John Walker holds a D.M.A. from the University of Colorado at Boulder, M. M. from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and B.M. from the University of California at Santa Barbara. He studied pedagogy at the New School for Music Study under Frances Clark and Louise Goss in 1977-78. Dr. Walker has been Assistant Professor of Piano at Adams State College since 1995, and is frequently called upon to serve as a piano festival coordinator and adjudicator throughout Colorado. He is a regular performer with the Colorado Music Festival orchestra in Boulder, and has appeared with the Diablo Symphony, Contra Costa Chamber Orchestra, Shasta Symphony, and Paradise Symphony orchestras in California. Dr. Walker currently lives in Alamosa, CO, with his wife and two boys Tristan and Dorian.
John Walker
Adams State College
208 Edgemont
Alamosa, CO 81102
719.587.7701
jmwalker@adams.edu
Twenty years a ago, I attended the New School for Music Study. It was a different world from California, living near Princeton, New Jersey for nine months - heavy snow and heavy humidity, highway jug handles, diners, the "shore" instead of the "beach," and a much older history including Revolutionary War battlegrounds. I found myself working in a colonial house, home of the New School, which felt like being at the narrow end of a microscope with Frances Clark and Louise Goss observing from the other end. With only five pedagogy students and two directors in a school, there is nowhere to hide. While appreciating the low student-to-teacher ratio I bent to learn my lessons, the first lesson being that when Frances called in her commanding, bass voice, you reported in quickly. The second, and really more imperative lesson, was that six-foot-three-inch pedagogy students should bend while running through doorways built in a time when the average male was five-foot-eight.
I asked myself, after taking this article assignment, what I had learned from Frances, and had to answer that I could not immediately think of a thing. Had I forgotten the teaching wisdom and methodology transferred into the absorbent brains of us pedagogy interns? Andrea, Susan, Joanna, Jane, and I knew we were a bit special to be on the receiving end of Miss Clark's lectures (both scholarly and personal.) Our education came hard and fast: intensive training sessions; group teaching of beginner classes (observed and videotaped with notes and comments); teaching twenty-five private lessons to New School piano students per week (intermittently observed); and weekly intermediate repertoire classes with occasional teaching by the interns (also with notes and comments given.) We were out from under the Clark/Goss microscope for Sunday afternoons only, plus Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter. Through lectures, teaching observations, videotape, direct experience in teaching, and collegial conversation, we picked up an astounding amount of information and training in nine hard-paced and exhausting months. The fine points stayed with me for several years. I recall well enough now how Frances taught, but what she taught, piece by piece, is harder to pin down.
One mark of Frances Clark's teaching style was her ability to be severe with her students at just the right time. She took the most emotionally difficult measures with her most talented students, relying on knowledge of their own ability to bring them through the ordeal. In my thesaurus I have found 133 words that include the word "severe" in their definitions, many of which apply to Miss Clark's methods: blistering, calamitous, distressful, draconian, doom, exacting, gauntlet (as in "run the..."), heart attack, hurricane, meltdown, nervous breakdown, scorching, sledgehammer, tough, unsparing, and wringer. But not one of these words, applied to F. C., describes actions that attack the person, only what the person has not yet done. Students with musical ability who did not work up to their potential were made variously to identify their areas of weakness and write out their own lesson assignments; practice on their own during the lesson and prove their progress before leaving; call their parents to be picked up because they were insufficiently prepared to take their expensive lesson with the country's leading piano teacher; or , worst of all, suffer the arctic glare of Frances Clark for one full hour because they could not yet do what she knew full well they could do. She never failed to push a student to tears who would benefit by it. A lesser teacher might hesitate to risk pushing high caliber students to emotional extremes in order to motivate them. Not Frances Clark. She knew what a student could and should do, and brought that student to the right point of development at the right time.
I would never tell Frances this, but to be honest, she had kind of a scary face. It was large and expressive, with all of a clown's frightfulness as well as humor. She could inspire most any reaction from her students, from fear to fun, with her face. When teaching The Music Tree to a student it appeared that she could force (and I mean "force," not just "inspire") the student to smile while playing. We were all taught that bizarre and useful skill. A student was not allowed to play "Happy-Go-Lucky" without feeling happy about it, and to achieve that we teachers had to learn to put on idiotic smiles on cue. And to get us to do that, Frances would grin like a maniac until we complied. It seems natural now - one of the many things I learned from Frances.
While writing this, I have been thumbing through Frances Clark's Questions and Answers: Practical Advice for Piano Teachers (The Instrumentalist Company, Northfield, IL, 1992). I recall that during my time at the New School Frances was asked several times by her students when she would write "her book," which we all knew would be the authoritative reference on piano pedagogy. She always answered that she wasn't ready to write such a book. Unknown to us acolytes, "the book" was undergoing authorship week by week, column by column, in Clavier magazine's "Questions and Answers." It was not the book we were expecting because it contained much of the same material that we were experiencing day by day at the New School. The clueless interns did not fathom that the column's practical advice was based in part on day-to-day results at the New School, and even on our part of the process. We were all essential elements of the proving grounds, the working model, of Miss Clark's educational philosophies and pragmatisms.
As I leaf through the book I find it contains information, most of which I now assume to be incontrovertible and obvious. I can no longer distinguish between that body of wisdom and training learned at the New School and the continual creation of teaching ideas that I think are my own. Of course I have assimilated my pedagogy instruction so thoroughly that I no longer "follow" the precepts I learned, but subconsciously use those precepts as the core of reading, technique and interpretation; but like a hybrid plant, though the fruit looks different, the roots have not changed.
I believe that my creative impulses in teaching stem almost entirely from a handful of sources, most of which are indebted to Frances Clark. And to whom was Frances Clark indebted for her inspirations? In her opening lectures to my pedagogy class she spoke of the educational philosophers that formed a basis for her thinking: Aristotle, Comenius, Whithead, and Dewey. The writings of these four great thinkers were the compass and map for her answers to Questions and Answers. Turning educational philosophy into practical piano pedagogy was her particular genius, and, with Louise Goss, she created not a method (she frequently denied having a method) but a body of literature, experience, wisdom (general and specific), and practical methodology that encompasses the teacher's art.
In the Spring of 1978 Frances was stung by a bee while shopping. Being highly allergic to bee stings, she fortunately made it back to her car and to the hospital, and narrowly lived through it. It was then that I started to think about her mortality. She seemed old then, and I have since wondered how she kept going these past twenty years. I was not surprised to hear of her death this year, but was always amazed to read in Louise's Christmas letters how well Frances endured and continued her work. I saw the pair once at a music teachers' convention in California a few years after my New School graduation, and I am not sure that Frances fully recognized me. But she made me feel as if she did, and I appreciated it. Frances, like a prime minister, contained and conveyed the grand concepts and hawk-like observations. Her teachings, philosophies and style have become such a part of me that I cannot separate the concepts from myself anymore. Thank you, Frances, and thank you Louise, for the year of learning, inspiration, exhaustion, desperation, and ultimately the single most challenging and inspirational year of my life.
Questions and Answers: Practical Advice for Piano Teachers by Frances Clark is available from The Instrumentalist Publishing Company, 200 Northfield Road, Northfield, Illinois, 60093. Phone: 847.446.8550.
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