

HOW TO FIND A  
PIANO TEACHER
How to Find a  
Piano Teacher

Gabriel Lanyi

Sycorax Books

Boston
Sycorax BooksTM

"Words count"

How to Find a Piano Teacher

Gabriel Lanyi

First Sycorax Books edition 2019

Copyright © 2019 by Sycorax Books

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book write to Sycorax Books,  
permissions@sycoraxbooks.com.

How to Find a Piano Teacher / Gabriel Lanyi – 1st American ed.

ISBN 978-1-941245-15-6

Published in the United States of America

First edition

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Contents

Prologue

I — Setting

II — Assuming responsibility for practice

III — Talking to the head

IV — Student concerts

V — Concern for students

VI — Letting go

Epilogue on independent thinking

Prologue

It was a special event dedicated to Bartok. Some of the top piano and string teachers of the Conservatory were present, in addition to students, parents, relatives, and a few guests. The Conservatory held several of these every year, each on a different topic. The Bartok event took a few months to prepare. Performances by the best students were interspersed with short talks about Bartok's life and work, video clips, and some singing. Ariel played two pieces from the second volume of _Mikrokosmos_. He was six years old, and at least four years younger than any of the other performers.

The violin teacher and his wife, the singer, were sitting in the last row. Their nine-year-old boy was taking piano lessons, but they weren't happy with his progress. He was not performing in this event. When Ariel walked on stage, people applauded politely, beaming from ear to ear. He was extremely cute, sitting at the piano with his feet dangling in the air some fifteen inches above the ground. Everyone was getting ready to do a lot of smiling. Then he started playing. The audience continued to smile, but not in the indulgent, patronizing way they had been preparing to do. This was not child's play. Ariel was playing not merely the notes, but Bartok's music, with all its intelligence and subtle humor. The singer leaned over to her husband and whispered: "Find me this child's teacher. I want my son to study with her."

Now if your span of attention is such that you have no patience but for one page—you may put paid right here and be done. The method described on this page certainly qualifies as the short answer to the question of how to find a piano teacher: attend a few student concerts, pick out a child whose playing you like, and find out who teaches that child.

This may well turn out to be the only actionable piece of advice in the book. Many of the parables included here involve circumstances that might be impossible for most readers to recreate. For example, in the first years, Ariel's piano lessons were held a fair distance from home, which made it unprofitable for me to drop him off and come back to collect him. I therefore ended up sitting through all his lessons, which gave me the kind of insight into his teacher's method that is not available to most parents. But regardless of your circumstances, identifying a child whose playing you like and locating the child's teacher is certainly within your means, and it is a more productive path than simply following someone's recommendation, which is what most parents do.

* * *

*

A question arises immediately: If you don't know enough to evaluate the skills of a piano teacher, can you trust your judgment to evaluate the playing of a student? The answer is, yes. I believe that it is easier to judge the playing of a young pianist, which is on display for all to see, than the behind-closed-doors practices of teachers, which we can only guess about. Above all, it is easy to spot the young pianists who play with an ease and fluency generally associated with experienced musicians. Typical beginners play haltingly, with obvious mistakes, speeding up for the easier parts and slowing down during the more difficult ones. You need not be an expert on the technicalities of piano playing to make this determination.

If the insights you gain at the student concert are not sufficient to make a decision, and you want to find out more about the teachers you are considering for your child, this book describes a few of the qualities that I consider to be important in a piano teacher. By talking to parents whose children take piano lessons, you should be able to collect the information you need to form an opinion about the degree to which your candidate teacher possesses these qualities. For the purposes of presentation, after a brief description of the setting, I group these qualities into the following categories:

  * Attitude toward practice and assuming responsibility for it

  * The mind or the fingers: The focus of the teaching effort

  * Handling of student concerts

  * General concern for the student as a child

  * Letting go

Some of these categories, especially the second, embrace several aspects of the teacher's general method and pedagogical philosophy. But first, a word about the setting of Ariel's piano lessons is in order.
I

Setting

Ariel started piano lessons with Lea two months before turning five, and studied with her for a little over eight years, as a student of the Conservatory of the Jerusalem Academy of Music. This book could not have been written but for the fact that for the first few years I attended most of the lessons owing to a purely technical reason. Because of the variable and unpredictable quality of the pianos at the Conservatory, Lea chose to teach some of her students in her studio, in the basement of her home, where she had a better piano. As it took me a little over 20 minutes to reach her home, it didn't make sense for me to drive home and then drive back to pick up Ariel. Instead, I took some work or reading with me, and I sat on the couch in her studio, listening to the lesson with part of my brain. Occasionally, I performed minor services such as fetching a glass of water and getting the door when the next student rang. Although I didn't participate in the lesson, and most of the time I was reading, the experience was a valuable one. I learned a great deal about music and music making, and above all, I gained a much better understanding of what Ariel was doing and of how he was growing musically than I would have by merely listening to him play at home. And although I was silent during the lessons, we did talk a lot driving to and from them, and in this way I became rather closely involved with what turned out to be Ariel's most important activity.

Lea's time management skills leave a lot to be desired. She was never able to fit a lesson in the allotted 60 or 90 minutes, and invariably kept her students for 10, 15, 20 minutes longer. In the course of the day, the accumulated delays meant that any given lesson could start as much as three quarters of an hour later than scheduled. Many students, and especially parents, objected to this, and some knew not to arrive on time. My attitude was different. First, I always tried to be punctual, regardless of circumstances. Second, and more important, I saw this as an opportunity. Since lessons were in Lea's home, we were not waiting outside in some corridor, but sitting on a couch in her studio, watching the end of another lesson—or the middle, as the case may be... In practice, we were attending a master class. It was a wonderful opportunity for Ariel to hear some of the piano repertoire played by generally more advanced students, to see Lea's method in action with works he may be playing years later, to see the types of problems other pianists had, and the ways in which Lea was solving them. Some of the greatest teachers of all times (Nadia Boulanger and Leon Fleisher immediately come to mind) used (and continue) to have all their students attend the lessons of the others.

As a teenager, Ariel participated in three workshops with Leon Fleisher in Europe, each lasting from a few days to a week and attended typically by 5-8 students. Each student received 3-4 lessons in the course of the workshop, but heard many more. All in all, Ariel may have had ten individual lessons with Fleisher, but attended more than sixty. This amounts to more Fleisher hours than if Ariel had studied with him for a year (without attending other students' lessons), and had the opportunity of hearing Fleisher teach a much wider repertoire than any student would have been able to cover in the space of one year.

By the same token, we were quite happy if the next student in line watched Ariel's lesson. It was not as though Lea ignored the people sitting on the couch, whether it was Ariel or someone else. Lessons are always better if there is more than one student present. Although Lea was working with only one student at a time, she was mindful of the audience on the couch, and occasionally addressed them, expanding the scope of the lesson, making it more general and more interesting. Suddenly, the long delays, which started out as a potential irritant, turned into a bonus for everybody involved. This explains the source of my information, but there is also something the reader can take away from the experience, and that is to avoid teachers who are reluctant to allow family to attend their lessons.

One more word about the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance (JAMD) is in order here to complete the picture. JAMD is located on the Hebrew University campus, but it is not part of the university; it grants its own Bachelor's and Master's degrees in various disciplines of music performance and dance. As such, it is similar to other music and dance academies. What is special about it, however, is that it contains two additional units: the Conservatory and the High School, both housed in a building adjacent to the Academy. The Conservatory teaches every conceivable instrument, singing, and dance to students of all ages. The High School enrolls students starting from 7th grade, and prepares them for the standard matriculation exams at the end of 12th grade, with a heavy emphasis on specialized subjects for musicians and dancers. Although it is not mandatory for High School students to receive their instrument lessons at the Conservatory, most do, which means that teenagers spend most of the day in the same environment, going to school in the morning, and having their music lessons, practice sessions, rehearsals, and performances in the afternoons and evenings in the same place. The two buildings form a wonderful campus, where students can immerse in their subject and hang out with kids who have similar skills and interests. The High School also shows great understanding for the students' musical activities, and it is relatively easy to be excused from various school activities to attend rehearsals and prepare for special events. Ariel was so eager to get to the High School that he skipped the 6th grade of his grammar school, to be able to join earlier.
II

Assuming responsibility for practice

Parents tend to feel responsible for their children's practice. They also often tend to believe that if the child goes to the lesson unprepared, the lesson and the investment in it are wasted. They therefore consider it their job to make sure that the child meets the teacher's expectations of work to be done between lessons.

I was of the same persuasion. At our first meeting with Lea, after she checked Ariel's hearing and they played a bit together, and after Ariel agreed to take lessons (he was four years and ten months old), I asked Lea about my function. What exactly was my job. She didn't quite understand what I meant.

"How do I make sure that he practices and does what you expect him to do?"

She was rather surprised, or pretended to be: "Who asked you to do any such thing?"

I was aghast. What if Ariel decided to continue playing his customary games at the keyboard, instead of doing his assigned work? Lea told me in so many words to stay out of it. How much Ariel practiced was none of my business; it was between her and him. I had nothing to do with it. It was her responsibility to make sure that Ariel does what he needs to do. Ariel ended up studying with Lea for a little over eight years, at a rate of two hour-and-a-half lessons a week. Not once in the course of these eight years did she ask him how much he had practiced, or whether he had practiced at all. And not once, to the best of my knowledge, did he show up for class unprepared.

How did she do it?

The answer is so simple, it is almost trivial. But let me first describe my own experience, as a child, when I took piano lessons for three years, between ages seven and ten. Except for scales and fingering exercises, my teacher taught all her students one new piece per year, which we were expected to play at the end-of-year recital, in her home. I don't remember what I played the first year, but the second year it was _Für Elize_ and the third year it was the Paderewski minuet. Incidentally, the end-of-year recitals were identical each year, except that different kids were playing the same pieces each time. It is easy to see how playing _Für Elize_ for a whole year would dampen one's enthusiasm for practicing. With my parents away at work, it was my grandmother who was supposed to monitor my efforts and make sure that I put in the required 30 minutes every day. But as luck would have it, my grandmother couldn't have told the difference between _Für Elize_ and _Rock Around the Clock_ , so I spent most of the time trying to cover pop tunes I'd heard on the radio. I'm afraid that the experience of many children today is not much different from mine.

This is not what happened in Ariel's case. At any given time, Ariel was playing some ten pieces, sometimes more. Some were short, certainly in the first year or two; a Bach prelude, a Bartok miniature, or a piece from Debussy's _Children's Corner_. But others could be substantial: a Haydn sonata, some Mozart variations, or a Chopin nocturne. Ariel had a lot to say about his choice of repertoire, and Lea never imposed anything on him, although she often recommended certain pieces that she thought were important for him to play. But if Ariel objected (which he didn't often do), she always had some alternative offer that could achieve the same pedagogical goals as far as she was concerned. The piano literature is so vast that there is never a shortage of music at any level. Most often, Ariel wanted to play pieces that were way over his head. Even then, Lea never dismissed his requests. Typically, it would go something like this: "Beethoven's D major sonata is a fantastic one. It is a very difficult piece, but I promise to teach it to you. I think that at this point, if you first learn one of these," and here she would offer him three alternative sonatas by Beethoven, "it will make it much easier for you to do the D major. Read through them, and tell me which one you would like to do." It worked like a charm. Ariel played the _Sonata quasi una fantasia_ instead, and tinkered with the D major on his own, eventually learning it with Lea.

Not all the pieces were practiced to performance level. Although Ariel had quite a few performances since he was very young, not all his repertoire got to see the footlights. Often, after Lea thought that she had achieved her pedagogical goals with a piece, she didn't try to improve on it further or to fine-tune it, unless Ariel insisted on it.

Lea believed that if a student didn't practice it was because the teacher hasn't found the material that would interest and challenge him. She considered it her responsibility to learn her student's mind and identify the repertoire that captured his imagination and held his attention. That repertoire was different for every student.

