Child’s Play

By Elizabeth Derrick Smith

The boy’s fingers plucked frantic staccatos before galloping over the keys in the arpeggios. I sat in the hallway with my music tote resting against my legs, my back politely turned away from the lesson going on in Lenora’s home studio. The boy, Trevor, delightfully played through the flirtatious melodies of Rhapsody in Blue. Being a fan of Gershwin myself, I conjured in my mind’s ear the slippery clarinet solo and dazzling fanfare to accompany his piano part.

Trevor stopped somewhere about a third of the way through the piece, and Lenora sourly expressed her frank opinion. Hardly moving my head, I peered over at the two pianos as the discussion worsened. At one point, Trevor began playing a measure again, but the teacher interpreted the move as an offensive interruption. Finally she dismissed him: “Don’t come back here if you are going to play like that.” My eyes fell to the floor as Trevor packed up, but I did sneak a glimpse at him and his spikey, gelled, teen hair-do when he passed through the hall and walked out to the door. Although I was often nervous about my lessons with Lenora, I had never felt utter dread until that moment, when I saw her fire Trevor.

It never occurred to me that a piano teacher could dismiss a paying student like that. I always assumed that music teachers were underpaid and were elated by a full schedule as long as the students paid their monthly fees on time. Yet I suppose that Lenora, as a great teacher with a solid reputation, must have had the luxury of accepting and keeping only the students she felt were most worthy. For my part, I thought Trevor’s performance sounded nice. Then again, I also thought he looked cute, so I was biased. I interacted with him briefly between lessons until we performed together in the local university’s “monster concert,” in which all the performances were group piano arrangements. Our song was “Beauty and the Beast,” arranged by Lenora for eight pianos or so. For entertainment’s sake, Trevor dressed up as the Beast and I as Belle, and we danced on stage for the final refrain.

Why had Trevor taken piano lessons? I never asked him, and after he stopped coming, I never had the chance to speak with him again. Did his mother have expectations? Was he trying to impress someone? I liked to imagine that everyone taking lessons from Lenora, and other teachers like her, loved music. Or at least enjoyed it enough to practice a couple of hours a day. Perhaps Trevor enjoyed Rhapsody in Blue but did not care to perfect it. Our piano competitions required a Mary Poppins–like performance, practically perfect in every way.

When I started lessons with Lenora, I voluntarily signed up for them. But like most new recruits beginning any rigorous venture, I had not quite known what was coming. At first I learned to play the piano because of my mother, who demanded that all her children take lessons until a certain age and that we practice every afternoon. For her youngest children, my brother Mike and me, Mom had higher sights than lessons from the neighborhood teacher. So during the summer when I was eleven and Mike was fifteen, we auditioned for teachers with MA or PhD after their names. 

One of those teachers was Carolee. She had a sense of humor, and her studio was the organized-chaos type. After Mike and I played some cheerful sonatas for her, she accepted Mike as a student but said I was too young. I should have considered her response more carefully, but unless she had waved a bright orange sign in my face, I would not have realized she had my best interests in mind. I was still a child, after all, and I certainly wasn’t yet prepared for intense study. Carolee had tried to warn me. But all I could think about was that Mike had walked out of her studio with a “great” teacher, and I had not.

Next Mom took me to Lenora—for advice. Lenora had coached my sister through a bachelor’s and then a master’s in music, and we all assumed that if there were someone with the right connections to other great teachers in the area, it would be her. When I first met Lenora and entered her home studio, which displayed spotless white couches despite her gray cat, I played on one of her black Steinways the same sonata I had performed for Carolee. 

After correcting my mistakes, Lenora simply stated she would be glad to take me on, and then she listed the required books and mentioned the blank CDs needed for recording the lessons. I was thrilled, but Mom wasn’t so excited. She remembered what Lenora’s curriculum demanded, the seemingly endless hours my sister spent on the piano bench in preparation for juries and recitals. And Mom knew me—how I was a little too eager to please others and how competitive I could be.

