The Howard County
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F O C U S
VOL.7, NO.10
F O R
P E O P L E
O V E R
5 0 OCTOBER 2017
More than 30,000 readers throughout Howard County
‘Camp’ pumps up music lovers
I N S I D E …
PHOTO BY STUART ROSENTHAL
By Stuart Rosenthal If you ever took music lessons as a child, you may well recall the traumatic experience of performing for fellow students and their families at annual recitals. You might then consider it a nightmare were you to find yourself attending a weeklong “piano camp,” where you would endure a public critique of your technique before performing on stage at the Peabody School of Music in downtown Baltimore. But for several dozen adults each summer, the Piano at Peabody program is heaven on earth. For a solid week, these men and women live in the Peabody graduate dorms (with or without their spouses), eat in its cafeteria, and attend lectures, private coaching sessions, public master classes and faculty recitals from 8 a.m. till 10 p.m. every day. Those who wish can also secure private lessons with the faculty, play duets with other attendees, and practice to their heart’s content — something some of the attendees cherish as much as any other aspect of the program. The week concludes with two nights of recitals by the attendees, presumably pumped up and well-practiced for their public performances. But it’s not the performing that brings them here. It’s the love of music, and what it does for them. Marie Celano, a first-time participant, is a counselor who works frequently with trauma victims. Her work “can become very heavy.” A resident of Clarksville, Md., Celano said she played piano a little as a child. Now 54, she decided to attend Peabody this year “to have a jump-start back to piano.” So far, so good. Though she was intimidated the first day, by mid-week she’s “soaking it all up, hoping it will give me something beautiful to focus on, and will be therapeutic.” She also loves the people. “Everyone’s been so generous and gracious,” despite her being a newbie. Amitabh Basu, 34, another first-timer and the youngest attendee this year, hails from India, where the music is “very different.” While his wife, also from India, finds the Western classical music he plays “a little jarring,” she still wants him to practice daily. “She says I become very calm and peaceful each day I play the piano. Every day I
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Marie Celano, of Clarksville, was a newcomer to the Piano at Peabody program this summer. The intensive one-week “piano camp” for adults brings together experienced and beginning pianists for a full slate of daily music lectures, master classes, classical and jazz recitals and performances. But most of all, it forges a community spirit among the participants, some of whom have been attending for more than two decades.
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don’t, I’m a little more agitated. She wants me to play even more!” Basu teaches applied mathematics and statistics at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, and his wife is a Ph.D. student in the medical school there. Though he says he’s “very nervous” to play in public, you wouldn’t have known it from the powerful performance he gave of the first movement of a difficult Beethoven sonata at one day’s master class.
Began at a real camp What is now known as Piano at Peabody actually started out about 25 years ago as a summer music camp in Maine called Encore Coda. Diane Moskowitz of Timonium, Md., who attended it for several years, remembers the camp fondly.
“You could hear music in the woods all the time,” she said, as there were practice pianos in all the cabins where people stayed. It wasn’t so good for the pianos, which suffered from the weather, but it made for an ethereal experience. Now 84, Moskowitz enjoys giving recitals to her fellow condo residents at Mays Chapel North, even as she continues to take regular piano lessons. Why the lessons? “Because I want to play better. There’s music that I want to play that I need help with,” she said. Combining her years in Maine with the 18 years Peabody has been home to the program, Moskowitz is enjoying her 24th year at what she still calls “piano camp.” Several other current participants are See PEABODY, page 36
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