Coercing a child to practice, using bribes or discipline, has little value. Most children eventually submit, but this kind of practice is largely a waste of time. After a while children often rebel and quit playing altogether. Making music is one of the most exciting human activities. The thoughtful teacher knows how to tap into this excitement and let the child's interest in the music drive the practice. This is not necessarily easy to do. Every child is a different riddle. Lea spent untold hours at night thinking about what Ariel and her other students should play next.

When Ariel was about eight years old he developed a strong interest in jazz. He quickly became knowledgeable in various styles, played all over Israel and Europe, and attended many performances by some jazz legends such as Johnny Griffin, Kenny Garret, Phil Wood, Al Foster, Chick Corea, Al Di Meola, and many others. On one occasion, Hiromi appeared in Tel-Aviv in what was billed as a master class, but ended up being more of a lecture. Someone asked her to talk about how she acquired her phenomenal piano technique, and she told the story of her classical piano training as a child. At the age of 6 or thereabouts she was subjected to a deadly diet of Hanon exercises, a mind-deadening series of scales and arpeggios that generations of children have been tortured with. Hiromi was a terrible student. She never could finish an exercise because she always fell asleep before it ended, slumping onto the keyboard. (She illustrated how she used to do this, to the delight of the audience.) Her teacher and parents declared that she was hopeless and decided to stop her lessons. But just then, by some fateful coincidence, an Oscar Peterson record found its way into their home and she started listening to it. And she loved it. At the next lesson she asked her teacher whether she could play the Hanons not as written but with dotted notes and a feeling of swing. So that instead of ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta she would be playing the same notes, but taTA taTA taTA taTA, and so forth. Her teacher said something like "be my guest," or its Japanese equivalent, and little Hiromi started spending three hours a day at the keyboard doing her exercises. In short order she developed amazing technique. In this case, fate did her teacher's job and put in front of Hiromi the kind of music that was able to light her fire.

Lea never asked Ariel to play scales, which she considered a waste of time. Violinists and string players in general must constantly play scales because they "make" the sounds on their instruments. There is no ready-made C or F-sharp on the violin; violinists must know exactly where to place their fingers on the finger board to make the correct sound. So unless they practice it all the time, they will not be able to do it in the fraction of a second at their disposal, in the middle of a performance. But this is not the case on the piano. The 88 notes the piano can play are already built into it; all the pianist needs to do is to press the right key. To do that, there is no need to practice scales that have no musical meaning. According to Lea, all these scales are already in the music of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, and others. Students can practice them while making music. Teachers who insist on piano students playing scales believe that technique has a life of its own, independent of the music that is being played. They believe that they can teach their students to move their fingers fast and accurately up and down the keyboard in complete dissociation from any kind of music, with the expectation that once a generic sort of technique has been acquired, it can then be employed to play all kinds of material. Lea believed, by contrast, that there isn't one technique, and that each musical work requires its own technique, so that technique is not something that stands on its own, divorced from musical content, and can be mastered for its own sake.

Lea also understood that if the parents keep pressuring the child to practice, the child stops practicing for himself and begins to practice for the parent. This kind of practice has no musical value. It is kept up by some external threat or incentive, explicit or implicit. When the external drive is removed, the child turns his back on music because he never learned to enjoy it for its own sake. When children love what they're doing, practice is its own reward.

Admittedly, a child who attends expensive music lessons also has the responsibility to practice, to do his own part of the deal, so to speak, to justify his parents' investment. But by constantly badgering a child to practice, the parents remove this responsibility from the child and take it upon themselves. The child doesn't have to remember to practice and make time for it because his mother is sure to remind him and to arrange his schedule accordingly. In time, an activity that should be thoroughly enjoyable and its own reward, indeed a privilege, becomes drudgery. Coerced practice is one of the reasons why children stop playing the instrument, usually around age 12, when they find their voice and begin to insist on their rights. Children who practice voluntarily usually stay with the instrument into adulthood, even if they don't end up being professional musicians but rather lifelong amateurs and lovers of music.

Effective practice requires total concentration. A child who is driven by external motives is constantly preoccupied with how much longer he has to go before completing his daily quota and being able to go back to his other activities. Without a total focus, much of the practice is wasted anyway.

# "Practice less, think more"

This wonderful phrase belongs to Leon Fleisher, with whom Ariel was to attend several workshops as a teenager, but it reflects entirely Lea's approach to the matter. Obsession with practice is universal. Teachers and parents are equally susceptible to it. Children are always prepared to answer the recurring question, "how much did you practice?" It is not surprising that parents, seeking to protect their investment in music lessons, keep tabs on the only quantifiable measure they often possess. But teachers should know better. They should know from experience that spending hours at the instrument, in thoughtless repetition of some exercise or passage, while the student's mind wanders elsewhere, is utterly worthless. Fifteen minutes of focused practice, according to Lea, are worth more than hours of mindless repetition. Lea absolutely did not care how much time Ariel spent at the keyboard by the clock, and in any case, she could tell immediately how much progress he made on any given piece from the previous lesson from the way he played—she didn't need to hear how many hours or minutes Ariel practiced between lessons. The "practice less, think more" maxim also implies that there is important practice to be done away from the keyboard, reading the work, thinking about it, playing it in one's head, and developing an interpretation. Lea encouraged this attitude, and Ariel never stopped following this practice.

Ariel also had the experience of the opposite attitude toward practice. Around the same time he started lessons with Lea, Ariel decided that he wanted to also take violin lessons from none other than the luthier who used to fix his tiny 1/32nd violin, which Ariel used to mistreat. The violin was very delicate and susceptible to various caprices, so we often visited Lev, the avuncular violin maker who used to restore it to its former respectability, because Ariel had been treating it rather as a toy. Ariel loved Lev's workshop, with the sharp and dangerous-looking tools lying about and hanging on the walls, and the colorful musicians walking in and out of the shop. Each time before returning a repaired violin to its grateful owner, Lev would play a few virtuosic scales to try it out. Ariel was greatly impressed by the accuracy and clarity of his playing, and he told Lev that he wanted him to teach him how to play the violin. Lev protested that he was not a teacher, that it has been decades since he'd played the violin, that he didn't have time... To no avail. So twice a week, half an hour before he opened his shop, we would show up and Ariel would have a lesson.

It started out really well. Lev showed him how to hold the violin and the bow properly, brought out a simple piece, and Ariel, who had perfect pitch and could read notes since he was about two years old, pretty much sight read it with reasonable accuracy. Lev was impressed. Of course, there were issues. Violin is not piano, and it involves two entirely distinct techniques: the left and right hands do completely different things. And the violin must sit exactly so. And the elbow must be at precisely this height. And the bow must be held like this and not like that. And the fingers must touch the frog here and not there. And the wrist... In short, there were lots of things to adjust and correct, all of which required practice. Now, a violin maker is nothing if not meticulous. At the next lesson, they went over the same little exercise, and Lev was more critical. He pointed out all the mistakes and slips, and asked Ariel to practice more conscientiously. Ariel spent some more time on this exercise, but he had really hoped to be moving along and start learning other pieces. Lev didn't think that they could proceed before solving all the problems, and in reality, Ariel started playing the same exercise worse and worse. Finally, Lev relented and pulled out a difference piece, and again was amazed how well Ariel sight read it. But then the refinement and the fine-tuning began, and again Ariel ended up playing worse and worse—or perhaps meeting higher expectations less and less. Eventually, Lev became discouraged and persuaded Ariel to transfer to a different teacher. Although violin remained Ariel's second instrument, he did eventually become a competent violinist and was concertmeister of the high school and conservatory orchestra in his senior year. This episode serves as a good illustration of how the same child responds to different practice regimes.

Admittedly, violin and piano are vastly different instruments, but nevertheless they have something decisive in common, and that is music. The child's excitement and enthusiasm, after all, does not come from the technical control of the instrument but from the ability to use it to make music. Lea never lost sight of this fact for a moment, and never allowed herself to get bogged down on any single technical issue or piece of repertoire. If something didn't work out, she set it aside and moved on. She pointed out that there are many different pieces that can be used to achieve the same pedagogical goals—there was no reason to keep working on any single one after the child lost interest in it. And if it was important to play that particular work for whatever reason, it was always possible to come back to it six months or a year later, "from above," as Lea would say, and ace it. This is why Ariel usually played ten or more pieces at a time (fewer later, as works became longer), picking and choosing what to practice at any given moment, and never getting to the point of becoming bored with any of the music he was playing.

This required a great deal of thought on Lea's part. She never simply passed the same pieces of music from one student to the next, as they advanced from stage to stage, but spent untold hours thinking about what was appropriate at that precise time for each individual student. It is not a trivial task. There are many false starts, and one must be prepared to admit defeat, correct mistakes, show flexibility, rethink, and make changes, sometimes in the middle of a lesson. I've seen Lea not once, halfway through a lesson, go to her bookshelf, pull out some volume, and say: "OK, I think we should try something else." The more advanced and more promising the students were, the more difficult it was to cater to their needs.

Despite Lea's dire warnings, I did on occasion interfere with Ariel's practice, usually with disastrous results. Ariel was about eight years old, preparing to play Bach's F minor piano concerto with an orchestra. When students practice a piece to be played with an orchestra, during lessons the teacher plays the orchestral part on a second piano. There are special practice editions of concertos, with a piano reduction of the orchestral part, and pianists use these editions to practice and rehearse away from the orchestra. As I was watching Ariel practice at home, I decided he can do better than that; why try to play the orchestral part in his head, when we had the CD of the concerto at home? We could just put on the CD, and he could play along with the orchestra. True, there was already a piano playing on this recording (Gould, in this case), but he could just ignore that and play over it. (Jazz musicians, incidentally, commonly practice with "minus one" tracks, such as those published by Aebersold, where the performer's instrument is missing from the recording or is on a different track that can be muted. And minus one recordings are available for classical music as well, although I haven't seen any.) So I suggested that Ariel do the same with the Bach concerto. I put on the CD, and Ariel was diligently playing along with the orchestra, in tempo. I even found a way to RIP the CD and move the tracks to the computer, where with the aid of special software I was able to decrease and increase the speed of the playback without changing the pitch. This allowed him to play the piece at faster than required tempo, giving him some ability to spare during the real performance. When at the next lesson I proudly described to Lea my innovation and revolutionary new method of practice, she almost had a heart attack.

In the cooperative playing with an orchestra, or alternatively, with another pianist standing in for it, the musicians listen to each other all the time, continually adjusting their playing to the other, responding to each other's gestures, and adapting their playing to what they hear in real time, like two reciprocal feedback loops. Together they form a living, breathing organism that functions like a single, synchronous unit. When playing with a CD, only one musician is alive; the recorded track is for all practical purposes dead; it has no ears and no brain, and cannot respond to the playing of the live musician. One might still want to try out this exercise just for the fun of it, but as a method of practice, in other words, getting used to playing with a dead and unresponsive partner, is absolutely sacrilegious in Lea's eyes because it contradicts the very life and spirit of music. I believe this was my last attempt to interfere in Ariel's practice.
III

Talking to the head

If I were to reduce Lea's method to one statement, it would be her pronouncement: "I cannot teach your fingers. I can only talk to your head. Your head must tell your fingers what to do."

At first, this appears entirely trivial. Of course, one cannot teach someone else's fingers what to do. Amazingly, though, this is exactly what most instrument teachers do. From the perspective of the dynamics that take place between music teacher and student, Lea's is the most profound and consequential proposition that I know about teaching music.

