Every Good Boy Does Fine

Photograph by Mauricio Alejo

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.