Piano Lessons

Piano Lessons

I never met a musician I didn't like as I grew up in my hometown, Fond du Lac,
Wisconsin. I suppose that my love for music and those who make it came naturally. Dad played the violin in the Fond du Lac Symphony for some years. Mom had a lovely soprano voice and sang for weddings and funerals when she was young. She played the piano too.

Mom enrolled me for weekly lessons with Ms. Helen Gaffin. She taught piano lessons in her home and I was a weekly student there in my youth. Ms. Gaffin was a tall slender woman in her late fifties. She was a pleasant person and I enjoyed my visits to her home. She lived in a large old house and had not one, but two full-sized grand pianos shoehorned into her living room. They left no room for any other furniture there. Behind the front room, in what I took to be her dining room, she had a card table and two chairs set up.

A part of each lesson was spent seated not at the piano, but at her card table playing games that she devised to teach the basics of music. She made flash cards upon which were hand drawn notes and rests and they taught me the value of each. Others showed the clefs, various time signatures, and other information needed to be able to read music. To help students remember the notes of the scale, she gave each a name.

As she flashed the card depicting a particular note, I was to identify it by name.
I remember them to this day. Cecil was for C, Deanie for D. E was Ephraim and F-lynn was F. Genie, Abraham and Beanie rounded out the scale as G, A, and B. The balance of each lesson was spent at one of the pianos working on whatever pieces I was learning that week. The metronome always ticked in the background as I played and when I finished a piece, she would make corrections in my technique or help me with difficult passages. When I could perform a particular number to her satisfaction, she signed off on that one and assigned a new piece to be learned.

Once a year, in the summer, Ms. Gaffin arranged a piano recital for all her students. It was always in the evening and parents and grandparents came and sat where the card table always stood. It had been replaced with a collection of assorted chairs which sat in rows facing the bank of pianos in the living room. We girls wore frilly dresses and the boys, shirts and ties. Ms. Gaffin's foyer served as her "green room" and we kids waited together on the steps to the second floor there. Each in turn, appeared before the audience, played, bowed, and returned to the relative safety of the stairwell.

There were usually eight or ten students in various stages of accomplishment lined up for the event. Ms. Gaffin had an uncanny knack for selecting her recital night. It was, without fail, the hottest evening of the year and occasionally included an electrical storm. The sultry atmosphere and nerves caused each stair-sitter to perspire profusely. The starched frilly dresses went limp, boy's white shirts were stuck to their backs, and those ringlets that mothers had fussed so to comb into place sagged limply alongside moist faces.

These things didn't matter because this was our chance to show just how hard we had worked since the last recital. Nerves played some funny tricks on the little group of would-be stars. A recital never passed without one or more "incidents." Probably the most common was the memory lapse. We all knew our recital piece by memory. It was engraved on that internal blackboard, never to be lost. . .except in front of the gathered audience.

When one keyboardist finished, polite applause accompanied the bow or curtsy and Ms. Gaffin stood to introduce the next exhibit. That student entered from the stairwell, bowed, again to polite clapping, and sat down at the appropriate keyboard to play. Hands were confidently lifted to the keys and we all breathed a sigh of relief when music issued forth at that point. Occasionally the child would place hands on the keyboard only to find that wiring to the memory banks had picked exactly that time to short out. Ms. Gaffin had already seen everything and was prepared for all eventualities. She had the music for each recital number piled neatly next to her chair. When memory failed, she quietly stepped forward with the appropriate book already open to the correct page and gracefully placed it on the music rack so that the show could proceed

We were all wound up like clock springs and there were several occasions when an exhibit lost pressure altogether and fainted. This was the only circumstance that warranted an unequivocal excuse from the public performance that night. A student lost her supper there one year. We did have a brief intermission while cleanup and repairs were effected, but the show went on. That person played, even if a bit untidy.

Parents and others patiently sat fanning themselves with their printed recital program while they did their duty and supported their budding keyboard mavens. The smallest and newest students went first, the evening progressed to the oldest, and most accomplished. For the finale, Ms. Gaffin usually had an especially peppy and impressive number scheduled. It was sometimes a march or a difficult duet played by two of her most accomplished students. This served to wake up the dads and alerted the assemblage that the end was near.

Following the music, there was a polite reception for everyone involved. Ms. Gaffin served little plates with cake and very soupy ice cream. It rewarded us for playing, and the congregate for sitting through it. She also served a delicious punch and, because we all were in particular need of re-hydration, the punch bowl emptied rapidly. After what Mom called a "presentable interval" and the required homage to Ms. Gaffin, we headed for home and comfortable clothes. Everyone involved felt great relief to be finished with recital night for another year.