JUNE 13, 2023 – Mother was on the phone a lot when I was a kid. If she had a question about something—anything—or developed an urge to talk to someone outside our household, she never hesitated to pick up the phone and call away. However, she knew lots of people, and she did lots of things, so it was no wonder she was on the phone a lot.
Mother was a joiner, a doer, much in the image of Grandpa Holman. She joined the usual organizations that a civic-minded woman would belong to in those days—PTA, Philolectian, the local chapter of the Red Cross, the Eastern Star, the fund drive for construction of a new hospital. In the case of the hospital project, I remember well the gray, autumn Saturday when I accompanied her going door-to-door soliciting contributions. She spoke with such confidence and conviction, and I was impressed by her success: didn’t leave a single house without collecting a generous donation. But her activities reached far beyond active participation in established organizations.
When I was in about third grade, Mother went back to the University of Minnesota to study piano pedagogy with Miles Mauney, and after acing the program, she set about marketing herself as a piano teacher. She made up a bunch of flyers, and I remember being conscripted to help hand them out to kids as they poured out of our elementary school. The effort worked, and before the rest of the family could say “Frederic Chopin,” Mother had a steady stream of eager students—or, in many cases, I suspect, students with eager parents—coming to our house for after-school piano lessons.
Mother set up her studio in the basement, under the living room. She started off with an old upright piano but later inherited a Steinway upright from my Nilsson grandparents. A year or two after that, she gathered what must have been all of her teaching proceeds to that point and then some, to acquire a beautiful, refurbished, Steinway parlor grand. Mother poured her heart into piano teaching, and she clearly enjoyed her students, some of whom actually became fairly proficient. At some stage along the way, a banner appeared over the stairs leading down to the studio. It read, “Music is Love in Search of a Word.” It captured precisely how Mother felt about great music.
Yet, as a mathematician, Mother was fascinated by the structure of music, especially of Bach, and she was an effective and enthusiastic instructor of music theory. Her large, handmade chart of the key signatures was a familiar fixture on a wall of her studio.
Mother played the piano a lot herself. When she wasn’t teaching, which for years was pretty much from the time school let out in the afternoon till supper time and then after supper for an hour or two, Mother would repair to the studio to play mostly Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, and Mendelssohn. As I grew older and more discerning, I noticed that Mother lacked the penchant for perfection and the deep-water feeling that Dad exuded on his far less frequent turns at many of the same pieces. I think the difference was that classical music resided deep inside Dad’s heart and poured forth when he played, like a well-measured stream of fine wine flowing from a leaded glass decanter straight into the center of a crystal clear goblet, whereas Mother’s frenetic heart simply gushed over the keyboard, spilling into the cracks and onto the floor. So what if some of the notes spilled too? But if Dad was a true artist, Mother was a true purveyor of great music, and she must be remembered for that and the influence she had over a great many young people.
To Mother’s credit, although she exposed her students to as much great music as they would tolerate, she strongly encouraged them to play whatever genre they liked, from ragtime to rock ‘n roll. There was a period when Scott Joplin was in vogue again, and on a regular basis, we heard several of Mother’s better students cranking out ragtime tunes. I think Mother was rather surprised and doubtless pleased when Dad himself made a regular practice of sneaking down to the studio after the last student of the day had left and playing Scott Joplin tunes like there was no tomorrow.
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© 2023 by Eric Nilsson
