Unforgettable Music Teachers

 Dear Flute lovers,

 I'm still loving this  Jeremy Denk article in the New Yorker about his piano teachers when he was young and the fantastic drawings one of his earliest teacher put into his lesson notebook each week. Read this fun piece here:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/04/08/every-good-boy-does-fine

To see his actual piano lesson notebook, watch the video here: Video at the NewYorker

Quote: 

" (My piano teacher) 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."

Enjoy,

Best, Jen