Only later did I grasp the connection between two hundred hours of piano practice and those thousand vacant houses in South Bend. Some things like this only become visible with the benefit of hindsight—along with a paper coffee cup with a quote by Leonard Bernstein printed on its side: “To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan, and not quite enough time.”
It was Bernstein who conducted the authoritative recording of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, and he was on my mind as I took a bow, exhilarated and relieved, on the stage of the Morris Performing Arts Center, in front of about two thousand people on a February evening in 2013. I’d been a mayor for thirteen months, and a concert pianist for twenty minutes. By briefly becoming both, I had found a way to support the arts and to demonstrate how our city can punch above its weight class—all thanks to a chain of events that began with a Soviet defector, a Chinese maestro, and an ambitious music school dean.
Indiana University has long boasted a very strong music program, and so does its South Bend campus. At its center is Professor Alexander Toradze, a Georgian pianist who defected from the Soviet Union in 1983 while on tour with the Bolshoi Symphony Orchestra—and somehow wound up in the Hoosier State. The circle of professionals and students who grew around him, known as the Toradze Piano Studio, perform around the world and win prestigious competitions. As if a prerequisite to study with him, his students have magnificently complicated names, like Vakhtang Kodanashvili, one of Toradze’s star students who also plays with the South Bend Symphony Orchestra, or Maxim Mogilevsky, whom I once saw attack a piano with such vigor during a performance of Mussorgsky that they had to give it a quick retuning at intermission.
The presence of so many gifted graduate students meant that South Bend had an abundance of talented and willing piano teachers. They were available at very reasonable rates to parents like my mother, who figured out quickly that I was not destined to be a Division I athlete, and instead developed the hope that I might fund my college education with a music scholarship. She lined up piano teachers starting when I was five, and continued patiently taking me to lessons every week for years. After my childhood teacher, Kayo Tatebe, moved out of town, Mom began to deliver me every Friday to a basement practice room in IUSB’s Northside Hall for lessons from a Singaporean student, May Lin Ding, whose name was a rare exception to the polysyllabic norm around the department.
When May Lin moved on, my mother started taking me half an hour up the road to Berrien Springs in Michigan, where Dr. Sandra Camp lived and practiced her twin passions of music education and cat showmanship—her split-level home containing both a piano studio and a breeding operation. As I became a teenager, the weekly commute ensured a little quality time with one or the other of my parents. We might talk, or not, as we crossed the state line, either in Mom’s giant blue Buick LeSabre listening to NPR news, or Dad’s two-door Chevy Cavalier listening to what might have been his sole cassette, the Creedence Clearwater Revival masterpiece Cosmo’s Factory, looping permanently in the tape player for about as long he owned the car.
In a wall-to-wall carpeted room at Dr. Camp’s house, full of sheet music and Persian longhair cats, I labored under her no-nonsense gaze, which in retrospect was itself a little cat-like. She taught me technique and theory, tempo and musicianship, until I became a pretty good pianist, skilled enough to play Rachmaninoff’s C-sharp minor prelude in competitions.
Good, not great. I rated honorable mentions here and there, but by the time I was a teenager I was practicing less faithfully and getting more interested in guitar, teaching myself those Creedence songs, then graduating to Jimi Hendrix solos and Dave Matthews acoustic licks. A capable guitarist, I wound up occasionally gigging with a garage band that we called “Turkish Delight” for some reason I can’t remember. While a scholarship wasn’t going to happen, music would stay with me as a discipline and a retreat.
When I left for college, the “Peter 2000,” a Stratocaster-type guitar I’d built from a Carvin self-assembly kit, joined me on the trip to Boston. The piano, of course, did not. I stopped playing almost completely, until I moved back to South Bend in 2008. Not yet having bought a home, I was renting a carriage house out back of a professor’s house farther down the river when my mother—ever the champion of my fleeting music career—overheard a stranger on a bus in Chicago lamenting that he couldn’t get rid of his old piano. Having once heard me say something about wanting a keyboard, she sidled up to him and asked if he was selling a piano.
“No, I’m trying to give it away! No one wants it. I’m about ready to put it in a Glad bag and drop it out the window,” he told her.
What did my mother say to him next? Who knows? But soon after that, I found myself standing among knickknacks in this gentleman’s carpeted apartment in Chicago, looking at a rather neglected antique grand piano. The pianist in the household had been his wife; she had passed away years ago. The instrument was not in great shape. It hadn’t been tuned for years; some keys were broken and others didn’t move at all. But it looked like something that could be repaired. So I called Steve Merriman, a neighbor of my parents who seems to embody one of South Bend’s defining characteristics: a knack for salvage and reuse.
Some years ago Steve and his wife, Mary, launched a piano-tuning business, which developed into piano reconditioning and more. Over time, the business escalated into a kind of mission. Whenever Steve hears of a piano on its way to the landfill—someone passing away, a church moving, a school upgrading its instruments—he intervenes and commences a rescue. He recently moved his operations into a disused dry-cleaning facility with all the space he needed both to store and fix them. But back then, he was constantly negotiating with someone to get more space to park the pianos he had caught and saved, unwanted and unplayable. At his pleading, someone’s garage or storeroom would become a foster home for his wayward instruments until he could get them repaired.
Like a devoted volunteer at an animal rescue shelter, he is always on the lookout for potential owners, anyone who will fund him to fix an instrument. He’s not really looking to sell or “flip” the pianos, just seeking someone to cover the cost of his time to restore them. In fact, he’s not even a pianist—he’s a jazz drummer—but he has a compelling vision that a good instrument belongs in every home. As he once told me in his gravelly voice, his eyes at once smiling and piercing, “I just believe that every house oughta have a furnace, it oughta have a toilet, and it oughta have a piano.”
So, standing in the living room of a bemused elderly gentleman in Chicago preparing to leave his wife’s possessions behind and go to a second retirement somewhere in Mexico, we called Steve back in South Bend, describing the piano to him and asking if he thought he could fix it. A couple weeks later, the living room of my modest quarters had been converted into a sort of piano workshop. The black hulk of an instrument now dominated the room, surrounded by little pieces of wood, scraps of felt, and a mysterious arsenal of tools as Steve took the piano apart and put it back together. And soon after that, for about as much money as I had saved to spend on a good keyboard, I was the proud new owner of a working 1920s Conover grand.