My husband is a creative, poetical person, who composes a lot of his own music, reads Percy Shelley for fun, and studied philosophy before turning to political science. Nevertheless, he is also deeply analytic. He loves to figure out how things are constructed or why a group of parts makes a whole work. When he listens to music, he listens to the chords and picks them out on his guitar. He listens to the words and tries to find meaning in each word choice.
I, on the other hand, have never been able to do this. It sometimes takes me months of listening to songs on repeat before I can learn the words. I think I listen to the whole piece as a single, unified entity. For me, for whatever reason, the parts are inseparable.
When I was five years old, a family friend moved to Delaware and gave my parents her old piano. It wasn't a spectacular model, but it was a decent upright and she hoped our parents would encourage my sister and me to take piano lessons, which, of course, they did. For a year or two, we took lessons with a wonderful, kind lady who lived across the street from my best friend. I did not particularly excel, although when I re-watch the home videos my parents made of our first few recitals, it's clear I didn't recognize my own stunning incompetence. When I was eight years old, we moved into a different part of Fresno. My parents decided that, given mine and my sister's disappointing lack of talent, it was not worth driving back into our old neighborhood for lessons. But nor were they willing to give up. My father loved music and my mother dreamed of one day having one of her daughters play Polish Christmas carols on the piano. So they found a different teacher who lived closer to us.
This teacher's name was Sister Anna Marie. She was a nun.
My experience with nuns was limited, at this time, to the character of Miss Clavel in the Madeleine books. I was envisioning a youngish nun who would take me under her wing, gently guiding me toward a righteous and musical path.
When we arrived for our first lesson, an short, elderly lady opened the door. I was dismayed to discover this was my piano teacher (who insisted we call her Sister, which seemed horrifically strange to me).
She wasn't even wearing a habit.
My dad stayed for our first lesson, and as far as I recall, Sister tested our technique and asked us some basic theory questions. She didn't seem interested in hearing us show off any of the pieces we'd learned. She ordered us to go buy several books she required her students to have, among them a thick theory book and a binder in which we would be keeping our technique blocks. To my horror, she explained to my dad that we needed to be practicing at least 45 minutes. My sister was good at practicing the piano, but up to this point, I had sat at the piano and gone through each short piece exactly once, and I considered that perfectly adequate practicing.
For our next lesson, my dad simply dropped us off, and we walked to her apartment. It was then that Sister's Germanic characteristics revealed themselves. She had a pointer she'd rap the page with especially aggressively each time I made a mistake. I'd imagine to myself that she was just barely able to prevent herself from rapping my knuckles with the pointer. Instead of praising my weak attempts to master basic etudes, she employed sarcastic quips to shame me into working hard. (It was very Catholic of her). When my sister was having her lesson, I was not allowed to read whatever book I'd brought, and instead was required to go into Sister's study and play a really un-fun music computer game or listen to ear training tapes so I could identify what interval, pattern, or chord I was hearing.
I began to hate piano lessons. One day, when I knew I hadn't made enough progress for that week, I decided I would break my wrist so I wouldn't be able to go. I took a small rock from our backyard and dropped it on my hand. My sister said it didn't look broken. I despaired.
Eventually, Sister told my parents privately that she was going to move my sister into a more advanced group lesson (we had group lessons every month) and keep me where I was. My parents, of course, told me. At the time I assumed Sister had generously been trying to spare my feelings, but I think I know better now. She knew my parents would tell me, and she realized this was the last chance she had to try to force me into becoming a better music student.
And, I'm ashamed to say, it worked.
The following week I practiced for more than an hour each day. My mind would wander while I struggled over poly-rhythmic scales, but I'd snap myself back to attention. I practiced them so much that I began to dream in scales. The next time I went to a lesson, Sister said nothing about my minor improvement. But I kept at it. I began borrowing books from her to practice my sight-reading, a skill that I'd been unable to learn. I practiced every day. And though it might sound like revisionist history to say it, within a few months I was an entirely different student. I practiced every single day, for at least an hour. I passed my first theory test with almost 100%. Sister acknowledged I might have become one of the better sight-readers she had for a student. But for the most part, she refused to praise me. I could play a piece through almost perfectly note-for-note, but she'd find the accidental I forgot to flatten or the crescendo sign I'd ignored. I felt as though nothing I ever did would be good enough, but this only made me more determined to exceed her expectations. Her favorite student was an extremely talented pianist named Stephanie, and Sister often made a point of praising Stephanie to me. Now that I am a teacher myself, I've come to understand the importance of fine-tuning your methods to each individual student, no matter how exhausting that might be. Sister clearly knew me better than I thought she did, and she effectively manipulated my fiercely competitive streak to shape me into a better pianist.
When I was a miserable seventh-grade student, a new school opened up in my hometown. It was called University High School, and it was a college-preparatory and music charter school. It was located on Fresno State's campus and students were going to be allowed to take college courses. Because of how unhappy and unchallenged I felt in middle school, my parents decided I should skip eighth grade (a decision that, I should add, was viewed very, very unfavorably by the Fresno Unified School District. When we dropped my sister off on her first day of seventh grade, numerous teachers and administrators made a point of telling me what a horrible idea my parents had forced on me). In order to do so, I needed to take algebra in summer school, and I needed to be at my grade level (i.e., level 9) in terms of my piano performance and knowledge of theory. (As a side note, there were various competitions and festivals students could participate in in California, and the most rigorous of these festivals involved playing technique blocks, playing four or five memorized pieces, taking a theory test, a sight-reading test, and an ear training test. If a student passed all of these requirements with a silver or gold, he or she passed to the next level for the following year). I was in level 7 that year, and in order to apply to UHS, would have to complete two levels in one year. Sister was skeptical, but she agreed to help me. Much to everyone's surprise, my first year doing the festival, I passed with silvers for both levels. I applied to UHS and started attending that fall.
