were working on Chopin’s Waltz Op. 64 in C sharp minor, and I had spent a long time practicing the fast sections with the showy chromatic runs. I executed them well, but he wasn’t impressed. He told me that I would need to give the piece some more character, since “everyone and their grandmother plays this.” I smarted — I loved the piece! But my understanding of it was lacking. He started asking about the underlying, background melodies: I could play them, but did I really know what they sounded like? When he asked me to sing the notes, it turned out that I did not, in fact, know them at all. Singing in a lesson always feels silly, but I played it again after sounding out the notes and he said, doesn’t the passage sound clearer now? And it did.
At some point he asked if I was moving to Victoria, and then said point-blank: I could make you into a good pianist if you took lessons with me. And when I told him that I lived in Edmonton, he said I should try to find a better teacher than whoever I had. He wrote down the name of an old friend of his, Henry, and said I should look him up. Writing this now, it occurs to me that there’s something sinister about it: an older man telling a teenage girl that he’s going to improve her, that she should break with the person she trusts and work with him instead. But when I reported the exchange to my mother, asking to change teachers, she agreed with him. She spoke to him after one of my lessons, and he explained how my technique was deficient: no one had taught me about armweight, or how to rotate my wrist. Back in Edmonton a month later, I stopped taking lessons from my mother’s friend in the soupy-smelling living room and started seeing Henry.
Henry was also somewhere in his 30’s, blond, with Scandinavian features and a very gentle way of speaking. He had two small grand pianos stuffed side by side in a studio overlooking a busy downtown street, with a miniature bust of Schumann perched on his piano and a portrait of his mentor hanging on the wall. At the time I was starting to love classical music in a deeper, more serious way, and discovered that one of the best things about a good piano teacher is that they can talk to you about it. I remember so many lessons largely spent chatting — he loved Schumann above all other piano composers, except perhaps for Ravel, especially played by Louis Lortie. He picked up extra money playing tunes in strict time for ballet schools, but hated the monotony. We talked about how the slow movements of Mozart sonatas are intensely difficult to convey musically, and how Ravel’s ambition to write something more difficult to play than Islamey seemed irritatingly small-minded. Working with him, while he showed me how to take apart a piece and attend to every minor detail, is when I really came into a deeper love of playing the piano. Before that I enjoyed it but thought of it largely as an extracurricular, sometimes fun but at worst a chore; Henry taught me to think like a musician.
I learned Schumann’s Papillons, which he loved and to which I was mostly indifferent. That year, he gave a small recital of his own, which I attended, and at which he also played Papillons. Watching him play, I understood the difference between what I could do and what he could: there were no filler notes when he played, nothing faked or glossed over. My playing was clunky next to his. He attended carefully to every note, like they were all his children, taking obvious enjoyment in it. It’s this quality more than anything that I listen for now in other pianists.
Now, I take Zoom lessons from a piano teacher in San Francisco. Her affiliated music school ranked her as “distinguished,” and it seems to be deserved. With her, there’s no time for chatting about Ravel. In our first lesson she immediately zeroed in on how I still don’t use my wrist properly (keep it floating above the fingers for lyrical delicacy, straighten it only for sterner sounds) and how my technique for trills is lacking (curve the fingers until they’re very very short, push down the shoulder, and never let the keys come all the way up). Always know what the most important note is in a motif, a phrase, a section, the entire piece, she says, and don’t let anything detract from it. Henry was never so particular, but then perhaps I was lazier.
Lessons with her are stressful. She always notices and points out a misplaced emphasis in a three-note phrase, or a diminuendo started too soon, or a split-second hesitation before a chord. Sometimes we spend the hour working on only a few bars. During our most recent lesson I must have looked frustrated, because she asked if she was pushing me too hard. Back in the days when Arne was flopping his mop around, I’m sure I would have hated this rigorous style. But now rigor is to be found in so few places that her strictness is welcome: being told the truth feels clear and sharp, like the scent of a lemon that’s just been sliced with a good knife. When I was young I wanted encouragement, wanted to be told I played beautifully and that I just needed to work a little harder. But the best teachers can show you the errors that no amount of grinding will fix: the errors of perception. I never take it for granted anymore that I know the notes unless I can sing them, and I still need someone to draw my attention to all the melodies I can’t hear.
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