I did not have a fun-loving attitude about playing the piano. Mike did, as he took from Carolee, who seemed like a free-spirited version of Lenora; at one point he embraced a prelude by Gershwin, retaining the enchanting notes in his fingers for years after completing the assignment. It wasn’t that I didn’t like practicing, and it wasn’t that I didn’t like “classical” music. It was only the nights before a lesson when the metronome ticked my fate like a time bomb. But on all the other days, sprinting through scales and Hanon exercises was exhilarating, like the euphoria of skipping outside on a spring morning. And the pieces I learned, though challenging for me, were also relieving because they allowed me to express what was impossible for my teenage self to share in words.

What really made my music education strenuous was my ambition. My parents told me I could become whatever I wanted when I grew up, and, by my own extension, that included becoming a musician. An elderly gentleman from church once asked me when I would be performing at Carnegie Hall. And after playing for the school talent show, my peers said I impressed them. 

I failed to see what these kind words truly meant. Now that I look back, I think these folks were actually saying, “You should be proud of yourself,” or, “Keep up the hard work,” or, “Be grateful you have a bright future.” But somehow I used their praise to fuel my starry dream of winning the local competitions, performing for thousands of listeners, and selling an album on iTunes. I’m not sure why, but mostly I imagined fame.

Lenora pushed me to improve, as great teachers do, and I did improve, as great students do. I would occasionally tremble before a lesson, as if I were a knight before a dragon in a storybook, but most of the time she gave me her feedback truthfully but kindly. And I sense she could see, early on, what I had failed to see.

When Trevor closed the front door that afternoon, I treaded timidly across the carpet and sat silently on the bench as Lenora pinched the bridge of her nose and sighed. I should have marched confidently to the grand piano, snatched a Clorox wipe from the desk, and cleaned his sweat from the keys. But I did not realize that Trevor had set Lenora’s usually high bar pretty low that afternoon and that any improvement on my part would be welcomed with both arms. No, all I could imagine was a fuming dragon as I shuddered in front of the cave, a knife in my hand.

I wish I had known then what I do now—that ambition is overrated and that, regardless of the teacher, the purpose of music lessons is, or at least should be, to learn another form of self-expression, a process both enriching and enjoyable. No, I would never become a famous pianist, although I was a dedicated student. I suspect Lenora knew all this effort would amount to child’s play; she did not assign me a prestigious piano concerto, like Tchaikovsky’s first or Rachmaninov’s second. Instead, she assigned Kabalevsky’s third, nicknamed the children’s concerto. Perhaps this was Lenora’s subtle way of telling me to have fun along the way.

After I rushed through my exercises that afternoon, Lenora scribbled the next week’s assignment in my notebook with her long, strong fingers, which reminded me of the new forks in the kitchen drawer at home. And then the fateful moment came, the one that I assumed would be like the Judgment: I handed her the book containing Kabalevsky’s concerto and began to play the springy tune. To my utter relief, after I had finished presenting my third of the piano part, Lenora smiled and softly said, “Oh, Lizzie. You’ve made my day.” 

The dragon in the cave turned out not to be a dragon at all, but a mentor guiding me toward my destiny. When I turned eighteen, I moved away for college and stopped taking lessons from Lenora; although I learned from two other great teachers at the university I attended, my years of piano lessons soon came to an end. Now I assign my own musical curriculum, and when I sit at my little electric piano in the afternoon, I play because I love it. And, as I look back at that particular lesson with Lenora, I hope that Trevor enjoys playing the piano as well.

All the same, I still have never learned any Gershwin. My bookshelf doesn’t contain a single composition of his, although I greatly admire his memorable, charismatic melodies. Perhaps I should have learned some Gershwin all those years ago as a young student. Perhaps I still should.

Elizabeth is a freelance editor and writer with a bachelor's degree in English from Brigham Young University. Her work has been published in Entremundos, Auroras and Blossoms, as well as BYU Studies Quarterly. She is the co-founder of an online literary journal: thepensieve.site. She currently lives in Utah with her husband and daughters.