‘You don’t give up. You just keep looking for new and different ways to improve.’

Source: Princeton Packet
Date Posted: Monday, December 5, 2011 3:43 PM EST
By Michele Alperin Special Writer

    Imagine a gifted piano teacher who combines humor, empathy, and a magnificent stage presence and who teaches not only her own students but piano teachers across the nation. Then consider the implications of a stroke that paralyzes the left side of her body and reduces her left hand to immobility.

   In March of the year she turned 60, master piano teacher Ingrid Jacobson Clarfield did not feel well after returning from a national conference of music educators in Toronto, and at 4 the next morning she collapsed from a stroke on the way to the bathroom. But the feistiness that helped her overcome the limitations imposed by the stroke was probably encapsulated in her reaction to the resident at the Princeton Medical Center who told her what had happened to her. She remembers yelling at him, “Don’t say something stupid like that.”

   What had begun as weakness on her left side progressed to paralysis, and she spent seven-and-a-half weeks in the St. Lawrence Rehabilitation Center. Instead of giving in to the despair she often felt, Ms. Clarfield gave herself six months to get back to her career at Westminster Choir College and be able to drive herself to work. And she succeeded.

   The career that awaited Ms. Clarfield’s return involved teaching a select group of piano students, teaching pedagogy at Westminster, doing lecture demonstrations at national conferences, offering master classes to piano teachers across the country, and writing books. Before the stroke she had also performed for 30 years on two pianos with her best friend, Lillian Livingston.

   A generally very upbeat person, Ms. Clarfield experienced horrible depression in the face of her stroke, but with the support of her husband Mel Mack, friends, and the therapists at the center, she was able to reawaken her native optimism. Every morning her husband came at 7 with a cup of coffee and helped her put in her contact lenses, and within the first week Yamaha sent her a keyboard that kept her brain engaged.

   ”Sometimes I would play with my right hand and imagine my left hand,” she says, “and sometimes friends would come and play the left hand.”

   Ms. Clarfield developed close relationships with her therapists at the center but was also very demanding. Setting daily goals, including the editing of her book “Keys to Artistic Performance,” she was enraged if someone showed up late for a therapy appointment, of which she had many — for example, physical therapy to learn to walk and occupational therapy to regain use of her left hand.

   When it came to recreational therapy, she put her foot down at knitting and arts and crafts and instead learned to type with one hand and put on makeup. She also kept firing speech therapists until she found one who offered activities relevant to her recovery: “I finally got a speech therapist who was smart enough to study my website. She said, ‘Name five things you need to pack to go to a conference.’”

   Paradoxically the hardest part for Ms. Clarfield was coming home. Still in a wheelchair, she remembers feeling overwhelmed and not being able to get out of bed without her husband’s help. Slowly but surely she shed the wheelchair and ultimately traded in the quad cane for a dozen canes in different colors that match her outfits.

   Before returning to work, she had to relearn driving, using a car equipped with a knob. “It’s a major thing if you have a stroke: Not to have to rely on other people to get you places,” she says.

   Luckily Westminster at Rider University was also willing to make the changes she would need to do her work.

   Ms. Clarfield has always known she wanted to be a musician. She first studied with her uncle, who died when she was 10, and then with Michael Field, part of a famous two-piano team, who ultimately decided to give up the piano for cooking. When she was playing concertos, and he was whipping soufflé in the background, she decided it was time to enter the Juilliard precollege program.

   At Juilliard she loved her fellow students, but her teacher was very negative. She recalls, “He literally told me I was the worst student at Juilliard and that he didn’t know how I was accepted.” Although he later explained that his goal had been to motivate her, what he left her with was a determination to be a different sort of teacher.

   Ms. Clarfield says, “There’s an old saying that teachers teach like they were taught. In my case, I decided to teach exactly the opposite of the way he taught.”

   Ms. Clarfield focuses on what is good in her students’ playing.

   ”It’s not false praise; it’s very specific,” she says. Her goal is to keep their egos intact while criticizing them musically. “I make sure they feel good about themselves in the process,” she says. “If a student’s ego is crushed, how are they going to project the character, mood, and love of the music?”

