I was searching for some tapestry teaching video footage on some old hard drives recently and came across the recordings from my senior recital in college. Most of you probably don’t know that I was a music major as an undergrad. I played piano and clarinet while attending Lawrence University in Wisconsin. I was a liberal arts major among a conservatory of bachelor of music majors. I knew I didn’t want to be a performer, but I was interested in teaching so I took a lot of piano pedagogy classes. My senior thesis was writing a piano pedagogy curriculum for preschoolers.*
For all the decades since I graduated from Lawrence I have avoided listening to that recording. And that is because of what happened in my piano playing before the recital.
Ready for a story about teachers?
I had a wonderful piano teacher for my first two years of school. His name was Dr. Ted Rehl and his teaching style and personality was exceptionally supportive. He understood that I wasn’t a performance major and that I was playing for the love of the music. He taught me so much in those two years and I loved playing because of him. He was easy-going and had a great sense of humor. He listened to my perspective and was exceptional at giving me the information I needed to make decisions.
Dr. Rehl retired at the end of my sophomore year and I was assigned the new hire. I no longer remember her name which is probably for the best. She was the opposite of Dr. Rehl. She was only 7 years older than I was and the best way I can describe her is that she was fierce. She was absolutely driven and so focused on performance I don’t think she could see anything else. I cried after many of her lessons. I was never ever good enough for her. I remember her criticism in my bones. I had gone from loving playing the piano to dreading each and every lesson just with the change of a teacher.
I keep taking lessons though because you have to when you’re a junior BA in music major. I suppose it was also my own tenacity that wouldn’t let me quit something I’d been doing since I was a little girl, but there was definitely a danger that this one teacher would make me quit this part of my major study. I’m sure I learned a lot in my junior year in lessons with her, but by my senior year I was thinking about ways to step away from piano.
I was required to do a half recital as a BA candidate with a major in music. I decided my senior year that I was going to add organ lessons for something fun. I also knew that the organ professor, Dr. George Damp, was the sort of teacher who would get me excited about playing again. I was right about that. So being the overachiever that I was, I decided a full recital was for me. The first half would be on the piano, the second half on the organ.
Moving on to organ and harpsichord
Lawrence has a trimester system, so there are three semesters (quarters) each year with no summer session. I struggled so much with my piano teacher that I finally realized I was missing the joy in my playing. My senior year I added organ lessons to my schedule. Because I had to do a senior recital, I couldn’t drop piano, but I could add something fun with a teacher I was sure would help me enjoy playing again.
The massive tracker organ in the Lawrence chapel had been removed and the building was being renovated as a new organ was being made. The new instrument wouldn’t be installed until after I graduated. So the nearby Presbyterian church allowed the organ students at LU to use their beautiful pipe organ. It had some 32 foot pipes and I have rarely found the deep joy in anything else in life that came from registering a piece and using those almost inaudible rumbling bass pipes. It was pure joy. You can feel that music somewhere deep down and to be the being that is creating that sound is really quite an experience. Organ is not a popular instrument, but if you have been an organ performer and have played a full pipe organ in a large space, you know what I’m talking about.
Dr. Damp loved liturgical and early music and so I played a lot of that. I learned to register and play hymns** and focused a lot on Baroque music. Eventually I ended up doing some work on a small tracker organ that the university had in its smaller concert hall. It was a sweet, intimate instrument that sort of fluttered its way into my bruised heart.
I took organ lessons the first and second trimesters of my senior year along with piano. I decided to include organ on my senior recital which may not have made my piano teacher happy, but it did make me happy. It is noteworthy that after the recital the end of my second trimester, I dropped piano and organ and took harpsichord lessons with my dear Dr. Damp. It was the one musical thing I did at Lawrence entirely for fun. (I also took a fair number of visual art classes “for fun” as they didn’t apply to my degree course of study.)
The recital
At the end of the recital…
The first half of my recital was in the huge Lawrence chapel on one of their 7 foot concert grand pianos. I played Beethoven’s Sonata in D major, op 28 and El Puerto from Iberia by Albeniz. All of the piano music was required to be from memory.***
This is the part of the recital that I have avoided thinking about for the last 30 years. I was convinced that my playing was not good and I place the blame for that squarely on the shoulders of my piano teacher. Every lesson I went to I felt that I wasn’t good enough. Perhaps it isn’t fair to blame her entirely. Her culture was one of fierce competitive performance-centric perfection though I don’t remember Lawrence’s conservatory being particularly that way. But what I know is that her intense criticism made me feel like I was never good enough as a player and maybe as a person. I was a sensitive kid and it took a couple decades in the trenches as an occupational therapist to help me get past that.
The Yamaha
Later, I taught piano lessons when I was a graduate student in occupational therapy in Colorado to put myself through school. I had the training to be a good teacher thanks to my Lawrence pedagogy teacher Dr. Kathleen Murray, and I really enjoyed the kids. I also taught at a local piano store and because I did that, I was able to purchase a Yamaha piano at a very good price. That allowed me to teach in my apartment as well as visiting student’s houses to teach.
