Two summers ago, I was playing concerts in
Santa Fe, some five hours’ drive from where I grew up. Travel is more difficult
for my parents than it used to be, but they made the trek to hear me. They
brought along a strange gift—a black notebook with my name on the front,
written in my best prepubescent cursive. It had been excavated from a closet
and smelled faintly of mothballs. I’d forgotten it existed but recognized it
instantly: my piano-lesson journal. Starting in 1981, when I was eleven, it sat
on my music rack, so that I could consult, or pretend to consult, my teacher’s
comments. Week after week, he wrote down what I’d played and how it went, and
outlined the next week’s goals.
I paged through nostalgically, reflecting on
how far I’d come. But a few days later I was onstage, performing, and a voice
made itself heard in my head: “Better not play faster than you can think.” It
was the notebook talking. I was indeed playing faster than I could
think—sometimes your fingers have plans of their own. The notebook voice went
on. “Keep back straight,” it said. “Beware of concentration lapses.” Through
several subsequent concerts, it lodged complaints and probed weaknesses,
delivering opinions worse than any reviewer’s. It took me weeks to silence the
voice and play normally again.
In popular culture, music lessons are often
linked with psychological torment. People apparently love stories about
performing-arts teachers who drive students mad, breaking their spirits with
pitiless exactitude. There’s David Helfgott in “Shine,” Isabelle Huppert’s
sadomasochistic turn in “The Piano Teacher,” the sneering Juilliard judges for
whom Julia Stiles auditions to redeem her mother’s death in “Save the Last
Dance.” (I can testify that the behavior of the judges at my real-life
Juilliard audition was even meaner and funnier.) I’ve often rolled my eyes at
the music-lesson clichés of movies: the mind games and power plays, the teacher
with the quaint European accent who says, “You will never make it, you are not
a real musician,” in order to get you to work even harder. But as the notebook
recalled memories of lessons I’d had—both as a child and later, once the piano
became my life—I wondered if my story was all that different.
When I was five, my parents, desperate to
find me an outlet, noticed that I had a thing for music. Family lore has me
singing the Hallelujah Chorus in the checkout lane at a grocery store—an early
warning of my classical predilections and their dire social consequences. We
were living in Englishtown, New Jersey, and one day my dad drove me to a nearby
Suzuki school, where I observed a long row of child violinists playing “Twinkle
Twinkle,” their bows all moving back and forth together, as if tethered. They
faced a wall of mirrors, so that each child duetted with a diabolical backward
twin. I threw a tantrum, and the violin was nixed.
Not long afterward, I began taking piano
lessons with Mona Schneiderman, who lived down the street and had a spinet
covered with tchotchkes, next to the kitchen. There was a candy bowl, and
sometimes the smell of cookies or chicken soup. She taught me to read
music—Every Good Boy Does Fine, and so on—and before long suggested a more
advanced teacher, Lillian Livingston. Livingston had a dedicated music room,
with two grand pianos, and a dark waiting room, where you endured the last
moments of preceding lessons—other seven-year-olds playing their Clementi and
Kabalevsky, music so transcendentally mediocre that it is thought a child
cannot ruin it.
When I was ten, we moved to Las Cruces, New
Mexico, and I began lessons with a teacher named William Leland. He taught at
New Mexico State University but consented to take me on after an audition. He
insisted that I get a new black composition notebook for his weekly comments.
At first, lessons were at his gloomy campus studio, but later they were at his
house—a ranch house in a modest neighborhood with an enormous, shiny,
improbable Bösendorfer grand greeting you as you came in the door. Like my
father, he favored a gently ironic tone of voice.
Leland’s notebook is surprisingly visual. In
place of the paste-on stars used by piano teachers everywhere, Leland drew
stars by hand, giving nuance to his praise: sometimes the stars were beaming
with pride, sporting halos or crowns; sometimes they had sidelong glances, to
reflect mitigated success; some stars were amputees, and limped on crutches;
and sometimes things were so generally disappointing that he drew a slug, or a
caterpillar, or even, on one terrible occasion, a toilet. There were other
artistic annotations, such as a drawing of a large check from the Screwball
Bank of West Burlap, dated April 7, 1981, and made out to me for a million
dollars: I had at last remembered to play a correct F-sharp in place of an
erroneous F-natural.
