Play Me Something

I would venture to say that there are only a handful of events that might cause a person’s life to flash before their eyes. Earlier this week was a new one – for me, at least – when my mom told me that my childhood piano teacher, Patsy Vines, had just passed away.

As soon as I heard this, the flash sent me all the way back to the first week of my second grade class in the fall of 1979. There was a girl who got to leave class for an hour once a week for piano lessons from a woman named Patsy. This girl was the only person in our class who got a weekly reprieve from the humdrum and monotony of sitting in the same chair and seeing the same people all day long. I wanted in on it.

Over the next summer, my mom finally relented. She bought an old second-hand upright for $50 and had it hauled into the basement to get me started. Later that fall, during the first week of my third grade year in 1980, I started taking piano lessons from Patsy.

I remember that first day when Patsy knocked on my classroom door to come and get me. I stood up like I had just won an academy award, walked out the door and followed Patsy down the hall. We went to a room the size of a janitor’s closet with a small piano crammed inside with a metronome on top and a teacher’s chair in the corner.

Patsy said, “Play me something.”

I’d been pecking away all summer at my new old piano after church each Sunday, and had somehow cobbled out the melody to “Amazing Grace” after a lot of trial and error. So that’s what I played. A simple little tune of 6 simple notes in various combinations, all inside the comfort of G major in a waltzy 3/4 time signature.

Not that I knew much about the mechanics of music or anything. I’d kind of gotten a hint from my grandmother over the years on how musical notes worked every time we’d open the hymnal and sing in church. Around the same time I learned to read words, I always noticed she was singing the melody to all the hymns while everyone around us was singing harmony. When I asked her how she knew what to sing, she pointed to the staff above the words and said the top note (soprano) was hers, and to listen for the choir where my mom was always singing the second one down (alto), my grandfather the third (tenor) and my dad the fourth (bass).

As I finished playing the last five notes of my little ditty... “bu-ut now, I see”... I looked over at Patsy, who’d been listening quietly. I put my hands in my lap. She got up, walked around and sat to my left on the bench with me. Her closeness made me nervous. I’d never had a teacher get that close to me except on the last day of school in the first grade when I got a paddling for acting up in class. She could sense my unease. She laughed, and said, “It’s ok, just stay there. Now. Play it again, slower this time.”

As soon as I hit the first note, she filled in the other three parts with me. I was suddenly playing a duet with my new teacher, me leading the charge with the melody, her planting down the harmonics, together. As she played, I watched her hands. The movements are burned into my brain to this day. Every flick of her fingers, every unhinging of each joint, every swipe of each hand.

When we were done, she said, “Again please.” We did that three times in a row, each time me studying her hands, burning the patterns in my mind. At the end of the third round, she got up, went back to her chair, and she said, “Now, you play all of it.”

What happened next was nothing short of a miracle. Everything I’d absorbed standing next to my grandmother in church, listening to the choir, looking at the words next to the notes in the hymnal, tinkering around on our basement piano, and now this past ten minutes of bringing it all together – somehow, I played it back to her almost exactly as she and I had both played it together.

At least in my memory that’s what happened.

When I was done, she smiled and said, “That was great. Here’s the problem I’m going to have with you. You have a great ear. It’s beyond your hands. And I don't think you read a lick of music yet, do you? The struggle we’re going to have is tempering your desire to just ‘play something’ while you sit and learn the right way to do it, note for note, line by line. We have a lot of work to do. So let’s get started.”

Over the next two years, Patsy quickly cleaned up my rudimentary understanding of reading music as I sailed through the beginner level of piano mechanics and went on to some more challenging pieces. She also taught me music theory. My absorption of theory was well beyond my performance ability. Every lesson, we’d check my theory homework first (which I would do about 30 minutes before each lesson) and then I’d play my pieces I was supposed to be practicing. I always enjoyed the first half of the lesson (the theory review) more than I did the second half (playing the piano). I remember at the end of my fourth grade year, she said “Your performance is fine. You’re doing exactly what you should be capable of doing at this point. But your music theory is going way beyond any of my other students. I am not sure what to make of that, but let’s go with it for now.”

I remember my theory book was a second-year college workbook, and I absolutely loved it. Music theory was like the best parts of art and math combined, and it was such a lovely side-subject. When I started fifth grade at a new middle school, there was no music room, so my parents had to start taking me to Patsy’s house at nights and weekends for my music lessons. I remember how much I enjoyed sounding out the chords and progressions from my theory homework on Patsy’s grand piano, then hearing (and watching) her play examples of what I’d learned after she dug through all the music on her shelves to find a match to my lesson plan.

I loved hearing her play so much. Every time there was a new piece for me to learn, I’d have her sit beside me on the bench and play it at least twice, each time with me watching her hands like a hawk. I could never play it as well as she could. Eventually, Patsy caught on. She realized that I was imitating her more than I was learning to sight read. I knew it too. Something was blocking me from being able to translate the notes on the page to that instantaneous, flowing effect of musical expression on the keys.

Patsy did everything she could to help. She invited me to concerts. Entered me into auditions. Forced me to go beyond my comfort zone with the pieces she’d help me choose for my recitals. She opened my mind to the reason, the purpose and application of music.

