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Like many people whose parents prod them into piano lessons, Elva Holland had an early relationship to music that was more about self-discipline than escape. But lots of kids in parentally-enforced music lessons grow up and leave the scales and etudes far behind. In Holland’s case, the lessons seem to have stuck more closely.
Then again, Holland herself is still close to the setting where, as a child, she labored over the keys. A Charlottesville native and a UVA Law graduate, she’s come home to live with her mother in the same house off Grady Avenue where she spent most of her childhood. In a pair of front parlors, layered with timeworn photos, soft chairs share the space with two pianos. Music-loving parents got Holland started on lessons as a youngster, in the days when only one white teacher in Charlottesville would take on black students. Standing in the parlor, Holland remembers sleepy Tuesday-morning lessons with a rueful laugh. Still, it’s perfectly clear that she’s glad she went through it and that, in this house, music has always been a joyful, essential element.
Holland doesn’t play much anymore, but her life is still infused with music. She’s a practicing music attorney with nationally known clients like Jae Sinnett and Ahmad Jamal, and she’s active with the Charlottesville Jazz Society. Her two children have gotten the music bug too; a son played in the Charlottesville High School orchestra and is now a music-business major at Virginia Commonwealth University. And Holland listens—to jazz, Latin, R&B—with the intensity of someone for whom, as she puts it, "music is like breath."
"Tuesday mornings, right in this spot, Mr. Smith’s chair was over there and I would be sitting here…I didn’t want to practice. I didn’t so much mind getting up early in the morning, but in summers we had to take summer piano. Mr. Smith would come by in the evening, so at 7:30 when you’re just having fun, you have to come inside. By the time you were finished it was dark.
"Every year we did a recital, and we couldn’t use music—we had to memorize it. In January, right after Christmas you got your music for your recital in June and you started learning it, and you had to have it memorized by March. For the longest time, the black kids played at First Baptist and the white kids had University Baptist. [Mr. Smith said,] ‘Why should my kids not be able to have recitals in one church?’ So we all ended up at University Baptist. My girlfriend, my very good friend—when you got older you had to do duets—so every year we did duets together. Our senior year, when we did that last duet together at University Baptist Church, we jumped up off that piano and we were like ‘We’re done!’
"Kids that are raised in the arts do better in class. It teaches you discipline. It teaches you listening. I call it ‘the quiet of loud’ because when you really get into the music it makes you listen and it makes you think.
"I really have to give all the credit to my mother and my father. Even my grandmother—she was always singing all through the house. If somebody came in here [when I was a teenager], they would have heard jazz downstairs, Mahalia Jackson in the kitchen, James Brown from my room….Music is my life. It is my lifeline."
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