My parents would not have met if it wasn’t for the violin. Their friends set them up on a blind date because they both played. Although my mother gave up the instrument after they married, my father played nearly every night of his life. He would practice in the downstairs den wearing his baggy blue boxer shorts and white undershirt, chin cradling the dark wooden instrument, the bow in his right hand hovering over the strings. I imagine the violin was a source of great pleasure, even meditation, although we never talked about it. I know because I play the piano and practicing can sometimes be the most enjoyable part of my day.
My father was self taught, which was probably the reason why he was keen to give his own children the benefit of piano lessons. When I was six years old he brought me to my teacher’s house for my first lesson. Mr. Levy had a lump poking out of the sparse hair at the top of his head and I couldn’t take my eyes off of it. A baby grand piano took up most of the space in his living room and when I sat down on the piano bench my feet barely touched the floor. He showed me where middle C was, right below the S of the Steinway name. My father sat nearby, which made me feel safe in this strange home.
I wasn’t fond of piano lessons when I was young, but I liked learning how to read music and Mr Levy was a patient teacher. After a while he came to our house to teach one of my brothers and me. My brother became one of his star pupils and I always envied his talent. The lump atop Mr. Levy’s head remained in the same place all the years I was his student.
Despite my brother’s talent, he gave up the piano after he left home, as many adults do who learn to play an instrument in their youth. I’m not sure why I continued to play, but I know it has something to do with my father, who served as a radioman and machine gunner on a B-24 during World War II. He was only 19 years old when he enlisted. He rarely spoke about his wartime experiences or about his feelings, but I think the violin was a refuge where he could express his emotions most fully.
When my brothers and I were kids my father would listen to the classical radio station WQXR AM in the car. There were no FM stations at the time. We were amazed he could identify the composers of the quartets, symphonies, concertos on the station’s broadcast. It was hard to stump him. Growing up in suburban Long Island in the 1960s we spent a lot of car time clamoring for control of the radio. If my mother wasn’t with us, we fought over who would sit in the front seat next to my father because that person could reach the radio dial. Usually we were in the back seat pleading with him to turn the dial to WABC, which played the top 40 hits of the day. The DJ Cousin Brucie (aka Bruce Morrow) pronounced each of the station’s call letters in a sort of drawn out howl. We wanted to hear the Beatles, Beach Boys, Supremes, Tommy James & the Shondells. Occasionally my father gave in to our incessant whining, but I realize now that our music must have been jarring to his ear.
Near the end of my father’s life I went with him and my mother to Carnegie Hall, which they had patronized for decades. We heard the renowned Vienna Philharmonic, one of the great orchestras of the world. Sitting near the front of the baronial cream-colored hall in some of the best seats in the house, we were quietly transfixed by the sound of that big orchestra. After the performance I noticed my father walked a little more upright and with a bit more spring in his step.
I thought about my father a lot during the first year of the pandemic, when the piano became a source of comfort, a refuge in uncertain times like baking sourdough bread or knitting a sweater.During that year I tackled Prokofiev’s second sonata, a piece in four movements encompassing some 41 pages that he composed when he was only 21 years old. The movements were tempestuous, at times even grotesque. The music also was heartbreakingly tender. An especially poignant moment occurred at the end of the first movement when the notes murmured like tolling bells. Were the bells for his father? He wrote the sonata around the time of his father’s death.
I remember playing through a passage where dense cascading chords were relieved by a simple melody. My teacher, an accomplished pianist from Eastern Europe trained in the classical repertoire, likened the passage to rain steadily falling against a window until it slowly tapered off. Her interpretation helped me to hear the sonata in an entirely new way, and during the worst days of the lockdown I fell in love with this difficult piece of music and cherished its dissonances.
Despite hours and hours of practice, I wasn’t able to play the sonata at the composer’s intended tempo and couldn’t manage to hit all of the right notes. Frankly, I will never master difficult piano music but it doesn’t really matter. I will continue to play for the rest of my life. The repertoire of music written for the piano is seemingly endless, a treasure that can be revisited countless times. When I was a growing up I struggled to practice. Now I willingly sit down to play and the time spent at the keyboard passes without notice, like a sort of meditation.
I never thanked my father for giving me piano lessons but I think he understood the importance of the piano in my life.
When I was a teenager I never would have imagined that playing the piano would become a pastime accompanying me through all of the years of my life. There is no way to predict whether a child will continue with the instrument in her adult life. But if a child is given lessons and learns to play at whatever level there is always a chance that she will continue to play when she leaves home and will find a place for the instrument wherever she lives. Perhaps she also may find an almost indescribable happiness in the hours she spends at the keyboard.
Marjorie Shaffer has worn many hats—copywriter, business reporter, science writer. She is the author of Pepper: A History of the World’s Most Influential Spice and lives in New York City with her two cats. She practices piano most days.