Margie Tong (right) of Orinda shares a keyboard with her 15-year-old student, Annabel Wang. Tong took her first piano lessons many years ago when her parents signed her up for an after-school program by Instrumental Music for Children (IMC) at Del Rey Elementary.
Born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, Margie Tong and her family made Orinda their home when she started kindergarten at Del Rey Elementary. Back then, after-school activities meant either taking French or piano lessons.
Music won.
Of course, her parents also chose to move to Orinda because of the quiet neighborhood, good schools, and well-educated residents. The beautiful trees, cooler climate and close proximity to her father’s work just added to the list.
But back to the music – when her parents signed her up with a program offered by Instrumental Music for Children (IMC) at Del Rey – she had no idea that this opportunity would shape the rest of her life.
When and how did music become important to you?
Had it not been for Del Rey School and their after-school enrichment program, my interest in music might not have been discovered. After signing me up for IMC piano lessons, my father decided to rent an upright piano instead of getting a less expensive electric keyboard for me to practice on. According to him, getting me an upright piano instead would give me a real sense of what playing on an acoustic piano with tactile key response would be like. He hoped that I would be able to practice better and learn my lessons well. Also, by renting, he would be able to avoid the long term commitment of buying expensive equipment before knowing for sure that I would continue my lessons and thus enjoy playing. In hindsight, that was one of the best decisions my father ever made.
I still remember how I felt when the piano was delivered to our house and I sat in front of the keyboard. The moment the piano was unwrapped, I sat down and immediately began messing around on it even though I had not had my first lesson. I pretended I was a real musician, I felt the power, and it was exhilarating. I already knew that I liked playing on it.
When did you start teaching piano?
That’s a funny story. I was in college, senior year, about to graduate, and had no intention of pursuing music, when one of my childhood piano teachers gave me a call and asked me to substitute for her because she was expecting her first baby. Up until that point, I had no experience teaching piano, and had not taken piano pedagogy in a school setting, but I had the very special opportunity to learn firsthand from my own teacher. I decided to approach another one of my former childhood piano teachers, who was the director of the IMC, and inquire about teaching with her. She was thrilled to see an old student become a new teacher. So she hired me as her contractor and gave me a position four days a week at Del Rey and one day at Saklan (School in Moraga), which later turned into five days at Del Rey and home lessons in the evenings and weekends.
What do you love about teaching?
I love watching my students make discoveries about the music or about themselves. There are a lot of “a-ha” moments and I love being a part of that. The kids always bring the fun. Also, I don’t tell the kids this, but I feel like they are the ones teaching me how to teach. What I do tell the parents is that my teaching philosophy is student-centered teaching.
It’s true that when you teach the same piece to say a dozen students, they each have their own voice and thoughts on the piece. You get a dozen different interpretations. No two are alike.
It’s such fun when I get to apply something I learned recently – even the day of – to the kids’ lesson. It could be a technique tip from my college professor, it could be a suggestion from a teacher convention or from a book on how to help students who struggle with reading music.
If my student wants to learn how to create a mash-up, then I get to summon my theory expertise or improvisation skills. In fact, it was my students who got me into doing mash-ups. (Editor’s note: Mash-ups are a mix of two or more songs, or elements from those songs, that become their own unique piece of music.)
When I started doing mash-ups then other students wanted to do the same. When I suggested my students sing while they played, in order to feel more connected to the melody, they joined choir in school as I had suggested. That in turn, inspired me to return to singing – 20 years after I did choir at Miramonte High School.
When I taught on campus at Del Rey, so many teachers would pass through my classroom and remark how lucky I was to teach so-and-so because as a school teacher, they only got to work with the kids for one year and then the kids would move on to a new school teacher the next year. I would get that kid for potentially longer.
What is your educational and musical background?
I’m classically trained. I took piano lessons with IMC. One of my teachers tried to use some of the Suzuki method on me, but I had already progressed past the stage of learning from listening. I could read fluently by then.