On a typical page of the notebook (March 12,
1981), Leland writes, “Scale practice is getting sloppy.” He
suggests practicing scales in a series of rhythms—eighth notes, triplets,
sixteenths—and urgently switches to capitals: “USE
METRONOME.” This heartless device is invoked constantly:
“Metronome! You need an outside policeman every time the inner policeman breaks
down”; “Use Metroyouknowwhat”; and on and on. Anyone who has taken music
lessons knows the indignity of emulating a machine until every last human
vagary vanishes. The clicking monster was also part of Leland’s cunning scheme
to prevent me from playing everything as fast as I possibly could. In response
to my performance of William Gillock’s “Forest Murmurs,” Leland writes, “Forest
Murmurs, not Forest Fire!” Below a carefully drawn portrait of a sullen
Beethoven saying, “Man muss zufrieden sein! (One must be happy!),”
he complains that my tempo “sounds like a Hell’s Angels motorcycle race.” At
the bottom of another page, there is a “Quote of the Week”—“It’s amazing what
you can do when you go slower!”—attributed to me in the act of discovering this
brilliant truth.
Most of all, Leland required my conscious
attention. In 1982, he wrote, “Practicing a passage is not just repetition but
really concentrating and burning every detail into your nervous system.” When I
failed to focus, he drew diagrams of my head, mostly empty, with a pea-size
brain rattling around inside. There were surveillance stratagems: once,
two-thirds of the way down a page full of advice, he wrote, “If you’ve read
this far, call me up.” The word “detail” is everywhere. Reading it now, I
notice that technical corrections are enumerated very specifically, but that
the musical observations tend to be generic: “2nd mvt. beautiful! now this is
making music!” or “This is getting very musical.” This is a common redundancy.
After a concert, you often hear people saying, “It was so musical,” as if they
had expected something else. Seeing these comments makes me realize something
about my teen-age self: how I withheld from Leland some of my most personal
feelings about music, in the same way that you hold things back from your
parents, who are all the more infuriating for having your best interests at
heart.
Learning to play the piano is learning to
reason with your muscles. One of the recurring story lines of my first years
with Leland was learning how to cross my thumb smoothly under the rest of my
hand in scales and arpeggios. He devised a symmetrical, synchronous,
soul-destroying exercise for this, in which the right and left thumbs reached
under the other fingers, crablike, for ever more distant notes. Exercises like
this are crucial and yet seem intended to quell any natural enthusiasm for
music, or possibly even for life. As you deal with thumb-crossings, or
fingerings for the F-sharp-minor scale, or chromatic scales in double thirds,
it is hard to accept that these will eventually allow you to probe eternity in
the final movement of Beethoven’s last sonata. Imagine that you are scrubbing
the grout in your bathroom and are told that removing every last particle of
mildew will somehow enable you to deliver the Gettysburg Address.
One May, right after I gave a solo recital,
Leland wrote in the notebook, “Welcome to the summer during which you will
learn to hate me. We are going to do precision drills:
Exercises in perfection of fingering, notes and rhythm. . . . Every slip means
back to beginning.” That was the summer the music died—long, tedious lessons
solely on scales, arpeggios, repeated notes, chords. But this misery proved a
success. Paging through the notebook, I recognize that I have not really
changed at all: I’m the sort of person who, if he has to suffer, wants to
suffer full time. In the couple of years that followed, I passed a commitment
boundary. Between the lines of the notebook, I can sense references to fraught
conversations with my parents about the escalating role of the piano in my
life. And, by the time the notebook breaks off, everything has become more
serious: there is a swirl of preparation for recitals and the compilation of a
college audition tape.
I went to Oberlin, and my single teacher
split into ten or twenty. As a piano student, you spend a lot of time accompanying
fellow-students—sopranos, violinists, bassoonists—at their lessons, and their
teachers offered lifetimes of perspectives on how music ought to go. My piano
teacher, Joseph Schwartz, was a natural musician with a beautiful Romantic
sound and a calm, avuncular style. He did once say that my Chopin Berceuse was
“unbelievably terrible,” but mostly he was encouraging, if reticent. Luckily
and unluckily, many of his colleagues were not reticent at all. I began to
recognize the various species of teacher: the holistic nurturers and the
sarcastic beraters; the belittlers, the analyzers, the gym coaches, and the old
hands who believe that musicianship can’t really be taught. Teachers would tell
me that other teachers were misguiding me, and I began to perceive a hidden web
of personal agendas and resentments. It was upsetting how often one lesson
contradicted another. Without realizing it, I slipped into the dangerous state
of craving a guru, someone who would tie it all together.
