May 19, 2007
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….the girls went to the big city. Last Saturday, I carried my mother and mother-in-law to Kansas City for a weekend with our daughter and her family. Sarah and Sam have two little girls, Emma who is almost 7, and Lucinda Jane who will be 2 in August. It was a busy, fun-filled time, and it was especially fun to be there for Mother’s Day.
But the main reason we went was to attend Emma’s first piano recital. She began lessons last fall, at the same time she started first grade. The piano we had bought for Sarah back in our Mississippi years, which had been carted to Missouri and housed in our dining room here, was loaded into our horse trailer and carted to Kansas City where it found a new home in their dining room.
After nine months of lessons, it was time for Emma’s first recital. Held in the chapel of a large assisted living/nursing home complex, the students excitedly gathered. Miss Grace, the teacher, welcomed everyone and then placed her chair beside the piano bench and sat there during each student’s turn. Students used their books if they needed to. When someone faltered, she murmured soft words of encouragement in their ear. With most of the students, she played a duet, often an upbeat, popular song. It was a comfortable, fun time, with no apparent stage fright or knee tremors evident in any of the pianists. Enthusiastic applause followed each song.
Emma even got to give an encore performance! Her daddy had been at a track meet and arrived late; Miss Grace realized this and called her back to the piano at the end of the recital to play her songs again, just so Sam could see. She eagerly complied.
What a far cry from my own experience! Back in the late ’50s and early ’60s, I plodded through several years of piano lessons. My small town did not offer much in the way of teachers. In fact, our school’s vocal and band teacher was the only person who gave lessons; he knew the basics, but was far from an accomplished pianist. But it really was not Mr. Heiskell’s fault that I did not “take to the piano.” I simply had no gift. (I did, however, learn to play by ear and can still make it slowly through a few hymns.)
Recitals were nightmare-inducing, gut-wrenching ordeals that I dreaded the entire year. Music had to be memorized, and stiff dress-up clothes were essential. We girls were expected to curtsy after our performance, and the boys were to make a formal bow. I played my songs thousands of time, always to perfection at home, but I knew that when it was recital time, the music would vanish from my mind and my fingers would cease to function.
When the date finally arrived, I spent the entire day tying my nerves in knots. Mother starched and ironed my best dress and laid out my full slip that scratched under my arms. She put up my shampooed, stick-straight hair in pincurls to ensure a mass of ringlets that night. White flats were polished, to be worn with anklets, and the final touch was a small corsage she pinned on my shoulder. Pictures were taken of me standing nervously in front of the piano. And then it was time to go to the church. I could only go to the bathroom one last time and hope I’d be first on the program; having to play late in the program was almost unbearable.
I don’t remember much of the rest. It was just a blur of “get it over with.” I do clearly remember one friend who lived out my worst nightmare. He forgot his song in the middle and simply sat there, back to the audience, while his sticky-out ears turned redder and redder. After what seemed like hours of silence, our teacher finally loudly whispered to him to start over. The second time he got through it, but I wonder if the experience, the humiliation, scarred him for life. I’ve certainly never forgotten it for him!
Emma, happily, had no qualms about going to the piano and playing her songs for her delighted Mimi and great-grandmas. She verily bounced on the piano bench while playing her duet of “The Can-Can Song” with Miss Grace. I captured the whole thing on my camera and still smile when I watch the video of her grinning and playing.
(Above, my mother-in-law Julia, Sarah, Emma, me and my mom, Bonnie
This is what music should be like. I have a feeling Emma will enjoy whatever time she spends at the piano, as long as she can have fun with it. She may not be a brilliant pianist, but she is learning about music and her memories of piano lessons will be happy ones.
And maybe someday Lucy will also take lessons…
she really likes to “play” the piano already!
Comments (8)
What a fun time you all had! You all look beautiful! Emma’s positive experience at a piano recital will add to her love of music.
Your Mississippi years? Where and when? We lived in Biloxi for 12 years – and that’s where all of my girls started their piano lessons!
That picture of your little girl at that big piano is priceless! I love it. What a fun family you have.
Your memories of your childhood recitals sound like mine. Nerves and all. My teacher was Miss Pattie, whom you may have never learned to know because she was quite elderly when I took piano lessons from her and I”m not sure she was still living by the time you moved here. But we had to curtsy, too, and the boys had to bow. It was all a part of performing in public and something we are losing so quickly for less formality in public appearances. But on the other hand, that may have been why we didn’t ‘bounce on the piano bench,” in anticipation of our performances. We were scared out of our wits!
Emma and all the generations is such a wonderful picture, one she will treasure for years! You all look so young!
Oh, what a fun Mother’s Day weekend, and I know your mother and mother-in-law just loved being able to go and experience it all. Sweet Sarah is still just beautiful, with that mega-watt smile I remember from her childhood days in Mississippi, and those little girls are just precious. I’m so glad Emma had a happy recital. Thanks for sharing this with us. I just smiled all the way through it.
I’ve been to Macon, Mississippi! Seems like my older girls went to camp in or near Macon. That would have been. . .let me think. . .around 1989ish. I am sure I have those details in a scrapbook somewhere! We lived on the coast from 1979 – 84, and then again from 1988 – ’95 when we moved here to VA, but we traveled some throughout the state.
Ten years of piano lessons only saw me reach a grade 5 level. Once I stopped taking lessons, I would sit down with a tape recorder and some music I loved and wanted to play. My ears and fingers worked together to find the sounds. All that theory fell into place and the math of music started to feel like art. Patterns emerged. I would watch pianists closely, gleaning new techniques over the years. Now I can play many many things by ear. But I do remember those mortifying moments at recitals. I not only felt the agony for myself, but for my poor sister too.
I posted some new pics on my blog, at the photos icon.
Your little Emma looks so tiny seated before that giant piano. I think that’s what used to scare me the most about piano recitals. I was always afraid the piano keybord would be strangly offset somehow because the piano was so huge. My piano teacher was into classical music, so that’s what I learned. No hymns. No modern. Just classical piano. In my memory the music I played in recitals sounded like CLONG, BLONG, CLING, CLOP. Inside my head from the start of the recital to the finish I only heard a loud roaring sound. I never knew anyone else felt like what you described in your entry. I’m so relieved to know I’m not alone.
I’d almost forgotten all about those days; the polished white shoes, the stiff full-length slip, dressy dresses, curtsys and bows. Thanks!
what a great portrait of something that so many can identify with!