Bertha Burgundy

Several years ago Marian and I decided to buy a rain barrel.  We plant and water quite a few flowers, herbs and tomatoes every summer, and it just seemed like such a good idea.  Its free water and somehow we just knew that rain water would work better.  We were right, and the plants thrive.  The barrel is amazing; ¼ inch of rain will fill this huge barrel that started life as a wine barrel.  When we went to choose her, we could actually smell the Burgundy wine odor in the car on the way home. 

We have a rule in our house; anything that has a certain presence, an aura… a personality… must be named.  We have named our rain barrel Bertha Burgundy.  Big Bertha for short.  Online we saw all kinds of rain collection devices; some were made out of plastic.  Some were made to look like wine or whiskey barrels, and others look more like trash barrels.  Bertha is made of oak, and has the traditional metal bands around her.  She has been retrofitted with a spigot, and overflow outlet, and a small intake that allows rain to run from a flexible downspout right into her big belly.

There have been only a couple times that Bertha has been running low; they say that the Twin Cities have been in a mild drought, but Bertha seems oblivious.  That ¼ inch of rain is not too hard to come by, and the water has helped our tomatoes, hanging baskets, and two large garden areas for three summers.  I, and the flowers, worry periodically about the drought devastating Bertha’s moxy.  She has never failed us yet… and, yet…

I am that rain barrel.  I, too, feel a drought and the danger of running dry.  As a piano teacher, I expend tons of energy (my rain water) on my students.  When they have their dry spells… their droughts… I have to water them.  I have to urge, manipulate and cajole.  I have to motivate them to practice and get them so close to success that they can tell the difference between my “water” and the tap water of trophies and parental mandates.  I feel the of drought most clearly in the spring.  All of the recitals, contests, festivals and major repertoire have been mastered.  At times all teachers feel the weight of pushing their students, up hill and at times, pushing dead weight.  We know the pushing is necessary, and our investments will pay out; but still, the energy saps us, and we feel drained, much as Bertha must at the mid-point of summer (her peak time.)

The rain always comes, and Big Bertha Burgundy is replenished; as am I.

The Ghetto

One of the more interesting elements of music is the principal of dissonance and resolution.  Like a good novel, or a drama, music has to build tension, which ultimately will be treated with the resolution of that tension.  Part of a musician’s study is in how to recognize musical tension, and how to elegantly resolve that tension.  We musicians must become manipulators of that element, and we thus become manipulators of our audiences.  Hopefully we are kind and generous manipulators!

As a full-fledged musician, I totally believe in dissonance and the need for resolution.  I believe in harmony and the life-pulse of rhythm.  I find these elements in perfection within the music I love:  Brahms (God, how I love Brahms), Chopin, Rachmaninoff, and even the curmudgeonly Ludwig van Beethoven and the smarty-pants Mozart.  I’m being facetious; they all were geniuses at building a perfection we rarely are able to find in life.

I have made my life’s work the conveying of musical dissonance, and hopefully, the masterful resolution of all that tension.  I firmly believe that the dissonance that we find in other aspects of our lives is as important as in music.  I also have to believe, then, that every day dissonance can be resolved.  I find that musicians are constantly frustrated with the lack of harmony in life, and the erratic nature of rhythm we find in the people around us.  We instinctively retreat into our music, where we can control things and we rail against the non-understanding we find in non-musicians.  I would like to tell you a tale that not many have heard beyond my closest circle of friends.  This is a true story of dissonance and resolution that I found myself engrossed in.  I believe my heart and mind were shaped by the study of music and by my time practicing the piano.  I think this story is a time when my two hands touched the sky.

Back in 1981, before I had acquired tenure in my position on the faculty of Louisiana Tech University, I put the wheels in motion to sue my university and its president in federal district court.  This probably wasn’t the smartest career move a lowly Assistant Professor could make, but it was my move, and I gladly made it.  At the time I was the College of Arts & Sciences representative on the Faculty Senate.  Interested in the way the elements of the university worked as a whole, much as I was interested in the blending of the elements of music in my repertoire, I became very active in university governance. 

During my second year on the Senate I was alerted to a disturbing rumor.  It seems that the university, in their wisdom, decided that all international students (non-citizens) would be housed in one dormitory on campus.  I immediately didn’t like the sound of this; over a quarter break I took it upon myself to call the housing office to ask the head of that office if the rumor was true.  The person answering the phone was a staff member of the housing office, and he confirmed what I had heard.  I asked a few questions of detail, and he gave me enough information that I knew a basic timetable, exactly which students would be involved in this change, and even a basic rationale. 

