Etna
It was a spinet, one of those of those smaller, affordable models that first brought pianos into the reach of millions of American homes. In 1962, the teenaged Julie sat on the bench beside her younger sister, Jan, in the living room of their home in a northern Virginia suburb of Washington.
“She was a nice big sister,” said Jan, now Jan Lambert, of Charlestown. “She taught me a lot of things. Cooking. Sewing. And music.”
Back then, Lambert said, high schools like theirs didn’t offer music lessons, and so Julie took piano lessons from an instructor.
Julie sat on the left, working hard to pass on her newly acquired skills to Jan, who was four years younger. They were painstakingly plunking out a simple classical piece: Mozart. Or maybe Bach.
Long before his medical career began, the girls’ father, Dr. Charles Albright, played banjo on cruise ships crawling over the surface of the Atlantic. He used to pick out show tunes and old Stephen Foster songs, like Camptown Races and Oh! Susanna. Their mother, Margery Albright, was an artist.
“She filled the house with paintings, and Julie filled the house with music,” said Lambert.
The Albrights had well-defined tastes that favored the wholesome sounds of classical or Broadway bits.
“We didn’t have junky music in our house,” Lambert said. “That added to the atmosphere, I think.”
Later in life, when Julie Albright would go on to become a beloved and respected piano teacher for hundreds throughout the Upper Valley, she would draw on those early experiences to develop her theory of music education.
Albright came to believe that teaching students to memorize songs by rote was really an act of cold transcription — notes mechanically transposed from the page of a songbook into the air.
She favored a different approach.
Learning songs was important, but more important was to learn the basic building blocks of music — notes, chords, and change keys — and to be able to connect them to music that was heard, instead of read. That deeper understanding was what allowed space for creativity and invention.
“She picked that up from my father,” Lambert said, “just her realization that, ‘Hey, this is what makes the complete musician.’”
June 2016
Before Julie Albright sat down at the grand piano in the amphitheater of the Bernice A Ray School in Hanover, she surveyed the 100 or so people seated in the audience, and they quieted to hear her words.
The girl from the suburbs had grown into herself, a presence that was quiet, but warm.
Albright was an intensely private person. In all her 25 years of recitals, her introductory speeches had always been directed outward, focused on the students who were about to perform. But this time was different.
Albright faced the crowd. Most were blood relatives to the 25 or so students who would perform that day to show off what they’d learned during their piano lessons at Albright’s Etna home. But there were also a couple of dear friends — her loyal fellow music educator Becky Duce, her longtime performance partner Edith Poor — and Albright’s sister and mother, then 95 and whose presence was facilitated by the school’s wheelchair ramp.
Though Julie Albright was a private person, every single person in the room was someone she loved and trusted with her vulnerability. And so, she offered a simple thanks for their support during her ongoing fight with cancer.
“To be able to say something as straightforward and heartfelt to all those people who knew and respected and loved her was, I think, very healing,” said Poor, of Washington, Vt., who was there that day.
The recital began. “This little girl goes marching up to the piano,” dressed in her best dress and so little that the music book she carried looked comically outsized, said Lambert. “And Julie’s there right behind her. They sit down together and they have a little whispered conference with each other and then they both put their hands up and the little girl starts playing.”
Albright played along, providing a robust accompaniment, as she always did to lend courage and palatability to the one-minute public performances of the youngest musicians under her wing.
One by one, the other students came up, playing music they had chosen and worked on all year: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Muzio Clementi, brief sonatinas and rhythmic waltzes or, sometimes, recognizable scores from popular movies. As each one finished, the nervousness drained out of their faces and they began to think of the cookies, grape juice and other refreshments waiting for a post-recital gathering in the other half of the room.
Albright stood away from the piano, watching as she gave the other students space to shine on their own.
“You could just see it in their eyes. She knew them inside out,” said Luce. “You could see the love she had for them. It was palpable.”
For Albright, explained Luce, it wasn’t possible to teach music well without loving her students. “It was intentional and it was thoughtful,” Luce said. “Because music is about relationships.”
Albright got her bachelor’s degree in music at Western Reserve University in Cleveland, and moved to Pomfret in the early 1970s, playing a variety of roles in the community. She built a log cabin homestead in Tunbridge, where she raised pigs and exotic chickens, and she worked for a publisher in Pomfret.
Around 1987, Albright started giving piano lessons in the basement of the old Frederick Johnson Pianos store in White River Junction. In the first year, she had only two students. The following year, she had 20, and she kept adding until she had as many as 55 in a single year.
Instead of trying to manage all that from the store, Albright soon switched to giving lessons from the Steinway that dominated her living room. She had received no formal teacher training, but recognized that her mastery of the piano was useless unless she also had mastery of teaching.
“She had notebook upon notebook upon notebook of teaching notes and what ifs and ‘I’m going to try this,’” said Luce. “She was always looking to improve, and always looking for ways to help her students improve.”
Albright assembled a mountain of techniques and strategies, each of which could be applied to the individual, depending on their need. She videotaped the hands of students while they played, and let them watch it back to assess their own performances. She brainstormed with Luce and Poor, puzzling over how to better connect with a particularly shy child in her care. She read books about how the brain works. She wrote a series of music education books for kids, called Rabbit-Man. (Her family cleared 5,000 copies out of her home and are looking for a distributor). Each student got personalized notes, every week.