In the dozen years in which Ariel went through the conservatory and high school of the Jerusalem Academy of Music, I met countless students and teachers of various instruments, spent many hours talking to parents, attended dozens of student concerts, and sat through hundreds of lessons and master classes. The immediate instinct of all music teachers, from the recent graduate who is barely older than his students to the world renowned performing artist, is to tell students exactly what to do. Piano master classes are among the most predictable events in history. Some of the advice is entirely generic (I also could provide it): "Don't rush." "Don't bang." "What is this piece about?.. OK, now show us this at the piano." "Take time." "Build up to it." "I want to hear the piano sing." "This is not a horse race." "The piano is not a typewriter." "Don't tense up your shoulders." "Don't slouch." These precepts are at times accompanied by explicit instructions about what to do in each and every bar: where to accelerate and where to slow down, which notes to play forte and which piano, what articulation is needed for every bar and passage, which notes and phrases to emphasize, what type of sound to aim for, what tempo to follow. Teachers exemplify what they mean and ask students to imitate them, as best they can. Those who are more agile and flexible succeed better and garner much praise. Those less able to follow must satisfy themselves with polite condescension and with "you'll practice it more at home."

Generations of students have grown up trying to imitate their teachers in how to hold their shoulders, raise their elbows, position their fingers, and apply the correct force and pressure to the keys to obtain this or that sound. Teaching these skills is a rather straightforward matter. By contrast, music theory is an intricate science. The structure of musical pieces can be of staggering complexity. Explaining to a young student the reason for taking time just before a cadential sequence appears to most music teachers like a herculean task: someday, maybe, the students will learn it in college. For now, "take time" is all is needed to achieve the desired result. And to some degree, this method works. A well-trained student can deliver a credible performance, which to the untrained ear sounds almost indistinguishable from a genuinely informed interpretation. From the student's point of view, however, the difference is immense: one plays the notes, the other the music; one presses the keys as told, the other seeks to recreate the musical ideas of the composer; one is a reflection of his teacher, the other thinks for himself. You can guess in which category Lea's students fall.

According to Lea, no student is too young to be intellectually challenged, to think for himself, to play the music rather than the notes. Ariel started piano lessons with Lea just before he turned five. Three months later he played in public for the first time at a student concert. Although he was playing simple, short Baroque pieces, it was evident already then that he was minding the music and not the individual notes. Lea saw no reason not to discuss with a five-year-old issues of consonance and dissonance, which are the basis for understanding the tensions and resolutions in tonal music, and the direction where every piece of music is going.

True, the intricacies and subtleties of music theory can be mind-boggling, and one can spend a lifetime studying harmony and counterpoint without exhausting the topic. But the basic notions are not only simple, they are also obvious to the ear and immediately familiar because we hear them all the time when we listen to music. Nor is it necessary to use the exalted language of academia to talk about them. Lea told Ariel about how playful Bach was, and how he liked to hide all sorts of puzzles and surprises in his pieces, expecting us to discover them. Children always like a riddle. "Look at these six notes," Lea would say, pointing to a segment consisting of one ascending and five descending 16th notes. "What does it remind you of?" Ariel quickly found another segment just like it, starting on a different note, and then another and another. "And here, except it's backwards!" "You're absolutely right. Where else?" Who would have suspected Bach of being such a trickster? Suddenly, what looked like a series of black dots on the page acquired meaning. Melodies joined together to form patterns that repeated at different pitches, in different directions, and at different tempi. It is not necessary to use terms like "sequence," "inversion," "augmentation," etc. for children to begin to understand the thematic character of Baroque music, how motifs are reused, modified, broken up into smaller units, and played against each other to create the particular texture and structure of this music. Talking to a 5-year-old child about how a musical piece works and what it is meant to convey, rather than telling him what to do, is not intuitive for a teacher. It is much more expedient to say "do this" or "do that" than to wait for the student to understand what works and to figure out how to produce a certain effect.

Teachers avoid discussing these matters with their students because many of the complex rules on which the architecture of a musical piece is based are not reflected in the interpretation, and therefore do not affect performance. But some elements in the structure of the composition do emerge in performance, and the performer must be aware of them, otherwise he is like an actor reciting a text in a language he doesn't understand. One cannot produce an emotional effect on an audience by pronouncing words one doesn't understand. Music is a language; it has its vocabulary and its syntax. As it unfolds, expectations are created, tensions arise, and eventually are resolved (or deliberately left unresolved). Some of the resolutions, as well as the episodes along the way, are highly predictable. Others are surprising, even shocking. In tonal music, most of this drama is caused by the tension between consonance (sounds that are naturally in agreement and appear pleasing to the ear, like an octave or a fifth) and dissonance (harsh sounds that clash disagreeably and require resolution, like a tritone). The resolution of a tritone, say B-F, to a major third (C-E) or a minor sixth (A-sharp-F-sharp) is a physical need. We feel the need in our bones. The tritone is by nature unstable. We yearn for the closure, the finality, the feeling we achieve when the inevitable arrives. When the resolution is delayed, the music becomes more complex, more dramatic, and the interest of the listener is aroused further. These are the moments in music that are responsible for its strong emotional affect. And these are the moments that performers must emphasize to produce an emotional response in their audience. Telling a student to play louder here, to take time there, without knowing why, is training a child to play like a machine that carries out someone else's instructions. A student like this will have a difficult time developing into a musician in his own right, and will be more like an algorithm that carries out his teacher's program.

As listeners, we need not be aware of the mechanisms responsible for the emotional effect of tonal music. By instinct, or maybe by early conditioning, we respond emotionally to its characteristics when we hear them. We are all easily awed by the finale of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, where the two subjects of the last movement come together, even without knowing what a double fugue is. But it is not possible to inspire such awe if, as performers, we are not sufficiently aware of the compositional elements that are intended to produce it.

How does Lea find the time, in the space of a student lesson, to explore with her young students the intricacies of musical expression? The answer lies in the second part of her statement: "Your head must tell your fingers what to do." Most teachers spend an inordinate amount of time attempting to communicate directly with their students' fingers. They try to manipulate their students' arms, hands, and fingers to produce a sound that matches the one in their (the teachers') head. Lea wastes no time on this at all. All her effort is aimed at helping the student form, in his head, the musical ideas he wants to express and the sounds he wants to produce. Armed with this knowledge and understanding, the student will know how to get his fingers to obey. Of course, she helps out in technical matters, but only to solve problems when the student encounters them. There are always many ways of accomplishing the same result, and if the student can come up with the fingering that works best for him, so much the better. If not, she steps in to recommend what she knows from experience to work. But it is the student's ultimate responsibility to teach his fingers what to do. This also naturally ties in with the student's responsibility to invest the amount of practice needed to teach his fingers to do his bidding.

A few weeks after Ariel played at his first student concert, the conservatory held what they call "juries." These take place twice a year, and provide an opportunity for students to play before a panel of teachers. For high school students it is mandatory, and they are graded. But often teachers bring some of their younger students to the juries, to introduce them to their colleagues.

Having seen how much Ariel enjoyed playing at his first student concert (not all young children do), Lea asked him whether he wanted to play before an audience again, in a week or two. "This is a special type of concert," she said, "where people don't clap." Ariel readily agreed, and they decided that he would play, in addition to one of the pieces he had played at the student concert, one of Bach's little preludes.

On the day of the juries, about an hour before the event, students could take a few minutes to try out the piano, and teachers used the opportunity to give last-minute instructions. When Ariel's turn came, Lea went over the entire Bach prelude with him, for Ariel to get the feel of the hard touch of the Steinway B piano that he wasn't used to. Concerned to make Ariel as comfortable as possible, Lea may have taken longer than etiquette prescribed. As they were getting off the stage and making for the exit from the hall, a teacher waiting somewhat impatiently to have her turn at the piano, said to Lea in a less than friendly tone: "Do you think he should be playing this piece at his age?" Everything that Lea stood for—her method, philosophy, approach—was challenged in this question. Lea stopped in her tracks and gave her a long look: "I'd love to chat with you about it sometime, but right now I just don't have the time for it" (a few more of her students were performing that day). Some 30 teachers attended the juries, and breaking with tradition, they applauded after Ariel finished playing.

# The pedagogy class

Lea's method endowed her students, from early on, with the ability to read the musical text independently and to analyze its meaning. But it did more than that. It also developed in students the confidence of being able to explore and eventually master a musical piece independently, to generate ideas about it, and come up with their own interpretations. Most teachers encourage their students to listen to the great masters' performances of the pieces they learn. When an older friend of Ariel's, who was studying with a different teacher, was preparing Mendelssohn's first piano concerto, the Perahia recording was playing in the home around the clock. Lea asked Ariel explicitly not to listen to any piece he was in the process of learning or was likely to learn in the coming year or two. "No audience will want to pay money to hear you deliver an imitation of Gould or Richter," Lea would say. "They want to hear what you have to say about a piece." After he finished learning a piece, however, and had formed robust ideas about it, Lea occasionally asked him to listen to several performances and critique them.

One of the most dramatic illustrations of the effect of Lea's method came at a model lesson she was asked to conduct in front of students of the Academy of Music, as part of their pedagogy class. Lea asked Ariel whether he agreed to be the model student. Ariel did, and on the appointed day we all showed up at the Academy. My job was to crawl under the piano and set up the pedal booster—a heavy stool of adjustable height that fits on top of the pedals and on which small pianists could rest their feet. The stool comes with its own pedals, which if pressed, in turn press the pedals of the piano, allowing small pianists to use the pedals. At age eight, Ariel was such a pianist.

As I was setting up the pedals, Lea introduced Ariel to the class and asked him to list the repertoire he was working on. The twenty or so students in the class gasped as Ariel rattled off some ten or twelve familiar compositions, from Telemann to Bartok. Lea asked him what he would like to work on that morning and Ariel chose Copland.

Before beginning the lesson, Lea took a few moments to describe her method of exploring the musical aspects of the piece with her students, rather than drilling the technical ones. This invariably caused consternation among her audience, and students expressed doubts about the ability of young children to understand the theory sufficiently to be able to come up with a credible interpretation independently. Lea tried to explain that children of all ages can use their head, not only their fingers, in making music. On an impulse, she turned to Ariel:

"How many music teachers do you have?" she asked him.

"Four," Ariel replied.

"Who are they?"

"A piano teacher, a violin teacher, a composition teacher, and a jazz teacher."

"Now tell me who taught you more music than anyone else."

My heart stopped. I couldn't believe Lea would ask such a question. A deadly silence settled on the class, as all the students held their breath. No one moved a muscle. The scene looked like a freeze frame in a movie. The opportunities for embarrassment were almost too much to bear. Ariel answered without missing a beat:

"My head."

Twenty pairs of lungs gratefully filled with oxygen. I wasn't able to talk to Lea that morning because after the lesson Ariel and I left, while she stayed behind for a class discussion. The first thing I said to her that evening, on the phone, was "How did you dare ask such a question?!" Lea laughed. "I didn't doubt for a second how he would answer. I know my students."

# The alternative path

As I reread what I have written so far about Lea's method of emphasizing musical content as opposed to technical skill, of helping students develop their own interpretation in their head, then letting their heads teach their own fingers—it all seems so elementary, so obvious, and so necessarily true, I find it difficult to believe that everybody doesn't naturally follow such a method. In reality, almost nobody does. Indeed, many teachers follow a path that leads in the completely opposite direction, which may explain why there are so many generic pianists these days.

Although Lea taught mostly children, occasionally students from the Academy, usually in their early 20s, were referred to her to address special problems or to prepare them for certain events. One such student had studied, in his conservatory days, with one of the most exalted teachers in town. Lea asked what he wanted to work on, and let's say he named Beethoven's Waldstein sonata (I'm trying to protect the privacy of the innocent). Naturally, at the first lesson Lea wanted to hear his performance of it.