After a short period of rumination I decided that I didn’t agree with either the changes being considered, or the rationale.  I called the President of the Faculty Senate to see what he thought; I called a couple of friends that were also on the Senate.  It seemed that a few people were disgusted by this new idea, but that the Faculty Senate had no say in this particular item.  The President assured me that he was empathetic to my feelings, but I should not count on them to make inquiries.

It was at this moment that I decided that I would have to do something, or nothing would get done.  I found the telephone number of the ACLU chapter in New Orleans, and using the “watts line” I called N.O on Louisiana Tech’s dime.  My initial conversation with an attorney in New Orleans was about an hour long.  He took all of my information, gave me an idea of what options there were, and told me, “I’ll get back to you.”  I have to admit, I was more than cynical, and I thought I was probably done with the whole exercise.  I was ecstatic when, a few days later, I received a call from a different man at the ACLU.  He had instructions for me.  I wasn’t qualified to complain, legally, about this.  A dormitory that forced all international students to be isolated from the American students they came to study with did not affect me. 

Before I could descend all the way to crestfallen, he told me that they needed me desperately to do something.  The international students, themselves, were legally qualified to bring a class-action suit against the university.  They needed me to contact students, to have them sign a document that would be prepared at the ACLU, and get the document back to them.  One of my close friends was a professor in the foreign language department; at this point he joined me in my efforts, and sent a student from Nigeria to my office. 

I remember Robert as a gregarious young man, and he fully understood what was required.  Although he expressed a little fear about any retribution he might receive, I gave him the assurances that had been passed down from the ACLU lawyer.  He would find students that were willing to sign the document gathering plaintiffs, and they would come to my office to sign the document.  Before the episode was over I had hosted over 300 non-white, non-citizen foreign students in my office.  I held the document until it was full of signatures, telephone numbers, etc. 

The big moment was when we all met with the ACLU lawyer when he made a trip up to Ruston.  We co-opted a classroom in one of the university buildings and the lawyer explained to everyone what the steps would be.  Robert and one other student were selected to be named on the class-action lawsuit.  Papers were filed in Federal District Court, and the process ensued.  I have still in my possession articles from the Chronicle of Higher Education, the Philadelphia Enquirer and several other newspapers that picked up the story of the International Student ‘ghetto’ planned by Louisiana Tech University.  In the end, there was a consent decree that admitted no malice on the part of the university, but the revocation of the International Student Dorm.  (This would have been the oldest building on campus, and one with no air conditioning in Louisiana.  The building had not been used for a residence hall, but the plans were to reconfigure it, without the addition of air conditioning.)

In the end, I received a call from the Clerk of Court, with a follow-up letter and copy of the Consent Decree.  He told me to watch out for any retribution the university might take against the students… or against me.  I was to call him directly if I suspected anything.

Dissonance-Resolution.  How does one handle these musical elements?  How does one handle the same in a life-situation?  I find little difference in the handling.  This remains one of my proudest moments.

To Touch the Sky

I think the shape of my whole life has been a fluke!  Or, maybe it’s fate… some ingenious design I knew nothing about and had no part in setting up.  I feel lucky, or blessed, but naïve as I am, I have just proceeded with the whole thing, and here I am.

I am positive of one thing:  my life really started with my musical training.  That was all something that I stumbled into.  My little red accordion, with fourteen bass keys, was the beginning.  Or was it?  My mother likes to tell the story that almost as soon as I could talk, I was singing.  Sitting on my potty-chair, “It is no secret what God can do; what he do to udders, he do to you too!”  I almost remember it, but I think that’s because she tells it to everyone; I’ve heard it so often it just seems that I remember it.

So, when the accordion was placed on my lap it didn’t take long for me to hug it and learn to get something out of it.  I didn’t play it for long, due to a move away from the city.  I can’t remember much about what happened, but there I was playing the accordion, and then I wasn’t.  When I was in sixth grade I bought a piano with money that I had saved by setting pins at a bowling alley.  It was really nothing I had thought about much, but when the piano was suggested to me, I kind of went with the flow.  Somehow, right from the first, the piano felt natural to me.  I virtually had no trouble learning to read music, and I loved practicing.  I still do.  I have made practicing one of the focuses of my life.  And I try very hard to teach my students HOW to practice, hoping that they may grow to love it as much as I love it.

