Piano Lessons

NOTE: Names and some details have been changed.

In the late afternoons, when yellow school buses roll down the road, I turn into a piano teacher. I bring to a close whatever else I've been doing—whether writing, doing yard work, walking the dog, getting stuff together for dinner later on, or wasting time on the computer. I tell my dog “Friends are going to come,” put the tea kettle on, and begin my ritual of sweeping the wooden floors. I find the mindless motions of the broom relaxing. I move out whatever else is on my mind, dump the dustpan, and begin to think about which of my young friends is coming today, and what we are working on together.

Today I have my two youngest students, Tyler and Ellie—ages five and six respectively. I only recently started taking students this young, and am using a new method with Tyler. The book teaches musical concepts at a slower pace than I usually go, and is filled with games and little songs. It's more about process than performance. It comes with a CD. I have to study it for a few minutes, to get ready for Tyler.

I need to give my dog a treat, hopefully something that will occupy him during the afternoon of teaching, so that he won't jump on the couch, and start tossing the pillows around distracting me and my students. I pull the Kong stuffed with peanut butter out of the freezer—the blue plastic toy that is hollow inside, and has a small hole. Trying to lick the peanut butter out should keep Bentley busy for quite some time.

I set up the little TV table next to the piano and pull up a chair. The kettle whistles insistently and I pour the boiling water over my Egyptian Licorice tea. Today's words of wisdom from the tag on the tea bag reads, “Travel light, live light, be the light.” I ask the spirit to guide me to be the best teacher I can possibly be today.

The floors are swept, my teaching area is ready, the dog taken care of, I've made a lesson plan, I've poured tea as well as a glass of cold water for myself. And just in time, here is the car pulling up in the driveway, and Tyler stepping out. “Hi, Ty!” I call out, “I'm happy to see you.” And I am.

“Do you know Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star?” I ask him as we are seated together at the piano. “No. That's why I'm here. To learn to play the piano,” he says proudly and earnestly. He knows the tune, of course, just not how to play it yet—a feat that he masters quickly—as I mark the C and G keys lightly in pencil, and showed him how to start. Tyler is a musician inside. I can tell already. He loves music, sings beautifully on key and is drawn to the piano. He has a strong desire to learn to play.

It's interesting to me that these younger students, who I resisted teaching for so long, are the ones who have been bringing so much spontaneous joy into my house lately. Ellie, age 6, has so much enthusiasm that she has difficulty sitting still on the piano bench for very long. She wants to get up and beat the drums, pet the dog, look at the cat on the back porch. But despite her wiggly restlessness, I can see the talented musician inside finding expression. Her beat on the drum is quick but steady. She shows me how she can play “Doe, a deer” by ear on my wooden xylophone. As she leaves my house at the end of her lesson, Ellie said “I'm so glad my mom signed me up for piano lessons. Not just because you're my teacher and I get to come here. I just really like the piano.” My heart sings to hear these words. “I really like teaching you,” I tell Ellie, as I walk her out to my driveway and her mother's waiting van.

Not all of my students are so enthusiastic. Yesterday, Sam spent half his lesson time arguing with me about how he didn't want to play a particular passage again. “No. I'll do it at home. Don't make me do it now. Please.” Sam is a master at “eating the clock”. He takes a long time in the bathroom, and spends several minutes petting the dog when he first comes in. Of all my students, Sam is the most distracted by the dog. Yet I think his adoration of Bentley has helped our relationship, and given him new motivation to come to my house. Teaching piano is about more than music making, after all. It is about developing a relationship with each individual child. Although we spend way too much time arguing, and I have to humor and persuade Sam and bribe him with gold star stickers or ending the lesson 2 minutes early, we do manage all right together. He IS making progress. His Malaguena is sounding confident, if a bit uneven rhythmically, and it is ready for performance at the upcoming “piano party.” Focusing after a long day of school is just sometimes torturous to him. And Sam has some sensitivities that my other students don't have. He can't stand to be interrupted with little suggestions while he's playing something, and he hates it when I sing along.

