The Phone Call

Most phone calls are just part of the day. Your mother calls, a colleague calls, a friend calls. You sort out whatever needs sorting, and you move on. Most of them leave no trace at all.

But every so often the phone rings and nothing afterward feels quite as settled as it did before. Not because the conversation itself was dramatic — quite the opposite. These calls tend to be unexpectedly calm, ordinary, almost forgettable in the moment. It’s only later that you realize something shifted.

Jana called me a few years ago. It was one of those calls.

Jana Zanis Bajuszová studied piano with the same teacher I did — Monika Pavláková. Jana later became a piano teacher herself. She spent years teaching children to play — and among the sheet music she used was mine.

She was calling to ask whether I had any objection, from a copyright standpoint.

It took me a moment to understand what she was actually telling me. I was around fifty-two, and I had just learned that music I’d written as a twenty-two-year-old conservatory student still existed — not boxed away somewhere with old belongings, not filed under some catalogue number in an archive, but in real piano lessons. Thirty-six years of them. Without my having the faintest idea.

My original manuscript had been lost in a move at some point. Jana still had her copy, from her own student years. She photographed it on her phone and emailed it to me. It’s a suite of six pieces for four-hand piano. If you’re curious what the music is and what story it carries, you can read more here.

What I felt when this long-forgotten music suddenly came back into my life is hard to describe. It wasn’t euphoria. It was something quieter — a warm surprise, tangled up with one question: now what? The idea of doing something with the music arrived quickly. But I didn’t rush toward it. For about two years I just turned it over in my mind, without deciding anything.

In the end, it wasn’t the music itself that pushed me into motion. It was teaching.

My first job was teaching music. I started before I’d even turned twenty — teaching in Piešťany alongside my studies in Bratislava. Later I taught at the ZUŠ in Handlová, alongside everything else I was doing. Teaching was always something different from every other kind of work. Shaping people — children especially — and lighting a spark of interest in something beautiful: that’s a gift that sits above almost anything else you could do for a living.

I didn’t leave teaching because I stopped loving it. I left because feeding a family of four on a teacher’s salary simply wasn’t going to work, not back then. So I left. The detour led into IT — that’s a story for another time. But one part of me — the part that wanted to spark an interest in beauty — stayed quietly behind, waiting.

When my own long-forgotten composition found its way back to me, by this strange detour, I started to feel that waiting part of me wake up.

Not because I was about to go back into a classroom. It was something else — this music, tested for thirty-six years in real classrooms with real children, with no awareness and no effort on my part, was now getting a real chance. A chance to be properly published. A chance to reach other teachers, other children.

There’s one more detail that always comes back to me.

The original story text for each piece in the suite was written by my mother, thirty-six years ago, when I first handed the suite in as my graduation work. And somehow, ever since, this music kept finding people willing to look after it — though none of us ever planned it that way.

Happy practicing, friends.