Taking it Up a Notch
by: John Otis
It was nothing you could put a finger on, but something was off.
As she’d been instructed, Royala Davis would glide her hands along the black and white keys of her piano, hoping to recreate the pieces she loved. An approving smile from her piano teacher signaled that she was doing fine, yet she had doubts about her performance. “I’d always enjoyed playing, but it didn’t always sound right to me,” Davis recalls. “Some of the pieces didn’t sound the way I’d heard them played.”
A Better Sense of Timing
These lessons took place in the ’80s, when Davis, now 77, lived in Silver Spring, Maryland, as an analyst for the Department of Defense. She began learning on a piano she had owned since 1954. The piano was left over, she says, from a time when everyone had one in the parlor. “The teacher I had back in Maryland didn’t have a lot of adult students,” she explains. “And she didn’t expect a lot from them.” While the lessons weren’t awful, Davis says they weren’t very useful either. “I was encouraged to produce whatever I could and was commended for it. But I was never given any tips on how to improve.”
It wasn’t until she retired and moved out west in 1996 that she began to play the way she’d always wanted to. The source for her musical awakening was the San Francisco Conservatory’s Adult Extension Program. She enrolled in private lessons there so she could receive the advanced instruction she hadn’t received before. “I didn’t want to take formal classes because I didn’t want anything too involved at this stage in my life,” she says. “These one-on-one tutorials have been enjoyable and wonderful.”
After just a few sessions with piano instructor Anna Marie McCarthy, Davis knew why her playing never sounded quite right. The problem was with her sense of timing. It was an eye-opening experience. “It’s like thinking you have 20/20 vision, and not realizing that you don’t until you put on a pair of glasses and then you can see better,” she says. “It’s so nice to hear music played the way it should be played and to hear it sound the way it’s suppose to sound.”
“I try to be encouraging,” McCarthy says, explaining her philosophy toward teaching adults. “But I also know that if I don’t address what’s getting in the way of making a better performance, the student can’t improve. I try to get students to really understand the music, too. We discuss what a song does—where the phrases are, whose style the piece resembles, or how it’s structured.”
Davis says she is grateful for the lessons received at the Conservatory, and especially pleased that McCarthy knew just what to improve. “If I never took lessons, I wouldn’t know that there’s more to learn,” she says.
A Nut About Breathing
While Davis went to the Conservatory to give piano lessons another try, others have enrolled to brush up on old skills. Physician Yeva Johnson, 40, played the flute all through high school and college, and confesses that she still secretly dreams of playing the flute professionally. But her ambition to take up a career in music was rivaled by a stronger desire to pursue a career in medicine. “I wanted to keep music fun and not have it become competitive,” Johnson says, adding with a laugh, “and I thought being a doctor was noncompetitive.”
She continued to play flute throughout her medical school residency, but the birth of Johnson’s children started a four-year break from music. Then her brother asked her if she would play flute at his wedding.
Johnson knew her hiatus had made her rusty and that she’d have to repolish both her flutes and her chops. So she scanned the Conservatory’s adult classes and selected as her teacher Yaada Weber, a professional flute player. “I picked a teacher whose name started with a Y, because mine does too, and it’s somewhat unusual,” Johnson explains. As fate would have it, Weber turned out to be a perfect match and Johnson can’t praise her teacher enough.
Eighty-year-old Weber is a professional flute player and another high caliber member of the faculty at the Conservatory. Weber stresses how to use the human body as an instrument, noting that many students lack basic knowledge on posture and breathing. “I teach my students how to properly inhale and show them how to expand the rib cage and breathe deeply,” she explains. “I’m a nut about breathing. I also teach students how to hold the flute because many players are in physical pain these days.”
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When Johnson took her first lessons with Weber, she saw improvement right away. But at the time, Johnson was trying to balance her career and a family that included young kids, so she was only able to take six lessons. Weber told her to come back and continue playing once her life calmed down. Johnson did just that, and let music become a big item on her priority list once again. “I view music as personal therapy,” she says. “I consider it life saving, one of the things that makes life worth living.”
A Community of Practicing Adults
Psychiatrist Richard Forde, 57, of Yountville, California, also sees music as a form of therapy. “Music has helped me be more centered,” he says. Forde has played the piano for years and recently took up the harpsichord. He takes lessons for both instruments at the Conservatory. “I work in the public sector, and I see a lot of very sick people with serious illnesses. I look forward to playing music as an escape.”
Forde also views music as a form of exercise as well. “I like the motor activity,” he explains. “I see mastering the intricacies of fingering, and the act of playing, as a type of sport. It has an athletic component.” Forde says he practices everyday and plays very well. And yet, at least once a week, he makes an hour long journey across the Golden Gate Bridge to attend lessons at the Conservatory. Forde explains that the lessons are valuable and, most importantly, it provides him with a unique atmosphere that is hard to find elsewhere. “The environment pulls me into a musical orbit,” Forde says. “I’ll just be walking down the halls of the school and hear a song and think: I need to learn that.”
The Conservatory can also brings music students together outside of the classroom. Forde’s piano instructor, Richard Rogers, holds “house recitals” about once a month, which gives students a chance to perform for others and interact with their fellow musicians. “I am a firm believer in ensemble playing,” Rogers says. “As my students get to know other performers, a community of practicing adult musicians is born.”
Like Forde, Yeva Johnson performs with others —members of her family. When she returned to the Conservatory to study under Weber, she didn’t go alone. Both her children are signed up for violin lessons.
The Conservatory has given Yeva new-found musical confidence: “I’m better now than I was when I was in college—something I didn’t know could happen,” she says. “I’m not washed up in middle age.
