People I Knew: Piano Teacher

In the early 00's we took piano lessons from our piano teacher Mary. Our Children's Church teacher Ms. Vickie's sons also took lessons from her. 

I think it may have been just me when we started, although Haley was also in this recital from early on. Toward the end all four of us went. Seems like at the time Andrew preferred guitar though. 

We took lessons at her house. We rang her doorbell to start, although I remember once or twice waiting a bit to listen to her play. On entering the house you would turn left and there it was, the piano, and the whole room had a warm glow in part because of a brass lamp on the piano for reading the sheet music. A marimba was in the same room, as well as several seats and a coffee table with reading materials and games like Checkers. The siblings who weren't currently learning would wait their turn in that room or outside in the car with Mom. 

This is my first notebook, in which Mary wrote what to practice. Judging from the dates I must have started in 2001, because we went on Wednesday mornings. Mary would say, "You want the car built on Wednesday." She meant that the middle of the week is when we get our best work done, because earlier we're still rubbing the weekend's sleep from our eyes and later we're too excited for the next weekend to concentrate. Also, Mary either knew or had met in person many of the composers of the music books we'd play from. 

Recitals gave us something to practice for, and Mary was good about lining them up for us. I think a couple were at her house, other times were at other venues like the Community Church. One time the students had a party at her house and my strongest memory is that we played bingo and got prizes. 

Mary had the gift of being able to see the good in everyone. She would say that when she was asked, "Who's your favorite student?" she answered, "The one I'm with." I like to think some of that rubbed off on me! 

She was strong and joyful and open and honest, but also caring and patient and tactful and mindful of others. She would recommend music books for us to buy at the local store, but was also open to teaching music we brought to her. We had piano software at home which could print out its sheet music, and two I remember bringing to her were Swan Lake and Hatikvah. At one point we had a CD from one of her daughters that had Hatikvah on it, I think. (Still tracking it down.)

I played piano by feel a lot during this time. This usually means a lot of sustain pedal. (It's the reverberating 80s musician in my soul.) I think Mary had a story where she was playing somewhere where a couch faced away from the piano, and one time when she thought she was alone and had used too much pedal a voice rose up from the couch telling her so. 

Our similarities didn't end there. I like slow, dynamic, somber songs like Albinoni's Adagio in G Minor. I think she said she did the same thing, and one time someone (her father?) asked her if she could play something a little cheerier. And so it was natural I feel that we worked on Moonlight Sonata together.

I recall one practice session in particular, and I think it was the scales in the middle of this song. I played it one way, my feeling way, probably faster or with a syncopation different than the sheet showed. She was ok with that a lot of the time. But one time she tried to get me to see how to play it the way it was written but I couldn't nail it down. I could read notes all right then but other stuff like time signatures and accents not so well. So I relied on hearing sometimes. But she would play it for me as it was written and listen for something I couldn't catch, or at least something I thought I was doing. And I may have figured it out eventually because we were stuck for only a few minutes, and continued to practice other parts of the song.

When it was time for me to perform it before an audience, I had a lot of it down solid but had trouble with the ending. The piece was four pages, which she pasted into two manila folders for quick and easy reference. Somewhere we may have a CD of that day. The way I remember it I made it without the sheet music through the parts I knew, and then paused the performance to pull it out somewhere toward the end. 

This strayed from what Mary taught. Though she didn't put it this way exactly, her philosophy was "Just keep going" or "It's only as bad as you make it out to be." And she had two stories about this. The first was about a student she knew who once performed the first part of a song perfectly and beautifully, but when she made a mistake she made a big deal about it and refused to finish. The other was when Mary had to sing a solo in Latin and forgot the lyrics. So she improvised and made her own Latin, because she knew the vowel sounds like AH, OO, EE, and consonants like KUH, WUH, BUH enough to pass it off as the lyrics. Her general feeling was that in both cases, the audience can't tell and no one ends up feeling bad or embarrassed, so why not make it up as you go along? (Kind of like humming along to the parts of the song you don't remember the words to, which I think pretty much everyone has done at some point. 🙂)

And she encouraged me to read beyond the sheet. Especially with hymns, which don't always have on paper the flourishes you might hear in church. Improvisation is one skill I wish I'd learned more from her, as well as her philosophy of music: She had an epiphany that involved music and math, especially geometry, that I never fully comprehended. She could be very lively and passionate when she talked about it, which was a pleasure to be a part of.

The last time we were in touch was my high school graduation.

I thought about her earlier this year and remembered hearing she had published her book, which she would talk about sometimes. I meant to read it in April because of the date I saw when I pulled out my recital's bulletin, but I couldn't put it down when it came in. It talks about what Moonlight Sonata means to her, which I didn't know until reading it. I have been very blessed to have a light like Mary in my life.