Milton Stern: March 6, 1929 - September 29, 2023
"Why don't you try Dr. Stern's class? He's good with young people."
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| El Patron restaurant, Altadena. |
This was spoken to me by Henry Jackson, professor of piano at Cal State University Los Angeles, who resembled Cheswick from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. He'd just listened to me struggle through Chopin's Revolutionary Etude. He probably didn't know what to make of me: I didn't resemble a typical classical piano student. I had long hair halfway down my back tied in a ponytail, torn jeans and a Pignose t-shirt.
When I showed up at Milton Stern's master class, I saw a man with a silky, partly unbuttoned shirt, a gold necklace in his chest hair, gold rings with opals, sporty glasses, a mustache, a rich tan…basically, a 70's swinger. And a New York accent.
But he made me feel welcome, invited me to play my etude, and had this to say when I was done: "I'm disappointed in you."
"I’m disappointed, not so much over how you played, but for what you aren't doing with those wonderful hands of yours."
He wanted me to scoot the piano bench much farther away from the piano because of my long arms. "You're what we call in Yiddish a lang lokshn…a long noodle." Then, addressing the girls, "You need to sit where your bikini underwear meets the edge of the bench," producing giggles. "Look," he said, sitting his butt all the way back on the piano bench. He picked up a score and started leafing through it. "I'm on the toilet, reading my magazine, hum, hum.. (the girl next to me made silent convulsing laughter in her hands) …oh! I dropped it!" The "magazine" fell to the floor. "Let me pick that up…oof, ugh!" and he made a display of not being able to pivot from where he's sitting to reach it. "I can’t reach sitting this far back. Sitting on the edge of the bench gives you the degree of freedom to transfer your weight to the different parts of the keys."
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| with Greg Sandell. At Ellen Kravitz home, ca 1978 |
He then taught the rest of the Stern piano doctrine, passed down to him from the teachings of Isabella Vangerova and Josef and Rosina Lhévinne: use the weight of the forearm, the wrist as a shock absorber, position your hand in a high arch, straight fingers from the knuckle, and strike the key like a hammer from the knuckle down, cushioning it with the pad of your fingertip.
He demonstrated for us what playing with weight could accomplish. He played us Ravel's virtuoso piece Alborada del gracioso, bringing such power and savagery to the recap that the whole grand piano, suspended on its wheeled piano dolly, oscillated up and down. Another was Liszt's Sonetto del Petrarca 104, with its alternating passages of thunderous chords and soft, delicate virtuoso flourishes. Everyone who has heard him play 104 has never forgotten it.
When some of the other students gave impressive performances of virtuoso piece like Prokofiev 3rd Sonata, the Beethoven "Tempest" Sonata, and the Chopin Scherzo in C# Minor, I began to wonder what I was doing there. These kids had to have started at a much younger age than me, driven by a parent to practice for hours a day. But he believed in me, I began to take private lessons with him, and I gained one of the greatest mentors and friends a person could have.
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| with Andrew Levin and Opus 1 at Cal State LA. For a performance of Mozart Piano Concerto Piano Concerto No. 17 in G major, KV. 453 |
He taught brilliantly because he cared about his students and wanted to nurture their souls through self-discovery. He was a great egalitarian. Whether you came from Pasadena blue blood or the east LA barrio, he didn't see class. He looked for your goodness or helped you find it. If you were a closed book to him, he’d extend you credit that you had beauty inside, soon to be revealed.
I'd run into him in the halls of the Music Department when I was on a practice break, wearing his leather jacket and carrying his small valise that he called his Ditty Bag, leaving for home. "Walk with me, hero," he said, and we took the stairs to the parking lot. We'd chat a bit about our last lesson before I returned to the practice rooms, or he'd give me a lift to my apartment in his Datsun 280Z. He'd tell me of professors who were his friends, and it was through those conversations that I came to take Art History with Arlene Quint, Yoga with Pat White and Balkan line dancing with Dan Brown. Then he'd drive up to his house in the Altadena hills where I imagined he carried on some kind of extraordinary life.
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| with Greg Sandell and Andrew Levin. Stern home, Altadena |
The words sensual and sensuality seemed to permeate much of his conversation. Yes, some of it was straight up about sex, but there was a bigger picture: his belief that the most human experience possible was to experience life through sensations, whether physical, mental, literary, or musical. This was not the kind of message you typically got from a piano teacher. Most of them taught you to transmit only what was written on the page and nothing about yourself. As a musician who himself was taught by some of the great turn of the century romantic pianists, Milton Stern devoted himself to teaching students how to use their own living being to bring Chopin or Beethoven's humanity from the page, through their feelings, and out to the listener to hear.
