What I learned from the Russian School, and How it Ruined My Confidence
This was my first piano recital I remember feeling nervous. I was 10 playing Chopin’s Fantasie Impromptu.
This article is part of a new series I’m doing called Piano Confidential: Tales Of a Struggling Concert Pianist. This is my story: a wacky ADHD kid that ended up building and imploding several companies, non-profits, and developed a complicated relationship with music.
You know that point when you were really shitty at something, but suddenly you’re fairly comfortable at that thing? Well that happened to me at around 10 years old.
As I’ve stated previously, I am no prodigy, or particularly displayed any innate talent for the piano. However, when I turned double digits I started getting recognized for my playing. Whether it be at talent shows in school or local piano competitions, my playing attracted followers. Soon, my mother felt it was time I switch to a more serious teacher.
To be honest, switching teachers didn’t feel like a cataclysmic disruption to my life. Piano to me was more or less like a chore, and I only played an hour a week so it was fairly low commitment. However my active passivity in playing the piano was about to take a huge punch to the gut from the Russian School.
I met the new teacher at my home. He drove over in his car and seemed like a very typical piano teacher. He was recommended to my mother from a friend and we had a trial lesson. Seemed pretty normal. Afterwards, he had a private conversation with my mom. I could only see their mouths moving through the glass door. Then he left.
First time I donned a bow tie for a piano recital. I think I played Mozart. Honestly, who knows?
The next week was when I encountered the Russian School of teaching for the first time. Before we started the lesson, my teacher gave me his honest feedback on my playing. “You have no musicality. What you play at the piano is not music. It’s just notes. We need to start all over again.”
Well, that killed my self-esteem. Even though I never cared for the damn instrument, that was the first time I had ever been told that I have absolutely no potential at the piano. My heart sank. My eyes glued to the floor. My chest suspended as if my lungs could only stay at mid breath.
We started with the basics. I don’t mean scales or finger exercises. We started with one note. My teacher would play one note and ask me to replicate the exact sound he played. For weeks, he said I couldn’t do it. To be honest, I had no idea if I was close or not. At every 1-hour lesson we had, he would say the same thing. “Just play it the same way I do.” That was the next 3 years of my piano apprenticeship.
We moved on to 2 notes, then chords, then scales. After 3 months, he let me play some repertoire. Sometimes, we would go to concerts and he would ask me to point out which orchestral player was out of tune or sing the phrasing of what the viola was playing in the 3rd movement of Tchaikovsky’s fifth symphony. Like a lightning bolt, I finally understood his madness: he was teaching me how to listen.
All those exercises playing a single note were to help me develop a new sort of technique: one of reacting to how your fingers are playing with listening very closely. By developing this skill, I was able to mold the sound of what I wanted to play at the keyboard. I was actively tricking my brain, turning my sonic thoughts into subconscious finger movements.
My last student recital before I quit the piano.
The Russian School was never about a specific type of physical technique to help a pianist play a beautiful sound. It was the practice of listening and imagining the most beautiful sound that can be done subconsciously at the keyboard; to create this sound, you needed to move your body in whichever way possible. That’s why so many great pianists from the Russian School have such a beautiful sound, even though they all play the piano physically differently. Nevertheless, the only way to do that was through tedious and repetitive practice.
Soon, my sound started to improve and my tonal imagination started growing in my brain like an uncontrolled chia pet. Kaleidoscopes and psychedelic spirals bounced from the soundboard and filled the room. However, all that Jimi Hendrix Experience nonsense came to a grinding halt because of another aspect of the Russian School.
Despite the playing potential of what the school offers, the Russian School is just like any other classical music tradition. Its main mantra is you have to do it my way. Every time I tried to experiment, play a piece of Beethoven differently, or even adjust the tempo by 1 bpm from what my teacher was doing, I was scolded. “If Beethoven heard that, he would roll over in his grave… Mozart would commit suicide hearing his sonata played like that… Do you call that music? More like pieces of plywood falling on the floor.” Receiving all this verbal abuse as a 10, 11, and 12-year old started to take its toll. I became increasingly fearful of putting my ass on the piano bench, to the point that I began to shiver at the thought of performing. At 13, prodding me to play the piano with Thor’s lightning sparks wouldn’t make my fingers move.
“Mozart would commit suicide hearing his sonata played like that… You call that music? More like pieces of plywood falling on the floor.”
I remember my last piano lesson being as awkward as a prom proposal rejection in front of your entire high school. Just before I played, my mother told my teacher it was my last lesson. He seemed incredibly frustrated, angry, upset, and filled with resentment. I remember my eyes were pinned to the keyboard at all times, I played everything at half tempo and half volume. It felt like I had just run a marathon, and my coach was dragging me back on the track to do another 26 miles.
After the minute hand swung past 12 he said, “Ok,” and left. And that was that.
I was now free of the piano. Or so I thought.
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