I’ve never thought of practicing as being the same as playing the piano.  I instinctively warmed to the process of self-evaluation; of diagnosis; of corrective action.  I loved the repetition, but I don’t think I ever thought of practice as mindless repetition.  I’ve learned that although this is exactly right, not every piano student understands this, or feels compelled by the practice effect.

There was a time, while in the U.S. Army, that I didn’t get to practice very much.  I missed it.  I was in a military occupation that had me working with 1970’s level of computerized equipment.  My job was to maintain that equipment in a high level of order; that equipment ciphered classified military telephone communications and it would have been a breach of national security if the equipment failed.  I had never had any electronics training, and I found myself, the ubiquitous piano major/practice room nerd, studying along with guys that had Electronics Engineer degrees.  I never questioned why I was attracted to this field, or why I was able to succeed so easily in it.  I found out later.

When I left the Army and started graduate school I found that in some mysterious way I had improved at the piano.  I’d had no instruction and virtually no practicing.  I was a little rusty at first, but after a month I found that something had happened.  I even understood music theory better.  It seemed to integrate with my playing; as an undergraduate I had thought the theory just an irrelevant evil that took time away from my piano.  Although amazed, I really didn’t question why this happened.  I found out later.

Soon after I started my life as a university professor in the Department of Music at Louisiana Tech University I began voraciously buying books on music, and specifically books on piano performance.  I went to workshops, conferences and seminars.  I became a virtual convention-junkie.  One of the presenters that attracted me was Seymour Bernstein.  He was a gentle man that seemed to love his teaching and his students.  I witnessed him teaching in a master class; he interacted with the students in such a stunning display that it seemed he had taught them for years.  When I learned that he had just written a book, titled With Your Own Two Hands, I ordered it immediately.  And the earth stood still.

Seymour’s book, I found, was an amazing homage to practicing the piano.  His main premise in this book is that while many people will agree that life’s experiences influence the way one practices a musical instrument, he finds the reverse is true:  the skills gained from practicing influences our lives.  Practicing, for Seymour, is a path to the integration of one’s person.  Wow.  The more I read, the more I loved this book and this author.  I could see, no… I could FEEL so many points he makes in my own experience.  Practicing changes our brain.  Practicing affects our thinking processes, and in doing so, we find we have learned things, approaches, processes that we have never endeavored.  Fingers Dancing has been, for me, a description of how life has intersected with music.  I have often found a relationship of my music, my piano, to other facets of life.  I have described some of these particulars in previous blog entries.  This particular entry is to preface some rather important milestones in my life that came about, I completely believe, as a result of positive changes in my thinking skills due to practicing the piano for tens of thousands of hours.

The title of this blog entry refers to a quote of Sappho that Bernstein places in his book, With Your Own Two Hands:  I never dreamt that with my own two hands I could touch the sky.

The Accidental Teacher

Most people that know me, even in passing, know that I have deeply held ideas and opinions.  Its just part of my DNA.  Since I have always loved words and imagery, I often take my opinions into the “verbosphere” (like that?) and this is another of those well-intentioned rants.

I’m an accidental teacher.  I really never had opinions, positive or negative, about the profession of teaching.  Teaching was never what I imagined myself doing.  I dreamed of being a lawyer; but I would have only accepted being Perry Mason, and the job was already taken.  I could have imagined myself a journalist, writing impassioned stories, exposing injustice and corruption.  The problem was always that I loved to play the piano.  My first piano teacher disabused me of the idea that most professions would allow time for the amount of piano playing I required; all except one:  if you become a college professor you will be expected to play the piano as part of your job, she said.  The idea was like offering me my own warehouse of dark chocolate.  Yes, I’ll become a college professor of piano!

{Cut to 10 years later}

I had two interviews set up; the first was to be at Louisiana Tech University, in Ruston, Louisiana.  The second was to be a week later in Flagstaff, Arizona.  Both seemingly nice, hot places; I didn’t think I would miss those days where the ice coated the trees of Iowa City.  I didn’t have a Plan B.  My high school piano teacher had assured me that what I needed to sustain my life was in one of those two places.  I would become a college piano teacher, and play the piano to my heart’s content.  I didn’t even question myself when I learned in Ruston that there had been over 200 applications for my job.  It did occur to me that I was one of 5 semi-finalists.  Instead of spending my time worrying about the application process, I looked through the yellow pages of the phone book in my motel room:  wow!  50 Southern Baptist churches in the parish (county) the university was in.  I went to the university library and tabulated the books specifically dealing with piano music, piano literature, piano teaching, etc.  I found that my own library was far superior.  I knew I would have to fix that.

