The Lesson My Student Taught Me

When a friend asked last year if I could give piano lessons to her stepsons, 11 and 16, I was hesitant. I’d made a living as a pianist and songwriter for more than 30 years but had never taught piano. The thought of starting at the beginning with do-re-mi terrified me. Since I lived far away, lessons would have to be on Skype. My friend ultimately convinced me, after much hesitation, to do a three-month trial.

I’m very glad she did. Both boys have made impressive progress, and the elder son, Elias, now 17, just delivered a genuine Gershwin moment.

Our lessons are every two weeks and last 45 minutes. At our most recent one, I began by asking Elias to play the first movement of Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata,” a piece we’d recently taken up.

“I didn’t exactly work on the Beethoven,” he replied. (At least the kid’s honest, I thought.) When I asked what he had worked on, he said he’d found a YouTube piano video of “this really cool tune” from the popular Japanese anime series “Attack on Titan” and had practiced it to the exclusion of everything else. (Scott Joplin’s rag “The Entertainer” had also fallen by the wayside.) I went with the flow. “Can you play some of it for me?”

Elias began to perform, completely from memory, the entire two-minute-plus piece, which featured multiple key changes as well as some complicated left-hand passages reminiscent of J.S. Bach. I was blown away. I asked how he learned it so quickly. He said he had kept rewinding the YouTube video as necessary, copying the fingering. As for the complex Bach-like passage, he said, “I think I practiced that part a billion times.” I replied, “It shows.”

After learning his methodology, I said, “Elias, you’re just like George Gershwin!” Blank expression. I’d forgotten he was only 17. “Gershwin was a great American pianist and composer of the 1920s and ’30s. At age 10 he taught himself to play the piano by imitating the keys’ movements on a player piano at a friend’s home.”

I told him about piano rolls and how Gershwin would pump through them slowly and meticulously to learn the correct fingering for a piece. “You’ve just modernized George’s process by using YouTube,” I lauded. “Maybe someday you’ll write your own ‘Rhapsody in Blue’!”

Another blank expression. He’d never heard of it. I grabbed my copy of the piece, which happened to be lying in a stack of music books nearby, and played its famous motif. “That sounds kind of familiar. Isn’t that in a commercial?” Elias asked. “Yes. United Airlines has drummed it into our ears for decades.”

I promised to find the sheet music for the anime song by our next lesson so we could develop it together for future performance. The best lessons are reciprocal, ones in which the teacher also learns something from the student. Elias had learned about his Gershwin moment and in turn taught me about the beautiful music found in Japanese anime. “Nevertheless,” I said, ending the session, “I’d like to hear both the Beethoven and the Joplin in two weeks.” Even a proud teacher needs to crack the whip.

Mr. Opelka is a musical-theater composer-lyricist.