When I was in college, I had the pleasure of working with a professor who would change my life forever. After four years of working with Dr. Robert Bowman, my technical skill had transformed. Senior year, I was expected to give a senior year recital and in preparation for that, he basically forced me into performing in a piano competition. It was a lot of pressure. But I kept reminding myself daily why I was there in the first place – for the love of the music. It caught everyone off guard when it was announced that I had won the first prize in the competition and the $2,000 music scholarship. It was the first and only piano competition I ever participated in.
The other wonderful thing to come out of this was remembering that enjoyment comes from the process of preparing and practicing for the performance. And it made me realize that I had to have music in my life after college, somehow.
When I graduated college, I kept in touch with my college professor, driving 2½ hours just to take a piano lesson. I drove up once a month, sometimes more frequently, if a performance was coming up. I like to think that most of my training began after college. Because I had a new reason to learn – I was teaching music to my own students and fine-tuning my own skills at the same time. I picked up harpsichord from this teacher, as well as chamber music repertoire, and I worked with his colleagues and their students from orchestra class.
What did you want to grow up to be when you were little?
According to my mom, I wanted to be a cop. She remembers driving me home from school one day and I explained it was because “cops eat doughnuts.” I don’t think I had any clue what I was talking about.
Is your family musical as well?
Most of my family members do not play musical instruments. We will never know if they had the talent or interest. These days people think of Asians as “tiger moms,” but my parents came from a generation where people had to work hard to earn enough money to put food on the table at night.
Any funny or memorable moments while teaching?
There are a lot of funny stories – the best are all the inside jokes that the students try to turn into traditions, like how when I cry at the year-end recital. It’s really because I’m so proud of my students I’m overcome with emotion, but there’s always an older, more seasoned veteran student who wants to be the one to explain to the other kids, that Ms. Tong is crying because she has allergies.
Do you have any favorite compositions you enjoy playing?
The Goldberg Variations. There’s a nice story – or legend, depending on what you believe, surrounding the origins of the Goldberg Variations which involves the young orphan named Goldberg, as well as a wealthy count, and the Variations (which contains a riddle) composed by J.S. Bach. I recommend that people look up the children’s picture book that illustrates the story and while the pictures may be great for kids, the story can be appreciated by people of all ages, all the while giving meaning to an otherwise complex-sounding piece of music.
This masterpiece I hold close to my heart, because my beloved college professor taught me this as one of the last pieces of music that I learned from him before his passing in 2023. I mostly played this piece on my harpsichord. My late teacher would say to me that some professional musicians today still hold the belief that it would be better to play a musical piece on the same instrument that it was created on and intended for, but that “I’m not a purist.” I feel the same way about it as he did.
Outside of teaching, how do you spend your free time?
Learning is contagious, especially when you are a teacher surrounded by students who are eager to learn. My students inspire me to keep learning.
For a while, I got into using my iPhone to record myself playing keyboard and making music videos, mostly to playback during Zoom recitals, never to post online.
I went back to Diablo Valley College to take some classes. This spring, I took Intro to MIDI and Electronic Music. I initially chose this class because I wanted to familiarize myself with other music software, but I ended up finding it to be very satisfying because I could experiment with new chamber music and hear it on the spot, all the parts working separately and then together, before meeting up with live musicians to play it through. It’s so great to take classes for recreation like this – something I would have never thought to do while I was attending college.
I taught myself how to compose fugues from books by John Mortensen. I started with Baroque improvisation, which is unfortunately, a dying art. It’s a kind of training that is lacking from most harpsichordists’ studies. In Bach’s time, every keyboardist was familiar with improvisation, even the amateur musicians.
Even my college professor said that this is something he had to teach himself while he was in school working towards his Ph.D in music. He told me that music schools and music teachers simply don’t teach this anymore.
Why is music important to you?
My piano teacher once told me that he believed that we as people are all just balls of light bouncing around in the darkness looking to make a connection with others. When we find it, we shine even brighter. This image really stuck with me.
Music is important because it connects us. We each have an innate need to connect to ourselves, to others, and to the world around us. When we form that connection, we find great meaning in our own individual lives, but we also discover something that exists beyond ourselves and that is even bigger and greater than any one individual person. Music is a universal language that transcends time and place.