It was a good several days; I was feeling very good.  I talked to lots of people and knew that my biggest weakness… not being able to remember names… was going to be ultimately exposed.  I did spend a little time with one of my favorites pastimes; I loved to match people up with their instruments.  It always seems to work.  If you’ve ever met a drummer or a sax player you know what I mean.  They simply become their instruments.  I sought out the tuba teacher (I played tuba in highs school, college, and even in the Army when I wasn't busy with the Signal Corps).  He looked OK, smiling his "Oom Pah" best when he didn't know me from Adam.  I was only slightly taken aback when I was offered the job before I left.  But, what about Flagstaff?  I was able to get a stall of a couple of days, although they really wanted my answer right on the spot.  But, it was my spot that I was on, so I was allowed a decision period of 3 days.  I had decided by the time I got home, so I called and cancelled the interview in Arizona.

It was only after my first day of teaching Freshman Music Theory and meeting the piano majors that were relying on me that the thought struck me:  my boss had no idea if I could teach; I had no idea if I could teach.  What little experience I had was in a guided and protected situation, with lots of talented students that seemed that they would do just fine, with or without me.  Oh, reality, thou cruel, cold, damp towel that… OK, enough of that.  I had to think about how I was going to approach this.

I remembered the first recital I prepared without a teacher.  I was hired to play a whole recital for the Cecilian Club of Freehold, New Jersey.  I had a grand piano to work on, and time to practice.  Life was good.  OK, I know what I want to play.  Now what?  I listened closely, and I could hear the voice of my college teacher.  I knew what he would say.  “That went quite well,” which meant I sucked.  “Your Chopin is ‘growing’, but you haven’t gotten control yet.”  So I let John Holstad teach me that recital, in absentia.  It worked pretty well, so I thought I understood.

When my first piano major came to her first lesson, I observed the score of her Chopin Nocturne.  It was full of colors of many markings.  Joseph’s Coat had nothing on the E Minor Posthumous Nocturne.  She explained that the colors were the “feelings and emotions” that she would apply at the different points.  The look on her face when I expressed confusion, concern and not a little disagreement, showed that she missed her teacher from the previous year.  I, on the other hand, knew why they chose someone from the University of Iowa, rather than another Indiana University elite.  I knew that John Holstad’s wisdom would fall on deaf ears, so I had to think of something.

So I said, “Leslie, where are you having trouble?”  She thought for a while, forgot about her rainbow score, and played one of the phrases with the intense Chopin figuration that everyone agonizes over.  For myself, I just thought, if this were me, and my piece, what would I do?  Practicing is what I do.  Diagnosing problems and determining solutions… that’s what I do.  If nothing else, I know how to practice.  We got to work.  I worked with her for the rest of that year on technical matters that prevented her from playing the best she could, and on other little things that seemed to disrupt the flow of the pieces she had begun.  She had won a regional competition, and I helped her to move on to the state finals.  I helped her prepare for her admittance to the upper division, where she would have to play a short program for a panel of faculty.  She did well on both, and I felt very good about working with her.

Leslie taught me quite a few things; first, I learned that it really had nothing to do with my teaching.  It had to do with her learning.  Most of the information that I have explored since, in over 40 years of teaching, has had to do with how people learn.  It turns out that not everyone learns in the same way.  We, the teachers, have to figure out how each of our students can become… and then address them in that fashion.  There is no method.  There is no solution.  I found that I don’t teach music; I don’t teach piano.  I teach students.

Along the way, in twenty years at Louisiana Tech University, I noticed that something interesting was happening.  I was accidentally becoming a teacher.  My students taught me how to become a teacher.  As I taught, I found that I played better myself.  I was teaching myself, too.  I no longer had to imagine John Holstad.  I used my "closet."  My closet had all of the answers.  I also want to believe that I taught my students to find their own closet.  Oh, wait… I guess a word of explanation is in order?  That will have to wait for the next installment, I’m afraid.

The Battle of Stuttgart

Almost every night my wife and I settle in with our books and read.  It is something we have always done; it’s a release from the work that we do during the day.  She is a tax accountant, and I am a piano teacher.  Both of us find that we spend most of the day deep in thought, working at 130% capacity to do justice to our clients and students.  Reading allows the brain to slip to another track.

A couple of nights ago I came across a phrase in my book that referred to the sounds and sights of war.  I experienced the most incredible series of images, all in a matter of 3 seconds.  The images were clear, vivid, and worthy of a Hollywood director.  I provided the sound track, thank you!  Below, I have written the scenario, as best I can relate it, with “flashbacks” intact.

