I remember her, sitting with perfect posture in her Queen Anne chair across the room from the rosewood Steinway. She was statuesque with a tousle of short brown hair and piercing eyes. Her features were classic, almost aristocratic. Nobody could ever tell how old she was. We only knew that she was a war widow before she married Donald. She had a vaguely New England manner of speaking, very refined and proper.

My piano lessons were technically a half an hour. They usually ran on until the next student arrived, sometimes 45 minutes or longer. With my wire-bound book balanced on her lap she would take notes while listening to me play. She always seemed to write with a dull pencil, periodically pausing to moisten the point with her tongue before continuing. I vividly remember her handwriting, and eagerly read every word she wrote for me. There was a certain sound her pencil would make as it roughly moved against pages of my book. From where she sat, she could see my hands at the keyboard. I could always feel her watching me.

Every so often, Patricia would lift a slender hand and trace a balletic arc through the air. It would follow the shape of the phrase I was playing. More accurately, it is I who would follow her gesture with my playing, coaxed as if by a fine conductor. I would glance up to see her face upturned, eyes closed, and eyebrows arched approvingly. Somehow, she saw and heard something in my playing that was worth her time and effort. Her faith in me was a deep honor. In my time as her student, I worked hard to please her by playing my best.

Not everything I did pleased her. When my efforts missed the mark, she would shake her head and express a kind of detached dismay. With an air of weary nonchalance, she would let me know when my playing was clumsy, unprepared, rushed, or lacking the intelligence she expected from me. She could tell when I had not practiced. In those anguished moments, there was nowhere for me to hide. She would lower her chin and glare coldly in my direction. It was as if she were peering over the tops of her glasses – except Patricia don’t wear any. Certain remarks I remember most vividly.

“My DARLING, you absolutely played that poor movement as though you were born in Milpitas.”

“You played that like a house afire.”

When I went to her the first time, she asked me what I would play. I brazenly attempted a Chopin Mazurka I had sloppily taught myself to play by ear. I was too naive to know just how embarrassed I should have felt. When I finished the A section, she abruptly interrupted me. She told me I had a lot of nerve, coming in like that. But despite my faux pas, she accepted me into her studio because I was musical and smart. Early on, she said I was a pretty girl who happened to play a little piano. But she wanted me to be a fine pianist who happened to be a beautiful woman. Such elegant pronouncements marked the beginning of my real education. I was seventeen years old when I walked into her house on D Street.

Patricia could be brutal. She selected impossibly difficult finger interdependence drills from a tattered book by Ernst von Dohnányi. Her methods and repertoire choices were esoteric, certainly in comparison to other teachers. The repertoire I learned was not the sort of pop-classic fare you would hear at parties. Rather, I was to learn music by Vincent Persichetti, the three Preludes by Gershwin, and pieces from Grieg’s Lyriche Sctücke. I told her that I wanted to learn Debussy’s “Clair de Lune. ” She relented, but would only allow it after I memorized the other three movements from Suite Bergamasque. When my father complained that I wasn’t playing enough Chopin, she had me learn the posthumous Etudes. He refrained from making any further requests. I was content to learn whatever music she wanted me to learn, including gems from the two-piano repertoire, a body of work in which she was an expert.

Patricia taught me to listen to – and take an interest in – a diversity of compositional styles. She insisted I regard music as a language, and that my goal was to be fluent. As such, I should be able to read, write, express an opinion, and tell a joke. I believe this awareness had much to do with my desire to compose, which I would do later.

Tomorrow I will continue my remembrances of Patricia.