I must note here that there is a fundamental difference between teaching beginner and advanced students. Young students and beginners spend a long time with their teachers reading through new material, bar by bar, often note by note, counting the beats and figuring out how to place their fingers on the keyboard to match the black dots in the score. The process is sometimes called "deciphering," as the student grapples with the musical notation. It can be a slow and baffling process, as the beginning student must figure out not only what notes to play but also when to play them. Most teachers consider this step to be a prerequisite for later developing an interpretation of the work. In other words, students go through a two-step process: deciphering and interpreting. Lea never believed in this approach, and insisted on playing the music from the first phrase the student was able to decipher. As soon as the student could play five notes, she expected him to start thinking about the meaning of those notes, and not settle for merely playing them accurately. The goal was always the music; deciphering was never an end in itself. In the case of more advanced students, the process is quite different. Once they no longer need the teacher's assistance to master the score, they learn the pieces on their own and bring them to the lesson, when they are able to play them fluently. In this way, the lesson can be devoted entirely to correcting mistakes and to musical issues such as style, approach, sound production, and the like.

This is one of the few episodes in the book that I didn't personally witness and I know only from Lea's account. Naturally, the Academy student who showed up at Lea's had prepared in advance the Waldstein sonata, which he proceeded to play. Lea used the term "sewing machine" to characterize the type of playing where there was absolutely no attempt at any kind of expression: no dynamics, no pedaling, no style, no interpretation. In short, a sewing machine. After a few minutes, Lea stopped him and asked why he was playing like this. He didn't understand the question.

"Do you have any opinion or feeling about this piece? Don't you want to say anything about it?"

The student was befuddled. "I was waiting for you to give me the interpretation."

So there it was. Admittedly, this was an extreme case, but it illustrated perfectly the separation between the mastery of the technical aspects of the work (the ability to play the notes accurately, at the required tempo) and its musical aspects. The student was saying: "I did my part. I learned all the notes and I can play them without mistakes. Now it's up to you, my teacher, to tell me how you wish me to play them." Here was living proof of a dozen years of instruction that separated these two aspects and trained students in developing fast fingers that can run up and down the keyboard, leaving the musical aspects to be supplied by the teacher or copied from the performances of illustrious artists, without necessarily understanding them. This kind of teaching must be rooted in deep distrust of the student's abilities and artistic sensibility. By contrast, all of Lea's teaching was based on respect for students and their understanding, at all ages.

# A-natural

Ariel was 7 or 8 years old when he was working with Lea on Bach's F minor piano concerto. As Ariel was playing, Lea pointed to a given bar in the score and said: "A-natural." Ariel repeated the passage, and Lea said again: "A-natural!" Ariel repeated the passage again, and once more he played A-flat, almost automatically. "A-natural!!" said Lea. "But Gould plays A-flat here," said Ariel. By now Lea knew that Ariel could not make a mistake of this type, so she got up and pulled out another edition of the concerto: A-flat. She opened a third edition: A-natural. At this point, she called in her husband, Eytan, a professor of music theory. It is convenient to have an expert in music theory handy, just for these circumstances. Eytan came down to her studio, and after examining the different editions, made the rabbinical pronouncement that it worked equally well with A-flat and A-natural. This was a minor issue, of no particular importance, except for the fact that Lea chose not to dismiss the comment of a seven-year-old student (it would have been easy to say: "We play A-flat because that's what's written here"), but went to some length to clarify it.

# Breaking the rules

When Ariel was about seven years old, he and Lea were working on one of Haydn's G major sonatas. Some of the dialog between them went more or less as follows:

Lea: What would you expect at this point?

Ariel: A return to the theme in the original key.

Lea: And what does Haydn do?

Ariel: Modulates once more.

Lea: Surprise!.. He broke the rule. It's what makes this piece so special. Although it might be a relatively simple piece, it manages to take us by surprise. Just when the audience thinks they have it all figured out, Haydn plays a trick on them and doesn't do what everyone expects.

The following year, they were working on Mozart's Sonata in E-flat major, K. 282. "What's happening in the development section of the first movement?" asked Lea. "What's happening?.." asked Ariel. "OK, how does it begin?" asked Lea. "With a diminished chord," said Ariel. "And what would we expect," asked Lea. "The dominant." Surprise! Mozart broke the rule.

In the year after, they were working on Beethoven's Sonata Op. 27 No. 1, in E-flat major. "What do we have here, in the middle of the first slow movement?" asked Lea. "A fast section," said Ariel. "Yes, but in what key?" she asked. "In C major," said Ariel. "Ah, but what would we expect?" asked Lea. "Something closer to E-flat, like B-flat major." Again, Beethoven took us by surprise and broke the rules.

"OK, so Haydn broke the rules, Mozart broke the rules, Beethoven broke the rules," said Ariel. "What's so special about breaking the rules? Everybody seems to have done it."

Lea thought about this for a moment before answering: "Not everybody broke the rules, but those who did are the ones we remember today and whose music we play."

It's a generalization, but a wonderful one. Of course, one can elaborate endlessly on the importance of those passages where the rules are broken and on how to communicate this to the audience, which Lea didn't do then and there. But Ariel did it on his own, and by his own admission, has thought about this sentence for many years to come, and indeed, still does.

# Exploring the music, rather than working on  
technique out of context

Ariel was eight years old when he first played at a recital that was broadcast live on radio. This caused great excitement, and he was fired up. He played Mozart's sonata in E-flat major. This is a jewel, an utter masterpiece, and the only one of Mozart's 18 piano sonatas that begins with a slow movement, an _Adagio_. It was a great privilege for Ariel to play it in a live broadcast. Mozart was 18-years-old when he wrote this sonata. It was one of his favorites at the time, and he played it extensively as he traveled through Europe. These were the early days of the piano, and keyboard players were just discovering the expressive possibilities opened up by the fact that they could alternate between playing loudly and softly (the harpsichord, which is a plucked instrument, plays always at the same level of intensity). The E-flat major sonata was one of the first piano pieces in which Mozart made extensive use of dynamics. Especially in the lyrical first part, Mozart was demonstrating for the first time, for generations of future pianists, that the piano can sing. Playing this piece with the adequate depth of thought and feeling is not trivial even for mature pianists, and Lea worked extensively with Ariel on sound production in the first part, which makes up about half the sonata. The second part contains two lovely minuets, and the last part is a short and brilliant fast movement, with a bunch of treacherous runs. (Like in Beethoven's _Moonlight_ sonata, each part of Mozart's E-flat major sonata is played faster than the previous one.)

The first part doesn't seem particularly challenging because it is slow and there are relatively few notes. But paradoxically, this economy of means is precisely what makes it so difficult. As it is often remarked with reference to Mozart's writing: "there's no place to hide." The scarcity of notes makes each one count and stand out prominently. It requires great delicacy, sensitivity, and intense focus to produce the charming cantabile that Mozart intended.

Ariel made steady progress, but because Lea always wanted him to reach higher and higher levels of expressivity, and because of the inducement of the live broadcast, they worked unusually hard on this sonata, and especially on the first part. At the same time, however, I couldn't help but notice that when Ariel was practicing the sonata at home, the virtuosic runs in the last part never came out (and when you miss some notes in a Mozart piece, even the non-musicians can hear it). Popular literature about piano practice is full of advice and formulas suggesting how many consecutive times one must nail a difficult passage during practice to be assured that it comes out in performance. Numbers range from five to ten. This means that if you are practicing a difficult run and got it right eight times in a row but mess up on the ninth, you start all over from the beginning. Mercifully, Ariel was not aware of this literature, but I was already calculating in my head the chances of getting these runs right, when he wasn't able to get through them even once in practice. I was sure that eventually Lea would spend the time needed to fix this problem. And yet, each time they approached the sonata (this was not the only piece in Ariel's active repertoire), they worked on the difficult musical aspects of the first part.

The week of the concert arrived. The concert was on Friday. Ariel's lessons were on Sundays and Wednesdays. The Sunday lesson came and went, without even getting as far as the third part. In the meantime, during practice, I didn't hear any improvement. I was sure Lea would spend the Wednesday lesson entirely on the third part. But again, when they came to the sonata they kept working on the _Adagio_. I was wondering whether I should say something, when Lea announced that they were going to have an extra lesson on Thursday, in advance of the concert, to work only on the sonata. This was cutting it a bit close, but I was reassured, so I didn't mention my concern.

At the Thursday lesson, Lea again wanted to hear the _Adagio_ , and they kept working on it for a long time. Toward the end of the lesson, not long before the next student showed up, in a hiatus in the flow of the lesson, I said to Lea: "You know that Ariel hasn't properly mastered the runs in the third movement, and I don't think I heard the right hand clean even once." "Ah, yes, I was coming to that," said Lea. "That's nothing. It's not the right hand. Actually, his left hand is running an interference." Lea asked him to play the right hand alone, then the left hand alone, explained where the pauses on the left hand fall, then asked him to play the two hands together. The runs came out without a flaw. I was speechless. The issue was settled in one minute. The performance the next day was fabulous, and of course, all the runs were clean and crystal clear.

I pondered afterward how many hours of mindless practice it would have taken to master these runs by brute force, repeating them endlessly until achieving five or ten consecutive clean renditions during practice—which is what unfortunately most students do. It was the clearest demonstration of "practice less, think more" that I witnessed.

The one-sentence moral of this chapter is: "Look for the teacher who talks to the head, not to the fingers."
IV

Student concerts:  
A microcosm of their own

Student concerts are an important aspect of musical instruction, and one of the main reasons for choosing a conservatory over a private teacher. Private teachers rarely have the logistic ability to organize more than one or two concerts per year for their students, and the performers at these concerts are more or less the same children, year after year. A conservatory, by contrast, can provide countless opportunities for students to perform and to attend concerts, where they can gain exposure to a varied repertoire performed by different students. At the JAMD conservatory there were regular student concerts held every other week, in addition to the many special events. No individual teacher, coming to your home or teaching in hers, can provide anything comparable.

First and foremost, student concerts are an opportunity for children to perform before a live audience. The feeling of walking on stage and taking a bow while the audience applauds is something that cannot be explained or understood without experiencing it. The insights that students gain by playing before an audience are unlike anything else they achieve when practicing or playing for their teacher. And the process of preparing a work intended for public performance is different from that of practicing pieces learned for pedagogical reasons only.

Student concerts, however, are much more than just a musical event, and the students are not the only stakeholders. For teachers, it is an opportunity to display their accomplishments before their colleagues and their employer. For parents, it is an occasion of pride, a validation of their investment, and a vicarious taste of being in the limelight. And at times, for the institution and its leaders, it serves as a showcase before actual and potential donors, pubic sponsors, and future customers. When Yo-Yo Ma or Bronfman walk on stage in front of two thousand people, it is only their personal reputation that is at stake; if they have a bad day, they're the only ones who will be affected—if at all. When a ten-year-old sits down at the piano at a student concert, before an audience of twenty-five people, a whole range of interests lie in the balance, and a great many members of the small audience are holding their breath, keeping their fingers crossed, or biting their nails. (Perhaps I'm exaggerating, and this may not be the case at every concert for every student; but it is often true at least for some of the students at some of the concerts.)

Student concerts bring out the best and the worst in the students, but especially in their parents and teachers. Except for rare occasions, few unaffiliated people attend these concerts. Most of the audience is made up of the students themselves, their parents, grandparents, siblings, and teachers. A much smaller group consists of more distant relatives (occasional aunts and uncles), a few close friends of the parents, rarely a friend of the student, and a few teachers who attend student concerts out of dedication to the cause, even when their own students happen not to be playing. All these form a small but highly intimidating bunch. With rare exceptions, nobody is there to enjoy himself, but has a clear agenda. They have various degrees of expertise, but they all have some understanding of music, all have strong opinions, and are highly critical. Students performing at these concerts are generally quite terrified. Hands often tremble visibly, and it is not unusual for students to become so distraught as to lose their place in the work they are playing, stop in the middle of the piece, try to resume, and even walk off the stage. Tears are rare, but not unheard of.

I don't want to get into the role of parents in all this, because this is the subject of a different book, but the role of the teachers is definitely our topic. You want the teacher you choose for your child to agree with Lea that student concerts are exclusively for the benefit of the children, not of their parents, teachers, or institutions. "Concerts are for the students," Lea used to say, "not the other way around." Like most of Lea's ideas, it seems almost trivial, and yet precious few teachers subscribe to it.

