After hours at Klavierhaus, in a room behind the gallery of showpiece Steinways, Sophia Rosoff is teaching class. Nine of her students are here, amateurs and professionals alike, ranging in age from 20 to 80. Rosoff sits quietly while they play, head cocked, eyes huge, seeming to receive the music with her whole body. She never interrupts nor offers corrections. Technical perfection is of little interest to her; like her mentor Abby Whiteside, Rosoff deals in rhythm.
“Show Barry how we are learning fugues now,” she tells her student Fiona, who has just played a Bach prelude.
Fiona closes the cover over the keys. “This is soprano, alto, tenor, and bass,” she explains, showing us her hands and her feet. She taps out the rhythm of the first two voices with her hands. When the third voice enters, she stomps it out on the floor.
Like all Rosoff’s set-ups, this way of learning a fugue puts rhythm first, drawing focus away from peripheral concerns of fingers and notes. Students who walk into Rosoff’s book-filled Upper East Side apartment expecting a traditional piano lesson are in for a surprise. Depending on the day, she may have them balance eggs on a china plate, walk across the room like Groucho Marx, or dance and sing their Chopin mazurka.
Rosoff had a long road to that book-filled, Upper East Side apartment. Born in 1921 in the small town of Amsterdam, NY, she was the third of six children to shopkeepers William and Anna Greenspan. The Greenspans were not a musical family, and Rosoff’s first sight of a piano came at age eight. “I knew right away, ‘I can play that,’” she recalls, “I signed up for lessons at school even though we didn’t own a piano, and my teacher never knew because I would practice on the little paper keyboard that came inside the music book. I woke up every morning at six, put the keyboard outside my parents’ bedroom, and sang and danced my lessons.” After a year of dawn recitals, the Greenspans broke down and bought their daughter a piano.
Rosoff briefly considered marrying the one local bachelor who owned a Steinway. Her life might have been very different had her ninety-year-old friend, Dr. Julius Schiller, not driven her through a blizzard to hear the famous pianist Ray Lev in nearby Gloversville. After her concert, Lev listened to the eighteen-year-old Rosoff play a Schubert Impromptu. “You belong in New York City,” she declared.
Rosoff started saving her babysitting money. Six months later, she had $500 and announced her intention to take the train to New York City the next day. Her father had a fit, but her mother understood.
“I called Ray Lev from a payphone at Grand Central,” she says. “I was so scared she wouldn’t remember who I was, but when I said, ‘Ray, I’m here,’ she said, ‘Great. I’m playing a concert at the Metropolitan Museum tonight. You can turn pages.’” Soon Rosoff was moving into Lev’s suite at the Spencer Arms, a residence hotel on 69th and Broadway. The day she moved in, Rosoff remembers standing outside the door, rapt, as Lev played Chopin’s Piano Sonata no. 2. She waited until the end of the piece to knock.
Lev’s willingness to undertake such an eleventh-hour assignment speaks to how difficult it had become for her to find work. Her outspoken leftism and public support of her friend Paul Robeson had led to her inclusion in the Red Channels blacklist of 1950, after which her manager dropped her and her concerts were boycotted. Although she was welcomed overseas, Lev’s career in America was ruined. She would commit suicide at the Spencer Arms in 1968.
Rosoff prefers to remember the good years, when Lev regularly sold out Carnegie Hall and entertained the likes of Isaac Stern, Leonard Bernstein, and Helen Keller. Rosoff still recalls the feel of Keller’s sensitive hands on her face and the way Keller listened to Lev play by laying her palms against the piano.
“And what did you say?” I ask her.
Throughout their fifty-two years of marriage, the Rosoffs traveled frequently from New York to Paris, where Noah kept a second office on the Champs Elysée. During one of these trips, Rosoff got a call from her friend the Maharani of Baroda, who had received an invitation to call on Princess Grace of Monaco and wanted Rosoff to join.