One night in my senior year, I went to hear
the Hungarian pianist György Sebők, who was visiting from Indiana University,
where he taught. He was then in his late sixties—short and squat, almost
triangular, and epically bald down the middle of his head. After a serious,
hefty program, he offered an evanescent encore, the Gigue (or Jig) from Bach’s
first Partita. The witty premise of the piece is hand-crossings: the right hand
burbles away in the middle of the keyboard, filling in the harmony, while the
left darts over and under it, picking out scraps of melody and bass line.
Toward the end, Bach arrives emphatically on the bass note F. He is, in
music-theory terms, just one step away from the home key—the imminent end of
the piece is implied—but, instead of wrapping things up, he doubles the pace of
hand-crossing and tightens the frame, so that the hands seem to whirl around
each other. A clever paradox: though the piece is frozen in place, it seems to
be moving faster than ever. As the hands whirl, the notes descend, and Bach visits
every daring harmony he can, while sitting in the driveway mere moments from
harmonic home. At last, in a flash, the piece resolves, and the left hand leaps
up several octaves, like a slingshot or a skipping stone.
While performing this devilish sleight of
hand, Sebők appeared angelic and unperturbed. The words “musical” and
“unmusical” did not apply. It was as if the concepts behind the notes, playful
and profound, had come alive. As he revealed each audacious but logical chord
change, I experienced both shock and comprehension—surprise at something that
made perfect sense. I can still see the last notes, his left arm gracefully
crossing over his right, describing an arc to the final B-flat, his face
conceding a small shadow of a smile. That moment felt like music escaping from
the boring necessity of sound. It determined the next five years of my life.
The next day, Sebők gave a master class, at
which I was scheduled to play. He was elegantly dressed, and smoked, in
flagrant contravention of college rules, from a long cigarette holder. He
rested his smoking elbow in the palm of his other hand, while I played through
the first movement of Brahms’s Second Concerto. Quite early, the pianist must
enter very grandly, with low bass notes leaping up to treble chords. I played
with nervous caution, missing a few notes. In front of everyone, Sebők told me
to close my eyes for a full minute. There was silence, and I could smell the
smoke from his cigarette. Then he told me that I knew the piano better than I
imagined. (This rang some bell in me.) He had me visualize the whole area of
the keyboard around and including that low F that I had to start with; he
enumerated notes to think about, the dangerous E-natural next door, the F-sharp
just above; and then—he was very rational as he led me, step by step, through
this mystical procedure—he had me play the very treacherous passage with my
eyes still closed, throwing my left hand confidently into darkness. Whether it
was chance, or whether Sebők had managed to unlock a subconscious knowledge of
the keyboard accumulated through years of practice, I nailed the passage. The
sound was deeper and richer, even thunderous. A lifetime of difficulty had been
replaced with a moment of ease.
Six months later, I was in Bloomington, Indiana,
to study with Sebők. I paced around the circular gray hallways of the music
school, reading the names of the legendary faculty members: the Italian
violinist Franco Gulli; the Hungarian cellist János Starker; and the
Russian-born violinist Josef Gingold. I was surrounded by Europe and at the
same time marooned in cornfields, with a frat house across the street. I’m
afraid to say that I turned up for my first lesson in a T-shirt, shorts, and
sneakers. Sebők came down the corridor in a three-piece suit and appraised me
silently in the few moments it took to unlock his door. It was clear that we
had no business meeting for any other purpose than music.
