On the importance of teachers

My beloved first piano teacher, Nance Brennan passed away towards the end of last year. At almost 90 years of age it was hardly surprising I suppose, and it had been over 20 years since I had studied with her. But I was struck at the depth of my feeling and my sadness at the loss of someone who had made such an impression on me at a particular time in my life.

We spend so much time talking about how we can measure the impact of the arts, and assess the benefits of music or arts and culture in the education of a child. We want to see statistics, to superimpose the kinds of structures and methodology we find elsewhere over the top of experiences that simply do not belong in this realm. Did my piano lessons make me better at maths? I have no idea. What I do know is that for about 8 years of my life, going to Mrs Brennan’s house to play the piano, discovering Bach, and Chopin and Debussy with her in her suburban house with a big garden full of trees and birds, was the highlight of my week. ‘What have you got for me today?’ she would ask, and off we would go. I always liked to learn other new pieces on my own but was sometimes too shy to admit it; she came to understand this pretty quickly and would often ask me if I had tried this or that other piece, and would then be full of praise for work I had undertaken off my own bat. Nurturing my fledgling sense of initiative I guess.

My father, who took us to our lessons, formed a great friendship with Mr Brennan’s husband, Frank. They talked about the land and farming and other passions. I like to think that the time we spent there was beneficial for our whole family – my father, a single parent, having some time out for a chat with a friend, whilst his kids were engaged in studying music.

Through Mrs Brennan, I have an abiding love of Chopin that will continue until the day I die and a deep appreciation of the poetic beauty of his aesthetic. She really awakened me to my own profound love of music. I remember my first lesson on a Chopin Waltz when she showed me how to play rubato, and the most delicious moment where she taught me that sometimes it was very much in the style to play the right and left hand downbeats of the bar NOT together (!). A technique I probably totally abused to my own extreme enjoyment for years afterwards.

With all our technology and methods of measurement, we still have no way of capturing the value of what I learned from that extraordinary, wonderful lady. The quiet appreciation of beauty, the benefits of consistent effort, patience; a positive weekly presence, as much a part of my life as brushing my teeth, or my grandmother’s sponge cake with passionfruit icing. I don’t think we’ll ever be able to measure things like that, but that in no way means that we shouldn’t value it. What we can and should do, is acknowledge it when we have the good fortune to meet people in our life who bring out something in us that we can admire.
Vale Nance Brennan.

A beginning

Last night I was shamed into making my first blog post. Everything has been sitting here, set up for a while, but life seemed to take over and in between writing other things, playing the clarinet, performing, discovering my new tarogato and planning for the coming months somehow my first blog post never made it into the ether. So here it is now, along with an invitation to join a conversation with me about art and the place that it has in life – my life, your life, the life of our immediate community and our country. I think those of us who are artists or working in the arts can too easily forget that for many people what we are so passionately involved with is not considered important, and certainly not necessary. The purpose of stimulating any kind of ongoing conversation or debate through a forum like this is really to see if we can’t collectively try to ‘MacGyver’ a new arts radar and system of measurement for ourselves and for others. It might make a good iphone app. actually...