The Frances Clark Center is deeply saddened by the passing of John Perry – virtuoso, mentor, teacher, and friend. His legacy will continue to inspire pianists for generations, and we honor his memory. In greatest honor and memory of his legacy, we share this article by Samuel Holland as it originally appeared in the Spring 2004 issue of Keyboard Companion.
John Perry
My first encounter with John Perry was at my audition for Oberlin, where I could see that many of the best students went to him. And there was one thing of which I was right away convinced – that the best preparation to become a teacher was first to become the best pianist. Mr. Perry’s studio included major competition winners and people who now hold important positions throughout the U.S. I may have been the worst pianist John ever accepted. But, did I work! At the time, he was known for not scheduling regular lessons. You signed up when you were ready. To him, this meant that your repertoire was memorized and up to tempo. He maintained that it took three hours a day to stay where you are. For undergraduate students, he expected at least six hours a day. Sometimes I put in ten.
Perry’s modus operandi
John Perry did not want to work on technique until your full recital was learned and being polished. He believed that technical work belonged in the finishing stages. The line of reasoning went something like this: Learning new repertoire is time-consuming and difficult. During that time, we make a lot of unnecessary movements and exertions because we don’t yet know the music. Once learned, the process of polishing is essentially a process of refining movements and control for expressive purposes. And so it is natural that most technical progress is made in the later stages of polishing repertoire. Time spent attempting this type of refinement at an earlier stage is wasted, or, at best, inefficient.
If I were to try to put into a few words what the essence of John’s teaching on technique was, it would begin with “one-ness” with the keyboard, a feeling that the piano is an extension of our own body – not something outside to be manipulated. The methods by which we produce tone are always based on what is appropriate. What is appropriate in Mozart might not be appropriate in Prokofiev. He gave us detailed exercises to develop “pure” techniques of many types: close finger, high finger, weight and weight transfer, rotation, open, flattened fingers that grasp. There was no one “correct” way.
I appreciated John Perry because once he took me on, he stood up for me. He fought battles for me. However frustrating I must have been to him, I knew he believed in me and this has continued right down to this day.
If I had to describe what was most remarkable about Perry as a teacher, it is most evident in a master class. I’ve never seen a student – no matter how bad, or more remarkably, how good, that he could not somehow make dramatically better on the spot. He has the diagnostic skill of a surgeon – a precise understanding of how technique works, an uncanny ability to observe and correct problems. His skill in English – the ability to say what he means and to make it colorful through metaphors and examples – is more remarkable than anyone I’ve ever known in any field.