   From her teacher at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, John Perry, now a world-renowned pedagogue, she learned about balancing a demanding approach to music with sensitivity to individual needs.

   ”He was extremely critical to the most-minute detail, but I always knew he cared about me as an individual,” she says. “He knew I wasn’t a superstar, but I felt his confidence in me as a musician.”

   What she took with her was the importance of seeing each student as a whole person. “When that student walks out of the door, they have a whole life outside of piano, and you’ve got to keep that in mind,” says Ms. Clarfield.

   After earning a master’s degree in music from the Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester, she taught technique and gave private and group lessons in a sabbatical position SUNY-Geneseo.

   Even at the beginning of her career Ms. Clarfield recognized the value of preparing her students to perform. “It is about sharing their love of music,” she says. Contrasting her young musicians to children interested in sports, she adds, “Music is their way of expressing themselves; it is about showing who they are.”

   Whereas she recognizes the importance of teaching basic technique — how to produce sound — she emphasizes that correct technique is not sufficient for performance. “For me music is all about expressing the emotions of music: What is the composer trying to say? Does a piece reflect joy, sadness, drama, intimacy?”

   Referring to the documentary about her life and music, “Take a Bow: The Ingrid Clarfield Story,” she continues, “What you see in the movie is that I’m a firm believer that you have to project physically for the audience the emotions of the music. You can play all the right notes, but if audience doesn’t feel the humanity in Haydn, or the drama and orchestral sound in a Beethoven sonata, or the imagery in Debussy ... It’s much more than just the right notes, and it needs to begin at the very early stages of learning.”

   Ms. Clarfield first achieved national renown in 1990 when her student Damien Dixon won the junior performance competition at the Music Teachers National Association. “When you have a national winner,” she says, “everybody goes, ‘Wow’!”

   In fact, his imaginative performance so impressed a teacher in Calgary, Alberta, that he invited Ms. Clarfield to a big conference to share her techniques with other piano teachers. She returned often and started a summer program there than she did for 11 years.

   By now, she has worked in more than 100 cities around North America, either doing lecture recitals on a variety of topics like teaching sonatas, preparing students for auditions, and musical expression, or doing master classes for students of varying ages and levels before an audience. “I want to make the audience part of the process,” she says. “They are all teachers and have opinions. It’s not about me; it’s about the music and the kid.”

   After moving to New Jersey in 1972, Ms. Clarfield taught for a few years at the Monmouth Conservatory and did music therapy for 10 years at the Children’s Psychiatric Center in Eatontown, where she had developed her own program. In 1982 she came to the Westminster Conservatory of Music at Rider University, which she loves.

   ”I’m truly blessed to be at a school where every day I get to do exactly what I love to do — working with talented young musicians.”

   As she has won back her career, Ms. Clarfield has overcome many challenges — learning to travel alone; doing lecture demonstrations with another pianist playing the left hand; teaching a master class alone — and she continues to chart her tiny steps forward. Just over the last three months, for example, she has been able to turn her left hand enough to clap and actually produce a noise when she does so, a hard-won improvement after three years of pounding her cane.

   ”You don’t give up,” she says. “You just keep looking for new and different ways to improve.”

Ingrid Clarfield presents a master class with exceptionally talented young pianists in the intimate Recital Hall in Jacobs Music Company, 2540 Brunswick Pike , Lawrence, on Saturday, Dec. 3 from 2:30 to 4:30 p.m. The program combines a concert with a musical seminar and recital. Students of six highly-admired New Jersey piano teachers will perform. The young artists being presented are students of prominent regional piano teachers Larissa Korkina, Julia Lam, Phyllis Lehrer, Chiu-Tze Lin, Lillian Livingston and Veda Zuponcic.

General admission tickets are $20; student tickets are $10. Space is limited and reservations and tickets are required. For more information on this and other performances at Jacobs Music Company in Lawrence, call 609-434-0222.