HOLLYWOOD — Henrietta Palfrey, who taught piano to roughly fourteen hundred children and a smaller number of adults in the front room of the same house off Franklin Avenue from 1958 until 2023, died September 5 at home. She was 96.
Her son, Gerald, said the cause was pneumonia.
For sixty-five years the house was known on its block by the sound that came out of it between three and seven on weekday afternoons and most of Saturday: scales, mostly, and the same eight or nine pieces every generation of eight-year-olds has been assigned since there were pianos, played imperfectly and then, over months, less so. Neighbors who moved in complained, her son said, for about a year, and then began sending their children.
Her teaching rule, delivered to every student in the first lesson and repeated in most of the rest, was that wrong notes should be played loud. “If you are going to miss it, miss it so we can both hear it,” she would say. “A wrong note you play quietly is a wrong note you are hoping I won’t notice, and I notice, and now you’ve also learned to hope.” Former students interviewed for this obituary quoted the rule, unprompted, in nearly identical words, decades apart.
Milo Petrovich, 52, a session pianist who has played on film scores for twenty-five years and took his first lesson in her front room at seven, said the rule had followed him into every recording studio in the city.
“You sit down in a room full of people who are paid by the hour and you play the take, and if you miss, you miss it full voice and you look up,” he said. “Every conductor I’ve worked with loves that. None of them know it came from a woman on Franklin who charged twelve dollars a lesson until 1990.”
She kept an index card on each student — name, age at first lesson, the piece they were on, a line or two in her hand each year — in a set of oak library-card drawers her husband bought at a school auction in 1961. Her son has counted the cards at 1,412. Some families have cards in three drawers: a grandmother, a mother and a daughter, all taught in the same room on the same upright, which was tuned twice a year by the same man until he retired and then by his son.
The annual recital was held each June in a church hall at the eastern end of the district, with the students in order from youngest to oldest and the parents forbidden, by a rule she enforced from the aisle, from applauding until the end. “She said applause between pieces taught children to play for it,” Mr. Petrovich said. “She wanted them to play for the next piece.”
Henrietta Marie Palfrey was born in 1930 in Fresno, the daughter of a rail clerk, and studied piano at a conservatory in San Francisco. She came to Hollywood in 1956 to play for a dance studio’s classes, took her first private student two years later, and never, her son said, seriously considered doing anything else. She married Walter Palfrey, a set carpenter, in 1959; he died in 2004. In addition to her son, of Burbank, she is survived by a daughter, Alice, of Sacramento; five grandchildren; and eleven great-grandchildren, four of whom have cards.
She stopped teaching in 2023, at 93, when her hearing made it hard to tell, she said, whether a wrong note had been played loud enough. She kept the upright tuned. Her son said that in the last two years she would sit at it in the afternoons, between three and seven, and play the scales herself, and that the neighbors had not complained.
The index cards will go to the families. The drawers, her son said, are staying with the piano.