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| Family photo |
Milton identified to an uncanny degree with the psychological state of students in their late teens. Perhaps he remembered the struggle of his own adolescence all too well: sex is on your mind, and, being not much older than a child, you crave entertainment and laughter. "Grab their hearts, and their minds will follow," was a favorite phrase of his.
Sensuality could be savage, as he showed in Ravel's Alborada del gracioso, or even painful, as he would show in Renaissance paintings of Saint Sebastian, pierced by arrows. Where I saw him to have an oddly melancholy look, Stern relished it as an expression of pain combined with exquisite pleasure. Or he'd urge you to listen and experience the orgasmic-sounding passages of Wagner's Tristan or Die Walküre, Mahler's Symphony No 2 or Charles Griffes’ Pleasure Dome of Kubla Kahn.
To express these things as a pianist, you needed strong piano fundamentals. One thing he talked about was the Long Line, the ability to shape a melody like a singer or violinist. He could play a melody with gradations of color and dynamics that made your playing sound black-and-white and cardboard. But if you watched his hand…with the silk sleeve, tan and the opal-encrusted rings…it would do a kind of ballet that was an analogue of the sound he attained. You could almost get his sound by imitating his hand. The movement was so innate for him that when you watched him learn a new piece or sight-read, you'd see that his “stage 1” was figuring out the motion of his hand. Memorizing the notes and fingering took a back seat. Most of us do the opposite.
Long Line, like the ability to "swing" in jazz, is a gift, and one that came naturally to him. He could be appalled when you clunked down on a note at the end of a phrase that was supposed to taper away. He'd compare it to a beautiful woman with flawlessly applied makeup, grotesquely ruined by a tiny lipstick smear. To him, clunking that note made about as much sense as holding down the pedal through several changes of harmony…who does that? To this day, I still work at finding the Long Line. One might not have the gift, but one can learn it.
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| with Andrew Levin in Houston, for a performance of Bortkiewicz Piano Concerto No 1 |
A lesson with Milton was seldom boring. People who walked by his studio, which happened to be a highly trafficked area near the Music Department administrative office, would sometimes be treated to unusual sounds. When he was coaching you to solve a problem, and you were trying and retrying to get it right, he resembled a frenzied theater director, shouting louder and louder in between your attempts, “No! … More legato! …Yuck, wrong notes! …Too slow! …Flutter the pedal!” and finally yelling in your face "THANK YOU!!" with mock passive-agressiveness, when you at last got it right.
He'd share interesting secrets of transcendent virtuoso technique. He'd show you how to strike a big chord "with a glancing blow", so as to ring the piano like a giant bell, loud and powerful, but not harsh. Chords could be made to sparkle by arpeggiating them from the top very fast, with no one the wiser. An octaves passage with large leaps could be helped with the technique he called "blind octaves."
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| with Greg Sandell and Paul Van Ness. Cal State LA, ca. 1980 |
More than anything else, it was his humor was that grabbed our hearts. He had the knack of a Victor Borge to entertain at the piano. If a student made an excuse, he'd run to the piano and played a melancholy song…we heard it dozens of times without knowing what it was…smiling ear to ear, his eyebrows going up and down like Groucho Marx. He cracked himself up with that each time. Eventually I found out it was "Nobody Knows the Troubles I Seen."
He told the story of his friend at Oberlin who botched the lightning-bolt opening of Chopin's Sonata No 3 in B minor landing on a a very off-key F-natural instead of the written F-sharp. "He never recovered."
He'd demonstrate how to get a gentle touch, by negative example. He'd start the left hand of Chopin's C minor Nocturne and create a romantic and elegant atmosphere. While keeping a detached, refined demeanor, he would rain down unforgiving sledgehammer blows for the melody.
There was Beethoven's Sonata in G, Op 31 No 1, which has unique syncopations between left and right hands in the first movement. He'd play it, as written, joking, "the poor guy can't keep his hands together!"
He would play the 3rd variation of the 2nd movement of Beethoven's Sonata in C minor op 111 and we laughed over how Beethoven had anticipated boogie-woogie by a century or more.
Some of his salty humor came from his days in the Air Force. One expression was a warning to be careful, or "you'll be screwed, blued, and tattooed." Another piece of advice was to be wary of venturing more information than you need to. With Rabbinical eyebrows and a Brooklyn/Yiddish accent, he said, "Nobody's pulling your tongue out of your mouth to tell the truth."
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| with Greg Sandell and Patrick Lindley. Stern home, Altadena. |
If you were preparing a sensual, emotional piece for a recital, he'd smile and tell you, "there won't be a dry pair of pants in the house." He'd describe a fast, savage piece as "balls out". He had a variation on this if a piece was even faster and more savage. Then it would be "balls flying in all sorts of directions."
