What Does a Great Piano Teacher See in a Student?
More than twenty years ago, when I was a doctoral student at USC, my conducting professor assigned me the Dies Irae from Mozart’s Requiem.
If you have never heard it, listen to the opening thirty seconds and you will understand why I have always jokingly called it the “hellfire” movement.
It is explosive, frightening, and relentless. It requires much more than technical accuracy. The conductor has to bring intensity, conviction, imagination, and tremendous energy to the music.
I remember wondering why she gave it to me.
At that point in my life, I certainly did not think of myself as someone who possessed those qualities.
In fact, I was beginning to wonder whether I belonged at USC at all.
I Was Ready to Give Myself One Last Chance
My first-semester piano jury had not gone well.
At the time, I was trying to attend school, teach my own students, and continue helping with my family’s business.
That summer, I had told my piano professor that I would continue studying with him.
I never went.
I had lost so much confidence in myself that summer that I began to wonder whether I was simply aiming much higher than my actual abilities could take me.
I have always had high standards. But especially when I was younger, those standards could turn against me.
I could hear what I wanted.
I just could not always produce it.
Eventually, I went to my father and asked whether I could temporarily step away from the family business.
I wanted one more semester.
Not forever.
Just one semester in which I could say that I had truly given school everything I had.
I had already made a private decision.
If I still could not do it, I would stop.
I would return to the family business and to accounting. At least I would know that I had really tried and had done everything I could.
Then I could let the dream go.
My conducting professor knew none of this.
And somehow, she gave me the “hellfire” movement.
She Saw Something I Had Not Seen Yet
During my conducting final, I had a migraine.
There were only about ten singers in the class.
But when we began the Dies Irae, something happened.
I stopped holding back.
Somehow, I made those ten singers sound like twenty.
There was an intensity coming out of me that I had not known was there.
My professor apparently saw it too.
Later that semester, I finally gathered enough courage to go to her office. I told her that I did not have much confidence in myself as a pianist.
She did not give me a long speech about believing in myself.
Instead, she reminded me of the Dies Irae.
Remember that fire.
Take that fire to your piano jury.
Stop worrying so much about whether everything is good or bad, right or wrong.
Just play.
So I did.
There were wrong notes.
I did not care.
For once, I stopped judging myself while I was playing. I simply played with everything I had.
The result was completely different.
Afterward, professors who remembered how poorly I had played the previous semester came out to congratulate me.
Then I got into my car for the drive home.
I cried almost the entire forty-plus minutes.
I could not stop.
For years afterward, I remembered that drive.
Now I understand those tears better.
I had spent months preparing myself for the possibility that I simply did not have what it took.
I had been ready to walk away.
And suddenly I had experienced something about myself that I had never known before.
I did not know I could play like that.
What Did My Professor See?
I still wonder about this.
Why did she assign the Dies Irae to me in the first place?
She assigned it before that conducting final.
She had not yet seen me create that kind of energy.
I certainly had not seen it in myself.
Maybe she saw intensity that I had not learned how to use.
Maybe she noticed something in the way I responded to music.
Maybe it was simply the intuition of an experienced teacher.
I will never know.
But somehow, she gave me music that demanded a part of me I had not yet met.
That experience has stayed with me throughout my own teaching career.
Because one of the most important things I have learned after 35 years of teaching is this:
A student’s current performance is evidence. It is not the whole student.
Seeing the Student Behind the Difficulty
I have become increasingly careful about deciding too quickly what a student can or cannot do.
A student may be capable but frightened.
A student may be working very hard but using the wrong method.
A strong sight-reader may use sight-reading to avoid analysis.
A student with a good ear may use that ear to avoid careful reading.
A child may appear resistant when the real problem is that the standard in the child’s head is much higher than what the hands can currently produce.
I know that feeling very well.
And sometimes a child may have difficulty understanding an idea in one way while possessing considerable ability in another.
One of my teenage students taught me a great deal about this.
He has difficulty generalizing ideas. Sometimes he can repeat exactly what I have told him without fully thinking through what the idea means or how he might apply it somewhere else.
But he has musical sensitivity.
Those two things can exist in the same child.
Over several years, I watched his musicianship develop. Eventually, he won first place in one of my studio competitions.
If I had defined his musical capacity only by the way he processed verbal instruction, I would have badly underestimated him.
The question was not simply:
Can he understand what I am saying?
The better question was:
How can I help him experience what I mean?
Then a Stray Cat Arrived
One day this student told me about something happening at his home.
A stray mother cat had appeared.
And she had brought six kittens.
I remembered that.
Later, I was trying to help him produce a particular sound at the piano.
I wanted sweetness.
Not merely soft playing.
Not merely legato.
I wanted a sound with tenderness in it.
So I brought his cat back into the lesson.
“Imagine the mother cat licking her kitten.”
She is not giving the kitten a casual lick because somebody told her she has to.
She is washing her baby.
There is contact.
There is direction.
There is gentleness.
But there is also intention.
She loves that kitten.
So do not just “lick” the note and move on.
Take care of it.
And when his movement became stiff?
I had another question.
“Did the cat’s tongue get a cramp?”
That usually got the point across.
It also made us laugh.
Sweetness Needs a Reason
Eventually, I added another part to the story.
A kitten does not stay with its mother forever.
Their time together is short compared with the years human parents may have with their children. Within a relatively short period, those kittens will grow and become increasingly independent.