I am on the familiar stage of Howard Auditorium at Louisiana Tech University, in Ruston Louisiana.  I love performing there.  It is a real concert hall, with proscenium stage, balcony and carved plaster for decoration.  The piano sits midway between the two chambers of pipes for the concert organ.  The curtain behind me is a deep blue, one of Tech’s colors, and to the best of my recollection, it does not sport the ugly Bulldog face of its mascot.  I love looking straight ahead at the round school clock; it is reassuring to me.  The clock has been there through every one of my many recitals on this state, and it has become almost a friend.  The time never registers on my mind; I think it functions like the focal point that Lamaze mothers choose when they’re in labor.  The clock helped me to NOT think about the extraneous.

I do hear everything that comes from the audience, but that just becomes part of my “script”.  I believe it has always been important to occupy my conscious mind during a performance.  One teacher I heard recently says that if we don’t occupy our conscious during performance, it will cause trouble.  I keep mine busy with images that bring my music to life… for me, and I hope, for my audiences.  On this wonderful Sunday afternoon, I heard a baby cry; I love that baby.  I have convinced myself over the years that it was my youngest daughter, who would have been at the recital.  She has never been shy about her utterances.  The wonderful part is that she let out her bellow during the “dead baby” section of the Sonata I was playing.

I guess that got your attention?  Yes, I had a section of this grand piece that I thought of as a cemetery, probably in Europe (France, I think) with long rows of white crosses.  This was a World War I graveyard; that was a brutal war that counted many civilians among its casualties.  The saddest part of my cemetery was where they buried the countless babies… the innocents that never even had a chance to object to war, or poverty or the cruel twists of fate that might have made up their lives.  I’m pretty sure that Cheryl, my daughter, helped me to convey that deep despair during that performance.  I did perform the Sonata of Charles Griffes again, but I never captured the emotion quite like that.

Charles Griffes was a remarkable American composer.  He spent four formative years from 1903-1906 at the Stern Conservatory in Berlin. He loved Germany, and one particular German composer, Konrad Wölcke, helped Griffes through rough times after Griffes’ father died in 1905. Wölcke even loaned Griffes money to continue his studies.  World War I was traumatic for Charles Griffes; he was an American patriot, but he had personal relations and friendships with Germans, and Germany, and the evils of war broke his heart.  His Piano Sonata of 1918 bristles with sounds of bombs and rockets, tension and trauma, and in one particular section, the wide-open sound of still and loneliness convey to me everything about war that is both fascinating and hateful.

I have never fought in a war, but I have a somewhat personal relationship to a different war that Charles Griffes did.  My father and several uncles fought in World War II.  One of my uncles fought in North Africa, against Field Marshall Rommel, and another was captured during the Battle of the Bulge, and incarcerated in a Nazi prison camp.  He made it out.  As a result, I’ve heard enough stories to enliven my fascination.  Uncle Reub gave me a Nazi armband, an insignia from a German officer’s hat, and a copy of Mein Kampf in German.  I interviewed Uncle Slug about his prison camp, and wrote a paper in high school.  I am possibly one of the few that read “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” while still in high school… twice!

I tease people who ask about my Army experience; I tell them that I fought the Battle of Stuttgart!  I did live in the Stuttgart area for almost two years.  I worked on the base that Field Marshall Rommel used as his administrative headquarters.  Four kilometers away was Panzer Kaserne, where Rommel’s tanks were housed.  The underground tunnel between Patch Barracks and Panzer Kaserne was sealed in 1945, flooded by the British and killing all who hid in the tunnel.  One night, late, as I was doing preventative maintenance in Bldg. 1 (Rommel’s living quarter, when he was at “home”) I know I saw a ghostly apparition walking down the staircase.  An MP told me that I was not the first to see the ghost of Rommel’s mistress.

I really knew I was in the Battle of Stuttgart however, when I drove home one day and found a sign taped to my door.  “Warnung vor schlusswaffen gebrauchen.”  Loosely translated, have your weapons ready when entering.  It turned out that my landlord had recently been released from a mental ward.  He sometimes transported himself into an era when blackout curtains and fear dominated the town of Stuttgart.  He had seen a friend of mine in army fatigues, and it triggered a little hysteria.  The next morning I was very convincing in explaining to a Frau Niebergall of the US Army Housing Office that my family, with one-year-old twins in tow, would be moving to another house.  The traumas of war seem to live on.

