Jeremy Bird was eleven years old when he joined Mrs. Clarfield’s teaching studio in June of 2024. Though by this point he’d only been studying piano formally for two years—notably with Daniel Haiduc, one of Mrs. Clarfield’s own students, his ear for music was apparent from the day he sat at the piano, aged five, to replicate, note for note, a Debussy piece his mother had been noodling on the piano a few minutes before.

Unable to find a single piano teacher he connected with—and boy did his parents try—Jeremy ended up exploring his passion on his own, refusing to read music and playing everything by ear.

Then, after moving to Princeton aged 9, he met Daniel, whose extraordinary talent at the piano inspired Jeremy to ask him for lessons. Daniel’s equally astonishing talent as a “student teacher” helped Jeremy, in two short years, make up for lost time.

Incidentally, it was through Jeremy’s performance on the clarinet that he met Mrs. Clarfield. Daniel and Jeremy had been working on a Mendelssohn clarinet and piano chamber arrangement which she’d offered to coach. For fun, knowing Jeremy was studying piano with Daniel, Mrs. C then and there asked him to play piano for her. This led to the invitation to audition for her studio a few months later.

On the drive home following his first audition-lesson, Jeremy was very emotional. His parents asked him if it was because he thought he hadn’t performed as well as he’d hoped, or if it was simply a nervous aftershock. It took a while for him to finally admit it was because, in Mrs. C, he felt he’d met the teacher he’d been looking for his whole life.

When Jeremy is not at the piano or playing clarinet with the Greater Princeton Youth Orchestra, he’s working on his scriptwriting and filmmaking.