Lineage: the debt we owe our piano teachers
A few weeks ago, at the end of a day when I felt I’d been flayed alive by the horrors depicted in the news, and the personal horror of my mother’s deterioration in hospice, I walked into a local art gallery I’d never visited. What I hadn’t anticipated when I passed through the front door was that I was crossing a threshold into a place of beauty, peace, color, life, and nobility—a place where all that is good in humanity was showcased and celebrated. A Mason & Hamlin grand piano sat in the corner of one room. At the gallery owner’s request, I sat down and played Gershwin—the music that seemed the perfect companion to the art hanging on the walls and piled on tables and stands. When I left the gallery an hour later, I was as refreshed as if I’d been on vacation.
That gallery visit, and the way the artwork and space allowed me to transcend myself, reminded me of crossing the threshold of Leonard Richter’s studio when I was an undergraduate. In his sunlit space, I walked away from fights with my boyfriend or concerns about exams to dwell in the soul-cleansing world of Bach, Beethoven, Scriabin, and Bartók. That gallery also transported me back to my mid-20s, to Jill Timmons’ 2-hour master classes for professional pianists where we dwelt in an oasis of beautiful sound, life-affirming philosophy, and the convivial community of like-minded players. And, on a deeper level, my gallery visit reminded me that for all the time spent learning technique, fingering, phrasing, and more, the real legacy of piano lessons is the gift of entry into a gracious, transcendent world.
My piano teachers opened new worlds to me. Through the notes I learned and through their examples of lives devoted to music, art, literature, psychology, and science, the narrow confines of my Seventh-day Adventist world expanded and I discovered life-changing loves as diverse as Jungian psychology, gardening, opera, and literature. While being taught why it was more effective to use my 3rd finger rather than my 4th finger on a given note, I also learned the value of patience, of being willing to work for something I loved, and the power of finding immense freedom within strict form. Piano lessons taught me how to build a gracious life.
Other pianists much more important than I also speak of the gifts they received from their teachers. András Schiff, in speaking of his former teacher György Kurtág, wrote this in his book Music Comes Out of Silence:
“If you played him a Mozart sonata, he quoted The Marriage of Figaro, Cosi fan tutte, Don Giovanni and The Magic Flute, as though it were the most obvious thing in the world that we knew all those operas by heart. That wasn’t so, but Kurtág had awakened our interest, and we immediately rushed off to the library to pore over the scores and vocal scores, and to plug the gaps in our cultural knowledge.”
And Russel Sherman, in his book Piano Pieces, wrote this about his former teacher, Mr. Steurmann:
“..[H]e introduced me to his longtime student, an elegant woman who joined us in a cab as we went off to the movies. Like many adolescents, I gave the usual inarticulate grunt of greetings. No, no, he protested; when you meet a lady you must always say, ‘Enchanté!’ As was almost always the case, he did not embarrass me by my ignorance. The charm and twinkle of his eye encouraged the pleasures of decent manners and discourse. Life and music were full of sweet surprises and agreeable detours. The role and privilege of being a musician implied a life without gloom, without pedantry. I learned from him, as best I could, decency, tolerance, courage, and the indifference of appearances.”
Music taught in this manner becomes lessons in the refinement of the human spirit, not simply notes. The rough edges of our playing are smoothed out, and the rough edges in our characters are refined through immersion in timeless works of art. It’s never just about the notes. It’s about the world those notes open up inside of us, and the most effective way to allow this to happen. We’re offered transcendence. And this gift is the spirit that gets passed on through generation after generation of teachers. In this way, each one of us privileged enough to have had our worlds expanded by instructors like these become our teachers’ living legacies, making them immortal as we live those treasured lessons in our lives and pass them on to others.
“You could ennoble anything, depending on the choices you made.”
Jeremy Denk attributed this to his teacher György Sebök , in his beautiful book, Every Good Boy Does Fine. In that simple statement lies the power of choice. In a world that feels stripped of civility, mystery, and transcendence, we can choose to embrace the privilege of living in timelessness and beauty. We can ennoble the music we play and the lives we lead. And, as bearers of the lessons that brought us to be the pianists and people we are today, we can choose to offer these gifts to students, listeners, and to others around us every day. When we do, our nobility encourages others to see the beauty, color, and joy that form the best of what makes us human.