Photo and story by Jose Leiva

“I’m not teaching children to be concert pianists, I am teaching them to be good people,” says pianist Rachel Feeley as she sits at her circa 1894 Steinway in her Auburn home.

“Children have happiness, joy and intellectual creativity within them, and music brings these out. It helps them to become what they are already.”

Quoting Galileo, Feeley says, “You cannot teach a man anything; you can only draw it from within himself.”

A graduate of Oberlin Conservatory and Bates College, Feeley has been teaching piano for 25 years. She surrounds herself with young people. For several years she ran a child-care business, instructed a creative dance program and taught high school.

She and her daughter stage six recitals a year. Her students learn the Suzuki method, invented by a Japanese doctor during World War II. It involves listening, repeating and support, just as one helps a child learn to speak. She notes that people don’t learn to read before they speak.

Feeley determines the learning style of her students, then capitalizes on the strengths and cultivates the weak areas.

“I make the lessons fun and try to create an atmosphere where they want to be here and play pieces they love.”

Once she even worked with a child who loved rap music and helped him create his own piece. Her students range in age from 3, to the oldest in her 80s.

Each July for the past 23 years, Feeley has taken classes at Queens University in Kingston, Ontario, in Canada. “We take students and parents with us and get lessons.” She says this is a way of keeping her fresh and current. “The kids keep me fresh, too. The teaching brings out in me what I am trying to develop in them.”

Feeley believes everyone has unlimited potential for something. Instead of using the word “practice,” Feeley tells her students, “Offer your mother some music while she prepares your dinner.”

Rachel Feeley feels she is teaching young pianists to be good people, to share the music within them.

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