For a concert to be successful from the student's point of view, it must be a learning experience. This is not intuitive for people who have not performed in public themselves. It took me a while to fully believe Ariel when he was saying that he learned a great deal more from a public performance than from a lesson. I couldn't understand why playing before an audience was more instructive than playing the same piece before one's teacher. But it is a fact that at a public performance the mind is in a different mode, listening to one's own playing is much more intense, concentration is at its peak, and performers, under spontaneous impulses, experiment in ways they wouldn't during a routine lesson. For all this to happen, however, the student concert must be an unqualified positive experience. The student must not only enjoy himself profusely during the performance, but must prepare for it with confidence and look forward to it, something he cannot do if he must worry continually about what his parents will think about his playing and what his teacher will say about the mistakes he made. Clearly, public performances are stressful events under the best of circumstances, so Lea always tried to minimize their secondary and indirect effects (who will attend, what they will think) and emphasize the immediate ones—the fun in delivering on stage the best performance one can of a piece one spent a long time practicing. And she puts her money where her mouth is. At every student concert, Lea is always the one who applauds loudest, and is the first to shout "bravo!" She is also the first to offer a hug to every performer. She never shows any displeasure and never voices any criticism of her students, irrespective of how they played. This is their event, and she wants them to enjoy it to the hilt. Any comments she may have about the way they played can wait a few days, until the next lesson, when they can be discussed from the safe perspective of the intervening time, when the student is already focused on the future, and thinking about the next works to be prepared. It is difficult to achieve such a perspective moments after playing a concert.

Lea is by no means alone in this approach, but she is in a minority. It is not easy for teachers to take their ego out of the students' public performances. When everybody in the hall knows who the teacher of the student on the stage is, the teacher is as much on display as the student who's playing; all compliments and criticism are aimed at the teacher as much as they are aimed at the student, and often even more so. I've seen teachers who simply walked out of the hall when they didn't like their students' playing ("I don't know this person; he's not my student; I wash my hands"). Others hold their head and demonstratively shake it in disbelief ("I told him a thousand times not to do this") to deflect all blame from themselves and place it all squarely on the student's shoulders. Some teachers berate the mortified student in loud whispers that everyone can hear, immediately as he walks off the stage and sits down, red-faced.

At a gala concert, a talented teenage student of another teacher delivered what was in her own opinion a substandard performance. She bowed briefly to polite applause and headed immediately for the exit. Lea was the only one to jump up and dash after her, realizing that she needed support then and there. (This was a concert organized by Lea, otherwise she would not have approached another teacher's student.) I was sitting close to the door and saw that the girl was on the verge of tears as she was leaving the hall, but Lea somehow picked up on it from the other end of the room. The girl's own teacher, meanwhile, was sitting stone-faced in her chair in the audience, looking like the victim of a grave personal affront.

The lessons of this chapter are among the easiest to apply. Even if you cannot observe most teachers in the course of their lessons, they are all on public display at student concerts, and their body language, both when their own students and when those of other teachers play, speaks volumes. You want the teacher you choose for your child to enjoy the student concert, to applaud generously her own and other teachers' students, and to reward her students with warmth, smiles, and encouragement, regardless of how they played.

V

Concern for students

All teachers care about their students, want to advance them, and are jealously protecting their interests. This is pretty much expected, and less than that would be considered dereliction of duty. But Lea's concern extended not only to her own students, but to the welfare of students in general.

Lea became increasingly involved with students not her own when she founded the Edward Aldwell Center for Piano Performance, which she established as part of the Jerusalem Academy of Music in memory of her former teacher, Edward Aldwell, who died tragically in an accident, in 2006. Although he never achieved wide popular recognition, Edward Aldwell enjoyed universal critical acclaim and the unqualified respect of his more famous colleagues. He was what is often referred to as a "pianists' pianist," and his regular Bach recitals were well-attended by practicing and aspiring pianists and a discerning audience. Edward Aldwell had taught for many years at the Mannes College of Music, and among his students were Lea, and later, one of Lea's first and favorite students, Yuval. Eventually, Yuval followed Lea not only as Edward Aldwell's student but also as Ariel's teacher.

Lea secured funding and established the Edward Aldwell Center for Piano Performance as a tribute to her teacher and with the aim of bringing some of the best pianists to Jerusalem to teach master classes and give local students the exposure they would have a difficult time getting otherwise. The extraordinary response she elicited is a testimony to Aldwell's reputation and to her own powers of persuasion. She was able to get Murray Perahia to agree to become honorary president of the center, and to use his prestige and connections to invite artists of the first rank (the likes of Richard Goode, Yefim Bronfman, Andras Schiff, Ivan Moravec, and others) to teach master classes. Together with Perahia, she devised a rich program for the center, which involved lectures and specialized courses in theory with some of the best musicologists in the country, master classes, and several gala concerts each year. Young pianists from all over the country enrolled, some of them traveling many hours to attend the meetings.

The crowning event of the first season was a series of master classes with Perahia, who for the first time agreed to teach students below college age, again the product of Lea's persuasiveness. (After this experience, Perahia completely changed his attitude toward very young musicians and recognized the benefits of including them in his lessons, which he continued to do in subsequent years.) This was a signal event, held at the Jerusalem Music Center, and although entrance was free, one needed to reserve seats well in advance because the place was packed. Ariel was one of the children playing, the youngest, and we arrived all scrubbed and beaming to the JMC half an hour before the start of the lessons. The lobby was full of people, and a small crowd was gathered around Lea in one corner. As soon as I got there I realized that something was wrong. Lea looked hugely distressed. My first thought was that something happened to Perahia and he cancelled. I asked whether everything was alright. "Not at all," said Lea, "we're having a big problem." Full of trepidation, I asked what was the matter, only to find out that one of the students, who was arriving from the north of the country and had left home at dawn, misread the announcement and went to the Conservatory instead of the JMC, and was now stuck there. I was hugely relieved. "Is that all?" I asked. "I'll go get her." "Would you do that?" Lea asked. There was no reason not to. There was still half an hour before the start of the master classes, and Ariel was playing third or fourth. So they called the girl to tell her where to wait for me, and I set out to pick her up. She was a high school student, and I had seen her before at Aldwell meetings and master classes, so after I picked her up we chatted a bit on the way back, and I asked her at what time she was scheduled to play. "To play what?" she asked. "To play for Perahia, of course," I said. "Oh, I'm not playing today." That was unexpected. I was sure that she had to go on stage any minute, and Lea was worried about the schedule. "No, I came only to listen."

She was not one of Lea's students. Lea had two students playing for Perahia that day, in addition to a difficult, day-long schedule of lessons that she was responsible for, and yet all she could worry about on this festive occasion was that a girl, who spent three hours on the road and arrived to the wrong venue, will miss fifteen minutes of the first master class if she has to wait for a bus and come to the JMC by public transportation. I didn't know whether to be annoyed or awed. In a way, I was both. But the annoyance lasted only a few minutes; the awe still persists.

If all this creates the impression that Lea is a pushover, the impression is definitely mistaken. Nothing could be farther from the truth. She's especially demanding with her older students and those who are clearly aspiring to a professional career. She was always particular about meeting commitments and not letting down teachers, organizers, or the institutions to which the students belong. On one occasion, about two hours before a student concert, a teenager who was scheduled to perform called Lea to tell her that he couldn't make it because he had a sore throat and was running a fever. "Are you in the emergency room?" Lea asked him. No, he was not. "Are you running a fever of 104 or more?" No, not that high. "Then take two Tylenol and some throat lozenges, and get yourself over here right away." This may seem somewhat harsh to lay people, but artists know that they have delivered some of their best performances when they were not in the best health and under this or that medication.

The universe of performance and performers is a cruel one, however; it is not always easy to protect the innocent parties, and not always clear how to do it. Our first negative experience with this setting was in Ariel's second year with Lea. At one of the lessons Lea announced that she received a request for Ariel to perform at an important fundraiser. Ariel became quite excited. They decided then and there what he was going to play, and he started preparing with great determination. In the following weeks a great deal of the work at the lessons was in preparation for the concert. But about three days before the event, Lea was told that there was a change, and Ariel's services were not needed. That she was outraged is an understatement. She tried to explain that one cannot treat a six-year-old child in this way. She argued, and she pleaded, and she yelled, but to no avail. The decision was made somewhere else, by other people, unnamed, and there was nothing to be done. We tried to find a way of telling Ariel without causing a lot of damage. It was not easy. Luckily, there was no shortage of opportunities for Ariel to perform, so in the end Lea had to do something that was against her principles, which was to lie to Ariel, but she couldn't see any alternative, and more than anything wanted to spare him the disappointment, after all the hard work that had gone into the concert. She told him that unexpectedly the concert was postponed, and that we were going to be told soon when it was to be held. Ariel was disappointed, but not shattered. She then booked Ariel for the first opportunity that became available and declared that this was the postponed concert. It was probably not a very special event, but by then the excitement had waned anyway, and there were other events and projects to look forward to. This was by no means the last time that projected engagements did not materialize, and when Ariel later began to perform at jazz venues they became quite frequent. To avoid unnecessary disappointment, every time someone called with an appealing offer to play here or there, we used to say that "a gig is not a gig until it's a gig." This saying came in quite handy on many occasions. And as far as special events were concerned, from that time onward Lea demanded much stronger guarantees before she committed Ariel, and before she told him about such opportunities.

# "The child is more important than the musician"

I often heard Lea make this statement, whenever parents and teachers placed unreasonable demands on students. However important music may be in shaping the brain, the child is always more important. Although because of her reputation Lea always had a selection of students with higher than average promise, she recognized that only a fraction of these would end up making music their career choice. It is not automatically clear what is reasonable to demand of each student. On one hand, it would be futile to try to push children in a direction they don't want to go. On the other, all children can greatly benefit from the encounter with music, whatever their agenda and intended final destination might be. Not all of Lea's students aspired to a life in music. I remember a highly intellectual, scientific young boy who was a competent pianist but without any intention of becoming a musician. He always had a book with him, which he was reading as he waited on Lea's couch for Ariel's lesson to end. At student concerts he would be reading his book until his name was called, whereupon he would go on stage, play his piece, bow, get back to his seat, and proceed with his reading. At some point, a talented teenager was referred to Lea, after all former teachers have apparently given up on him. Despite his great skill, he could barely read notes, which did not prevent him from playing a virtuosic repertoire, albeit not always accurately. These and other children whose special skills and divergent expectations were so different, were investing their energies into playing the piano for various reasons, and Lea knew that she must meet them on their own territory and help them achieve their diverse goals. Trying to put all these children through the same program, using the same method to teach them the same repertoire, is the sure way of making them quit as soon as they can have their way. Although studying music for even a limited period of time has great mental and emotional benefits, these benefits rarely extend into adulthood for children who quit in their early teenage years, because they end up quitting just before they reach a level where they can engage in meaningful music making.

Music is like a foreign language. Those who start learning a foreign language but quit before achieving fluency, are seldom able to make effective use of it, and soon are likely to forget most of what they learned. "Yes... I took Spanish in high school, but I don't remember any of it." The same happens with those who learned how to play the flute, the guitar, and clarinet, etc., but dropped it on the verge of adolescence. But those who stick with it at least until they finish high school develop a fluency they then retain for the rest of their lives, which enables them to converse with other speakers of their chosen musical dialect, to share their interests and impressions with both amateur and professional practitioners, and to appreciate not only the overt beauties of the works but the hidden ones as well. Becoming fluent in French does not make one a specialist in French language and literature, but it does enable one to enjoy the benefits of French culture in the original, without the need for translation. A certain type of person—like the one reading this book—perceives this as an enrichment and an enhancement in the quality of life. Music is no different. Many of us learn to enjoy its superficial qualities passively. But to participate actively in any capacity on the musical scene, one must reach a level of fluency that can rarely be achieved by age 12. Those who do, are likely to continue honing their skills. After one reaches a certain level of proficiency, the sense of satisfaction derived from playing is so great that it is alone sufficient to motivate for further practice, so as to achieve even greater proficiency. Still, music education and the ability to play an instrument are not necessarily professional training. To be able to teach a student effectively, the teacher must first learn the student—his needs, plans, ambitions, and unique characteristics. To do so, the teacher must be genuinely interested in her student, even if she knows that he is not going to be another Lipatti.