I’m once again on the stage of Howard Auditorium, this time in a recital of two-piano music; there is such a wealth in this literature, and it is too rarely touched.  With twin 9 foot Steinways to bring the music to life, my partner and I opened with En blanc et noir, by Claude Debussy.  Written in 1915, Debussy insisted the work was not a comment on the First World War, but since virtually all of his correspondence from this period indicates a near obsession with the subject, it’s hard to imagine this music without WWI as a backdrop.  There are suggestions of bugle calls and quiet military drum rhythms.  The second movement, dedicated to a French army officer that had been killed in battle is overpoweringly sad, filled with the sounds of drum beats, chimes, and out of the silence comes a powerful quote from the Lutheran hymn, A Mighty Fortress is Our God.  I can’t but help think that if that movement could bring chills and tears to the performers that day, the audience left unmoved.  A war which was over before my father was born, came back to inspire me to a powerfully satisfying musical experience.

Three seconds to evoke all of this.  I swear this to be true.  The images and experiences of life, and those of music, seem inseparable to me.  I hope they will always be thus.

MY HEARTFELT THANKS

As piano teachers, we spend great amounts of time… giving.  We meet so many different personalities, so many minds, during our workweek that we almost feel as if our “gears” were being stripped.  I have longed for the Vulcan Mind-Meld that Mr. Spock used so effectively in the Star Trek series.  Lacking that, I try as best I am able, to find where each student is, meet her there, and take her to the place she longs to be.  It’s fascinating, invigorating and exhausting work.  My colleagues and I attend workshops, recital, concerts and more extended conferences for our transfusion of “new blood”.  I am a confessed convention junky.

The MTNA Conference is one that I always anticipate.  It comes at the end of March every year.  Besides giving my mind and soul a refreshing, I look forward to one or two moments of transcendence…a workshop that gives me something totally new to chew on, or expresses old truths in new ways.  I am never disappointed, and sometimes I stumble into a session that underlines why I even bother to get up each morning.  And of course, the end of the Conference means the real beginning of spring for me.

I find that I am very protective of my time in general, and more so when I’m at MTNA.  I face the choices of several workshops for each hour with anguish, because often I would like to attend more than one.  Over the years, I’ve learned to deal with it, but it is never easy.  I like to find sessions that are different, possibly tangential to piano teaching and piano playing.  This year, with trepidation, I chose a session that seemed intriguing.  Its topic was Performance Medicine, a relatively new field related to the well-developed Sports Medicine field.  They promised a new collaborative endeavor that would bring Performance Medicine, the treatment for musicians with small muscle and joint injuries, to the level of it’s older and smarter cousin.

I knew this session had the possibility of disappointment.  It could be laden with medical lingo, filled with concepts of physiology and anatomy that were beyond my comprehension.  I knew I couldn’t WASTE an hour, but it beckoned to me.  I got there early.  Carrying my weird, flat muffin (it looked like someone stepped on it) and my ubiquitous coffee, I approached the door.  There was a girl pacing in the hallway; she seemed to move in a slightly jerky, unbalanced manner, but she had such an engaging smile!  She asked me where I got my coffee, and I told her.  But something in that meeting lingered; I didn’t know what it was.  I knew it was not a sexual attraction, but a sensual attraction, something mysterious she projected.  I soon forgot about her, and watched the huge group of presenters setting up their multi-media. 

The session proceeded on schedule, and it was very interesting.  There seems to be not only a promise of something happening with Music Medicine, but an extremely vibrant group of experts in many fields that are collaborating to make it a reality.  Just when I was settling in, the group leader said it was maybe time for a little musical interlude.  I was pleasantly surprised to see “the girl” introduced as an opera singer with experience in roles throughout Europe.  She moved, almost imperceptibly in her strange gait, across the stage, and proceeded to deliver a wonderful aria.  She was greatly gifted, and one of the best singers I have heard in a long time.  Still, it seemed strange that she was appearing in this particular session.

The group leader addressed that very question when the aria was done; he told us that within the last year she was the recipient of a bilateral lung transplant!  I don’t know if you have ever heard a collective gasp before, but it is very dramatic.  This singer had the breath control of Pavarotti, with no signs that she had ever had any related problems.  It seemed that this might be the worst thing that an opera singer could be faced with.  She had undergone a successful operation, and a year of rehabilitative therapy with several members of the panel presenting the Performance Medicine workshop.  That got our attention.  These professionals not only were determined to make Performance Medicine as advanced and prevalent as Sports Medicine, they were capable of a rehabilitative miracle.

