From Elizabeth…
B-Sharp Piano Studio owes its curious name to an incident from my piano-teaching career. During a lesson, one of my students was continually confused by the enharmonic equivalence between the notes B-sharp and C, and thus failed to raise the note by a semitone whenever it appeared in the piece we worked on. Delirious with frustration and resignation, I repeatedly reminded him of his mistakes with a slightly raised voice: “B-Sharp! B-sharp! Be Sharp!” The student’s father, upon entering the studio and hearing my remarks, took them as a judgment on his child’s natural intelligence. “Hmm, I thought you were smart, son,” he said, further adding to the confusion of the whole situation. Luckily for all of us, the student did become a very sharp person (currently an undergraduate at Georgetown University) and never forgot about the B-sharp note again. And B-Sharp became my studio’s name to reflect a desire to uphold musical integrity as well as to affirm students’ mental aptitude.