So when this mother cat is grooming her kitten, this time matters.
She is taking care of her baby while the baby is still there beside her.
Now the musical idea changed again.
Sweetness was no longer simply an adjective.
It had a reason.
The mother was not trying to “sound sweet.”
She was taking care of something she loved.
That distinction matters.
If I tell a student only, “Play sweeter,” the student may simply play more quietly.
But quiet is not necessarily sweet.
If I say, “Imagine a mother cat lovingly washing her kitten,” suddenly the sound has a purpose.
The physical gesture has a purpose.
Even the time between notes can begin to feel different.
This is something I have come to believe strongly about teaching:
Do not only give the sound an adjective. Give the sound something to care about.
The Child’s World Is Part of the Teaching Material
The funny part is that I did not bring the cat into the lesson.
He did.
I simply listened carefully enough to remember it.
That is an important distinction.
Teachers sometimes think creativity means arriving at a lesson with clever analogies prepared in advance.
Sometimes it does.
But some of my most useful teaching images have grown out of something a child happened to tell me.
The student gives me a piece of his world.
I hold onto it.
Later, when a musical problem appears, sometimes that little piece of information becomes the bridge.
The process may look spontaneous from the outside.
Underneath it, however, are questions I have spent decades learning to ask:
Who is this child?
How does this child naturally understand things?
What does this child notice?
What matters to this child?
Where is the real difficulty?
And what already exists in this child’s world that might become an entrance into the music?
Sometimes the Child Gives the Metaphor Back
Recently, a seven-year-old student looked at an accent mark—the little > symbol above a note—and announced:
“It looks like a cat’s whiskers.”
I laughed.
She was right.
Once she said it, I could not unsee it.
Instead of immediately saying, “No, that is called an accent,” and returning to the lesson, I asked her:
“May I borrow that? Can I tell my other students that an accent looks like a cat’s whiskers?”
She was delighted.
“Of course.”
I can teach her the formal definition of an accent five minutes later.
That information is not going anywhere.
But the spontaneous association tells me something else about the child.
It shows me how she notices, imagines, and connects things.
I do not want to correct a child so quickly that I correct the imagination out of her.
Sometimes the teacher gives the child a metaphor.
Sometimes the child gives one to the teacher.
Good teaching has room for both.
Repertoire Can Be a Teaching Tool, Not Just a Level
This is also why I do not choose repertoire only according to book level.
Of course technical readiness matters.
But sometimes a piece reinforces what a student already does well.
Sometimes I deliberately choose music that removes an old escape route.
A strong sight-reader may need music that cannot simply be sight-read quickly and left at the surface.
A student who depends heavily on pedal may need music that exposes what happens when the pedal can no longer hide weaknesses in the sound.
A technically capable but cautious student may need repertoire that asks for a kind of courage the student has not yet learned to trust.
This does not mean constantly giving children music that is too difficult.
Seeing potential does not give a teacher permission to force it.
Sometimes I challenge.
Sometimes I wait.
Sometimes I build trust first.
Being technically capable of a challenge and being ready to receive that challenge are not always the same thing.
So the question is not simply:
What piece can this student play?
Sometimes the more interesting question is:
What might this piece reveal about who this musician is becoming?
Experience Changes What a Teacher Sees
Parents can see the books their children use.
They can see how long the lesson lasts.
They can hear correct and incorrect notes.
They can see recital programs, examination levels, competition results, and awards.
What is harder to see is the judgment taking place inside the lesson.
Why does this student keep restarting from the beginning?
Why does the sound collapse when I remove the pedal?
Why does a student who normally learns quickly suddenly avoid one particular piece?
Why does another student become fascinated when I play something much simpler?
Why is this child repeating my words perfectly but not transferring the idea?
Why did a story about a stray cat and six kittens suddenly become the right way to teach a sweet piano tone?
Those questions are part of teaching too.
Years of experience should not simply give a teacher more answers.
Ideally, they teach us to notice better questions.
Sometimes the most important part of a lesson happens before the teacher gives an instruction.
It happens in recognizing where the door is.
More Than Twenty Years Later
My conducting professor became very ill.
Only later did I learn that when I sent her a thank-you card with lavender grown at my family home, she already knew that her breast cancer had returned.
I did not know what she was facing.
And she did not know what I had been facing.
Looking back now, I sometimes think we were comforting each other without knowing it.
She had given me something that said:
You may not be finished yet.
Perhaps my card gave something back:
What you gave me mattered.
She died not long afterward.
More than twenty years later, I still have a special affection for Mozart’s Dies Irae.
I probably always will.
Not simply because it is extraordinary music.
A teacher once gave me a piece that contained a version of myself I had not yet met.
She saw something before I did.
Today, I find myself doing something related with my own students.
Sometimes I see ability hidden behind fear.
Sometimes I see musicianship hidden behind an unusual way of learning.
Sometimes a student tells me something seemingly unrelated about a stray cat and six kittens, and later I realize that he has handed me exactly the language I need to help him understand a musical sound.
And sometimes a seven-year-old tells me an accent looks like a cat’s whiskers, and I realize that she has just taught me something too.
I cannot know which of these moments my students will remember twenty years from now.
But I know what I hope happens at least once.
I hope a student discovers something and thinks:
I didn’t know I could do that.
Because sometimes a great teacher does not simply teach what is already visible.
Sometimes the work is to recognize what is trying to appear—and find the right door to let it through.
