Beautiful Music
By Tim Mead
I was practically ordered by my department chair to do it. God knows I didn’t want to. She reminded me, however, that I was up for both tenure and promotion to associate professor, and refusing to do this wouldn’t look good.
I told her I wasn’t an accompanist, for Christ’s sake! I’m a soloist and a teacher, not some goddamned second fiddle to a fiddler.
Okay, I’d better back up. I’m Scott Wainwright. I’m thirty. I teach piano at the conservatory of music of a pretentious little college in Ohio. How’d I wind up here? Well, I graduated from Juilliard. Everyone knows that the very best from Juilliard go on to concert careers. The rest of us, good as we may be, usually go somewhere and take an MFA and wind up teaching somewhere. My MFA is from Peabody. Not a bad
