#11: Tea and Oranges

Herstory

It is my mom who sets me on the path to becoming a musician and teacher. There is a picture etched on my heart of me in her lap sitting face forward. As she plays, my hands ride on the top of hers. I’m hooked and, as soon as I can crawl, my spot is on the left side of her bench. I have no idea when she sets me on it by myself, but there is a photo of me one month before my first birthday dressed in a ruffled gingham dress with poufy sleeves, and petticoat—they were always scratchy—sitting in front of her Hammond B-3. I am close enough to the keyboard so that my arms reach the fall board; my fingers to the black and white patterns in front of me. My head is already slightly bent with the intent look of a keyboardist.¹ Somewhere along the way, she shows me where middle C is. The organ’s full-size Leslie speaker shares a wall with my parents’ bedroom so as she dresses for the day, she can hear me. This is my first baby sitter.

11 mos

I am not allowed in the front room while she teaches. Shhhh, mama’s teaching, says Helen, the babysitter who comes in the afternoons. Our house is small so I hear her students play and her voice gently correcting them with positivity. Lots of those lick on the back stick on stars in her studio.

I attend a nursery school that fosters free creative play through art and music. At home I play by ear on the piano what my older brother comes home to practice after his own lessons. I credit him leaving his yellow Schermer edition of Clementi Sonatinas open as part of my path to loving sight reading as it lets me see and figure out the written notes that my fingers are playing.² I play in recitals on hot Sunday afternoons, and come to rehearsals with my mom when a group of piano teachers in our town get together one night a week at Bennett’s Music to play 4 piano/8 hand music. They sell instruments as well as sheet music and records and I still have my first LP, Meet The Beatles, purchased there.

By nine I am playing the boom-chunk boom-chunk piano part in the elementary school orchestra a year before I’m supposed to be admitted to it. There is a short lived three-year addition of violin and occasionally I join the rest of the violin section on the stage for some pieces. I could never get the vibrato thing. My hand just didn’t want to do it and to this day I wonder and marvel at how string players do what they do. The school orchestra is followed by playing for glee clubs and choirs, and school church services.

Once in the stifling hot second story chapel playing for a First Friday service at the girls school I attend, I faint on the organ keys. It is quite noticeable as an organ has no decay of sound like there is on piano strings. When I come to, Reverend Mother Cecelia³ brings me downstairs in the nun’s elevator to the drawing room of the main house and gives me tea and a cookie. It would have been too perfect if there had been an orange...from China. When it’s time to choose a name for confirmation, I pick hers. I didn’t know about Hildegarde then.⁴

1. My chiropractor says all of us should have massage once a week. My current team consists of a PCP, chiropractor, PT, and a massage therapist, who are now addressing decades of neck, upper back, arm, and hand overuse as an accompanist and teacher. So, my PSA to all who are musicians, artists, gardeners, or whatever, listen to your body. If it hurts, address it.

2. I think this is called the Suzuki method today.

3. St Cecelia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Cecilia

4. St Hildegarde: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hildegard_of_Bingen