As a teacher, I have come to understand that I inherited something specific from the schools where I studied, and that one name sits near the center of it: Alexander Goldenweiser.
Who he was
Goldenweiser was a pianist, composer and teacher who spent his working life in Moscow. He studied at the Moscow Conservatory, where one of his teachers was Alexander Siloti, and he joined the Conservatory’s faculty not long after graduating. He is also remembered as a close friend of Leo Tolstoy, and he wrote a book of memories about that friendship. That detail tells you something about the kind of musician he was: a man who thought about music as part of a larger life, not as a set of finger exercises.
A line that runs back to Liszt
Siloti, in turn, had studied with Franz Liszt. So the chain, as it was handed to me, runs like this: Liszt, then Siloti, then Goldenweiser. From Goldenweiser it continues through two of his pupils. One was Tatiana Nikolayeva, the celebrated pianist. The other was Ilya Romanovich Klyachko, with whom I studied regularly during my years at the Central Music School. Tatiana Nikolayeva taught my formative teacher there, Manana Kandelaki, and Kandelaki taught me.
I want to be careful here. A lineage is not a certificate, and I do not offer it as proof that I play well. Plenty of people have famous teachers and play badly; plenty of fine musicians have no famous teachers at all. I tell you about the chain for a different reason: because it explains what I do when I teach you.
What actually gets handed down
You might imagine that a tradition hands down a list of rules: sit this way, curve your fingers that way, practice this exercise for this long. Some of that does travel along the chain. But rules are the least interesting part. They can be written in a book, and you can buy the book.
What cannot be written in a book is a way of listening. Every lesson I had in Moscow began with the sound. Not the notes, not the fingering, not even the rhythm, but the quality of the tone you had just made and whether you had meant it. A teacher in this tradition sits beside you and hears the thing you did not mean, the accent that fell by accident, the phrase that ran out of breath, the bass that swallowed the melody. Then she asks you to hear it too.
That is what I received from my teachers, and I suspect it is what they received from theirs. What a tradition hands down is a way of listening. Everything else follows from it.
Why this matters if you are teaching yourself
Most adults who come to me are working alone with a book, a video or an app. They worry that without a teacher in the room they cannot get the thing that matters. I understand the worry, and I do not dismiss it. But I also think the listening can be learned, at least in part, without anyone beside you, if you know what to listen for.
Here are three questions I ask my own students, and that you can ask yourself every time you practice:
- Did I mean that sound? Play one note and listen to it die away. Was it the sound you wanted, or merely the sound that happened?
- Which line is the voice? In almost every piece, one line sings and the rest accompany. Can you hear the singer over the accompaniment?
- Where does this phrase go, and where does it rest? Music breathes. If you play every bar with the same weight, you have played the notes but not the sentence.
None of these questions requires a teacher. They require patience, and the willingness to stop and listen instead of pushing on to the next line.
A habit to borrow from the tradition
One practical habit I carry from my schooling is to judge by ear, not by eye. Watching your hands tells you very little about whether a passage sounds good. So try this: play a phrase you know well, close your eyes, and listen as if someone else were playing it. Then play it again, changing one thing, perhaps making the top note a little softer or the last note of the phrase a little shorter. Did it improve? That small experiment is the whole tradition in miniature: hear, adjust, hear again.
You are part of a chain, too
It is easy to read about Liszt and Siloti and Goldenweiser and feel that they belong to a different world from your kitchen-table keyboard. I do not think they do. Every teacher in that chain began as a beginner, sat in front of a keyboard, and had to learn to hear what they were doing. The difference between a beginner and a master is mostly the depth of listening, and that deepens with attention, not with talent alone.
So when you sit down to practice tonight, you are not far from the tradition. You are doing the same small thing its greatest teachers asked of their pupils: play a sound, and listen to it honestly.
If you are teaching yourself and want a guide who learned this way, start with my free course. And when you are ready, record a short piece on your phone and send it to me for free written feedback. I read and listen to every recording myself.