During her late twenties, however, Rosoff was increasingly uncomfortable at the piano. At a rehearsal in 1948, she complained to Artie Shaw that her joints were feeling tight. Shaw recommended she see his friend Morton Gould’s teacher, who was supposed to be a genius.
Whiteside observed that this continuous, horizontal rhythm was at odds with the way sound was generated at the piano through vertical depression of the keys. This placed the pianist at a certain disadvantage vis-à-vis string players or singers, whose means for generating sound (bowing, breathing) were more innately horizontal. Traditional instruction in finger strength worsened this problem, as did a note-wise, rather than aural, conception of music. Whiteside taught that the whole body plays the piano. The upper arms move, like the music, in a horizontal fashion, originating from the fulcrum on the seat.
Abby Whiteside’s way of finding the music was to outline first. She had students play only selected notes of a piece, following the musical and rhythmic highlights.
This comfort with uncertainty may be another secret to Rosoff’s success with jazz players, who must be open to the vulnerability and imperfection inherent in improvisation. The teacher, too, must improvise. Once Rosoff walked in on an argument Whiteside was having with a student.
“But last week you told me to play it that way!” he was protesting.
Whiteside, whose own work had been shaped by her studies with Ideokinesis founder Mabel Todd, recommended Rosoff do some movement work in order to get her joints free. Rosoff’s sister-in-law, the composer Miriam Gideon, was going to a class taught by Charlotte Selver, and Rosoff tagged along. Selver would become Rosoff’s second great mentor.
I would like you – very gently, very gently – to place the palms of both your hands on the upper part of the chest. Very gently. And you just feel what happens underneath your hands…And then you go very gently away – without disturbing the process, and see what you can feel without touching… Could you be so that you are not “doing” your breathing anymore, but that you allow yourself to be breathed?
After Whiteside’s death, Rosoff and her colleague Joseph Prostakoff wrote “Mastering the Chopin Études” based on a note Whiteside had sent Rosoff on Op. 10, no. 7. They also founded the Whiteside Foundation, of which Rosoff is President, which sponsors a yearly concert series at Weill Recital Hall.
In 1970, Rosoff made the acquaintance of the psychic Joan Grant, author of the surreally beautiful bestseller Winged Pharaoh. Rosoff and Grant became best friends, traveling together throughout England and Scotland, visiting haunted houses, working on Grant’s memoirs, and having improbable adventures. Grant left Rosoff a trunk of her unpublished writings, which Rosoff co-edited with Nicola Bennett and Jane Lahr and released in 2007 as Speaking from the Heart.
As an outgrowth of her work with Grant, Rosoff was asked to play on an early 70s BBC radio broadcast. The scratchy tape of the Satie, Chopin, and Beethoven she played that day documents a beautiful, singing sound and an undulating rhythm.
It is getting late. All the students at Klavierhaus have had a turn, but Rosoff doesn’t want class to end. Like most great jazz musicians, Barry Harris showed up late, so he missed hearing her youngest student play.
Jeremy Siskind goes back to the piano and reprises his deconstructed version of “Take Five.” Rosoff looks back and forth from her young protégé to her old friend, twinkling. At the end of the song, she asks Harris to play again, too.
“Liza” was Noah Rosoff’s favorite song, and Harris would always play it when Noah came home during a lesson. A week after Noah’s death, when Harris was playing a Chopin étude, he and Rosoff heard a key turn in her lock. They looked at each other in disbelief, and Harris started playing “Liza.” Rosoff rushed to the door, but nobody was there.
“It has an accelerated action,” she says.
Then class is over, and I help her gather up the dark chocolate and homegrown cucumbers her students have brought her – everyone always gives Rosoff gifts; the Maharani of Baroda gave her 107 saris – and she lets me hold her hand as we walk out into the night.
Sarah Deming is an essayist and author of the children’s novel Iris, Messenger. She blogs at The Spiral Staircase.
Sarah took the following photo of Sophia and Ethan in 2010.