With the information given through the workshop, I was certain that I had chosen well.  So many musicians have been incapacitated with overuse syndromes of one kind or another.  At least two major professional concert pianists have had career ending problems with their hands; tendonitis and carpal tunnel problems are minor compared to dystonia and other debilitating skeletal and muscular problems.  The world of medicine has seemed to ignore these maladies, while professional and collegiate sports personnel have some of the best restorative and rehabilitative treatments known.

It wasn’t until the end of this session that I fell in love with the session itself, and the little opera singer.  She rose to say a few words to us, knowing that we were 90% piano teachers, and 10% vocalists.  As she struggled to keep herself composed, she described her yearlong therapy.  When she began trying to sing after her bilateral transplant, she couldn’t get a sound out.  Years of study in private and in college, and years of professional experience in operatic roles seemed to be worthless.  She worked with her therapists, tried to remember the many vocal lessons she had completed, and nothing seemed to work.  She wanted to give up.

She said she wanted the piano teachers assembled before her to know that they had her supreme gratitude for a life saved.  “I was a terrible piano student”, she said.  “I loved my piano teacher, and she also was my first voice teacher.”  She went on, “I never worked as hard as she did.  But I want you to know that during my therapy, when it was too hard, and I wanted to give up, it was my piano teacher and the things she really taught me, that saved me.” 

“What I learned after all those years is what all of you teach now, to young students like me.  Self discipline, the spirit to never give up until it is finished, the mental calluses that allow a person to repeat and repeat and repeat.  Voice lessons did not get my voice back, but what my piano teacher gave me did, and I don’t have her to thank anymore, but I have all of you.  Please accept my heart-felt thanks for what you do everyday, even when it seems to you like you are getting nowhere with that particular little boy or girl.  When you wonder why you still teacher into your 70’s, and when you feel the pain of every student that quits lessons, remember that you never know how much you changed someone.”

Let me tell you that the sounds of collective sobbing are much more musical than a collective gasp.  I now feel good about going back to my students.  I’m refocused on what I might accomplish.  And I won’t forget the singer with the engaging smile and the need for a little morning caffeine.

Memory Triggers: Bach's Italian Concerto (first movement only)

The experts say that smells are one of the more powerful triggers to memory; if you have ever experienced nostalgia, chances are that a smell… apple pie, cookies, rich dark chocolate… might propel you to a fond memory.  Or in Iowa, possibly the smell of a pig farm, baking in the summer sun, might bring thoughts of chores, or state fair FFA exhibits.

Of course for me, pieces of music are a powerful trigger.  One of my high school students came in this morning with the first movement of the Italian Concerto by J.S. Bach.  I was overwhelmed with memories associated with this piece.  It was an important piece because it is still associated with my first college Juries.  All of my piano teacher-friends will know exactly what Juries are; and, yes, they are as scary sometimes as confronting a regular jury in a courthouse.  But, let me tell you about the Italian Concerto.

I have always loved to practice.  The only cajoling that I remember at home was to remember to play certain piece that would relieve me of chores around the house, and to “not practice too early” when people were sleeping.  When I discovered the grand piano, my love of practice transformed into an almost-on-steroids event.  I didn’t have many chances to play on a grand before college, so when I arrived at the University of Northern Iowa’s music building and discovered grands in the practice rooms, I thought I might be in heaven.  The real dream was yet to come true.

Explorer that I am, I soon discovered a little door in the band room; a person had to duck to go through it, and I found that it led to the main auditorium, where a 9-foot Steinway resided.  The door had no lock, and I could walk through a short tunnel from the band room to the stage.  It was dark, but I didn’t care.  I tucked this knowledge away for later.

One night, after practicing until almost 11:00 (when the building closed), I heard some very interesting sounds coming from the band room.  Jazz Band 1 was rehearsing; I knew nothing of jazz.  My high school was in a town of 2000, and we were lucky to have a good band director.  There was no budget for a jazz band.  The sound entranced me.  I found a balcony in the band room, where I could sit and listen.  It was so interesting to hear them rehearse.  But more interesting was to see Campus Security come through the music building to lock up at 11:00 pm.  The jazz band was allowed to stay, as they rehearsed from 10:00 to midnight.  Aha!  An idea was born.

