Text size:

Talking with Tricia Tunstall, author 'Note by Note'

BY HELEN EISENBACH | Special to Newsday

May 4, 2008

The stereotype of the piano lesson as a drudgery to be endured is nowhere in evidence in Tricia Tunstall's "Note by Note: A Celebration of the Piano Lesson" (Simon & Schuster, $24). Tunstall, who once dreamed of being a concert pianist, was publishing in literary journals and trade magazines and raising two sons when two things happened almost by accident: She became a piano teacher, and she wrote a book about it. Her portrait captures both a unique mentoring relationship and the pure joys of musical discovery with the suspense, heartache and magic of any good love story.

How did the book come about?

It was so striking to me that any time I would say, "I'm a freelance writer and I teach piano," people would go "Teach piano?!" They instantly would have an anecdote: "My piano teacher had a mustache. ..." People's memories are so vivid. I wrote two pages, just out of curiosity. I always thought the book I would write would be a novel, so this was a wonderful surprise.

What is it that makes the piano lesson so special?

Learning to play the piano, or any musical instrument, is a physical, an intellectual and an emotional exercise. Because of that emotional aspect, the teacher and student become connected the way any two people do who share an emotional experience.

I was surprised the institution still existed; it felt like something in the past. Is that because it's not represented in TV or movies?

I think in the '30s, '40s and '50s it was really more a part of popular culture. Remember that scene in "The Music Man"?

The little boy's lesson! Are all your students children?

Right now my age range is 5 to 18. I have about 40 students. I have taught adults. It's much harder. They get so frustrated and self-critical so fast that they usually stop. But 5 can be too young, 5 or 6.

Like your student who sat paralyzed.

[Laughs] There's never been a lesson like that. He was frozen, just frozen with anxiety.

So many of your students stop making up music once they start playing by the rules. Is it inevitable that the creative impulse is squelched?

I don't think it's inevitable, but it takes a really consistent, conscious effort to encourage kids once they've launched on a learning-to-read-music path. I have to keep reminding myself to say, "Let's make something up together" or "Do you want to learn something by ear?"

Do you think music's a bigger part of our culture today than the past?

You go into a restaurant, there's music, you go into a store, there's music, you walk out of a store and plug in your iPod. It becomes something that's constantly in the background. It's so pervasive the specialness of the experience becomes degraded.

Some might argue it's actually more important, being so prevalent.

My worry is that it's harder to be stimulated by it as music instead of just having it be your constant wash in the background. In folk cultures there's not music happening until there's an occasion - it's usually associated with a social event, there's singing, there's dancing, it grabs you, wow! Now there's so little time that's not music. ... I had to write a paper last week and my cleaning lady came, so I thought, 'All right, I'll go out and sit in a coffee shop and write.' I went to six different places: There was music in every single one of them. I just went home - I'd rather hear the vacuum cleaner.

How will the piano teachers of the world respond to your book?

They may take issue with it - I'm looking forward to a lively dialogue. I hope I find a readership of non-musicians as well as musicians.

And people who secretly wish they'd had the experience when they were growing up?

So many people say that to me. They either say, "I remember my piano teacher" or "I wish I'd had piano lessons." Really, almost everybody has one of those two responses.