I am a Piano Teacher

This is new for 2020. I’ve never taught piano before, mostly because I don’t have any training as a piano teacher. I knew better than to try to teach my own children. DD#1 took lessons from other people and DD#2 wasn’t interested.

I started taking piano lessons when I was 8 years old. My first teacher was a lady who lived down the street from us. I took lessons from her for about a year, and then my parents enrolled me at the Koch School of Music in Cleveland, where I took lessons until I was a junior in high school. Interestingly enough, I never played in church. Our church had an organ, for one thing. (The two instruments are not interchangeable, by the way—pianists aren’t automatically organists.) We also had a young man about a year older than me who was unbelievably talented. He studied at Oberlin and Peabody and is currently on the staff of an orchestra in a major US city. On the rare occasions we needed a pianist, he was the obvious choice.

I did play piano in jazz band in high school when I wasn’t playing trombone. And although I played the trombone all the way through college, I stopped playing piano for almost 15 years. The Lutheran church I first attended when we moved to Kalispell had a very talented pianist. (That’s a different Lutheran church than the one I play for now.) It wasn’t until I joined the Mennonite church—and bought my own piano—that I started playing regularly again. If I could clone myself, I could be a church pianist at half a dozen churches here. It seems to me that fewer kids take piano lessons nowadays and church pianists (and organists) are a dying breed. I am hoping that someone shows up that I can train to take my place, because I don’t want to do this forever.

The husband commented a few weeks ago—as I was heading out the door to the Lutheran church—that if someone had told him when he was 20 that he was going to be married to a church pianist, he wouldn’t have believed them. Well hey, at 20, I didn’t think I was going to be a church pianist, so there you go.

Anyway . . . our friend Rebecca, who lives around the corner, asked me last spring if I would consider giving her lessons. We had hoped to start back in the fall, but couldn’t make it work. She came for her first lesson yesterday. I am grateful to be starting out with an adult, and one who knows some of the basics of reading music (she sang in choir in college). I think I would have a much harder time teaching a child starting at square one. She also understands that much of the work is going to be her responsibility; I can teach her good practice habits and a fair bit of music theory, but she’s going to have to do the hard work of building muscle memory.

We’ll see how this works out. With all the littles in the neighborhood, I may end up doing more teaching in the next couple of years than I anticipated.

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It’s time to start looking at seed catalogs. My partner-in-crime, Susan, is getting ready to put in a Fedco order and asked me if I wanted to add anything. I need to replace some fruit trees in our orchard and I want some old heirloom varieties. Black Oxford is at the top of the list:

Isn’t that a pretty apple? Susan wonders if it will ripen here, but it is a Maine variety so I am being optimistic. Susan’s son-in-law is from Montana, and his father is also interested in apple trees. He comes to visit every spring so he and Susan can graft some. Susan said that he planted a Black Oxford at his cabin in Kellogg, Idaho. I think that if it can survive there, it can survive here, too. I’ll have to ask him how it’s doing.

I also want a Seek-No-Further for the simple reason that it is mentioned in my favorite series of books by Sara Donati (Into the Wilderness is the first book in that series). Fedco doesn’t have Seek-No-Further trees, but they are selling the scion wood, so Susan said she would graft me one. She’s also going to graft me a Duchess of Oldenburg, which is the tree in her orchard that provides me with my annual supply of pie apples. Have I mentioned how much I appreciate having a friend with a degree in botany who has these specialized skills?

The Cosmic Crisp apple that was released at the beginning of December with much fanfare is available at our grocery store. Cosmic Crisp is a variety that was developed in Washington state from a cross between a Honeycrisp and an Enterprise. I haven’t bought any yet because they are pretty pricey. I’m also one of the few people on the planet who doesn’t think Honeycrisps live up to the hype, although they do keep well.