The next night I went up to the balcony to listen; when Security came through, I simply laid down on the floor of the balcony.  When the jazz band left, I waited until it was totally dark.  I then went through the little door, to the stage, and found the beautiful concert grand waiting for me.  I was in the process of preparing pieces for my first Jury, so I had music prepared and almost memorized.  I found the lights, opened the piano, and proceeded to spend the next hour in the concert hall, playing proudly on the Steinway.  I felt like a concert artist.  I basked in the glow of my imaginary audience, and I simply stunned them all with my masterful performance of Bach’s Italian Concerto (first movement only… remember, I was a freshman!)

I spent many nights practicing in the concert hall.  Years later, when the janitor retired (he and I had become close buddies), I found out that he knew what I was doing all along.  I’m assuming that a piano nerd from Jesup, Iowa didn’t seem like too much of a threat to the security of UNI.  But my story of the Italian Concerto is not finished, dear reader.  Much is to be revealed.

When I approached my first Jury, I became increasingly frantic.  The whole piano faculty and the organ professor would all sit and listen to me play the music I had prepared that semester, and then they would give me my grade.  I was insane with fear.  I remember the night before my jury, practicing the Italian Concerto (first movement only) in the auditorium for hours on end.  I was very tired, but I persisted. 

I only went back to my dorm room when I jerked, woke up, and found myself STILL playing Bach.  I didn’t know that it was possible to play in your sleep, but I’m here to tell you that it can happen.  I felt ready.  I felt energized.  Right before the jury appointment, as I was walking down the hallway to my sure doom, I made a quick pit stop in the men’s restroom and divested myself of lunch.  I remember trying to vomit quietly; if an upperclassman had found me in that situation, I would have been too humiliated to live another day.

When it was my time, I walked onto the state of the main auditorium, where the Jury was assembled, seated behind a long table.  They looked so evil to me; on the end was the oldest member of the Jury, the teacher of one of my friends.  I was sure he knew every note of the Italian Concerto by memory.  I could imagine the tally marks he would make, as one note after another fell to his superior, evil mind. 

My teacher had the most deadpan look on his face.  Where was the stiff, but endearing smile that always greeted me, as he ushered me onto his piano bench for yet another lesson.  He was my only friend in the world, and he seemed to have forgotten that.  I knew I was condemned when I saw Dr. Joyce Gault, there in the middle of the table.  She was tall and gaunt; she was scowly; she was the head of the keyboard division.  Oh my God!  It no longer mattered that we were on my turf, in my auditorium, with my Steinway 9 foot concert grand.  They, SHE, wanted me dead!

Then it happened; one of the most significant events of my life was about to be interrupted by fate.  My stage, and my piano, had to share space with the pipe organ console.  It was huge, and since it shared the stage, it had to be able to be moved from backstage to the stage extension for performances.  Since pipe organs need air for their bellows, this organ was fitted with an “umbilical cord” that screwed into the stage floor.  This umbilical supplied the organ with its air supply electrically.  There were several holes in the stage floor where the umbilical could be attached; they were supposed to be covered by metal plates.  Someone, probably the evil organ professor, forgot to put the metal plate back in place after they finished with the organ.

As I walked toward the grand piano for my first jury, my foot slipped into the hole in the stage.  I tried to act like nothing had happened.  I subtly pulled my foot up, but in trying to hide my problem, I twisted, and my foot became helplessly stuck.  I could no longer hide my anguish, so I bent over and tried to see what the problem was.  I just couldn’t get it out.  I prayed for the angel of death to take me away.  Instead, I got Joyce Gault, feared leader of my Jury.  She bent over and tugged on my leg.  I knew this couldn’t be happening.  It had to be a vestige of a dream I was having, as I slept and continue to play the Italian Concerto by J.S. Bach (first movement only).

But somehow Dr. Gault lost a little of her “snap” as she smoothed her dress and mounted her perch at the table.  We had somehow bonded, she and I, and I no longer felt she was seeking my demise.  My performance of the Italian Concerto was adequate.  I think I would have done better with more sleep (sans piano).  We won’t talk about my (almost) Victor Borge impression of scale playing, where I was instructed to play an E Major scale, 4 octaves, in 16^th notes.  THAT would have been much better if I would have started the scale in a place where there were four octaves to complete it.  As it turned out, my right hand sort of ran off the end of the piano, seeking keys that were not there.  I recovered, finished the downward journey of E Major, and was relieved when I was dismissed.  I’m thinking that the Jury might have been relieved also.  I wonder if any of them ever told this story to anyone.  Probably not.  My current student will have a much less eventful, a much less interesting life with J.S. Bach’s Italian Concerto.  He’ll be doing all three movements, by the way.