# Independence

Since Ariel was quite young, there was high awareness of him at the Conservatory because he was so active in many fields and because he was always among the money players, whenever a private performance needed to be organized for a special donor on short notice. So, early on everyone had an opinion about the path that Ariel should follow in life, and compliments were mixed with criticism.

From early childhood Ariel was quite independent, and explored many territories in music and outside of it. He was playing in an orchestra and doing chamber music. He performed in jazz clubs and went to jam sessions late at night. At some point he got a drum set and spent hours in the basement drumming, to the distress of some of the neighbors. He was teaching himself how to play the guitar. He composed and studied conducting. Not everybody knew the full scope of his interests, but what they did know was enough to cause disapproval. It was especially the violin that irked some people, because for many years Ariel paid equal attention to the violin and the piano, and because it was so visible, as he was seen coming and going, with the violin case hanging from his shoulder. Many considered it sheer waste of time and were pointing out that Ariel was spreading himself too thin, that he was dabbling in too many things, that he lacked focus, and so on. Although gradually, as a teenager, Ariel did eventually settle on the piano as his main instrument, all this dabbling ended up having great musical benefits for him. Today, Ariel considers himself a better pianist for being able to play the violin. But at the time this was not how it looked, and to many people it appeared that he was wasting his time and efforts in endeavors that will never pay dividends.

Naturally, the first one to object should have been Lea, because Ariel's many interests took away from what should have been his main focus, which was the piano. Two decades earlier, when Lea was on sabbatical in the US, the teacher who taught Yuval for one year in her absence promptly forbade him to play jazz when she found out that he did. Lea, by contrast, correctly identified all these activities as enriching, and showed great interest in them. She was especially appreciative of Ariel's ability to improvise, which of course, in times past, used to be an obligatory quality of proficient classical musicians. But beyond the professional benefits of these wide-ranging activities, Lea understood the importance of giving students the space to explore many territories independently, to make their own decisions about the musical path they want to follow, and to discover on their own the niche in which they will eventually settle. One of her frequent answers, formulated as a question, was: "Who is to determine for Ariel, at age 10, what he should want to do in life?"

Although Lea was intimately involved with many aspects of her students' lives, she was remarkably unconcerned with whatever liberties they were taking in their musical explorations, and never tried to micromanage their various engagements, even if they were not always beneficial. At some point, when Ariel was about 11 years old and greatly interested in chamber music, he wanted to play both piano and violin in different ensembles. The conservatory hired practicing musicians to coach students in chamber music, and different groups were assigned to various coaches. At some point, Lea, who was by then Director of the Conservatory, was counting the hours of the various instructors, and they were not adding up, until Ariel's name popped up in two separate trios. "But we already counted the trio where Ariel plays," said Lea. But wait, this was a different trio, and Ariel was playing the violin. "Who created this trio"? Lea asked in astonishment. It turned out that Ariel did. "Since when does Ariel create trios at the Conservatory?" This particular trio ended up not being funded, so it had to practice on its own, but it did have a public performance (not a very good one) of a movement by Mozart.

Around the same time, Ariel became fast friends with another of Lea's students, Adi Neuhuas, grandson of the legendary Russian pianist and teacher, Stanislav Neuhaus, and great grandson of the even more legendary Heinrich Neuhaus. As one of their private projects, they rehearsed Lutoslawski's virtuosic Paganini variations for two pianos. They had huge fun practicing it, but no concrete plans for any performance. About that time, the Ministry of Education was organizing a national competition for young musicians, called _Maestro_. It involved performers from all over the country, of all instruments, including vocalists, competing against each other for the same prizes. The preliminary rounds were held in the various conservatories across the country, with the jury travelling to them and hearing anyone who signed up. A semi-final round was scheduled at some location outside Jerusalem, and the ten finalists were to compete in a public performance at the Tel-Aviv Museum. Neither Ariel nor Adi were interested in the competition, but a clarinetist who signed up asked Ariel to accompany him, and Adi was accompanying a violinist. Both made it to the semi-finals, so on the appointed day, all the semi-finalists from the Conservatory, and their accompanists, were packed into a van and driven to the cultural center where the competition was held. But as luck would have it, neither Ariel's clarinetist nor Adi's violinist made it to the finals. Because all the children were driven together in the same van, they had to wait for all the contestants to finish playing. It was a dull place, with nothing to do, they were not allowed to leave the building, and were getting extremely bored. Apparently, the jury weren't doing any better. At some point, to relieve the tedium, and mostly as a joke, Ariel asked one of the members of the jury: "Would you like to hear me and my buddy do something on two pianos?" They did, so Ariel and Adi started playing the Lutoslawski. About a minute into the piece the jury stopped them and said: "You're in the finals." They dubbed them the accompanists' duo.

The next day, at the Conservatory, Lea was asking the children who had attended the semi-finals about the results, wanting to know who among their contestants made it to the finals. The clarinetist didn't make it. Shucks. Nor did the violinist. Darn. So who was in the finals? The children said that Ariel and Adi were in the finals. "How on earth can they be in the finals if the kids they were accompanying didn't make it?" Lea asked. The children didn't know. Nor did Lea have any idea about Ariel and Adi's side project. But evidently they had managed on their own to bring this piece to a level that was sufficient to make the finals—whereas the children who didn't make it had all been drilled. A week later, after some coaching by Lea, at the Tel-Aviv Museum, they shared first prize with a violinist. This was not a prestigious competition, or of any importance for the contestants. But the episode illustrates neatly how careful Lea was not to take over her students' mental space and to allow ample room for artistic independence.

In time, Adi and Ariel, although both students of Lea, went in different directions, playing different repertoires with different emphases, preferences, and tastes. Above all, neither of them is a reflection of Lea—artistically, stylistically, or philosophically. To the two of them, one can also add many others, including Yuval, a generation older but also a student of Lea, and in no way an imitator of her musical or pedagogical approach.

# Standing up to parents

Lea's overriding concern for the children often put her in a delicate position vis-à-vis some of the parents. Because she usually had a disproportionate number of promising students, she also had to contend with a disproportionate number of pushy parents, or with impatient parents, who had exaggerated and urgent ambitions for their children. Parents are easily carried away and develop unrealistic expectations for their high-performing children. But trying to cash a coupon early for an exceptional child can have devastating effects, and it is easy to overestimate the amount of pressure children can withstand. It is not uncommon for the most promising children to fall apart without warning, and even if there are warning signs, it is easy to misread them. In addition to other damage they may sustain, these children usually stop playing, sometimes for good. A teacher is generally, but not always, in a better position to gauge the child's mental resilience. But teachers may be no less invested in their students then parents are in their children. If parents are tempted to cash a coupon early, so are, or may be, some teachers.

Lea considered it one of her tasks to protect children (as much as possible, and without interfering in intimate family affairs) from their parents' misguided management. In most families, it is usually one of the parents who is directly or indirectly exerting undue pressure on the child. Picking her way through the minefield of family relations, Lea tried as much as possible to exert her influence whenever parents voluntarily sought her opinion on behavioral, logistic, and other related aspects of the child's musical development, beyond instrument training proper. Even if they were not seeking her opinion, she made sure to let parents know that she had also studied psychology, in addition to keyboard arts.

If you are the parent of a promising young musician, you need a teacher who can, in addition to teaching your child, guide you in two related areas: (a) what you can reasonably expect from your child, and how much pressure, if any, you should apply to make him meet your expectations; and (b) what is reasonable public exposure for children of different ages, and how to avoid premature exposure.

There is a good chance that in both these areas you will tend to go overboard, push your child too hard, and jump at every opportunity for exposure. If you do, you will place a conscientious teacher in a difficult situation and on a direct collision course with you, her employer. On one hand, you are paying for the teacher's good advice; on the other, you are inclined to ignore it. My recommendation is to choose a teacher strong enough to stand up to you in this regard, even if you think you are the customer, and that the customer is presumably always right. You should always keep in mind that, although you are paying the bill, the ultimate customer is still your child. Lea performed both functions with dedication, insisting to be the one setting expectations for the child, and demanding veto power over any engagement parents may be offered for the children.

It is not uncommon for children who perform above what is expected at their age to receive various offers to appear before large audiences. Children often open the shows of celebrated popular artists with a short number, or play during breaks between segments of various shows. These are generally not classical music events, and the children are not always classically trained, but because of the exceptional skills of classical students, they are often included in such programs as a curiosity. Promoters may be willing to pay not insignificant sums to be able to deck out a young prodigy in a monkey suit and make him perform a popular classical piece, often in a simplified arrangement, at some variety show or competition that features similar acts. It may appear for a moment that in one stroke the child can achieve everlasting fame. But most of the time this is an illusion and a delusion. The event comes and goes, the audience applauds without usually retaining the child's name, and what is remembered, if anything, is the act, not the child. The effort and emotional capital invested in the preparation end up yielding little beyond momentary hype. As the children eventually mature into serious artists, they can only hope that their real audience hasn't witnessed the embarrassing performance of yore, and that if some of them have, they do not associate the serious teenage musician with the young prodigy on earlier exhibit. When the audience does remember these events, it is generally not to the child's benefit. The audiences that are interested in the freak show are seldom the same ones that make up the following of a serious artist.

Rarely are parents in a position to make informed decisions about such offers. They don't have enough experience, and their instinct and intuition point them in the wrong direction. Lea had to frequently remind parents that an artist's (even a future artist's) reputation is his most important asset, that it takes a long time to establish a reputation, and the damage to one's name is difficult to repair.

As parents, we were extremely selective with the engagements we accepted for Ariel, and never accepted anything, even when he was very young, without his consent and without Lea's approval. But no matter how selective we were, Ariel was even more so, and more averse than ourselves to any form of hype. Producers from several popular talk shows called. Ariel, at age 8 or 9, checked out on the Internet their programs (we didn't have a TV) and rejected them one after another, with Lea's full support, and perhaps inspired by Lea's attitude, even in cases when we may have been tempted to vote in favor. We may point out, for example, the huge audience this or that show has, to which Ariel would respond: "this is not how I want to be remembered." In retrospect, I must concede that he was on the money each time. And so was Lea, who repeatedly argued that knowing which offers to turn down is as important as knowing which ones to accept.

It seems counterintuitive that you should hire a teacher for your child, who then challenges your judgment about what is best for that child. But it is important for the teacher to have the character and the self-confidence to stand up to the parents who are paying her fees, and act consistently in the children's long-term interest, resisting the quick payoff that comes too early, and usually in the wrong currency.

What you need to remember from this chapter, is to look for a teacher who cares deeply about all her students, not only the ones with star potential, and who doesn't try to mold them into what she may think they ought to become, but helps them develop into what they want to become. If your child has special promise, you need a teacher who can restrain you if it becomes necessary to regulate the amount of early exposure the child receives.
VI

Letting go

One of the things that comes hardest to music teachers is to let go of their students. The close, one-on-one work during music lessons, going on for years on end, creates a strong bond between teacher and student, and solid attachment on both parts, but especially on the part of the teacher. This is even more pronounced in the case of children who started their lessons very young. It takes a great deal of faith and imagination on the part of the teacher to see in the young child who is struggling with a little prelude by Bach or a simple scale on the violin, the teenager playing through the _Goldberg Variations_ or the _Chaconne_ with reckless virtuosity. And above all, it requires a great deal of patience. Teachers are happily investing years of effort into this enterprise, taking their time and yearning for the moment when their student will be able to stand alone on stage and deliver one of the timeless masterpieces of the repertoire with competence and artistry. It is therefore understandably painful when, in the midst of this process, after four, five, six years of work, the parents announce without warning that they are transferring their child to this or that exalted maestro, recommended by some neighbor, friend, acquaintance, or such. The new teacher is often someone whom the old one doesn't hold in high regard, but who may have had a few students with visible achievements. This kind of parting always involves a great deal of suffering, and it is not unlike a divorce: a lot of bad blood, accusations, blaming, and a relationship often shattered forever.

