My last in-person piano lesson happened on March 16, 2020, the day before our first shelter-in-place order took effect. I am a retired primary care doctor in California, and my son had returned from a visit to Shanghai on January 28, so I’d been following the epidemic in China and the U.S. for months. Governor Newsom had already introduced us to the concept of social distancing and discouraged large gatherings. Berkeley public schools closed March 13, even though we only had three reported cases at that point, none in the schools. I was worried enough that I emailed my teacher in the morning, asking if he wanted to cancel the lesson. He replied, “Please come,” so I did. I missed Newsom’s midday announcement that, starting on March 17 at 12:01 a.m., we should avoid any non-essential in-person social encounters.
My teacher reported the news as he opened the door. At first, I wondered if he would tell me to go home. When he didn’t, I was content to sit down at the piano. Over the fifteen years that I have taken piano and accordion lessons as an adult, I’ve discovered that music is a balm for moments of existential panic. Partly, I am sure, because I have so little natural talent, playing an instrument demands my unwavering focus. I can’t ruminate and noodle around, like moody characters in movies who drift to the piano in times of stress and play from the heart. Or I can, but it sounds terrible. Even when I concentrate, my improvisation is primitive, which is why I mostly play notes I can read, either classical music on the piano or popular music on the accordion. In my limited experience with piano teachers, they seem to be almost as good as doctors at attending to the task at hand. We are both paid to be present for the person in front of us, not to allow our personal lives to bleed into the professional.
I remember thinking, as I left, that my next monthly lesson might have to be postponed. I didn’t know when I would see my teacher again, but I wasn’t afraid of dying. If I had been, I would have reminded him, as I do before my annual faraway trip to Asia or Africa, that I depend on him to make sure Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” is played at my funeral. If I go down with my husband, no one else will remember. Usually, he rolls his eyes and schedules a lesson when I return. Before my trip to Thailand last November, he also volunteered to start practicing the piece.
When it became clear that there was no chance of an in-person lesson in April, my first thought was to wait until May. I’d participated in a few Zoom calls by then: it felt like making love with mittens on. In addition, I was reluctant to have a lesson at home. My piano is in the living room, about twenty feet from the front door. Any time in the afternoon, one of the three adults then working from home (husband, son, and son’s girlfriend, who was unable to return to her job in Shanghai) could wander through. Finally, my laptop is old, and messages like “USB has been disabled” or “Stor-age is full” pop up regularly. I’d been planning to upgrade, but surely that could wait until the pandemic ended. I was happy to pay my teacher for a month without a lesson, so I sent him a check with a note saying that I doubted I could handle Zoom.
He replied with an email suggesting dates and asking me to position the camera so that he could see my hands on the keyboard. He included some suggestions for improving the Zoom sound for music, since the automatic settings are optimized for the spoken voice. I thought it over and decided I would be a wimp not to try.
In order to position the camera high enough, I balanced my laptop on the top rung of a stepladder. I warned my housemates verbally and put a sign outside on the door, LESSON IN PROGRESS. I thought I was ready. Still, it was unnerving to have my piano teacher pop up on the screen when I was used to climbing the steps to his house, lugging my accordion, ringing the bell, and waiting for him to answer. It was also awkward making small talk at the beginning, but as soon as I started playing the piano, the fierce attention I have to summon took over. He let me play the whole first section without interruption, which is unusual, and commented that locking me up for a month had benefited my practice. Then he asked me what note I had played in a couple of places. He admitted that he couldn’t reliably distinguish half tones over Zoom, or see my fingers in enough detail to tell.