The end result of all that effort was embodied in the oldest students performing at the recital at the Ray School. Many of them had been receiving her intense attention for 12 years.
“They were magnificent,” said Lambert.
The recital ended; the consumption of grape juice began, while the community that Albright had built descended on her, offering congratulations on the event.
December 25, 2016
Julie Albright sat at the silent piano sitting in the big dining hall of the Cedar Hill assisted living facility in Windsor.
It was Christmas, always a busy day at Cedar Hill. Staff and families were at their most eager to provide a meaningful Christmas meal to the residents, and the dining hall was alive with spouses and children, and children of children, all in discrete clumps of family, each seeking their own particular brand of holiday cheer.
Margery Albright was seated and watching to see the moment when her oldest daughter would put her fingers on the piano keys. Lambert sat beside Albright on the bench, as they had when they were girls a half-century previous. Visiting and caring for their mother had always been a unifying force between them, and Lambert said she’d wanted to see her sister play the Cedar Hill piano for a while.
“I had had a vague idea of, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if Julie could do a sing-along with the residents,’ but we could never manage to get that scheduled,” said Lambert.
But Albright wasn’t any more constrained by the lack of a scheduled event than she was by the notes on a page of sheet music. With the bulk of their Christmas meal sitting warm in their stomachs, and child visitors darting about, Albright began to play – Joy to the World, and Come All Ye Faithful. And Jingle Bells.
Lambert invited staff and residents to join them, and soon they were surrounded by dozens of people of all ages, pulling chairs across the floor. The physical boundaries between different families dissolved. Everyone began singing together.
“Elderly people that have forgotten some things, a lot of them really remember lyrics to songs from way back,” said Lambert.
Luce said the event was a good example of how Albright was continuously improvising with music in her own life, finding endless ways to capitalize on its power to enliven one’s life.
“We would talk about how it would allow us to express, I don’t want to say feelings, but parts of ourselves that we wouldn’t normally share with others. But we could release it through our music,” said Luce. “We all want to be connected to others in some way. That’s part of the human condition.”
For a short time, at least, the people gathered together in the Cedar Hill dining hall felt connected to each other, joined in song, said Lambert.
“Sometimes a spontaneous gathering,” she said, “is much more enjoyable than something that is carefully planned out.”
August 2017
Julie Albright sat at the Baldwin baby grand wedged into the nook between a bookshelf and a wood stove in the living room of Poor’s 1840s farmhouse on a hill in Washington.
This was one of a series of intimate “house concerts” that Albright and Poor, who played the flute, gave to small groups of friends.
Albright had made connections throughout the Upper Valley’s music scene and beyond. She was pianist at the Church of Christ, a visiting instructor at Dartmouth, a faculty member at the Alcott Music Camp in Norwich, and Chairwoman of the Board at the Apple Hill Center for Chamber Music in Nelson, N.H., where she spearheaded a program that brought together Arab and Israeli students to play together.
It was at the Apple Hill Chamber Music Festival that Poor met Albright in 1999. The two became the best of friends, and by the time 2017 rolled around, they had enjoyed many small house concerts.
Albright wanted to take the concept to the next level. She asked Poor to help her develop a program they could perform as a thank you to the students and members of the musical community who had supported her through her illness. They planned to do a series, each one with an intimate, bite-sized chunk of guests.
Poor and Albright spent countless hours preparing — it was an exciting process of diving into all the infinite ways to interpret each little phrase of music, and then adopting the best possible combination of loud or soft, fast or slow, staccato or flowing, and where to insert the little beats of silence that give the musical notes their perfect presence.
They made a conscious decision, that together, they would make choices that suited them, and them alone.
“We did it how we wanted to, even if it wasn’t the way that Bach would have wanted it to be played,” Poor said. “We were both enabling the other to find new avenues to be creative and to explore ourselves.”
And so they’d hold lengthy debates over where, precisely, the composer intended for Poor to take a flute-powering breath, creating a tiny pause. They made the decisions together, “so the listener would know there was the same musical idea in both of us.”
On the other end of the living room from the piano, six guests sat, entranced as Albright’s impeccably-controlled fingers danced lovingly over the piano keys.
A piece by Debussy. A flute sonata from a well-known French composer named Jean-Marie LeClair, and a simple melodic line by a little-known French composer named Charles Koechlin. And of course, the music of Bach, Albright’s favorite.
“Bach was endlessly inventive in his compositions, and that appealed to her extraordinary intellect,” said Poor. “And also because Bach never wrote a line of music that wasn’t intensely beautiful.”
The first performance in the series proved to be the last. Albright died three weeks later, on Sept. 4, 2017. She was 70.
Poor said she would treasure the memory of that final house concert forever.
“Looking back it was one of the most meaningful experiences in my life, and for her too,” Poor said. “It was able to give her that sense of mastery and forward motion in music making.”
Matt Hongoltz-Hetling can be reached at mhonghet@vnews.com or 603-727-3211.