Lineage

Story of every parent's life.

They say it's only a matter of time until you turn out just like your parents.  You're cruising through your 20s feeling independent and unique until you run straight into the wall of parenthood and find yourself sounding exactly like your mother as you flatly deny a child's request for a later bedtime and fish things out of the garbage disposal. All wild speculation of course since I don't have kids, but my recent experiences teaching have shown me that there's probably a lot of truth to this unintended cycle.

I was incredibly lucky to have the same horn teacher from the time I was a beginner at age 9 until I graduated high school.  This woman saw me almost every week of my childhood, beginning at just 30 minutes at first until my senior year when we'd have marathon 3-hour lessons.  She charged $15 a lesson until 8th grade when she raised her rates to $25.  I didn't know it then, but she really became a second mom to me.  I love my mom dearly (hi mom!) but she wasn't a musician and there were vast expanses of my growth and development that only my teacher witnessed.  And she was an amazing teacher.  I learned to transpose before 5th grade, had complete parts to every Mahler symphony and Stravinsky tone poem before I entered high school, and had a deep understanding of the physics behind brass instruments; all of which seeped into my horn bone marrow in ways that I couldn't have predicted then.  But most significantly, she was just a really really really nice lady.  My other teachers (piano, band, orchestra) were nice too, but nobody could top my horn teacher.  She was always smiling and giggling and never criticized me.  I mean never.  I was a diligent student of course, but come on, never picking at your student is pretty amazing.  In 8 years, I cannot recall her ever seeming annoyed, impatient, or dissatisfied with my progress and despite her busy freelance career, she never seemed like she wanted to be anywhere but in her studio, working away at whatever issue I had that week.  She got me through the grueling and ultimately rewarding college audition process, and I remember crying all the way home from my last lesson before I left for college.  She set me up so beautifully to have a well-rounded life in music; I don't think I could ever adequately express my gratitude for that.

Not rocket science, just music science.

This year was the first year that I've actually had talented students, more than just young beginners who have little musical experience.  And lo and behold, my first teacher is expressing herself through my teaching at almost every turn.  I use the same scales and etude books, the same easy but still musically rich solos, even the same wording to explain what transposition is: "I have an F horn in my hand, and I need to get to a Horn in D.  What do I do?"  (Sounds simple, but it can really mess with your head if you don't explain transposing accurately the first time.)

The thing I've been noticing the most, though, is that I'm turning out to be a really nice teacher.

This is a bit surprising to me.  I always thought I'd take after my piano teacher, a very erudite and caustic theory scholar who assigned me thorny contemporary recordings to study and Thomas Mann books to read.  I'm much more like him when it comes to being my own teacher, often critical and always looking to up the ante.  But with my students, I find myself being very friendly, warm, and encouraging.  It's not that I don't care about their progress, I just want them to enjoy our lessons and enjoy playing what can be an incredibly frustrating instrument.  I want to be pleasant, to elicit their best selves and that's just easier if you're consistently friendly and kind.

This past weekend while visiting my parents, I met a young girl in the neighborhood who's playing horn in school.  She says she chose the horn because she grew up hearing me practice in my living room (heart: warmed) and she's taking lessons from this very same teacher, who I thought had retired.  Talking to this girl about our shared teacher made me so very happy.  I saw a lot of myself in her earnestness and desire to ask all the right questions about what she should be doing.  And thinking about her in lessons learning all the same exercises and tricks that I learned was so cosmically comforting.  Just like your parents, you can never really appreciate what your teachers gave you while you're growing up.  But somehow I absorbed enough of the warmth and love that my teacher gave me to pass it on in the zany disjointed world of New York City.  I am really proud to discover that I take after Sally; the universe needs more people like her.

I actually listened to "The Circle of Life" after writing this last paragraph.
Everything I learned in life I learned from Rafiki.