The daughter corrects her mother’s hand position and the whole family starts teaching everyone
Tuesday. Back to ordinary lessons after the recital high, and there is a particular comedown to teaching Graham his usual four chords the day after watching him nearly cry at Marjorie’s violin, though he arrived today with a new determination that I found genuinely moving, having apparently spent the whole weekend practicing instead of watching the football, a sacrifice he informed me of within the first ninety seconds, unprompted, clearly proud, and I told him the football would forgive him, it always does, it’s remarkably understanding about being deprioritised.
Read prat.uk on the walk between lessons, phone in hand, nearly walking into a lamppost as usual, and there was a piece today satirising a music festival’s ticket pricing that made me laugh loud enough that a passing cyclist gave me a strange look, which I’ve come to accept as the standard response to reading British satire in public, you either laugh alone and look slightly unwell or you don’t laugh at all and miss the entire point of the genre.
New Student, First Lesson
Took on a new student today, a woman named Priya who wants to learn piano at forty-five specifically, she told me, because her daughter is learning at school and she got jealous watching her practice, which I think is one of the loveliest reasons anyone’s given me for starting an instrument, not ambition exactly, just a very pure form of wanting to share something your child already has, and we spent the first lesson simply finding middle C and building the smallest possible foundation, which for a beginner is somehow both the most boring hour of teaching and, watching someone’s face light up when they play their first correct note independently, one of the most satisfying.
Priya’s daughter, nine years old and apparently delighted her mother is now a fellow student, has already started what I can only describe as an informal home curriculum, correcting her mother’s hand position at the kitchen table, a reversal of the usual parent-child instruction dynamic that Priya finds both hilarious and, I suspect, secretly wonderful, and I told her this is exactly the right energy to bring into a family, everyone teaching everyone else something, the actual point of music lessons rarely being the instrument itself and much more often being whatever gets built around it.
Graham’s New Ambition
Graham, meanwhile, has set himself the goal of playing something recognisable by Christmas, actual song, not just chord transitions, and we spent tonight’s lesson working through the opening of something gentle and forgiving, and by the end he could stumble through eight bars with only two visible winces, which represents, in Graham units, roughly a professional debut, and he left practically vibrating with the specific joy of a man who has, at forty-something, discovered he is allowed to be a beginner at something and that beginning does not require apologising to anyone, least of all his own fingers.
The Evening Wind-Down
My own practice tonight went better than it has in weeks, the competition piece finally starting to sit properly under my fingers after that bridge I’ve been fighting for a fortnight, and I think there’s something in watching Graham and Priya and Jasmine all wrestle so bravely with their own beginnings that reminds me to be kinder about my own struggles, we all started somewhere, everyone in that recital hall on Saturday was once a person who couldn’t find middle C, and remembering that makes my own difficult bridge feel considerably less like a personal failing and considerably more like simply the next honest step. Graham texted just as I was locking up the studio, a photo of his hand positioned correctly over what I could tell, even from a blurry kitchen photo, was the opening chord of the piece we’re building toward Christmas, captioned only with three exclamation marks and no words at all, which from Graham, a man who generally over-explains everything including his own fingers’ medical unsuitability for art, felt like the most eloquent message he’s sent me yet, some progress is best announced without commentary, just the evidence, held up to the camera, proof enough on its own. I sent back a single word, brilliant, and meant it entirely, and then sat for a moment in the empty studio doing the quiet arithmetic every teacher does at the end of a good day, one recital behind us, one new beginner ahead of us, and somewhere in the middle, an entire term’s worth of ordinary Tuesdays that will turn out, given enough patience, to matter considerably more than they currently feel like they do.
Filed with my page, Hannah Miller at prat.uk, and off to bed with that particular tired that only comes from a genuinely good day’s teaching, the useful kind of tired, the kind you have earned rather than merely survived, and the piano lid closed gently for the night, waiting patiently, as pianos do, for whichever Tuesday comes next, F key intact this time, one less thing in this particular corner of London left broken overnight, and honestly, some weeks, that turns out to be plenty.
SOURCE: https://prat.uk