Crabby Old Bags

The other night I awoke abruptly after a particularly awful dream that had percolated up from who knows where in my subconscious. It was a memory, not a dreamscape construction, replaying in vivid detail a dreadfully unpleasant woman for whom I was playing an audition. The idea was for eleven-year-old me to become this harpy’s piano student; she had a reputation as a leading teacher in my area and so there I was. She managed to combine aloofness with rudeness, indifference with severity, haughtiness with intimidation. I hated her at first sight and nothing that transpired over the next half-hour changed that.

She grudgingly agreed to accept me as a student and appropriate arrangements were made for lesson times and the like. My father and I returned home and I slinked into my room to brood. Some time later I emerged into the living room, burst into a torrent of tears, and hollered out that I absolutely didn’t want to be in that woman’s presence ever again. The folks were taken aback: as a rule, my modus operandi was passive-aggression, not emotional outbursts and virtually never from-the-gut honesty. But they realized that for me to break out of my shell of stoic misery the stakes must have been high indeed, so they telephoned the demoness and cancelled the arrangements. However, they made me talk to her in person—i.e., tell her to her face (at least over the telephone) that I didn’t want to be her piano student. Fortunately she didn’t press the point; in my state of mind I might have forgotten myself and used the gutter language so easily picked up around my blunt-spoken mother.

Nor did I get another piano teacher right away. In fact, I quit playing altogether for the better part of a year, the first of numerous times I’ve said hasta la vista to all things clavecin. To this day I’ve never quite understood just what it was about that broad that twisted my introverted little self’s aversion dials to FULL. But she wasn’t the first one to do that—although she was the first one I managed to fend off—nor was she the last. Each one of those crabby bags left me unwilling to play the piano for a period. For me, the joy of music dwelt in orchestral and Broadway recordings. Piano lessons and those horrid harridans who taught them were only ordeals to be tolerated—or not, if I were sufficiently determined to resist. For those of my associates who wonder why a really, really fine pianist such as myself is so ambivalent (at best) about the instrument, that’s it: grim old hags. They didn’t kill me off music for life, but they left my relationship with the piano irreparably damaged.

Upon awakening from the dream, I lay there in bed for a while just watching the torrent of thoughts come and go in that pedal-to-the-metal rush of associations that accompanies such vivid mental phenomena. Another replay came up, this time of recent vintage. I had carelessly allowed myself to get roped into serving as an evaluator for the yearly piano-playing tests at one of the local music teachers guilds. It was a simple enough task, requiring mostly diplomacy and gentleness to usher a kid through a pointless and intimidating ordeal. Said kid prepared various pieces according to various guidelines, which said kid proceeded to play for one of various teachers installed in various rooms at some outlying community college, I forget which.The evaluator checked off each piece as it was played, gave it a numerical rating, and scribbled a few comments appropriate to the kid’s age and level of accomplishment. (I still remember a clueless colleague’s comment to a seven-year-old beginner was that she “didn’t agree with your interpretation of the Mozart.” Interpretation? Oh, please.)

As far as I was concerned, the primary qualifications were: 1) speak softly and smile a lot, 2) don’t worry if the kid can’t get through the pieces, 3) write only generic but useful comments along the lines of “always try to listen to yourself while you play” and 4) stay on schedule.

In short, it was a painless if enervatingly long day and as far as I know no kid emerged from my cubicle with lifelong emotional damage or a grim determination never to touch a piano again. But I couldn’t keep from noticing that a fellow evaluator, a snappish and grim woman about my own age, was destroying egos and confidence left and right. Since we were on the same schedule, my door-openings and changes of kid were usually in synch with hers. Every time she opened the door—her face hard, her expression forbidding—to release her current victim, I saw one very seriously troubled child. Since most of the kids were Asian, they tended to be past masters at putting on obedient poker faces, but I could tell anyway. She would snap at the next kid waiting for her: well, COME ON, impatiently, unpleasantly, imperiously. I don’t know how that played out for any of her charges, but had one of those kids been me, at least a year of pianistic silence would have fallen yet again.

Crabby Old Bag Syndrome (COBS) is sadly endemic throughout piano-teaching suburbia. For several centuries the job of teaching piano to the nation’s young has been largely in the hands of women, thanks to a societal structure in which men spend the day working outside the home while women stay put. Thus women are better positioned to see kids in those critical after-school hours, the only time (apart from Saturday) when piano lessons can be given. With modern-day empowerment of women, those old roles are shifting, but for the most part they remain intact in upper-middle-class suburbia, still the most likely venue for piano teachers and their associated guilds.

Dissatisfied people employ a variety of mechanisms for making their dissatisfaction known, but certain broad gender distinctions can be made. Men have a tendency to be abrupt, hard-edged, sarcastic and rough. Unhappy women have a tendency to be crabby—imperious, irritable, impatient. But since very few men teach middle-American suburban piano, insensitive rude bastards aren’t often encountered. (Most of those guys wreak their havoc as Little League coaches instead.) Thus COBS rules in piano suburbia.

Now, of course tons of good-humored, gentle, compassionate, well-trained and hard-working women are found teaching piano in every corner of the nation. May fortune smile upon them. But I’m not talking about them, not today. Today I’m homing in on those irritable, snappish goddamn hags and their soul-shrivelling severity. Oh, you can defend them left and right, up and down, until pigs roost in trees. They’re busy raising their own families and don’t have emotional energy left over for their students, you can say. They feel trapped in a demeaning suburban life, chained to house, husband and kids, you can explain. They so wanted to be professional musicians but they just couldn’t make a go of it, you can suggest. And so forth and so on.

To all of which I say: well, maybe. But then why teach piano? Money? Oh, please…the pittances that lessons bring in are a drop in the bucket compared to what it costs these days to maintain a scrubbed-up suburban split-level out in Walnut Creek or wherever. Artistic thrill? What artistic thrill is there in listening to some kid plunking through the same crap you’ve been assigning for the past 20 years? If you want an artistic thrill, invest in a fine audio system and a healthy record collection, and start getting to know the music of the Western world beyond piano method books and those same five Clementi sonatinas and Mozart sonatas you know. Volunteer at the Symphony and become an usher and hear every concert for free. Give the occasional recital. Compose. Paint. Write. Garden.

But stop teaching. Stop persecuting little kids. Stop turning something as magical, wonderful, and mysterious as music into a deadening slough of boring, dinky piano pieces accompanied by threats. COBS came very close to denying me the great joy I’ve had in living a life in music. It’s a cinch that COBS has succeeded in destroying the future joy of some other kid. When you get right down to it, COBS may be a greater threat to the future of “classical music” than all the cancelled school music programs, TV shows, and Playstations combined.

I suppose lurking behind this intemperate rant is a broader notion: let’s have a lot more kids playing the piano, but let’s have a lot fewer piano teachers and weekly piano lessons and assignments and scales and yearly evaluations. Is it even possible, conceivable, that a kid could grow up playing the piano, doing music, and having a grand old, if sloppy, time of it? That won’t happen as long as COBS stalks amongst us. But with an end to COBS, perhaps joy could become the primary raison d’être of piano playing, and not discipline or responsibility or investment in future careers or any other COBS-related stuff. Just that beautiful human simplicity of making things, whether they be smeary finger-paintings or lumpy clay statues or weird conglomerations of tones on a piano.

So to every traumatized kid out there: get up, say sayonara that mean old biddy, and march right out of there into the sunshine. You have nothing to lose but that fear of music she has done her damndest to instill.

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