In more ways than one, this is a love story, and it begins in 1970.
Paul Cummins, headmaster of a Santa Monica elementary school called St. Augustine-by-the-Sea, was in the market for a music teacher and a colleague suggested he call a Rustic Canyon pianist named Mary Ann.
Mary Ann wasn’t interested in the job but agreed to host a get-together at her home and introduce Cummins to two teachers. But Cummins didn’t want the other two. He wanted Mary Ann.
“I’ve just seen the best teacher I’ve ever seen in my life,” he told a friend after visiting Mary Ann and hearing about her teaching techniques.
Cummins talked Mary Ann into taking the job, and before long, she joined the faculty of a brand-new middle school Cummins co-founded by the name of Crossroads.
That was in 1971.
But 1972 was a year of new beginnings, too. That was the year Paul and Mary Ann got married.
Fifty-five years later, Mr. and Mrs. Cummins live together in the house where they met. And Mary Ann is still teaching at Crossroads, among other places.
“She’s 93 and she’s got the energy of a teenager,” Paul Cummins, 88, said of his wife. “She’s kind of a freak of nature.”
I can attest to that after spending several hours with her on Tuesday, hustling to keep up as she taught at two schools and then hurried home to greet her private students.
At St. Anne School in Santa Monica, I watched Cummins harness the squirmy energy of second-graders wielding xylophone mallets. She’s been using the Orff Schulwerk Approach for decades, in which students create music in something of a percussion-driven jamboree of singing, dancing and moving.
“Two, three, four,” Cummins counted down, and her eager little ensemble broke into song: “This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine.”
When the session was done, Cummins, who bakes more cookies than Famous Amos, sent each of her students out the door with a treat.
Next stop, Crossroads School, where the level of musicianship rose several notches. A high school keyboard class came first, followed by a music theory class, and Cummins handled both like a conductor leading an orchestra, showering her students with “bravos.”
And then I followed Cummins home to watch her give lessons to two of her 18 or so private students. One, a 7-year-old girl named Birdie, was accompanied by her mother, who sat at the same piano stool a generation ago as a student.
“Look, there is something genetically askew,” said Emily Cummins Polk, the youngest of Mary Ann Cummins’ four daughters. “She has incredible genes, but you can’t discount the fact that she’s up at 6 and going to yoga. She’s active seven days a week … and I don’t think she has any intention of slowing down.”
I told Polk her mother seemed equally adept working with second-graders and high school students, and that her age does not appear to be something anyone is conscious of, including the teacher. That’s partly because — especially with the advanced classical musicians — teacher and students are speaking the same language. But there’s more to it than that.
“I think it’s because she has so many passions … and still approaches the world with the curiosity of a child,” Polk said. “If she sees something in pop culture that the kids relate to, she has to understand it. She’s in every world, whether it’s politics, movies, yoga, gourmet cooking, the Dodgers. … She just has a crazy lust for life.”
Polk said that when she was a child, her parents were plugged into a pipeline of international musicians who needed a place to stay while studying in the U.S. They opened their home, for months at a time and sometimes longer, Polk said, creating a vast extended family that has kept close ties.
Anna Cummins, another of the four daughters, said music was a tool her mother used to teach “life lessons, way beyond piano or music theory.”
“She weaves in literature and philosophy and emphasizes the point that music should make you a more whole person,” Anna said. “It’s not about being a concert pianist. It’s about … connecting to something spiritual that’s bigger than yourself.”
When she was a young violinist, Anna said, her mother taught her that to keep improving, she’d have to set her ego aside and accept mistakes as part of the bargain. Anna’s daughter, now 13, takes lessons from her grandmother.
It should be noted that Paul Cummins is no slacker himself. The longtime teacher, headmaster and arts advocate is still involved with schools he helped launch after Crossroads, including Camino Nuevo Charter and the Tree Academy. And he’s the founder of P.S. Arts, a nonprofit funded initially by musician Herb Alpert to help fill the gap in arts education for thousands of public school students.
A published poet,Cummins writes daily, and as he describes it, that means he is sometimes “wallowing in nostalgia” or “angsting over the future.” But the shape of time is different for a musician, he said, and he once wrote a poem that captured the essence of his wife’s ageless grace.
“I find myself staring across the studio, for forty-three years now: her focus, always, in the moment, riveted upon her students.”
Gina Coletti, director of the Elizabeth Mandel Music Institute at Crossroads, told me many of those students graduated to elite music schools and went on to professional careers, even as Mary Ann Cummins shifted her focus to the next generation, and the next, and the next. Teaching is “like an elixir of youth” for Cummins, said Coletti, who wasn’t surprised to hear that it took a bit of arm-twisting for Cummins to open her door to me.
“I think it’s rare to find somebody who does the work without their ego involved,” Coletti said. “And I think that’s what Mary Ann does. It’s about the music. It’s always about the students.”
Two years ago, Cummins was named to the Steinway & Sons Teacher Hall of Fame. Later this year, a new performing arts center will open at Crossroads, and the recital hall will be called The Mary Ann.
When the music theory class came to a close Tuesday at Crossroads, a senior named Lola Goetz asked me if she could say something about Cummins.
“I wouldn’t be … the person I am, the musician I am, without Mary Ann,” said Goetz, a classical and jazz musician and composer who began taking lessons with Cummins in first grade.
“Would you say that if I weren’t in the room?” Cummins asked.
“Yes,” said Goetz, who has several college options in front of her. “She’s so modest, but I want you … to know that she’s like the best, literally.”
Polk told me she’s often asked if her mother ever slows down.
“And the way I see it,” said Polk, “is that she just doesn’t have time to slow down.”
Music, Mary Ann Cummins told me, is language “that reaches deeper into you than other languages. It gets to places in you.” In the theory class, she and her students took turns at the keyboard, trying to break down the language of Chopin’s music.
It seemed to me that in asking what Chopin was thinking 200 years ago in a particular composition, she was indirectly asking her students what they’re thinking now. About themselves, about the infinite expanse of creativity, about the power of music to cross borders, outlast wars, span centuries and still inspire.
Cummins was in the moment, time suspended, her focus riveted on her students.
“It feeds me,” she says. “Music is my life, and I can’t not do it.”
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