The spurned teacher, however, is not always entirely innocent. The separation usually comes after a period of stagnation in the student's progress, when the parents may feel that the child's accomplishments fall short of expectations. Not all teachers are equally successful with students of all ages. When progress stalls, tension often develops during the lessons. Students may become frustrated and headstrong. Some teachers have a great touch for beginning students, others cannot raise students from seed but establish excellent communication with older ones. The telltale signs that it's time to part ways are usually obvious; teachers should be on the lookout for them and know how to recognize them. Above all, they should start looking for an alternative teacher to hand the student off to, before the student and the parents realize that a change is needed. And of course, they must be prepared to part with the student, even if he's on the verge of playing the _Goldberg Variations_ or the _Chaconne_ but is not quite there yet. (I remember Lea promising Ariel, when he was 8 or 9 years old, that he will be playing the _Hammerklavier_ sonata or _Gaspard de la nuit_ , but she never promised that she would be the one working with him on these pieces.) When the telltale signs began to manifest, she looked for an alternative and handed Ariel over, "provisionally" at first, to her former student, Yuval Cohen. It was a stroke of genius, and the match between the two was just what the doctor ordered. A few years earlier, I've seen Lea, in similar circumstances, hand over one of her star students at the time to another teacher, when her communication with the student started to unravel.

Yuval, incidentally, believes one shouldn't spend too many years with the same teacher, assuming of course that an appropriate alternative is available. The difficulties of young performers are generally persistent. To overcome them requires years of developing awareness, learning to listen to one's own playing, and achieving the intense concentration required. In the course of these years, teachers tend to repeat themselves a lot, issuing the same instructions lesson after lesson, and often repeating themselves endlessly. Naturally, after a while, students stop paying attention to this recurrent admonishment, or even hearing it. At master classes, a visiting teacher may tell a student once something that his teacher has been repeating for years, but in a slightly different way, or with a different emphasis, and the student will get it immediately. The exasperated teacher, listening in the audience, will mutter in despair: "I told him a million times but he would never listen." In time, more and more of a teacher's comments and suggestions tend to be of the recurring type, and fewer and fewer of the original, unexpected, inspiring type that is likely to wow the student. There is no precise formula to indicate when this will happen, but at some point the student needs to experience a change of approach, to begin to hear different messages, and have a different pair of ears listen to his playing. According to Yuval, students reach this point after spending about four years with one teacher.

The continuation of the handover is germane to the story. Ariel has come to thrive under Yuval's guidance, and to appreciate Yuval's unique musical mind. As expected, the change of perspective produced remarkable results. After eight years, Ariel pretty much knew what Lea's take would be on most matters, what she was likely to emphasize, what were the issues on which she would insist. All this suddenly changed, and Yuval set different priorities. He deemphasized aspects of performance that Lea may have considered important, and by contrast, pointed out elements she may have overlooked or disregarded. The new approach and new ideas opened up new horizons. Yuval was also an expert in certain repertoire that Ariel was highly interested in at the time. All around, the move was a great success, and the personal relationship between teacher and student was excellent.

As luck would have it, when the four-year limit on studying with the same teacher was reached, Ariel graduated from high school, so the separation from Yuval occurred naturally. Ariel went to London to study with Hamish Milne at the Royal Academy of Music. He had met Hamish earlier, at a workshop in Italy. This was a radical change for Ariel, because despite the many differences between Lea and Yuval, the two have much in common. After all, Yuval was himself Lea's student, and they were both students of Edward Aldwell. And Ariel himself was largely cut from the same cloth. Even if he argued with his teachers, he seldom disagreed with them. All this changed when Ariel started his lessons with Hamish, who was quite older than both Yuval and Lea, and came from an entirely different background, espousing different conceptions. But this is exactly what Ariel was looking for—a completely new point of view and ideas that would have never crossed his mind. Ariel found every lesson with Hamish to be an especially enlightening and enriching experience.

Now the unexpected thing happened. One would think that under the strong effect of the new method, Ariel should begin to distance himself from his old teachers, feeling that he has outgrown them. But the opposite was happening. On every visit home, Ariel rushed to play for Yuval, and took as many lessons from him as the two could fit into their schedules. Even more unexpected was the fact that his appreciation of Lea started growing with time, even though he did not maintain such close ties with her as he did with Yuval. The more young musicians who come from different pedagogical schools and backgrounds Ariel meets, and as his mastery expands, the more he realizes the powerful formative effect that Lea's method has had on him, and the rare musical qualities he was able to develop under her guidance. (It was Ariel, incidentally, who urged me to write this book and suggested its title, because he believed that it could open the eyes—not to say the ears—of many parents wishing their children to receive proper musical training.)

On the websites of many successful young musicians we routinely find the names of their renowned teachers, most of whom were acclaimed artists. But few list on their websites the names of the teachers who first showed them how to decipher a musical text, how to place their hands on the instrument, and how to listen to the sounds they produce. This is probably not only because those teachers are not sufficiently famous to grace the pages of their websites, but also because the artists do not believe that in their early formative days these teachers contributed much to their eventual musical accomplishments. They are naturally partial to the recognized masters who helped launch them on their successful careers. But it is reasonable to assume that in the childhood of every successful musician there is an exceptional first teacher (often a parent), genial and dedicated, who set the child on the right path and helped him reach the level, where later the world-renowned performer agreed to accept him as a student.

One suspects that performers who reach professional levels are seldom concerned with events in the distant past, which they can barely remember. And then there is the obfuscating issue of talent, that murky, undefinable, and ambiguous variable, which in the opinion of many is ultimately responsible for the success of every artist. It is based on the unproven assumption that already at birth the brains of certain newborns contain features that are absent from the brains of others. This view tends to ascribe a disproportionate role to innate abilities, at the expense of early exposure, proper guidance, a sense of purpose, and perseverance. In the process, the all-important first years of training are easily overlooked.

We have now come full circle. As a grown musician, Ariel looks back on the path he has followed, and with mature discernment identifies the constitutive elements that have contributed to his development. They are neither obvious nor trivial, and a measure of insight and introspection is needed to recognize them. He definitely considers his learning experience with Lea as one of these elements. But Ariel didn't choose Lea. How can parents know, when they make such choices, that they will prove to be the right ones? I myself didn't know any better, and Ariel ended up in Lea's piano class entirely by accident. When he was two and a half years old, and it was clear that he had perfect pitch and enormous interest in music, a friend suggested that we see Andre Hajdu, the composer, who lived in Jerusalem and was known to have a special way with children. He had written works with strong pedagogical aims, and had worked with the children on performing these. Hajdu chatted with Ariel for a while, they played together at the piano, and he checked Ariel's hearing. His advice was not to start any type of instruction but to let him play, as he was doing well enough on his own. He suggested to come and see him again a year or two, but I had resolved not to impose on him again because he was advanced in age and was already busy with many projects.

About two years later, however, the whimsies of fate brought us together again. I was sitting in the last row at the Jerusalem Theater during the intermission of a recital by Andras Schiff, when I noticed Hajdu a few rows in front of me. He apparently didn't have a ticket, because shortly after he sat down he was asked to leave the seat by the legitimate ticket holder. After several such episodes, in which he kept advancing toward the back of the hall, he ended up in the last row, where there were a few empty seats. We chatted briefly and he asked about Ariel. I told him about Ariel's latest interests and activities (he was by then reading music freely and improvising at the keyboard), and Hajdu asked me to bring him over. At the second meeting, Ariel improvised emphatically in a variety of styles, with great energy and enthusiasm. Hajdu had a difficult time restraining him, and Ariel was only marginally cooperative when Hajdu suggested that they play some things together. Ariel clearly preferred to follow his own, rather disorganized course. After some time Hajdu reached what appeared to be the correct diagnosis: "He has a strong need to express himself but lacks the tools to do so. He needs instruction immediately. And I know just the person to do it." He went to the phone and called Lea.

Ariel today believes that this was the right assessment and decision. In the intervening years, thinking about Ariel's upbringing and related matters, I developed the notion, expounded in my book, _Uscolia_ , that all important learning is self-learning, an internal process that begins and ends in the brain and requires only exposure to the right environment, especially early in life. Ariel has read _Uscolia_ and agrees with many of the ideas, but doesn't believe that one can become an accomplished musician without having been taught. "Where would I be today," he asks, "without Lea and Yuval?" I cannot answer this question. Clearly, he would be in a different place, and many things he knows today he wouldn't know. But assuming adequate exposure, and guided by his own lights, like Schumann and others who didn't have proper instruction, he may have discovered things that his knowledge at present conceals from him. I realize that this is a wildly radical idea and I'm not prepared to argue it here. Parents overwhelmingly believe that their children need instruction. A portion of them wish to include music, and specifically piano, among the subjects they want their children to take up. This booklet is intended for them. If you are one of these parents, sitting in the audience at a student concert, listening to the performance of a young pianist that you really like, now you know what to do.

Epilogue on independent thinking

Classical musicians and their fans form a complex ecosystem. Classical music is associated in our mind with high culture. Indeed, it is the epitome of high culture, with the greatest snob appeal. This means that among its fans and supporters are many who know a lot less about it than they pretend to know (or even realize themselves), and whose judgment is tainted by real and imaginary qualities.

Nobody knows this better than the musicians themselves. Members of a string quartet know that unless it is a special concert, before an unusual assembly of people, they are lucky if they can find a handful of people in the audience who truly appreciate the unique touches they spent weeks rehearsing. But to be able to continue making a good living (or just a living), classical musicians must play along with the myth that their enthusiastic and refined fans are connaisseurs of the finer things in life, including the subtleties of classical music. (Incidentally, I don't think that classical music will ever die, despite the fact that in recent decades it has been regularly eulogized and interred by journalists, critics, academics, artists, and educators. It is such a powerful differentiator that elites will always want to ensure its continued existence as a totem of superior taste and nobility of spirit.) Many years ago, after an informal concert at Tanglewood, I saw an old lady with blue hair accost Seiji Ozawa, as he was walking to his Mercedes. For minutes he stood patiently, nodding in agreement, as she lectured him on the emotional appeal of Maher. "I wonder what is going on in his mind at this very moment," I remember thinking. I know what Ariel feels when unfamiliar people congratulate him after a concert where he knows he didn't play well. And I can guess at what the people doing the congratulation think.

After performers reach a certain level of skill, lay music lovers have great difficulty distinguishing between degrees of artistry and assessing the quality of playing. Their hearing is not good enough to tell whether string players play in tune, and they don't know the scores well enough to determine whether they even hear the correct notes. True, if a pianist makes a glaring mistake in the slow part of a Mozart sonata, everyone will notice, but if he eliminates a few notes from a chord in a Schubert piece, only those who have seen and remember the score will. More important, few know enough to pass judgment on the musical quality of the performance. Of course, everyone can feel the emotional effect of the music, but it is often difficult to tell how much it is the playing and how much the piece itself that are responsible for this feeling. And even as far as the playing is concerned, it is not always easy to separate the effect of what one hears from that of what one sees. This is why lay audiences always look for visual clues. (Notice that at piano recitals lay members of the audience usually seek to occupy the seats on the left side of the hall, from where they can see the hands of the pianists, whereas musicians don't quite care where they sit.)