I still have that instrument. It is a good piano and though there have been years where I didn’t play anything more than Christmas carols, I have kept it for some unknown reason. I’ve shoehorned it into tiny apartments, had it moved up and down steep staircases, rolled it off the back of a pickup into a mountain cabin, and it currently lives in my tapestry studio. It is just waiting for me to come back. It keeps tune amazingly well and I like to think it whispers to me sometimes when I’m weaving.
Albeniz
It might be the Albeniz that brings me back to playing again. When I found the digital file on that hard drive last week, I clicked on the piece I loved the best from that recital, determined that after 30 years, I could listen to it. I was surprised to realize that it was far better than I remembered my playing to be. It is clear that I loved that piece and it is even clear that I was not a half-bad player. I’ve attached the audio file here in case you want to listen to my 1994 self playing El Puerto from Iberia by Isaac Albeniz on a Steinway grand in the chapel at Lawrence University.**** This non-performance major picked a very difficult piece and it was a joy to hear myself playing after all these years.
The Beethoven was the cornerstone piece of the recital and I have not yet been able to listen to that recording. Maybe one day I will. But I have played the piece now and then over the years, from music, and with all the errors unpracticed fingers will create. Beethoven comes alive again when I go back to it.
Teachers matter
Oh my goodness but this return to the struggles of my young piano-playing life brought back some pricks of pain. I gave up playing after getting my graduate degree, the only sign that I might want to come back to it has been my insistence on hiring piano movers (and once my sister, brother-in-law and his father and many times my own father) to get that piano into approximately 14 different houses. I tenaciously hung onto that instrument even though I almost never played it and definitely never play it in front of anyone else still.
I had a long list of incredible teachers at Lawrence University. Every single one in all disciplines was supportive, inspired me to engage and explore, and helped me find new knowledge and skills… except one.^ She was my piano teacher and she ruined piano for me.
It is time to take it back. Thirty years is too long. I am grateful that I hung onto that long-ago recording so that I could embrace my young self again.
I think teachers matter in so many ways. How many kids find their way in the world because one special teacher believed in them? How many aren’t so lucky and end up broken and unable to cope with the stress and tragedy of this world? There is no excuse for a teacher of art (or anything else) to break a student’s resolve in the way my piano teacher broke mine.
I’m grateful for Dr. Ted Rehl who came before and taught me that I could enjoy making music and that performance was not the point and for Dr. George Damp who introduced me to the delight of early music. My piano pedagogy teacher, Dr. Kathleen Murray, was similarly supportive and did a marvelous job walking me through the creation of my senior thesis project, the preschool piano method described in a footnote.
I hear so many stories from my tapestry students about art classes where teachers told them they were no good or that they couldn’t do things the way their imagination told them they should. And those scars last a lifetime. If you were one of those kids who was told that trees couldn’t be purple or that you were playing Claire de Lune too fast, take back those moments and try again. Those teachers were wrong. Art is an expression of your soul and you can do it in any way that has meaning for you.
As I teach tapestry weaving, it is my primary goal to be encouraging especially for beginners. It is far more important that a new weaver enjoy the process and accept that mistakes will happen then that they find criticism and negativity in their teacher. If you’ve been on the receiving end of my “sandwich” style of delivering comments on a tapestry submission in class, you’ll recognize this: start with something positive, give suggestions for improvement, end with something positive and encouraging.
Music and the family
My mom playing the organ for church somewhere a long time ago.
I was unable to find a photo of myself playing the organ, but I did find this one of my Mom. She plays piano, harpsichord, and organ and so I came by all those things honestly.
My parents are life-long amateur musicians. My mom plays keyboard instruments and my father plays the bassoon. Their example, family ensembles, and their dedication to my music lessons allowed me to spend a lot of my younger years making music. And that dedication to art brought me to where I am today.
*My subsequent training as an OT might have told me that 3 and 4 year olds are a little small to be playing the piano, but looking back at the curriculum I made, it was geared for group teaching and revolved around really fun activities, singing, games, and learning a few notes and simple tunes on the piano. So all in all, probably my instincts and that of my pedagogy professor Dr. Murray were good when creating that. I never moved forward with publishing it though I was encouraged to do so. Grad school turned me in another direction for many years.
**I grew up in the Presbyterian church and we were working with the same hymnbook. I don’t think I ever played the organ at my home church even after having lessons, but the hymns and ways of playing them so people could sing along was familiar to me.
***I suspect Dr. Rehl would have allowed me to use music for a recital of this length which was far beyond what was required for a BA in music student, but my new teacher absolutely would not hear of having music for reference at a recital. I did use music for the organ part of the recital and except for the need for a page turner, I believe it had no effect on the music.
****The recording was originally on tape and was later digitized. Recording equipment has come a long way in the last 30 years, but it isn’t half bad considering the concert was in 1994.
^Well, there was also the new hire calculus teacher that gave me the worst grade I’ve ever had in any class in high school or college. I only passed because my roommate’s boyfriend (thanks Don!) was a math major and helped me through many frustrating nights of calculus hell and because everyone in the class was failing and he had to curve the grades so he didn’t fail the entire class. I’ve never taken another math class, nor have I needed to!