He spoke of composers like they were pals at the golf course: "Dickie Wagner," "John Brahms," and "Dickie Strauss." He told us that as a young man Brahms played piano in brothels and was adored by the girls (supposedly).
When he had to endure an emotionless performance, it was "death warmed over." When students came to him with impressive levels of technique already, but who were taught it to the exclusion of feelings, they were "fingerbusters." On the other hand, a fingerbuster could also be the description of a difficult piece. "Beethoven's Waldstein, that's a real fingerbuster."
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| with David Lowenkron, 93rd Birthday party. Stern home, Altadena |
One the qualities that I especially loved was his questing, exploratory nature. He was searching for anything that might hold the key to a world of insight and understanding. He was always sharing a discovery he made with me, perhaps a book he found life-changing, or a obscure painter with an unusual style.
He was excited by the possibilities for personal transformation that psychotherapy could bring, both as a patient and as a lay practitioner to people he thought he could help. He was open to making piano study a personal journey as well, and brought compassion and empathy to turmoils experienced by his young adult students. You could turn to him in a crisis and he'd welcome it.
For a time he took up a mission to make a cross-disciplinary synthesis of Music and Sports Medicine. For piano works of virtuoso difficulty, the risks of tendinitis and carpal tunnel syndrome through overexertion were just as "athletic" a concern as avoiding and recovering from a football knee injury. He had noticed that problems often started with tension in the thumb, and he coined the phrase "the thumb is the key to the wrist." For years he had drummed into his students’ minds to be wary of practicing too long without break, or playing through pain, else they'd experience an "injury." Not all pianists he spoke to were receptive to using that word.
As a confirmed Romanticist, avant garde and contemporary music were not his cup of tea, but he had had his encounters with it. As a student at Oberlin, he once played Bartok's Piano Sonata at a party, "and I cleared the room." For a time he studied with Eduard Steuermann who was assistant to Arnold Schoenberg and premiered many of his pieces. At Cal State LA he was asked by faculty composer Byong-Kon Kim to perform one of his pieces. It was emotionally opaque to him at first; so he got creative and found his own way to give it life. Despite the extreme liberties he had taken with the score, Professor Kim was overjoyed with the performance and asked him to record it later.
He wasn't beyond a little modification to the great literature either. Sometimes this scandalized me, like recommending that I hold the pedal through a passage marked staccato, or adding a crescendo where none was indicated. But I knew where it was coming from: with his breadth of knowledge of the piano literature, he understood composers' musical language, their soul. A slight deviation from the score was a small price to pay when, in the end, the audience's emotional experience was what the composer intended. I still play one of the climaxes of Liszt's Sonetto del Petrarca 104 the way he advocated, modifying which of the notes fall on the downbeat.
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| Demonstrating a melody |
As effusive as he could be socially, at lessons his assessment of your progress could be peculiarly cautious. I must have come to a dozen lessons, proud that I had just memorized a new piece or improved greatly upon it, only to hear once again, "it's really coming along." After playing a Rachmaninoff Etude Tableau for him, he said one word: "remarkable." But if you really made progress, or broke through, he’d let you know. Once I was rewarded with, “Finally, there’s the pianist I knew you had inside you!”
I'm driving my car up Lake Ave in Pasadena to reach his Altadena house for what must be the 30th time. I had moved away years ago but I'd visit him every time I was in town. Later, when I returned to California and resumed studies with him in his late 80's, and clocked even more trips up that hill, I had a sad reflection. Will one day be my last trip up Lake?
In his 90's, he could still give an inspired lesson, despite failing eyesight, lack of mobility, and vulnerability to fatigue. He had urged me to take lessons weekly again, saying that it was the only way to accelerate my improvement. He was right, I got better, I broke through some barriers. But more to the point, he simply thrived on teaching. Many times I picked up the phone and heard his plaintive voice ask, "when are you coming for a lesson?"
At the last lesson I took with him, he was weak, his voice gravelly. But as I was leaving, he summoned the strength to say: "I want you to know I'm very impressed and proud of how much progress you've made. And I'm not just saying that you know, I really do mean it."
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| With Carol Ann and Greg Sandell. Lake Street, Pasadena |
Two weeks later I visited him again to listen to some music together on my iPhone and Bluetooth speaker. I brought him Rachmaninoff songs and piano pieces by Medtner and Bortkiewicz. During Spring Torrents, the Rachmaninoff song I'd heard him perform long ago with singer Lu Elrod, I saw him pull one of his funny faces, the one that says "stop it, the sensuality's killing me!"
Two weeks later, we lost him. Rest in Peace, hero.