I played the Mozart C-Minor Sonata, and when
I finished the first movement he got up and went over to a Michelangelo drawing
he had on the wall, along with an enormous, ornate diploma from the Liszt
Academy, in Budapest. (My diploma from Las Cruces High School was definitely
outclassed.) He pointed out various lines in the drawing, ranging from quite
dark to almost invisible. He began to flesh out a metaphor: Mozart is made up
of two-, three-, four-, and eight-bar phrases, all in a row, punctuated by
cadences of various kinds. If you’re not careful, the row can resemble a string
of sausages. The solution was to find more varied and more sensual ways of
ending phrases—like drawing charcoal over paper, creating a curved or straight
line. I continued on to the second movement, and he neither praised nor
criticized it. Instead, he told me it was a Don Juan serenade, and began to
demonstrate, drawing a connection between Mozart’s florid ornamentation and the
art of flirtation. The presence of sex behind Mozart’s ruffles had been mostly
unknown to me.
The aim of that first lesson, I later
realized, was to ennoble the art of practicing. You were not practicing
“phrasing”; you were drawing like Michelangelo, or seducing like Don Juan. Sebők
said many times that you don’t teach piano playing at lessons; you teach how to
practice—the daily rite of discovery that is how learning really happens.
At that first lesson, too, he did one of his
sublime parlor tricks. He played a stretch of melody that culminated in a long
held note, and warned me with a raised eyebrow to listen. The absolute
limitation of the piano is that every note decays after it is played, but as he
shifted the underlying harmony I heard the melody note crescendo and blossom,
by some confluence of overtones. Sebők was full of impossibilities like this. I
remember a class where a young woman thundered away at Liszt’s First Mephisto
Waltz—thrashing, head shaking, hair thrown about. His response was bemused: “If
I did what you just did, I would be exhausted. I’d need”—he paused for the
prosaic word—“a vacation.” He had her replay one of the biggest passages, smiling
and savoring her inefficiency. Then he went to the piano and, with his
cigarette holder dangling from his mouth, brought his arms slowly down,
creating a focussed sound ten times as large. The room gasped. His huge sound
had no trace of ugliness, and there was no recoil; his body was unaltered, like
a boulder with arms. We all had a desperate urge to be able to do that.
Gradually, a few basic Sebők principles
consolidated themselves. He was, by turns, spirit guide and physics teacher.
His goal was to bridge the gap between boring technical detail and the
mysteries of the universe. He would make you focus on the myriad hinges of the
arm and wrist, sometimes looking for the arm to resemble a sewing machine, with
up-and-down linear simplicity, other times looking for curves, circles,
spirals. The mechanism of bone and muscle brought to bear on the piano is very
complex; the hidden responding mechanism inside the piano is also very complex;
and the interaction of the two is a lifetime’s study. Putting a heavy ashtray
on top of the piano, he offered a lesson in motion: “If I want to move this
thing, I don’t come at it with a lot of speed”—he showed how the ashtray would
tip over if you hit it hard—“but slowly, at the speed I want to move it.” He
approached the ashtray with his outstretched hand, which resembled a lion’s
paw, and made it glide across the piano lid. He believed that matching one’s
motions to the gestures within the music was essential to unlocking the
emotions in a piece. “If you don’t smile, can you really be happy?” he asked
rhetorically. He conceded that, yes, you could be happy without smiling, but
insisted that the most complete happiness tended to find a physical outlet. All
this led to a question: wasn’t it perverse to play a phrase with body language
that was opposed to the musical idea itself?
Unlike studio classes at Oberlin, where
students played nervously for their peers and received one another’s guarded
comments, Sebők’s classes were happenings. They took place at night in his tiny
studio, which fit maybe twenty-five people; it was always uncomfortably packed.
The only light came from a small desk lamp next to where he sat, which made him
seem to glow. One night, he warned all of us gathered there not to become
inured to even the most textbook harmonic progressions. As a student played a
Mozart concerto, he got up from the desk, sat at a second piano, and added
chords quietly from time to time, to enunciate a higher rhythm of events. At
first, there were two harmonies alternating every couple of bars, then the
alternation sped up, every bar, every half bar, and suddenly Mozart released
everything into eight sailing bars—a balloon drifting, all ties to the earth
cut. It was unforgettable, this demonstration of the poetry of structure, and many
times, sitting in concerts, I’ve wished that Sebők would come onstage and start
playing those chords, so that the performers would stop producing
sausage-string phrases and give us ones that know their surroundings.
