Acknowledgements

I will be forever indebted to my own teachers, whose wisdom permeates anything useful I may have to say. All the thoughts and ideas about practicing offered in these pages are my own genuine expressions; the tools described are the ones I have used myself all my life and that I explore daily with my students. But given the long, unbroken chain of transmission from piano teacher to student across the generations, who can claim ownership of any of it? Practice skills are collective wisdom! We put everything we are taught into the blender, so to speak. We throw our own ideas, energy & personality into the mix…. we leave aside whatever isn’t helpful for us; we introduce new material from all kinds of sources…. time passes, we grow and learn and change, the blender blends, and at some point, with any luck, we honor our teachers by putting the whole thing to good use. And by passing it on.

My particular musical lineage comes to me through my loved & deeply respected teachers (in reverse chronological order) Yoheved Kaplinsky at Peabody, where I earned by M.M. and D.M.A.; Robert Shannon at Oberlin; Robert McDonald at the North Carolina School of the Arts & the Taos School of Music; Marian Hahn, also at NCSA; and the one and only Margaret Mueller, my childhood teacher and a true force of nature. My father, pianist Clifton Matthews, unquestionably belongs on this list as well. Upon reading these pages, perhaps they would hear echoes of their own teaching (and their own teachers’ teaching…), or perhaps (who knows?) they would be horrified—but I assure you that each of them has had a hand in it all the same! And: my teachers in the broader sense also include every one of my own students. Thank you for letting me experiment on you over the years! Thank you for your energy & perseverance & friendship; thank you for making it possible for me to spend my days the way I do, with music and with each of you. I am the luckiest piano teacher on the face of the earth.