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Mrs. Shafer's Piano Studio 1934 – 1997 Marie Shafer, 1911–1998, who taught piano in her living room in Lincoln, Nebraska, for sixty-three years The Studio · Recital Programs · Former Students Remember If you took piano lessons in Lincoln at any time between Franklin Roosevelt's first term and Bill Clinton's second, there is a fair chance you took them from Marie Shafer, or that somebody in your family did. She taught about 1,200 students in all, by her own count, which was kept in pencil in a ledger in the drawer of the telephone table. She taught them one at a time, in her living room, on an upright and a grand that stood side by side under the front window. Mrs. Shafer stopped teaching in 1997, when her hands finally gave out, and she died last December at the age of 87. I was her student from 1963 to 1974, from the age of seven until I left for college, and I have been a piano teacher myself, here in Lincoln, for twenty years. Every week, at some point in a lesson, I hear her voice come out of my mouth. This page is my thank-you to her, and a place for the rest of us to gather. My name is Lori Honea. If you were one of her students too, please read the Former Students Remember page, and then write to me and add yours. The Studio The "studio" was the front room of a white frame house with a deep porch. You came in the side door, not the front, and you sat on the bench in the hall with your music on your lap until the student before you was finished. You could hear every note of their lesson through the wall, which was a strong argument for practicing, since they would be hearing yours too. The two pianos. The upright was an old black one she bought secondhand in 1934, the year she started, with yellowed keys and a sound like a schoolroom. Beginners started on the upright. The grand was a walnut Baldwin baby grand her husband, Jesse, bought her in 1952. You were moved to the grand when she decided you were ready, and not one day before, and there was no asking. I was moved to the grand in the fall of 1967, when I was eleven, and I went home and told my mother it was the best day of my life, and I meant it. The metronome. A wooden pyramid on top of the upright, with a brass pendulum and a weight that slid up and down. She would set it going without a word, and you had to find the beat and get on it, like jumping onto a moving merry-go-round. If you rushed, she would lean over and tap the top of the metronome with one finger, once, and that was all she ever had to do. The gold-star chart. On the kitchen door, which you could see from the piano bench, there was a chart ruled in red ink with every student's name down the side and the weeks of the school year across the top. If you brought back your practice card signed by a parent for six days of practice that week, you got a gold star, the kind that came in little boxes from the dime store and that you licked. Ten stars in a row and you picked something from the cigar box: a pencil with a treble clef on it, a plastic bust of Beethoven, a bookmark. I still have two of the Beethovens. Nobody, in sixty-three years, ever got a star they hadn't earned. The butterscotch. A cut-glass dish of butterscotch candies sat on top of the grand. You got one at the end of your lesson. Never before, because of sticky fingers, and never more than one, though the little ones were allowed one for each hand if they'd had a hard day. The smell of butterscotch is the smell of that room for me, and I suspect for a thousand other people. The fingernails. Her most famous rule. She checked your hands at the start of every lesson, palms down, like a school nurse. If she could see white over the ends of your fingers, they were too long, because long nails click on the keys and keep you from playing on the pads of your fingers. There were nail clippers in the drawer of the telephone table for that purpose. Every teenage girl in Lincoln who ever wanted long nails for a dance had to negotiate with Mrs. Shafer first. She never once gave in. How She Taught She was not a fancy teacher and she would have hated to be called one. Her method came down to a few things, done every week for sixty-three years:
Every May, on a Sunday afternoon, every one of her students played in the spring recital at Maple Grove Methodist Church, a few blocks from her house, on the church's grand piano. The youngest played first and the seniors played last, and the program was typed by Mrs. Shafer on her own typewriter and run off on the church's mimeograph machine, so that it came out purple and smelled wonderful. Everybody bowed. You walked to the piano, you bowed, you sat, you counted one silent measure in your head before you began, and when you were done you stood up and bowed again whether you had played well or badly. She said the bow was a promise to the audience and a thank-you afterward, and you owed them both either way. Afterward there was red punch and cookies in the fellowship hall, and Jesse, who could not play a note, stood behind the punch bowl in a bow tie every single year until he died in 1980. She sat in the front row with a pencil and a program on her lap, and she marked every performance with a little sign of her own. Nobody ever learned what the signs meant. When her niece, Rosie Jiron, cleared out the house this spring, she found a shoebox of those programs going back to 1936, and she let me borrow a few. I've typed up three of them, from 1968, 1973 and 1981, on the Recital Programs page. See if you're on one. Her Last Years Arthritis came for her hands slowly, starting in her seventies. She cut back to a few students and then to a handful, and she kept teaching the way she always had, only now she demonstrated less and described more. Her last spring recital was in May of 1997. She was 86. That summer she told her last few families that her hands had had enough, and she found every one of her students another teacher. Three of them came to me. She lived in the house another year and a half, with Rosie coming by every day, and she died in the hospital in December 1998, peacefully, after a short illness. At the funeral at Maple Grove, six of her former students played, one from each decade from the 1940s to the 1990s. I played for the 1970s, the Chopin Prelude in E minor, which she taught me when I was fifteen. I counted one measure before I began. What I Kept I teach thirty students in my own living room, and I use newer method books than she did, and I don't own a mimeograph machine. But here is what came with me from her front room:
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Were you a Shafer student? Write to me: [email protected] Last updated September 21, 1999 |