This explains also the exaggerated gestures and mannerisms of many performers, which can be defined as all the movements that are not necessary for sound production. Some performers tend to enact with various parts of their body, especially the face and eyes, the meaning of the music, to clue in the clueless audience. Visible gestures greatly affect the emotional response of the audience, as does the one parameter everyone can easily assess: the speed of delivery. Playing many notes very fast is one of the hallmarks of virtuosity. Taken to the extreme, beyond a certain point the artist appears to be performing feats that are humanly impossible. (Attributes such as "diabolic" and talk of a deal with the devil were frequently bandied about with reference to Paganini.) And the appearance is often correct; playing accurately beyond a certain speed is impossible, and accuracy decreases in proportion as the speed increases. But lay audiences are generally not aware of the many wrong and missed notes. To exude an aura of virtuosity, some violinists make a strategic decision to play at a tempo where they know that it is not possible to have correct intonation. Unlike pianists, who choose from among 88 ready-made notes, violinists must create them anew each time by stopping the string in just the right place. If they position their fingers one or two millimeters further up or down the string, which is easy to do when playing very fast, what was supposed to be an F comes out a sound that is a little higher or lower. This is called poor intonation, and students are chastised for it. But lay audiences cannot tell the difference, unless it's striking. The same goes for playing the correct notes. True, pianists have 88 ready-to-play notes in front of them, but there is no guarantee that at high speed they will choose the right ones or that they will play all the ones the composer indicated. Some performers choose to play well; other choose to play in a way that is more likely to appeal to the public and enhance their commercial success. The two do not necessarily meet.

But more than anything, we, lay audiences are affected by the myths we build in our heads, or that others build and place there for us. (Music is only one example of many where our judgment is based on such myths.) To strengthen our mind against its own vagaries and against manipulation from outside, we need sharp, discriminating tools. This is true in all walks of life, and especially so in the arts and music, where standards are murky, taste is subject to fashion, and opinion is guided by mass psychosis. All too often, in this respect, instead of leading their fans, performers simply follow them. Everything Lea did, already with the youngest students, was aimed at developing a critical reading of the musical text, leading to critical listening to one's own playing and to that of others. Students who were told only when to play loud and where to slow down are unlikely to be able to evaluate the musical qualities of a performance. Over the years, Ariel has admired many performers, and many individual performances, but never developed any idols whose interpretations he accepted wholesale, and never tried to imitate anyone, not even in the smallest gestures. For Lea, other interpretations were merely opportunities to explore other conceptions of the text.

Parents of children studying with other teachers told us how in the weeks preceding an important concert, the CD with the Richter or Rubinstein recording of the piece was playing in the home 24/7. Lea considered this to be a typical example of mindlessness—trying to copy someone's conception of a piece rather than working to understand it and develop one's own interpretation. She asked Ariel not to listen to any performances of a piece he was learning or considering to be learning anytime soon, and above all, not to listen to any single performance repeatedly. After he had learned a piece and developed a concept about its interpretation, she often recommended that he listen to several performances and think about what he liked and disliked in each. Ariel took this request very seriously, and developed a critical attitude about performers and performances. Although as a small child he was exposed extensively to two pianists I much admired, Horowitz and Gould, he ended up being highly critical of both. Ariel tends to be selective even in his approval of pianists he admires, praising one performance and censuring another. Fame, fortune, and reputation have never affected his judgment, and he holds every performance to the same standard. Returning from a student concert, I might make a comment like "You played the _Ballade_ really nice tonight," to which Ariel would reply: "Pollini plays it better." At first I used to be outraged by answers like this. "How can you compare a 14 year old conservatory student with one of the top pianists in the world, at the height of his international career?!" Ariel remained unapologetic. "What can I say? The fact remains that Pollini plays it better." Fairness has nothing to do with it. There is an unattainable ideal in musical performance, and the question is how close you can come to it, how little you can deviate from it. Ariel measures everyone by the same standard, and is quick to concede that a 14-year-old conservatory student can, on occasion, produce a better performance of a piece than this or that internationally acclaimed artist. Which brings me to Horowitz.

# Horowitz in Ann Arbor

Horowitz played three recitals in Ann Arbor during the time I was there, in the late 1970s, and I attended all three. They were held, as was his custom in those years, on Sunday afternoons. The announcements were made in the last minute, and the tickets sold out within hours. I stumbled upon the queue for tickets to the first recital by mistake. I was a graduate student and teaching assistant at the University of Michigan at the time, and shared an office in the Modern Languages Building, next door to the Bell Tower, which housed the Ann Arbor Music Society, the organizer of the Horowitz recitals. As I was approaching the MLB one morning, I saw about a hundred people queued up in front of the Bell Tower. There was a ticket office on the ground floor, but I had never seen such a queue. I small poster announced the Horowitz recital on the coming Sunday, only a few days away. I got in line and bought the maximum number of tickets they were selling to one person, which was two. I wasn't sure at that moment to whom the second ticket would go.

Horowitz was among the mythical names in the universe of classical music that I grew up with as a child, like Caruso, Toscanini, Furtwangler, Rubinstein, Casals, Heifetz, and a few others. Growing up in a home that didn't own record player, most of these names were represented in my consciousness by old sepia photographs in dusty books, effusive stories told by my father, apocryphal anecdotes circulating among cognoscenti, and rare occasions on which we could hear one of the legendary performances on the radio. The unexpected opportunity to see one of these ethereal characters in flesh and blood, nay, to hear him perform, seemed unreal. With two tickets in my pocket, my first thought was: What if he doesn't live until Sunday? My next thought was whom to favor with the second ticket.

As a fluke of fate, there happened to be living in Ann Arbor at the time a pianist, Maria Kardas, who was a friend of my parents, originally from the same town in Transylvania where my parents and I hailed from. Maria was an accomplished artist, who had studied in Moscow with Neuhaus and had achieved renown as a pianist in Romania and beyond. Maria was teaching chamber music at the University and had a bevy of private piano students in town. She was the perfect choice to take along to hear Horowitz.

The concert was at Hill Auditorium, a hall that seated an audience of nearly four thousand. In case you wonder why a town of 100,000 residents needed a concert hall this size, you should bear in mind that Ann Arbor also had a stadium that accommodated 104,000 spectators, which was packed for every football game, including those against Northwestern, whom the Wolverines defeated in my presence 69-0. For the Horowitz concert, every seat in Hill Auditorium was taken, and additional rows of chairs were set up on the stage, around and behind the piano. As Horowitz walked on stage, all this humanity rose to its feet and began to applaud, and went on applauding for minutes on end. It is difficult to convey in simple words the effect of thousands of people cheering for what seems like an eternity (nothing happens during applause) a performer who hasn't started playing yet. After standing on your feet for five minutes, with 4000 other people, applauding someone who hasn't played a single note, you listen differently. I have known people who attended Beatles concerts in the US in the 60s, and I imagine the audience being gripped by a similar psychosis. Paderewski, at his first appearances in the US, paid teenagers to rush the stage cheering during applause to create a wave of enthusiasm. In many professionally produced videos circulating on YT, the camera frequently cuts away from the acrobats to show the awed expressions of the spectators, not trusting the viewer to grasp just how out-of-the-ordinary the skill of the performers is. With thousands of awed live people around you, this effect is multiplied many times. It is easy to imagine how after such a blast of adrenalin, when Horowitz finally sat down at the piano, every key he struck seemed to bear the mark of the finger of God.

He began with a short piece, the _Traumerei_ , and finished with the Liszt Sonata in B minor. In between there were sundry pieces by Scarlatti, Chopin, Schumann, Scriabin, and others—I cannot tell with any confidence which ones because after so many decades I probably conflate this concert with the other two I attended in subsequent years, when Horowitz appeared in Ann Arbor.

Needless to say, after every piece the audience applauded thunderously and shouted "bravo." Every note he played was a kiss broadcast from the fountainhead where the greatest sounds are stored to the privileged audience assembled at Hill Auditorium. I was transfixed. I distinctly remember thinking that I may be listening at this very moment to the greatest pianist ever to touch the keys, since Cristofori first designed and manufactured the strange looking instrument, in the beginning of the 18th century.

As we left our seats during the intermission, I felt like I was walking on pillows. I was amazed and somewhat flustered to find that Maria had some reservations about Horowitz's playing, although amidst the general euphoria she was hesitant to express her opinion freely. I was glad we were speaking in Hungarian, lest someone overheard us.

To begin with, I was astonished when she said that it would never cross her mind to suggest to her students to listen to Horowitz recordings. Regarding the evening's performance, her first comment was that Horowitz skipped a bunch of notes. "Those notes are not important," I said with a self-assurance whose source was not at all clear, not being a trained musician. She also pointed out that Horowitz played many notes that were not in the text. This I countered with the romantic claim about the discretion of the interpreter, citing the liberties Liszt had taken with the compositions of others. Maria shook her head. "This is not how Chopin would have played these pieces," she said. I answered with an argument to end all arguments: "If Chopin could play the piano like Horowitz, this is exactly how he would have played them." There was no basis in fact for such an arrogant statement by someone who was a complete dilettante (even if in the positive sense of the word), but I had the applause of four thousand people behind me to bolster my opinion, and Maria was mindful of it.

Fast forward some 35 years, to arguments with the teenage Ariel about the qualities and demerits of instrumentalists in decline—of whom there are legion. (The arguments often concerned the phenomenon of prodigies, those strange creatures who perform feats inappropriate for their age, whether far beyond their age, when they are very young, or far below it, when they are very old.) Many prodigies of the latter type occupy places of honor in the impressionable consciousness of classical music fans, although none have reached the levels of worship that Horowitz enjoyed all through his dotage. One would think that aspiring young musicians would be most susceptible to hero worship, and many are. Ariel, however, seems completely immune to it. Yes, he had his favorite pianists of the past, Lipatti, Schnabel, Fisher, and a few others, although even these he didn't accept automatically and not in every performance. But some of my favorites, Cortot, Horowitz, and Gould, were never Ariel's, despite his being profusely exposed to them practically since birth.

It was quite difficult for me to see the idols I had been worshiping for half a century being challenged. During one of many debates with Ariel I resorted to a measure I rarely used—I pulled rank: "You haven't heard Horowitz play the Liszt Sonata in Ann Arbor," I said. "Yes, I have," Ariel said. I was taken aback. "How do you know the Ann Arbor Liszt Sonata?" I asked. "It's on Youtube." This came as a complete surprise. I was not aware that a recording of that historic performance existed, that I could so easily revisit and relive my past, indeed, one of its high water marks. It was with great trepidation that I listened to the recording. The audio recording is very poor (someone must have surreptitiously used a primitive tape recorder), but the quality of the playing is unmistakable. It is difficult to reconcile the two performances, the one on Youtube with the one lodged in my memory. The video took me back to Ann Arbor, to how I waited in line for an hour after the concert to shake Horowitz's hand—the only time in my life that I went backstage to say "thank you" to an artist in person; to how for three days after the concert I was walking around like in a dream, Chopin and Liszt swirling in my head. Such is the power of suggestion and of self-suggestion.

There is no shortage of Horowitz and Gould worshippers to this day among lay audiences and professional musicians alike. I still consider myself to be one of them, although I must concede that with everything I learned from Ariel, I no longer applaud every performance without giving it a second thought. After driving a highly discriminating child to and from his music lessons for years, which were opportunities for increasingly fascinating conversations, I have become a great deal more critical myself. If you find a teacher like Lea for your musically inclined child, start paying close attention to what your child says over the years of study. You will not only grow new ears for listening and enjoying music, but will also enrich your life beyond your wildest expectations.

Other Titles from Sycorax Books

Fiction

Gabriel Lanyi – _Uscolia_

D. Otter – _Nobel Peace Prize_

Miranda Series for young readers

Ariel Setobarko – _The Judgment of Paris_

Ariel Setobarko – _Paris and Helen_

Ariel Setobarko – _Hot Summer in the Plain of Shinar_

Ariel Setobarko – _Prospero's Potent Art_

