Three Piano Teachers Keep The Music Flowing

Adam Matlock during a celebration of the Bitsie Clark Fund for Artists earlier this year. YouTube. 

Adam Matlock’s nine-year old student Thayer straightened his back and raised his hands over the piano. The scales rang through Zoom as his fingers began to move.

Thayer is a student at Pine Point School in Stonington. Matlock is a music teacher in Hamden. During COVID-19, he has had to find a new rhythm with online teaching. From piano and chorus to band and orchestra, teachers across New Haven have made the online pivot and are teaching remotely through Zoom.

Each student and teacher has to find “the story that the piece has to offer,” Matlock said.

During a recent piano lesson over Zoom, Matlock tried to convey to his student the emotionality of Andrew Markow's “Teapot Invention,” but found it challenging. Sometimes the audio cut out when there was a sudden rush of sound. Sometimes the video and the audio glitched at the same time. Despite such technical hurdles, the student still managed to make music.

“The social aspect of being a teacher … feels a little more formal and structured in a way,” Matlock said.

Matlock at Cafe Nine in 2018. Brian Slattery is pictured in the background. Lucy Gellman File Photo.

In a recent lesson, his words echoed as the two worked on a piece. Sometimes when Thayer brought his hands to the lower range of the piano, the chords rumbled over Zoom even though the notes were played staccato. While climbing higher in octave, every other note seemed to disappear because of the connection. The flow, when not interrupted by technical difficulties, danced between the left and right hand.

During COVID-19, Matlock has found new students at his Zoom doorstep. Since March 12, he has been teaching 15 students remotely. Four of them are completely new. He is currently working with students on an individual basis.

He’s also balancing his own musicianship and career as a composer, vocalist, and pianist. He has been streaming shows, participating in the Composers’ Choir, and has performed live for a virtual festival. He said that the musician community has started to put its foot into the Twitch platform, which is mainly for video game streamers. Matlock is also currently working on an opera about the 1921 Tulsa race massacre in the city’s Greenwood neighborhood.

Matlock said that remote work can be difficult as a teacher. When he begins with a student, he sees their faces on camera a single time, before working to align the camera with their hands and keyboard. After that single time, he sees only their fingers on the keys.

“You still get to know the student and the person behind the playing, even if it’s just a different experience of it,” he said.

Making The Remote Pivot Work

Isabella Mendes. Mike Franzman Photo.

As she teaches from her home, pianist Isabella Mendes has used the global pandemic and technology to broaden her teaching style.

Mendes said using a program called Open Broadcaster Software (OBS) has helped her immensely. It allows her piano students to see both her face and her hands on the piano over Zoom. The software is a virtual camera program that can be used in Zoom.

“Now online, we are very conscious of our own self image,” she said, referring to seeing oneself in the camera on Zoom.

Mendes said that pandemic-enforced creativity has helped her become a better teacher. She adds in new techniques to find what works best with each student. She said she may bring those newly learned skills back to in-person teaching in the future.

Mendes said she is still trying to individualize her lessons over Zoom. For some students, she has created hand signals to try and coordinate communication over Zoom. It may be the wave of a hand to grab her student’s attention, or a gesture to signal for a softer or louder tone.

She also uses a small thimble to signal to her students that it is time to transition to the next part of the lesson—for instance from theory to warm-ups. She thought of this idea because more than once has the audio not cooperated, cutting her or her students off.

“You don’t have the same energy in the room that you would in person,” she said.

Cautiously Back To In-Person

Part-time private piano teacher Jane Hanselman, meanwhile, has cautiously returned to in-person teaching. Hanselman’s students range from University of New Haven undergraduates to some in their 70s. In addition to teaching, she has served as an ESL (English as a Second Language) instructor at the Connecticut Institute for Refugees and Immigrants (CIRI).

Hanselman said that the transition to Zoom was harder for a number of her older students, as well as for those who had dependents. One of her older students discontinued lessons because she did not want to figure out all of the technology. The student has children at home, and found it difficult to focus and find time for her lessons.

At the beginning of this semester, Hanselman went back to her in-person piano teaching. She keeps several COVID-19 protocols, such as maintaining six-feet distance from the piano and from her student, masking up, and only touching the piano if necessary. If she does, she still stays at the opposite end of the piano from her student.

When she was teaching over Zoom and FaceTime with her students, she said she had a difficult time trying to have her students increase or decrease their volume while playing. “Coaxing them to play louder, and louder without being able to demonstrate” was one of her common challenges, she said. 

She added that her background in TV production helped her troubleshoot online teaching. It taught her to have pre-lesson trial runs with her students to adjust the mic position, where the best camera placement would be, and overall technical help.

“I’m all for anything that keeps students interested and wanting to play until this is over,” Hanselman said.

This piece comes to the Arts Paper through the Fall 2020 cohort of the Youth Arts Journalism Initiative (YAJI), a program of the Arts Council of Greater New Haven. This year, YAJI has gone virtual. Read more about the program here or by checking out the "YAJI" tag. Emma Martin Mooney is a sophomore at Wilbur Cross High School. She has blogged about her remote school experience here.