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Hello Reader,

As I prepare my next Mozart live-stream (you can check out the event here), I’ve been thinking a lot about mentors and teachers.

“You need to be a lion-tamer”. This isn’t the advice you expect to hear from your college piano teacher.

I’d just performed the first juried piano exam of my bachelor of music degree. My piano teacher, Sister Joan Miller, had called me to say that it went okay, but it wasn’t outstanding. I needed to do a lot more if I wanted to get into the performance degree program as I hoped to.

I had played part of a Mozart Sonata, a famous one in F major, K 332. The entire semester, she had been working on me to come out of my shell, to be more musical, and take control of my playing. That’s really hard to do in Mozart. There’s a subtle touch needed, and I was an 18 year-old coming into university with only 5 years of study with a serious piano teacher. I felt like everything I did at the piano was clumsy and awkward, not yet graceful and determined the way Mozart needed to be.

She wanted me to see Mozart as a lion that I had total control over. I wrote the advice at the top of my score, but when I played, I was cowering in the corner.

It’s a funny dichotomy she came up with: the nuance of Mozart’s music was so finicky that it was as uncontrollable as a wild, dangerous animal.

I ended up failing to meet expectations more often than not my first couple years of college. Sister Joan was hard on me. She was as unrelenting with her standards as she was generous with her time and advice. Sometimes she was too generous. More often, my extra lesson times were early mornings, sometimes on weekends. But she wanted to help me, how could I say that I really wanted to just sleep in on a Saturday?

She would come up with many more analogies that I’ve since forgotten. Things started to turn around, all thanks to her. I learned so much from her, and without a doubt, became the pianist I am today because of her nurturing, caring, and tough love.

Sister Joan passed away earlier this month. I hadn’t seen her in over 6 years. I miss her. The last time I saw her, I played a Liszt piece I had studied with her for my final degree recital. By then I had changed a lot as a pianist, technically and musically. I was doing things with that piece I knew she wouldn’t let me do if I was her student. But she loved my playing. All those years, she was pushing to uncover a musical voice that she knew was there. I think she was glad to hear it more unencumbered than ever.

I think I’ve tamed that lion, and I know she’d be proud of me and my playing now. The Sonata I played on that first jury was #12. I just performed #2 on Facebook Live two weeks ago--you can check out the video below. Even though I planned to play the whole cycle in order, in honor of her I’m going to play that first Sonata I studied with her on my next live-stream. It was the first major work I studied with her, and will forever be associated in my memory with Sister Joan.

So join me on Wednesday March 3rd at 8 PM EST for this Sonata. In the meantime, feel free to check out the video from last week’s performance, which also features reminiscences of Sister Joan, and a bonus performance of the first piece I ever studied with her, a Bach Prelude and Fugue.

Choose Joy,

Jeff.