Scaling heights, together

What students and teachers gain at the keys

Piano lessons "are not only about music but also about trust and confidence, chaos and order," writes teacher Tricia Tunstall. (Istock)

Note by Note: A Celebration of the Piano Lesson
By Tricia Tunstall
Simon & Schuster, 214 pp., $24
During my student years and into my first years as a teacher, I was a piano tuner in Western Massachusetts, a job that got me onto various musical stages and into many homes, where I often tuned pianos used by kids taking lessons. It was my unproven observation that kids who took piano got better grades, and I sometimes told customers this, adding that they were doing something special by providing lessons to their children. It was an act of caring that would bring all sorts of rewards, I would say.

In "Note by Note," her book about teaching piano, Tricia Tunstall never implies that piano students will do better in school, but she does give examples of the rewards awaiting a child who spends years developing technique, discipline, and musical feeling under the tutelage of an accomplished teacher. Right at the beginning of the book she makes an intriguing point about the process - for many children, piano lessons constitute the sole one-on-one relationship they will have with an adult, aside from the one they have with their parents. Tunstall soon has the reader thinking: better a piano teacher than a therapist, counselor, or any of the other coaches that enter a young person's life, as she develops the idea that a piano teacher is not only venturing into scales and chords, but also taking her students into realms of feeling and beauty that they may not otherwise experience. She has the reader thinking that those experiences may stand them well in their other relationships throughout life - the very point that I made to customers years ago.

Tunstall's students are the characters in this narrative, which moves through discussions of pop music (and how she is willing to go there, to learn what her students like), classical music (which the young people almost always like once they discover it), the development of skills, and the transformation of students into musicians, all leading up to the climactic event, the recital. Even though this is a short book, by the time readers get to the recital chapter, they feel that they know those children, and are curious to see how things play out onstage before appreciative but equally nervous parents.

We learn of the very young student who can't at that moment overcome the challenge of finding a particular note and crawls onto Tunstall's lap to sleep. We see the boy who comes with his iPod and bobs his head to Metallica, which sounds to the teacher like artillery fire, but they search through his iPod until they find a tune by Dave Matthews that they can learn at the piano. However, the path is almost always toward classical music and its unmatched emotional eloquence. We learn of the boy who refuses to play classical music (possibly because his parents love it), only to have the teacher slip a Brahms composition on the music shelf and tell him, to her appalled conscience, that it's part of a movie soundtrack - the discussion about whether to tell the boy he's playing classical music seems almost like they're about to tell him there's no Santa Claus. Another student, a 15-year-old, becomes obsessed with Beethoven sonatas and practices so much that his technique markedly improves and his hands even seem to lengthen as he is transformed into an advanced student before the teacher's eyes. At one lesson, playing a passage with "sweetness, turbulence and resolution," Tunstall has the feeling that he "was perhaps experiencing this particular emotional struggle for the first time. . . . Through playing, he was actually learning a new way to feel."

Seeing this sort of evolution is one of the great rewards for Tunstall. She notes that teachers see into the souls of their charges, as the weeks and years pass, but the reverse also is true, and rewards are mutual: "Teacher and student take turns leading and following one another through the possibilities of feeling; it is a kind of intimacy all the richer for being mediated by the beauty of music." This ultimately becomes the justification for the lessons - why do it, if your chances of ever becoming a concert pianist are nil? "The answer, of course, has to do with beauty, and with feeling, and with the intimate and mysterious connection between the two."

Almost any parent encountering these possibilities for their children would think, I want piano lessons for my child, and I want them for me too. But the challenge is also in finding the right teacher, someone like Tunstall. "Note for Note" can, through its lighthearted but sincere storytelling, serve as a primer for what to look for in a good piano teacher.

After the recital chapter the book resolves with "My Last Piano Teacher," about a jazz musician Tunstall took lessons from when she was in college and had briefly given up classical music. The jazz musician moves on to become an arranger for Broadway musicals, while his student becomes a piano teacher, and their sons become musicians in their own right, and, we assume, adeptly feeling human beings.

Douglas Whynott, director of the MFA writing program at Emerson College, is most recently the author of "A Country Practice: Scenes From the Veterinary Life."