Fortunately, the challenging lesson with Sam is followed by a visit from Hannah. She is the student I have the longest relationship with . Hannah came to me when she was seven, and she is now seventeen. She is preparing an arrangement of WC Handy's St. Louis Blues to play at the piano party. She takes this piece of music and makes it her own—adding her own personal fortes and diminuendos, which she is clearly feeling, as I see her body swaying to the music, hear her soul pouring forth through the notes. Years ago, I never would have predicted that of all the students who started around the same time as Hannah, that she would be the one to stick it out. Others were faster learners with more agile fingers. Hannah's progress has been slow and steady. But she has a deep love of music. It is extremely gratifying to me to think that I have played a role in bringing out this part of her identity. She enjoys singing, and participates in high school chorus. She is just starting to learn to play a selection from Phantom of the Opera, and I want to encourage her to try to accompany her beautiful voice with the piano chords.

Erica doesn't practice at all, and is always losing and forgetting her piano music. We have go over the same concepts of note reading again and again. Yet when she finds a song that she likes, she immediately memorizes it and sits right down and plays it. She delights in playing simple duets with me like Home on the Range or Oh Susannah and asks to do it again and again.

The most satisfying thing about being a piano teacher, is hearing this joy in music emerge in my students. My hope is that this desire to express themselves musically will last for their whole lives, as it has for me. It's not so much that I'm giving them this gift, it's more like I'm helping them discover it inside themselves and draw it out.

There is a force greater than the musician, that sometimes speaks through the music itself. It is the music moving through the musician. On those rare occasions when it happens, the musician is merely the channel. I think about my own recent experience accompanying a “cosmic dance” class, in the beautifully designed Eurythmy room at Emerson Waldorf School.

Sunlight shone through the muslin curtains on the polished, wooden floors. The dancers lifted their arms and gestured, as they wove around the circle. I was playing a piano passage from one of Liszt's Consolations. I had practiced it many times and had always thought it lovely—but suddenly in that particular moment, it all made sense to me in a new way. The chromatic harmonies and modulations gave it a haunting quality—yet I had a clear sense of the arc of the music, of where it was going and its hushed resolve. When the music ended, the notes hung in the air, the dancers holding the stillness. The spell of the music still lingered, like the dust particles in the sunlight, although the sound had faded.

I feel this same magic, when my student Mollie, a shy high school student, plays The Moonlight Sonata. She adds her own touches—a special crescendo, an accelerando, revealing the passion that is in her soul. I hear it in Ben, a fifth grade boy, energetically pounding out the Theme from Star Wars, playing forte and confidently. I hear it when 11-year old Ryan, enters my studio, quickly drops his books on the floor and without even taking off his coat, immediately launches into the Beatle's We Can Work It Out , grooving to the beat.

The smell of chicken roasting in the oven permeates the house, and I am hungry. But I so enjoy teaching my one adult student, Laura. I notice how her scales have improved as her fingers move agilely and rhythmically up and down the keys. When I hear her soft and delicate pianissimos in Schumann's Of Strange Lands and People, contrasting with the warmth of the melodic line, I hear the music coming to life through her. Laura's lesson ends with a lively, accented Hungarian folk dance tune by Bartok—which she is now playing at a nice, fast tempo, the best she's ever played it. She thanks me as we walk to the door together.

Laura gets into her car and shuts the door, just as my teenage son pulls up next to her in the driveway and enters the house with his heavy backpack. I greet Noah and ask about his day. I fold up the TV tray and slide the chair I've been sitting on back under the table. I let Bentley out briefly, then feed him. The roast chicken is almost ready to come out of the oven. I toss the salad. I draw the curtains. I pour myself a glass of wine. With these gestures, I officially slip out of my piano teaching role.