There is an aura to these studio sessions
that no performance can match. They are beautiful acts of attention, in which
the revelatory detail is cherished for its own sake, freed from the narrative
necessities of performance. The climax of my Sebők experience was a class at
which someone played the Bartok Suite, Opus 14. In the third movement, the
student was having trouble negotiating wild skips around the keyboard, and Sebők
offered, “Motion is not that important, but mobility is.” I was still digesting
that Zen distinction when the student began the darkly lilting last movement.
Sebők listened to the student play as if he were tired of teaching and hoped to
experience the music for its own sake. At last, he couldn’t take it anymore,
and demonstrated a few measures. Suddenly the music was wandering, halting,
sick-sounding. There was a stunning distance between the eloquence of what he
did and the student’s attempt—an awakening of melancholy possibility. He
stopped playing in the middle of a phrase, and we all waited, knowing that
something special was about to happen. Then he said, “To show love for someone,
but not to feel that love”—long pause—“that is the work of Mephistopheles.”
Hanging with the smoke in the dimly lit room,
that fantastic remark verged on camp. He made no further explanation; we had to
interpret it for ourselves. Ever since, when I’ve played the piece, I’ve
thought of Baudelaire’s “beauties of sickness,” of dishonest harmonies that at
once seduce and repel. “That is enough for tonight,” he said.
About a month into my time with Sebők, I got
a sense of how uncomfortable it would be to feel his disappointment. I played
the Chopin Fantaisie for him, a difficult and elusive piece, and my playing was
a muddle. In my search for fantasy, the structure disintegrated, as when you
add too much water to a dough and end up with a pasty soup. He was furious at
my lack of attention to Chopin’s phrasings, dynamics, and meticulously marked
pedallings. I tried to do what he was telling me, but was weirdly unable to
respond. A couple of days later, I found out that I had mononucleosis, and all
was forgiven. But the honeymoon period had been brought to a premature end, and
the possibility of mutual frustration entered the relationship.
Sebők was in town only for a few weeks at the
beginning of the semester; then he would leave to teach in Paris and Tokyo, and
return for a few weeks at the end of the semester. There were long months
without his inspiration, when I wondered what I was doing there; music itself
began to seem a bit pale, Midwestern, monotonous. One dreadful time, I forgot a
lesson. I can still remember his angry Hungarian voice on the phone, as I
uttered stumbling apologies. I couldn’t believe that I’d endured weeks and
weeks in Bloomington without him, only to fail to show up once he was back.
I was so dazzled by Sebők that I sometimes
didn’t pay attention to what he actually said—you sometimes love a piece so
much that you don’t really look at the score. As the years went by, I became
dependent on his magic, and I didn’t seem to be making much progress in a
career. My idea of music had merged with the idea of him. A member of the
faculty who had befriended me dropped hints about the dangers of idols, and I
realize now that I couldn’t bear to leave Sebők. But a key experience changed
that. In my fourth year, in studio class, I played Beethoven’s “Eroica”
Variations—an ambitious, virtuosic piece. Sebők had previously gone over it
with me, demonstrating how much humor it contained, and I had run with his
ideas. I had worked hard and, as I played, felt reasonably confident. The other
students gave me warm and generous applause after I finished. Sebők smoked for
a while. Perhaps I turned to him looking a bit jaunty. And then, very coolly
and evenly, he said, “You need to learn the difference between character and
caricature.” The room went silent, absorbing this elegant, lacerating remark.
It got worse. Variation after variation, he demonstrated how I had converted
high humor into low slapstick. In a manner that I now recognize as distinctively
European, he seemed to blame me for my enthusiasm for his own ideas. People
patted me on the back outside afterward, hugged me, as if I had been the victim
of an assault. I was stunned. Over the next few days, I began to think that
there might have been a less cruel way of telling me I had gone too far. It
seemed an injustice that he was meanest to me when I felt I had played my best.
I grasped the rationale, but I couldn’t quite swallow it.
Lessons began to feel less like progress and
more like some odd repetitive dream. Sebők gave me an important lesson in
rhythm, using the theme of the last movement of Beethoven’s Opus 109. The theme
is a saraband—a slow Baroque dance in triple time—and Sebők demonstrated how to
get a magical lilt: you subtly elongate the second beat and shorten the third,
in effect playing the third beat slightly late. The next week, I offered him a
limping, nearly drunken saraband; he was not happy. The week after that, I
tried to cultivate his reserve, his refinement; he told me I was playing “like
an old man.” Maybe we were both realizing that our time had run its course.
