I learnt today that my first piano teacher has died.
I had not noticed this post, I do not read the forums as much as I used to. Sorry to hear that news, but I am sure her spirit lives on in your music.
In 1955, two years after starting school, one of the teachers, who taught piano privately, sent a note to my parents saying she thought I should take piano lessons from somebody and that she was available. Norma Jacobson was an extraordinary teacher of children and one of the few genuine music lovers I have ever known. I don't remember her teaching me anything conventionally; there were no scales, very little discipline, yet in a few months all her pupils were playing pretty difficult pieces. During the walks to her place from school we had amazing philosophical discussions, and on arrival she gave me a heap of marmite sandwiches and more talk about music, before finally doing some playing. She had no qualifications, and at one stage, faced with embarrassing public contrasts between the playing of her pupils and theirs, registered teachers enviously tried to legally stop her teaching piano.
I gave up piano altogether at ten, sick of performing, which I hated with a vengeance and still do. It wasn't until the first year of secondary school, after hearing Rhapsody In Blue and learning it for myself, that I sought another teacher. Coincidentally, I ran into Norma at the shops and it was she who introduced me to the composer, Llewelyn Jones, my only other music teacher.
Over twenty-five years later I traced Norma, and my wife, my son and I saw her regularly until her death in 1986. She always told me it was a waste of time my taking further lessons from anybody, and that I should ignore all convention and just develop my own musical language and keyboard technique. She was right, and how I wish I had heeded her and ignored more musicians than I did !
I owe Llewelyn Jones a great deal in the specific, technical sense, of course, but the underlying, intangible spirit, the insurmountable drive of creation as an end, the all conquering love of music, I think I absorbed in no small measure from that perceptive and persevering woman.