There are piano teachers, there are piano students, there are parents of piano students…but exactly how many active piano teachers are there that have taught piano for nearly two decades, AND teach their own two young children piano, AND have studied piano for over three decades? Perhaps a few. What if I add, AND likes to surf? I’m no expert on surfing, but I have studied piano from many different and unique perspectives.
My interest in piano happened when I was five-and-a-half years old, over a play date. My friends in the neighborhood were going to attend an electric piano class at a local city college, and asked if I wanted to tag along. It sounded fun to me, and I loved putting on the huge headphones that entirely covered my ears. I thought it was pure magic that the teacher could somehow speak and make her voice reach like little tentacles into each student’s headphone set while we were practicing Mary Had a Little Lamb. I came home that day and asked my mom if I could take piano lessons.
She asked around to our family friends, most whom were Chinese, that all seemed to study with internationally reknown teacher and concert pianist Joanna Hodges or one of her entourage of six teaching assistants. It was impossible to study with Joanna herself, unless you had proven to be an extremely precocious young pianist, or a serious, advanced adult performer. She performed at Carnegie’s Town Hall at only twelve years old. She was the first American woman to concertize in Rumania. Many people may remember her from from the Joanna Hodges International Piano Competition that was held in Palm Desert, California that ran for several weeks at a time, for about a decade.
So I was sent over to study with Nancy Perry, one of her teaching assistants that lived near me. Nancy was still a teenager herself, living at home with her parents, with a piano in her bedroom. She was kind, encouraging, thorough. My mom neglected to let her know that she would not be plunking down money for a real piano without proof that I was going to stick with it, and instead bought me a toy piano that had ten keys and tinkled like bells. My parents splurged for an Kimball console piano a few months later, but I’m not sure if we ever let my teacher in on our little secret. Perhaps that is why I make my own students sign a contract stating that they own an acoustic piano!
All of the teaching done by the six teaching assistants was overseen by Joanna at the monthly piano workshops. Each student received written comments, and each teaching assistant got reviews at their next lesson with her. Joanna wrote comments totaling almost three hours some nights. Sometimes the workshops lasted what seemed like eternity, but the level of playing was incredible for every age. After about three years, I eventually became a full-time student of Joanna Hodges, and would continue my studies with her until I graduated from high school.
From age six, I loved performing and playing in piano competitions, but wasn’t able to reign in the discipline to practice for hours that would have kept me in the top competition standings as I hit my late teens. I never even imagined nor desired to become a piano teacher at this earlier stage in my life. I’ve always had the great fortune of having wonderful piano teachers that I loved to see each week. However, for most people, the conjured image of the neighborhood piano teacher is the older lady that lives with ten cats, with bad breath and a long stick that rap the knuckles of the very innocent fingers that find their way to the wrong notes (the piano teaching nuns and the Soviet teachers did have a legacy of putting the fear of God into students!)
I started teaching piano almost accidentally. I flew up to Vancouver, Washington from California to visit Joanna Hodge whom I studied with from ages nine to sixteen. It had been over six years since I had left her studio and headed off to college. I decided that it would be best for me to avoid trying to have a career in music. I earned a piano performance degree from University of California, Santa Barbara, almost by default. I entered U.C. S.B. as a business major, but wanted to still continue my piano lessons. I found that I needed to audition and become a piano major in order to get private piano lessons and not pay out of pocket. So I switched majors, temporarily, in my own mind. My plan was to take all the different classes that I wanted, and later change back majors when I found a major that wouldn’t leave me with a “starving artist” stamp across my forehead.
I thought about switching majors every few quarters after taking an exciting class in a different major, such as french literature, political science, art history, and science fiction, but soon realized that I could keep any class that I was interested in, and keep the piano performance major. I enjoyed my private lessons with Peter Yazbeck, the ensemble classes, and although I’ve never been a history buff, the music history classes began to grow on me. Joining a sorority definitely cut into my practice time, but I would stay on campus late into evening practicing for hours before an upcoming jury or competition.
I graduated as a piano performance major, and immediately found work having nothing to do with my major through my sister’s temporary agency called MacTemps, now known as Aquent. I landed the job after convincing my soon-to-be-boss that music had everything to do with marketing a product. “It’s just like learning a new piece of music,” I explained. “You learn the music note-for-note, and then you have to put your own interpretation on the piece in order to sell it to the public.” She understood the correlation, and I spent the next two years using graphic design and creating presentations for the sales and marketing departments at Nissan Foods, the king of Top Ramen.
There was a short fling with an famous actor that also had a love of music and a band that reminded me of my musical life that was now silent. I played my classical repertoire that I had from memory on his grand piano, from Bach to Ginastera. I began to miss my music-making, and bought a top-of-the-line Yamaha electric piano to put in my ocean-view Manhattan Beach apartment that wouldn’t disturb my neighbors and bought my very own pair of ear-encompassing headphones, just like the ones that I had at age five, but a lot nicer. I moonlighted as a sit-in keyboard player to Joe’s Band, a popular cover band in the south bay. We played in many south bay hot spots and even trekked out to Palm Springs, a world away from my piano competition days in the desert.
After working at Nissin Foods for a few years, I hit a crossroad and decided that the only way to figure out the rest of my life to was to hit the road with my good friend Elise, and figure it all out in a three-month stint backpacking through Europe. We met up with friends sprinkled throughout Europe, she sang and I played piano with pieces like “La Jazz Hot” and “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” everywhere, for a group of beer-drinking priests in Belgium to some new friends we made in Italy with a room with a view that matched the movie. We returned rested and refreshed with a new outlook on life. Elise was to apply for law school, and I would somehow get back into music.
That summer I received a flyer from Joanna Hodges for a piano seminar she was having up in her new location, Vancouver, Washington. My mission was to attend a piano seminar and see if I really wanted to get back into music. After the two weeks, I decided to stay “a little longer” to prepare a college entrance program for a masters in piano performance. I became a teaching assistant in the classic sense; living, breathing and complete immersed in music. I played as part of the Vancouver Symphony, practiced eight hours a day while teaching and earned an Artist Diploma, and won a few local competitions, playing some recitals in Washington.
I left four years later as an experienced, piano teacher teaching 35 young students and six weekly piano theory and music history classes. As I began teaching all of my students’ younger siblings, my beginning age dropped from six down to three. I saw the need for a piano method just for very young children, and I spent my spare time writing my own piano method book during the wee hours of the night that only the consummate night-owl is familiar with. I relocated back to California after stint of long-distance-dating an friend from back in my U.C.S.B. days. We bumped into each other by chance on one of my California visits. I should’ve known that he was “the one” when he drove up from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara with his buddy to attend my senior recital. I then started up two piano studios in Los Angeles and Seal Beach simultaneously, student by student, while doing temp work at MacTemps until my studio became full. My husband was amazingly supportive every step of the way. I would often throw him for a loop when he’d come home from a long day at work, and an actor like Christopher Lambert or Diane Lane would be sitting on the couch, cheering on their daughter.
I deemed my studios officially “full” when I reached a total of fourty-four students, privately teaching each student myself; Six hours of teaching straight through with no breaks. Like they say, “be careful what you wish for!” With the addition of a husband, and two children, I have recently adjusted the number down to a more reasonable thirty-two students, teaching only Monday through Thursday, for all of our sanity!
In this blog, I plan to share adventures and information about all things piano: teaching tips, learning as a piano student, how to help your child that is taking piano, how to inspire your students, and upcoming concerts and events. I welcome your ideas, thoughts, and feedback as we take this musical journey together.
