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Melodies and memories

NOTE BY NOTE:
A Celebration of the Piano Lesson
By Tricia Tunstall
224 pp. Simon and Schuster $24.00

Reviewed by Ruth Douillette

Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata plays softly in the background. The melody floods me with memories.

Years and years have passed since I watched my mother practice scales, hand over hand, up and down the keyboard, ages gone by since I woke on a Saturday to the piano tuner plunking keys until his precise ear was satisfied.

Has it really been forty-five years since I listened to my brother practice the piano? I can still hear his hesitating stumble through Beethoven’s Für Elise. Da, da, da, da, da, dah__ da, da, dah__ da, da, dah . . . over and over.

His lesson book included Ode to Joy, Moonlight Sonata, Debussy’s Claire de Lune, Tchaikovsky’s Waltz of the Flowers. Only the simplest arrangements, of course, the very basics for young fingers barely able to stretch an octave on the ivories.

Note by Note is a certainly a book for those who took piano lessons, but it’s also for those of us who didn’t, and lived with someone who did. Isn’t that pretty much everybody?

Tunstall’s tale is simple, not quite a memoir as much as a mix of memories that she ties to the present. Or perhaps the present triggers the memories.

Sequential chapters including “Beginnings,” “Emerging,” and “Mastery” lead us to “Recital” and finally to the only chapter written in a minor key—“My Last Piano Teacher.” Whose life doesn’t have a little discord among the harmonies?

What makes the story sing is the author’s observant eye, her keen memory for detail, and the wisdom and humor that are part of her tale. She’s not instructing us as much as sharing what she herself has discovered about life via the piano and the people it brought, and continues to bring, into her life.

In a family of three talented sisters, Tunstall was the one who took piano lessons. A writer, a musician, and currently a doctoral candidate in music education at Boston University, she gives the lessons now.

As she shares the piano bench with her students—the ones between the “babies and the adults”—she recalls her past, remembering her piano teachers with the kind of detail students reserve for their mentors.

“She of the beautiful white fingers, and genteel dictum,” she says of one.

Of another.“It was the fingers—perfectly curved, effortlessly fleet, lithe and muscular at the same time—that made an impression.”

Some stressed thematic structure; others proper form; others, practice; but all held her to the classics, and all played a role not only in her music education, but in shaping her teaching philosophy as well: music speaks differently to different people.

Her grandmother introduced her to the Beatles when they made their debut on The Ed Sullivan Show by hustling Tunstall and her sisters behind a closed door to watch television—a treat not usually allowed by her parents.

“My grandmother’s eyes were sparkling; her cigarette lay burning away in the ash tray. . . . ‘My, my, my,’ she said, tapping her foot and bobbing her head . . . ‘they sure are cute.’”

Tunstall thought so, too, and at her next piano lesson found herself humming a Beatles tune while she “played the C-sharp major and minor scales and ... wondered if Mrs. Witschey ever watched The Ed Sullivan Show.”

Perhaps this is the reason she encourages her students to come to lessons and share the music on their iPods. It’s a gift she gives them, along with the jellybeans in a bowl by the piano.

When I scroll through the tunes on their iPods, I always expect to be surprised by the juxtapositions and combinations, and I am usually not disappointed. Amy’s library of music includes the Broadway show Hairspray, the popular group Maroon 5 and the country line-dance “Cotton-Eye Joe”; Max’s beloved Oscar Peterson (if iPods had grooves, these would be well-worn) is followed by “Bohemian Rhapsody.” How to explain precisely what moves each child? I prefer to think of musical preference as something finally irreducible, unpredictable and inarguable as a thumbprint.

And what of talent? “Talent is unfair and undemocratic; it is also unarguable,” she writes. “So when a parent asks me, ‘Do you think he’s got talent?’ I am usually pretty certain about what I think, especially if it’s an intermediate level child with whom I have been working for several years. “Yes, he’s got talent,” she’ll answer when she can, but for the “intelligent, dedicated, less talented children” she often tells parents they are “progressing, developing new capacities” or often that they are “finding [their] musical identity.”

There is wisdom in her explanation of what practice really entails: “When you think you cannot bear to play a passage one more time, you play it ten more times. Or twenty.” What dedication means: “When you are tempted to give up and go make yourself a sandwich, there is no coach to stop you; you must be trainer and athlete, good cop and bad, all at once.” There is wisdom in the way she nuances her lessons to fit each student, and the way she copes with life’s disharmonies.

You don’t need to have taken piano lessons to appreciate Note by Note, but reading Tunstall’s prose may make you wish you did. She’d tell you it’s never too late.

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Ruth Douillette retired after 35 years as a middle school teacher, and now freelances as a writer and photographer. Her essays have been published in the Christian Science Monitor, Cup of Comfort, Chicken Soup for the Soul, and Under Our Skin, an anthology about breast cancer. Her photography has been featured in flashquake's gallery of art. Ruth is a member of the Internet Writing Workshop where she’s an administrator for the Practice group. For a sample of her writing and photography, visit Upstream and Down~.

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