The Gourds - Steeple Full of Swallows

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You know how most people say the piano lessons they had when they were a kid were a nightmare?

I had the opposite experience. But maybe it was the teacher.

People have the strangest impression of what the archetypal piano teacher looks like.

I think they expect somewhere between Miss Hathaway in The Beverly Hillbillies and perhaps a brusque Margaret Thatcher in her severe Prime Minister suit.

I've heard all the horror stories about knuckles getting rapped and the towering rages of the insulted master.

I even have a friend, a violin player in a major US Symphony Orchestra, whose early piano virtuoso years were replete with a wooden yoke he had to wear around his neck to prevent him looking at the keys. True story. Very misguided teacher, but that was in the late 1950's. Kids have rights now.

But I had none of these monsters for a piano teacher.

I had Mr. Blew.

He was a kindly middle-aged gentleman who taught in his home, always wearing a cardigan sweater, sort of like Fred MacMurray.

I don't remember anything about the piano part of the lessons. I could read music well, but I had never really played difficult piano pieces very much.

All I remember is our discussions of chords and harmony. Mr. Blew taught me figured bass, the language of chords and improvisation in Baroque usage such as Bach. We played Bach chorales endlessly, studying the seemingly tiny but actually significant differences from one beautiful chorale to another.

He taught me how to move four voices pleasingly, looking for what the listener expected, but also looking for what we could add to it ourselves.

My major revelation as an eleven year old was with Chopin, not as music to play, but as music to analyze and find the secret source of its haunting beauty.

I remember looking intensely at a page of a Chopin Polonaise, and, seeing a similarity between two different chord movements of a certain, subtle kind, I cried out, "Did Chopin mean to do that?" It seemed so elegant how the two chords followed one another, yet so well thought-out.

Mr. Blew looked at me with that Cheshire Cat smile somewhere in between an enlightened uncle and Yoda, and said, "Exactly what Chopin wanted to do, my boy. Every note was carefully figured out, and refined endlessly until it fit perfectly like a watch."

Mr. Blew opened up to me that day the secret world of chords and harmony, which famed German philosopher and novelist Hermann Hesse once called the Three Dimensional Chess Game in his mystic novel Magister Ludi (Master of the Game).

By John Aschenbrenner Copyright 2000 Walden Pond Press. Visit http://www.pianoiseasy.com to see the fun PIANO BY NUMBER method for kids.

John Aschenbrenner is a leading children's music educator and book publisher, and the author of numerous piano method books in the series PIANO BY NUMBER.