The three B’s – Bach, Beethoven and Bobby

Evanston RoundTable, August 14, 2024

With more than two dozen teachers and 327 students ranging in age from 1 to 92, the Northwestern University Music Academy has a huge teaching load – as well as a long and illustrious past. Susan Osborn, who started as a piano teacher with the Academy in 1987 and has been director the last two years, was uncertain of its history and at my request dug it out for me.

“I hadn’t realized how far back we actually go!” she wrote.

In fact, the original Music Academy began well over a century ago, in 1886, which might make it one of the longest continuously operating music schools in the Midwest, if not the nation.

Since then it has provided individual and group lessons to thousands of students of piano, violin, viola, cello, bass and guitar. One of the pianists is 92-year-old Bobby Perlman. Bobby lives on the North Side of Chicago and has been studying piano at the school’s 1818 Hinman Ave. building in Evanston, a converted two-story house, with Karen Kan-Walsh. They are currently working on Bach Partitas and the Beethoven Piano Sonata opus 110.

With Bach’s intricate polyphonic writing and Beethoven’s late-period complexity and profundity, these pieces are a huge challenge for any pianist. But Bobby is not just any piano student.

She started playing as a youngster. “It was a major thing in my life, from the time I was a child.”  She pursued music as a piano major at Northwestern University in 1948, when she was 16 years old, and minored in theater. “I wanted to be a musician or an actress. Two different professions that could lead you to a nervous breakdown,” she said, laughing.

“At first I thought I might make a career of piano,” she said. “But I don’t know what I was thinking. There are a lot of people out there who are concert pianist material.”

After graduating Northwestern, Bobby married and raised three children. Later she spent 25 years in partnership with her daughter in an interior design business. And she went back to Northwestern to study liberal arts, something she never got a chance to do as a music major.

She never stopped playing piano, even taking lessons at Music Institute of Chicago in Winnetka. But sometimes her playing took a back seat to her other activities. After her husband died, she said she “meandered back to piano.”

Finally, in 2017 she started studying at the Music Academy with Walsh. “She’s a terrific teacher,” Bobby said, explaining that Walsh is able to balance her romantic and freewheeling tendencies. “She gets me down to earth and is very detailed.”

Walsh returned the compliment. “It’s wonderful to work with Bobby,” she said. “She’s advanced, a hard worker and loves challenges.”

As a youngster, Walsh studied piano with her mother for 10 years in the Detroit area, then got bachelor and master’s performance degrees from University of Michigan – Ann Arbor and a doctorate in piano performance and pedagogy at Northwestern University’s Bienen School of Music in 1995.

She teaches some 65 students in Keyboard Skills classes at Bienen as well as two individual students at the Music Academy. “They do an incredible job of serving the community,” she said of the Academy. “They’re very nice people. I’m proud to be on staff.”

Said Bobby,  “Coming back to music this time of my life is fabulous!”