Book celebrates piano lessons

NOTE BY NOTE: A CELEBRATION OF THE PIANO LESSON, by Tricia Tunstall, Simon and Schuster, 214 pages, $24

Tricia Tunstall, an experienced piano teacher and accomplished musician, has hit on a subject almost as universal as a child's softball games.

Speaking of a piano lesson, she writes, "In the course of a modern American childhood, there are very few occasions when a child spends an extended period alone with an unrelated adult."

Undoubtedly, there are times when the adult teaching the lesson is the mother of the student, but most mothers and piano teachers would not advise that situation — certainly not the author. She notes that anyone who has had piano lessons as a child vividly remembers the piano teacher, for good or ill.

Depending on the musical ability of the child, the experience can become very tense, and every failure a traumatic experience, threatening to the ego. The author believes that the interaction between student and teacher is vital to a successful piano lesson. As a result, piano teachers don't worry about the encroachment of printed manuals, online courses, instructional videos or any other "user-friendly software" that promises to teach someone to play the piano.

The evidence is abundant that both adults and children come to suspect that learning to play a musical instrument is part of a complete education. It is a "ritual of American childhood," Tunstall says. That is related to the discipline necessary to perform well in piano lessons, and also to the power to appreciate the beauty and emotional reach of music.

An excerpt from Tunstall is instructive: "My first piano teacher was Dorothea Ortmann, daughter of the director of the Peabody Conservatory. When I was six she was terribly old, maybe even fifty. Her row house on Saint Paul Street in downtown Baltimore had three stories, and I sometimes thought I could hear pianos being played on all three floors simultaneously.

"I did not know who else was playing, but I decided that she had six grand pianos, two on each floor. Six would not have been too many for Miss Ortmann, whose life was clearly dedicated to the art of pianism in the grand European tradition. I would not have been surprised to learn that when her students had gone and she was left in dark brocaded solitude, she drifted up and down the stairs playing all the pianos, all night long."