My father's students

I have been getting emails full of praise for my father from his former students.  They are eloquent in their grief and in their recounting of the worlds of great literature that my father introduced them to.  They were as deeply affected by his charm and kindness as by his erudition.  It's good to know that he transmitted his excitement and enthusiasm for knowledge to so many people.  We all have a wider influence than we know upon the lives of others. 

As a teacher myself, I am acutely aware of the responsibility I have to nurture the gifts of my students and to mentor them.  I have viewed their successes with satisfaction, knowing the important role I played in their development as artists.  I remember my father's pride at being the advisor to such writers as Anne Beattie and Elaine Scarry.  He must have felt a pang of envy at times, because the one thing he was unable to accomplish was writing a book.  I believe that he was paralyzed by the inability to write a first draft--he was a perfectionist and wanted his work to spring fully formed from his mind like Athena from the head of Zeus.

After writing my first book, I realized that I had accomplished what my father failed to do.
Somehow, I overcame my fear of failure and worked doggedly at draft after draft, occasionally reluctant to include the suggestions of my editor.  I spent every spare moment of 2011 writing.  Whenever I am tempted by the idea of writing a second book on improvisation, I remind myself that the amount of work required would take me the better part of a year to complete.  Though maybe the second book is easier, like giving birth to the second baby.  Sometimes I want to quit performing entirely and devote myself to composition and writing about music.

Dad's work required a certain type of performance--some teachers (and I am not one of them) take the stage as they address their classes.  They challenge, bait, provoke, pontificate.  They are very much like the conductor of an orchestra.  These are the born teachers.  My father was one.  I am not.  I had teaching thrust upon me with no formal training in it.  I had no advanced degrees.  Fortunately, I had a long performing career by the time I applied to Berklee, which trumped my lack of formal academic credentials.

An impatient person by nature, I had to cultivate patience for years.  It is my firm belief that no teaching can be effective without patience.  And so I am loath to give up on any student, even one who does not practice and skips class.  I have seen many students respond to my approach.  The courses I teach are generally not inspirational--I have more success with teaching lessons one on one.  My manner is not flamboyant, but I convey my love of music to each student.

I wonder if the ability to teach is inborn.  Not everyone is a good teacher.  I think I inherited some of my father's teaching genius, but I am not in his league.  To this day, students from 30 years ago and more remember him and mourn his loss.  This is a major achievement.  He never boasted about it, and I suspect he did not value it.  He once told me he felt fraudulent because he never wrote "the book" and because he got his PhD from Columbia without taking his oral exam (he did write a thesis, which I have been unable to find among his papers.)  He was so nervous that he developed severe stomach trouble (ulcers?) and since he was so highly regarded by  his professors he was excused from orals.  But this hardly constitutes fraud.  After all, it was they who made the decision.
He had to live in the shadow of Lionel Trilling and Jacques Barzun, his teachers.  Even so, he was universally regarded as brilliant and as a star teacher.  But like Leonard Bernstein, who did not value his greatest achievement, West Side Story, because it isn't "serious" music (and he wanted to be another Mahler) my father never realized that being a great teacher is just as great an achievement as writing a book.

My piano teacher, Charlie Banacos, was a brilliant jazz player and prodigy who gave up performing while still young and devoted his life entirely to teaching.  He never wrote a book, but his many students became his disciples and used his teaching methods, keeping the tradition alive.  He said he didn't have to "prove" anything to anyone, and refused every plea to perform in a concert or at a club.  Charlie was a genius and he probably knew it, though he never acted conceited and certainly never boasted about his teaching.
I wish Dad had been more like Charlie--proud of his status as a great teacher.

I hope Dad didn't feel like a fraud when he died.  The nature of his final decline was such that I was unable to discuss serious matters with him.  I told him many times that not only wasn't he a fraud,  he was an exceptional teacher whose students will never forget him.