Teaching the sharps and flats of piano playing
Print Edition
It’s never too old to get out and play. Piano, that is. Wu Ruidong, an 80- year-old retired geography teacher, has been giving piano lessons to area residents of the Fangsong Community Cultural Center for eight years.
“I tell them not to expect too much and just enjoy it,” said Wu. “We’re just playing piano for fun.” His age, he says, is an advantage in connecting with older students with no musical background.
“I’m an old man myself, and I know what my students need most when learning a musical instrument,” he said. “Many old people really want to learn to play piano but are worried that their fingers are too clumsy or their memories too weak to play and remember the notes. I simply tell them you are never too old to learn something new.”
Wu gives his students simple-to-play versions of songs they know. He is quick to give encouragement if they get frustrated.
He still has the yellowed, dog-eared piano pieces that he hand-copied in the 1950s, when he was too poor to buy music books.
“I show the old pieces to my students because I want them to appreciate that they are luckier than I was when starting out,” Wu said.
He reckons he has taught more than 400 students in the past eight years. A few of them have shown great talent. Sometimes, former students send Wu videos of their piano playing. And when a semester of classes is over, grateful pupils frequently give Wu small gifts. Piano students are often migrants from other parts of China.
“These old people are new settlers, moving to Shanghai with their children, and the piano class is a way to meet people, make friends and learn an interesting pastime,” Wu said.
Wu himself is a native of Songjiang, though he left the district in 1954 to study at Nanjing Normal University in the capital of Jiangsu Province.
After graduation, like so many other “intellectuals” of that era, he was sent to the countryside to work among the peasants. He taught geography in a middle school in the remote Jiangsu town of Taixing for 28 years before retiring and returning to Songjiang.
Wu said he has always loved music. He began teaching himself to play the piano and the erhu, an ancient Chinese stringed instrument, when he was young and managed to squeeze a one-year music course into his college curriculum in Nanjing.
In fact, Wu said he offers free lessons to anyone interested in learning how to play the erhu. He once bought a dozen of the instrument to help children in the community prepare for a national erhu contest.
“For amateurs like us, it’s not about how well we can play but how much joy we derive from playing at all,” he said. “Music bonds us together. In fact, we always throw a party to celebrate the birthdays of each person in the class.”
Such is Wu’s dedication to his classes that even a typhoon warning in the summer of 2013 couldn’t keep him away.
“We all thought Wu would heed the public warning and stay home,” student Ge Hui, 57, recalled. “But he showed up on time in the classroom, completely soaked from the torrential rain. The whole class was touched. He is such a good man.”
Wu’s wife, also a retired teacher, is one of the greatest fans of his musicmaking. They are a couple still very much in love. They go to the food market together and cook at home together. They also take care of Wu’s 100-year-old mother.
“Every morning my wife walks to the community’s central park to do exercises, and I go to the cultural center to start my day of music,” Wu said. “A busy life keeps us healthy and happy.”
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