My musicianship classes were led by a wonderful, slightly crazy man named Mr. Jones (eventually nicknamed Jonesy by students when a math teacher named Mr. Jones was hired). He was similarly demanding to Sister, and I thrived under his attention. For the first time, I was really good at a skill that lots of other students admired. (I had always been a good reader, but nobody cared about that). In order to take drama at UHS, which met during my time slot with Sister, I had to start taking piano lessons on Wednesday mornings from 7:30 to 8:30, which left me just enough time to get to class for 9. At this point, there was no question as to whether or not I would wake up early for lessons with Sister. She was the first person besides my parents who forced me to work my ass off, and for the first time I could actually see my hard work paying off. I'd been a decent student in school, but I seemed to have either an innate ability for certain subjects, like art or English, and a complete lack of intelligence regarding others. But when it came to piano, I had to work harder than I'd ever worked at anything--but I was succeeding.
Sister began giving me more and more challenging pieces to practice. She privately told my dad I was one of the most talented students she'd ever had. I practiced sight-reading more and more difficult pieces and almost never missed a note. My technique was never great, but I made up for it with perfect scores on every ear training test I took. Sister could play a piece for me once and I could sing it back. She encouraged me to sing along with the pieces I practiced to remember them better and to listen to the whole sound instead of focusing on the parts that were difficult for me. She made me tapes of chords and intervals to listen to before I went to sleep. During our lessons, I'd tell her about what I'd done that day in school, or about the violinist at my school that I had a crush on. Before Christmas of that year, my mother suggested inviting Sister over for our Christmas Eve and I was thrilled. She came and I spent the whole evening talking to her. From that point on, Sister came to all of our big family holidays and celebrations. Somehow, my terrifying, curmudgeonly nun had become one of the most important people to me. It no longer felt strange to call her Sister.
Then, a few months before the end of my junior year in high school, the unthinkable happened. Sister sent a letter out to all of her families, announcing she was retiring and moving to Texas to her convent.
I was heartbroken. I considered going on a music-strike, refusing to play until Sister would finally give in and change her mind and save me from malnutrition. But I quickly realized that as a nun, Sister probably had more experience in sacrifice than I did and would probably outlast me.
There's not much point in recollecting how hard the next few months were. I felt on the verge of tears after every lesson and did not want to think about finding a new teacher. Part of me was being childishly spiteful, but another part of me realized that no amount of talent would help me remain a good pianist. I needed Sister to finish the equation. Without her drive, I was only someone with an above-average ear and an average amount of self-motivation.
For the last recital her students would play, a number of families organized a few surprises for Sister. I don't remember the details, but I think there were a few gifts and flowers. I was asked to give a short speech about Sister and my experience with her.
I worked on my presentation for ages. Sister was not given over to huge displays of emotion and I knew she'd frown if I cried in front of her (though I'd cried plenty of times in her bathroom when I was younger and felt she was being unusually cruel to me). Nevertheless, I wanted to find a way of telling everybody how much she'd meant to all of her students, as well as a private way of telling her just how incredibly much she meant to me. I didn't have a lot of experience writing, other than for class, but I tried to make my speech humorous; many of my earliest memories with Sister were now hilarious to recollect, especially the slightly nutty lengths I was prepared to go in what I thought was our battle of wits. I finished the speech by telling everyone how special Sister was to each and every one of her students, and how I knew that for each one of us she was family.
I practiced giving my speech almost as much as I practiced my Bach. I was determined that for this last performance I wouldn't miss a single note. Although I normally banned my parents from coming to any performance I was playing in, I insisted my dad come to this one, for Sister's sake.
The evening was a huge success. Instead of separating us by age, as she usually did, Sister had us all play together in a much larger venue. It was sweet to see some of her youngest little students play beautifully, and by this point many of her older students had become my friends. It was clear that each student was doing his or her best, and I'd like to think many of us really did play our best that night. After the music was done, various parents and students came up to give Sister the plaque we'd had engraved for her and the numerous bouquets that had been brought. Then, for the last surprise, I came up to give my speech.
It's probably not a surprise to say I did break down and cry a bit by the end of my speech, but it was a big surprise to see Sister in tears when I went to hug her.
The longer I've been a student, and the longer I've been a teacher, the more I've realized how difficult teaching really is. The same approach will never work twice, because every student is different, and every student needs a different teacher. I think the best teachers are the ones who can tailor their teaching to each individual student without losing their minds in the process. I listen to music every day, and never fail to think of Sister. Although my parents taught me to love music from an early age, it was Sister who taught me how to listen to it.
I've been blessed with many wonderful teachers, from elementary school to my Master's program. But I've only ever had one teacher like my Sister.
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| My beloved old piano in our Wrenwood house |
