MAY 10, 2020 – (Excerpt from Inheritance – Chapter Five: “Talking Out Loud” by the blogger) – When I was in third grade, Mother returned to the University of Minnesota to study piano pedagogy with Miles Mauney. After acing the program she marketed herself as a piano teacher. She printed flyers and conscripted me to help hand them out to kids leaving school at day’s end. The effort worked, and before the rest of the family could say “Felix Mendelssohn,” a stream of eager students—or, in many cases, students with eager parents—started pouring int our house for after-school lessons.
Mother set up her studio in the basement, under the living room. She started off with an old, upright piano but later acquired a Steinway upright from my Nilsson grandparents. Several years later 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 teaching, and she clearly enjoyed her students, some of whom became fairly proficient. At some point 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 she felt about great music.
Mother played 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 repaired 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 ‘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 motor mind ran full speed over the keyboard, falling into the cracks and onto the floor. So what if some of the notes landed there too? If Dad was a true artist, Mother was a true emissary of great music, and she must be remembered for that and the influence she had over a great many young people.
Though Mother 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. When Scott Joplin was in vogue again, we heard several of Mother’s better students cranking ragtime tunes out of the basement studio. As Dad, connoisseur of music from Bach to Brahms, read the newspaper in the living room, Joplin Revival below found an unlikely mark. Soon he began 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. That had to have been one of Mother’s greatest rewards as a piano teacher.
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© 2020 by Eric Nilsson