That first month I was working on a Mozart sonata (K. 333, B-flat major). I had started the piece well prior to the lockdown; it takes me months to decipher the ornaments, learn the phrasing, work toward a fluid, light touch. The technical challenges have more to do with finesse than brute strength. When I finished, in May, I craved something less fussy, so I chose “Bethena,” a Joplin rag. I have played other rags in the past. This time I was better at the leaps and octave runs that characterize the genre—after a few times through, my hand could find the bass notes reliably without looking, rather than having to practice the jumps in isolation over and over. The crashing fortissimo chords allowed me to express my frustration. On the accordion, I was playing a march and trying to push the bellows in with only the heel of the left hand, avoiding pressing with the fingers playing the chord buttons. The bellows are supposed to open and close smoothly, for an even tone. Like pretty much everything else in music, it’s harder than it sounds.
Normally, I would also join a friend (another retired woman doc) a couple of times a month to tackle duets, but since we sit together on the piano bench and play with four hands on one piano, that couldn’t happen. We naively thought perhaps we could play together over Zoom, until we learned that there is no way to completely avoid the Zoom Delay, familiar to anyone who has tried to sing “Happy Birthday” with others on a Zoom call. (Apparently, when you see people who appear to be singing together on Zoom, the voices have been recorded to synchronize them.)
Three months into the pandemic, I had settled into my restricted life and made peace with the guilt I felt about retiring the year before. My medical license is still current, so I looked into signing up with Governor Newsom’s health corps, but for that I had to be available to go anywhere in the state and work full-time, possibly in twelve-hour shifts. By then it was clear that our hospitals in California were not going to face the early, deadly surge that devastated New York, and there were younger doctors available, whose practices had evaporated. Forty years before, as a new mother, I had sweated through the AIDS epidemic, fearful every day of contracting that fatal virus. This time I would admire Dr. Fauci’s grace under pressure from the sidelines.
Besides reading and cooking, I filled my days with gardening, yoga, distanced or masked walking, playing the piano and accordion, and watching Detective Montalbano on television (to substitute for a canceled trip to Italy). The nightmares where I couldn’t find my purse or arrived late to clinic tapered off. I practiced to distract myself from the mounting public health catastrophe, whose roots were all too familiar. It was as though a floodlight suddenly projected onto a national stage my long-term personal struggle, as a black woman doctor, to provide care for diverse patients in a dysfunctional system.
At my June lesson, my teacher assigned another Joplin rag, “Bink’s Waltz,” along with Handel’s Piano Suite No. 12 in E minor, to add back some finer finger work. After playing the short Allemande that begins the suite, I told him that it was too sad for a pandemic. The theme descends, the key is minor, and the fingering is tricky. Where are we going? Will I get back?
Now I am working on the last movement, a rollicking Gigue in 24/16, a rhythm new to me. Luckily, I just finished a six-week Zoom class at the California Jazz Conservancy called “In the Shed: Powerful Piano Practice Routines.” It seemed like a good time to revisit the fundamentals. Our teacher emphasized working with the metronome to hone our sense of rhythm. With the sound muted, and taking care not to look at our classmates’ hands (so as to avoid sound and visual delay), we clapped to her beat. A pandemic koan: what is the sound of ten people clapping together alone?
The teacher called the rhythm work a “tonic” that would improve our whole practice: “The metronome is your friend.” As a kid, I figured the metronome was a punishment for failing to keep the beat on my own. As an adult, I still balked at repetitive grunt work. But in these days of grim and grimmer, even melody can seem frivolous. In 1963, Jackie Kennedy asked for drums alone to accompany the clacking hooves of the horses carrying her husband’s body. Earlier this year, the rhythm of the horses echoed again when John R. Lewis crossed over the Edmund Pettus Bridge for the last time.
Tricia Turnstall, a piano teacher, wrote about extended piano lessons: “Teacher and student take turns leading and following one another through the possibilities of feeling; it is a kind of intimacy all the richer for being mediated by the beauty of music.” I am not sure over these months that I could have faced my piano teacher in person, without my distress, my waves of rage and grief, emerging in the course of the hour. Zoom provided a way to meet and the distance to power through.
Toni Martin is a writer and physician who lives in Berkeley.