Evil moment, when you doubt the magician’s magic, when you wonder if it was
more image than insight.
I moved to New York and began trying to
cultivate a career, but I returned periodically to teach at Indiana University,
alongside my former master. I now got to see him in faculty meetings. A new
dean came to the school and asked for a mission statement from the piano
department, so that our goals could be incorporated into the “business model”
of the school as a whole. Sebők smoked as various earnest options were
presented. Finally, he offered, “We want to teach excellent students, very
well,” and looked wearily off into the distance. I sat smirking. His sarcasm was
a joy, now that it wasn’t directed at me. He treated me kindly, too, and was
pleased that things were starting to go well for me in New York. But I didn’t
play for him anymore; it was too painful.
As I taught my students in Bloomington, I
absorbed the ironies of role reversal. When you give ideas to students, they
tend either to ignore them or to exaggerate them. The first is distilled
futility, but the second is grotesque: there is the student, trying to be you
with all his youthful might. You look on with horror at this knockoff, this
puppet—yourself to the nth degree as interpreted by someone who
doesn’t know all the other parts of you. Then a thought occurs: what if this
really is you, and that only through the imitation of this struggling student
do you see what you’re really about. I recalled the moment when Sebők accused
me of playing like an old man.
One thing no one teaches you is how much
teaching resembles therapy. You can be working with a student you’ve recently
met, and you begin to tinker with one thing, even the movement of an arm. It
becomes clear that some important muscle has been blocked for a decade or more.
It’s an intimate thing, being shown these years of lost possibilities, and
before long you’re giving advice about boyfriends, and explaining why parents
are such a drag. There are diabolically opposed incentives, too: while the
teacher is trying to express the truth about the student and discover what
isn’t working, the student is in some way trying to elude discovery, disguising
weaknesses in order to seem better than she is. In this complicated situation,
a teacher must walk a thin line, destroying complacency without destroying
confidence.
Teaching makes you understand what your own
teachers must have endured—frustrations as great as any performer’s. Ninety per
cent of a teacher’s job is directing students to read what’s plainly on the
page. The other ten per cent is attempting to incite their imagination about
what’s behind and between the notes, what could never be written down in any
score—and sometimes this seems unteachable, like the creation of life itself.
Sebők died in 1999. When I heard, I was in my
apartment in New York watching some idiotic TV show. The news felt like a
warning not to waste my life and my time. Ten years later, I was sitting at a
post-concert dinner with my Oberlin professor, Joseph Schwartz, whom I hadn’t
seen in many years. We were at an Applebee’s in Florida, near Sarasota, the
only place open. We exchanged summaries of our lives, and then, just when the
conversation was flagging, out of nowhere he said, “Do you remember that Bach
Gigue Sebők played at Oberlin?” Yes, I did, I said, and found myself tearing
up. I couldn’t believe that, twenty years later, in this land of traffic lights
and strip malls, we were both still carrying the memory of those two minutes of
Bach.
Very recently, during a recital in Philadelphia, I
lifted my arm confidently to play a passage. A flurry of wrong notes rang out.
I had a moment of panic, a quick intake of breath, and was beginning a litany
of self-blame when I heard a voice in my head with a quaint Hungarian accent:
“The problem with you is that you’re a perfectionist.” It was quite a different
voice from that of the black notebook, an antidote, even. I played more freely;
there suddenly seemed to be more options. Leland had been right to remind me
that there was no end to the details one could strive for, but Sebők was also
right—the desire for perfection could be a deadly weakness. Living comfortably
in that paradox, without even knowing it, is part of being a musician. There’s
a labyrinth of voices inside your head, a counterpoint of self-awareness and
the remembered sayings of your guides and mentors, who don’t always agree.
Sometimes you wish you could go back and ask your teachers again to guide you;
but up there onstage, exactly where they always wanted you to be, you must
simply find your way. They have given all the help they can; the only person
who can solve the labyrinth of yourself is you. ♦
Jeremy Denk
