Book Review: The Music Teacher by Barbara Hall

I used to play the clarinet. I started in 7th grade, years after most kids started, so I spent my 4 years in band playing third clarinet, the easy parts. My mother and her mother before her also played the clarinet in high school, and wanting to encourage me, my grandmother bought me a wood clarinet which I was forced to drag out around during the holidays to butcher carols. Perhaps mercifully, my brother pawned my instrument while I was in college for drug money. I do sometimes miss it though, and while I was never the most musically gifted myself, I certainly appreciate those who are.

In The Music Teacher, Pearl has given up on ever being a truly great musician herself. She started the violin too late and her parents could never afford proper lessons. But she can recognize talent, and when she gets a new student at the music store she works at who shows amazing promise, she can’t help investing in her future. One terrible mistake with Hallie forces her to reevaluate and come to terms with what her life has become.

Pearl charmed me from the first page with her honest, down-to-earth realism and her self-depreciating humor. Her voice is a strong thread that pulls the reader through this very philosophical justification of a musician’s life.

Author Barbara Hall, an award winning writer of quite a few hit television series, knows how to pace her writing to keep it flowing well. The mystery concerning the mistake she made with Hallie is a successful narrative device that kept me extremely engaged in Pearl’s story and the deep introspection that allows her to realize some core truths about herself.

Through Pearl and her coworkers at the music store, Hall ruminates on music and how music relates to life and relationships. You can open this novel to almost any page and find a quotable passage. Don’t believe me? Wait a second. I’ll open to a page at random… Ok… page 84 (ARC version, so this may be different in the final print):

Music is like communion or something. You don’t do it because you’re perfect. You do it because you glimpse perfection. You realize it can take you a step closer. You move toward it because you are hoping it can make you better.

Here’s another passage that I found remarkable where Pearl thinks about how isolated she is from society and what the reason for that is:

I’ve always been isolated. It was a condition I was born with. Some children get to arrive on earth with one simple assurance: You were invited, and you are welcome. Those of us who imposed our existence on a couple of angry and resistant participants spend most of our lives feeling sorry that we came. (p. 210, ARC)

I’ve seen reviewers say this has too much talk and not enough action – and the talk does outweigh the action by far – but this novel just worked for me. I enjoyed reading it immensely.

The Music Teacher is available in hardcover now.