As I described last week, the galloping worldwide spread of COVID-19 resulted in the nearly equally rapid conversion of the world’s piano teachers from studio-based to Web-based practitioners.
The decision to continue piano lessons virtually was likely made by parents on behalf of their children. Adult amateur pianists make their own decision, based on factors such as affordability, time to practice, and personal learning goals. When I checked in with a few of my fellow amateur pianists this week, I found that, like me, they intend to continue playing piano during self-isolation, and continue to take lessons.
For Doug Freake, who has attended the Toronto Summer Music Festival Community Academy every summer since it began five years ago, last week’s announcement that the 2020 season is cancelled was, “such a disappointment. It was a real high point of the year, as well as a chance to perform.” Practising piano is a solitary discipline for many adults, so performing for others is an essential and pleasantly social part of the process. Just before the Stay Home edict was issued, Freake played in a master class in Toronto that he found especially illuminating, so was looking forward to applying those suggestions to the Mozart Rondo in A Minor, K511 that he planned to play at TSMF.
“I think you play better at home.”
Even though the summer deadline has been removed, Freake will continue virtual piano lessons because the coincidence of his retirement from York University, and being confined to quarters gives him more time than ever to practice, and an even greater need to have meaningful pursuits and goals.
Freake’s first virtual lesson, with his teacher Emily Rho, took place after a three-week hiatus from studio lessons. Possibly because he had practised quite a bit during that break and the lesson was on his own piano, Rho observed, “I think you play better at home.” Freake found that they were able to work virtually on improving legato, shaping the end of phrases, and achieving a bassoon-like effect in the staccato notes. These nuances were all perceivable by Rho.
Little did I know at my last in-studio piano lesson with Lawrence Pitchko, that over a month would go by before my next lesson, and it would be in front of a laptop computer set up on a snack table in front of my piano in my living room. The tidal wave of adaptation we all had to undergo had interfered with effective practising, so it took until the first week of April to commit to a lesson. By then I’d adjusted to using Zoom for group meetings but I had never tried a person-to-person encounter.
It was as if I was Alice and my teacher was the Cheshire Cat.
There is a pleasant jolt of recognition when the virtual connection begins and the person you haven’t been able to see face-to-face suddenly appears on the screen. For a few moments I was looking at my laptop screen and seeing myself and the wall behind me, when suddenly I disappeared and Lawrence’s face appeared instead. It was as if I was Alice and my teacher was the Cheshire Cat. The through the looking glass feeling was intensified because Lawrence’s familiar face and voice was suddenly in the room, but at the same time beamed in from some untethered distance, almost like a dream. The fact that I was wearing leggings and a long sleeved t-shirt under a sweater, while Lawrence was wearing shorts and a t-shirt, added to the mild disorientation.
A piano lesson is a process of demonstration by the student, followed by comment and correction by the teacher. An environment that permits keen observation is central to the enterprise. Without being aware of it, I’d assumed that our physical separation in two locations would reduce the degree of detail that could be perceived at my teacher’s end. But, when I played my first series of scales, accelerating the pace with each iteration to the point that my hands were stumbling, and Lawrence pointed out that my left thumb was not turning under my third finger in the descending scale at the same speed as my other fingers were moving, I realized that his astounding acuity had not been diminished one iota by the virtual platform.
Also, when Lawrence demonstrated the optimal thumb movement in arpeggios on his piano, I realized that we now had two pianos at our disposal instead of one, something that is often seen in serious master classes, when the teacher sits at one keyboard and the student at the other. The major compromise was the sound quality, which eliminated fine details such as the voicing of chords.
Still, I was really bolstered by the lesson, and reassured that effective lessons would be possible. I took away the same bracing feeling of still needing to work towards a higher standard, but also moving forward as a result of the work I’d already done. That is the essence of incremental learning, and it’s more important than ever during this lock down.
Adults, as much as children, need to continue learning while we are confined to quarters, receiving reduced stimuli, and constricted in our routines, to maintain cognitive strength and delay decline to the extent that we can. Studying music, whether it be music appreciation, music theory or history, or learning to play an instrument, are ideal lockdown pursuits. Virtual lessons are available, and so are online courses, for every instrument you can imagine, all of which can be purchased and delivered without leaving home.
“I am still teaching 50 students virtually.”
This is certainly how advanced pianist and piano teacher Ann Sublett is approaching COVID-19. “I am still teaching 50 students virtually,” she told me during a brief break she took over the weekend, “and whenever I can, I work on my own COVID-buster, Bach’s Chaconne in D Minor, transcribed by Busoni.” Another participant in the Toronto Summer Music Festival, Sublett was mentally prepared for it to be cancelled, and although she is disappointed, she was glad that the announcement was made before she had begun preparing for it.
“It’s very hard to work as hard as is necessary to polish a piece for performance when you think it might be cancelled. It has given me the chance to go back to the Bach/Busoni, which I dug out of my old collection of scores, and found that I’d purchased in high school for $3.00.”
For Kathleen Metcalfe, piano lessons are a sort of COVID consolation. When she learned that returning from vacationing in Mexico would result in self-isolating for fourteen days, she generated a list of goals for herself.
“The only goal I acted on was to get back to the piano. I had rented the Heliconian Hall for Alexey Pudinov, the gifted young Russian/German pianist who stayed with me when he was a Fellow at the Toronto Summer Music Academy, to give a concert in April. We were both so disappointed to cancel it. However, he offered to give me lessons from Germany. I put the phone at the end of the keyboard. He has the music in front of him on his iPad. I wrote after a lesson to say I was channelling his beautiful phrasing. Five minutes later he sent me a video of him playing the piece — no need to channel! As those initial 14 days are stretching rather endlessly, I’m grateful for these lessons.”
In the few weeks that we have been staying home, we’ve learned the truth of the saying that absence makes the heart grow fonder. Aside from missing friends, family, co-workers and colleagues, we also miss touching musical base with our teachers. Virtual lessons are a welcome stopgap until the day we can be together in one room, hearing the same sounds at the same time, and savouring the good vibrations that always lift our spirits.
#LUDWIGVAN
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