She’d play these extraordinarily complicated and beautiful pieces sometimes during our lessons just because she knew I loved hearing her play so much. Sometimes I'd ask her to close her eyes and I would wander over and grab something off her shelf that was nearly solid black with the sheer volume of notes in the piece. I’d set it in front of her and have her open her eyes. She’d say, oh I remember this or, hmm I’ve never seen this before, and she’d play it with all the grace and gusto implored by every embedded Italian word (I never realized until going to Italy in my 30’s that I’d learned an entirely different language during this time). I was always amazed when we’d get to the bottom of the right hand page of every piece and, with me following along reading what she was playing, she’d nod for me to turn the page and, with like… two hundred notes in just four bars left to play, I always thought to myself… how, on earth, did she just just absorb all those notes and play them perfectly while I was fumbling around to turn the page.

After a few years my performance hit a relatively mediocre plateau, and I finally came to terms with the reason my brick wall existed. It was due to a simple lack of practicing. And I wasn’t going to make the commitment to carve out more time for it. By the time Patsy and I both agreed that the wall was staring us in the face, I was halfway through the eighth grade and I’d told her I was going to stop piano lessons. It seemed like a waste of my parents’ money if I wasn’t going to practice more and get any better. Instead, I said, I was going to transfer to a larger middle school that actually had a junior high school band, and I was going to start playing saxophone. I told her I wanted to concentrate on that simpler instrument and perhaps get really good at it. I knew Patsy was disappointed, but she understood.

I didn’t see Patsy for many, many years after that last lesson. I got my saxophone. Learning to play it was relatively straightforward. I only had to read one note at a time. It was like reading just regular words on a page line after line. It wasn’t like reading four to ten different overlapping stories at once like the piano.

The summer before ninth grade, we moved to another town an hour away. I joined the high school band in our new town. My band director was surprised to learn I’d only had a semester of junior high band instruction when he heard me play my sax for the first time. He saw something in me, so year after year, he’d put a new instrument in front of me. By the time I graduated, I’d played alto saxophone, baritone and mallet percussion in marching band, bari sax in jazz band and basson during our concert seasons. I’d even taken a year of bassoon lessons from a private instructor in Auburn every week. Somehow I took to each new instrument like a duck to water.

In college, I continued my musical journey by joining various choirs and choruses, bands and orchestras, and was even a music education major for a while. I remember completing all my theory and ear training courses in a matter of days after classes would start. Quite literally, the classes would begin on day one, I would complete the entire semester’s worth of coursework by the end of day two, and wouldn’t need to come back to class at all for the rest of the semester. Every example of an augmented 7th or a suspended 4th that Patsy played all those years ago still rang in my head. In ear training, we’d we’d wear these heavy earphones, listen to 10-second clips of music in front of an electronic keyboard and be required to play each clip back note for note – I’d see Patsy’s hands playing the notes on the keyboard as each clip sounded out in my ears, and I’d play each one back exactly as I heard it and move on to the next lesson.

Eventually, I realized music wasn’t going to pay the bills in the future, so I scraped together a major in advertising then spent the next ten years working at ad agencies before I got into real estate.

…..

I don’t really do much in the way of music anymore except listen to Spotify on my iPhone. I haven’t played a wind instrument or sang in a choir since college. My saxophone has been sitting in its case for close to thirty years now. I do have a piano in my foyer just so I can sit at it once in a while to get something out of my head, but that’s about it.

It’s only been in the last few years, though, that I’ve realized how incredibly formative those piano lessons with Patsy were in the shaping of my young mind. And Patsy’s passion for teaching was nothing less than magical. Every move I make today, the forming of my thoughts and sentences, even the cadence of my voice in conversation… they all seem to come together with the same signatures, keys and tempos I learned in all of those years of piano lessons. I might even go so far as to say Patsy’s lessons are the reason I think the way I do, experience the world the way I do and interact with people the way I do today.

…..

Patsy, I never took the opportunity to reach back out to you after all this time to let you know how much our time together meant to me. I regret not doing that. Deep down, I think you know I wouldn’t be who I am today without your influence. So if you're reading this from another dimension right now, I want you to know I practiced just a little bit this afternoon since our first lesson together in 1980 when you said, "Play me something."

.....

     𝐴𝑙𝑙 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑝𝑎𝑠𝑠𝑒𝑠 𝑎𝑤𝑎𝑦

     𝐼𝑠 𝑜𝑛𝑙𝑦 𝑎 𝑙𝑖𝑘𝑒𝑛𝑒𝑠𝑠;

     𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝑖𝑛𝑎𝑑𝑒𝑞𝑢𝑎𝑐𝑦 𝑜𝑓 𝑒𝑎𝑟𝑡ℎ

     𝐻𝑒𝑟𝑒 𝑓𝑖𝑛𝑑𝑠 𝑓𝑢𝑙𝑓𝑖𝑙𝑙𝑚𝑒𝑛𝑡;

     𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝑖𝑛𝑒𝑓𝑓𝑎𝑏𝑙𝑒

     𝐻𝑒𝑟𝑒 𝑖𝑠 𝑎𝑐𝑐𝑜𝑚𝑝𝑙𝑖𝑠ℎ𝑒𝑑;

     𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝑒𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑛𝑎𝑙 𝑓𝑒𝑚𝑖𝑛𝑖𝑛𝑒

     𝑙𝑒𝑎𝑑𝑠 𝑢𝑠 𝑢𝑝.

          – 𝐹𝑖𝑛𝑎𝑙𝑒/𝐶ℎ𝑜𝑟𝑢𝑠 𝑀𝑦𝑠𝑡𝑖𝑐𝑢𝑠, 𝑆𝑦𝑚𝑝ℎ𝑜𝑛𝑦 8, 𝐺𝑢𝑠𝑡𝑎𝑣 𝑀𝑎ℎ𝑙𝑒𝑟

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