Energy and Excellence at Home in Bed-Stuy

By Fern Gillespie

How do you get to Carnegie Hall? For Brooklyn youth, it’s practice, practice, practice at The Patricia F. Robinson Music Studio, 590 Madison St. in Bed Stuy. On June 8, a group of Patricia Robinson’s musically gifted children ages 2 to 13 will be playing the piano with an orchestra at the prestigious Carnegie Hall’s Weill Hall.

“It’s really magnificent. I don’t know any other school that is doing it at this point in time,” Ms. Patricia Robinson explained to Our Time Press. “I want to take my children to the best. Carnegie Hall is the best in terms of acoustics. It’s built for music. The children are in awe. There are practice rooms. Carnegie Hall tunes the piano before the concert, and we have freshly tuned piano every time we play there.”

It was the Jazz Age when Robinson’s mother, piano teacher L. Elsie Cumberbatch Graham, decided to create The Stuyvesant School of Music at her brownstone. Since 1930, the site on Monroe Street has been a Bed Stuy musical institution. This is the school’s 94th annual student recital, which has been staged at Carnegie Hall since 2017.

“Music was my mother’s passion,” she explained. Her mother was born in Philadelphia and raised in Barbados with a father who was a musician. Moving to Brooklyn, her mother became known as a pianist with her choir. Her advisor, the renowned Brooklynite Dudley M. Archer, encouraged her to start a school. “She was different. She was fabulous. She was beautiful. She dressed up all the time,” said Robinson, whose mother died at age 84. “She never retired. She was teaching until her very last breath.”

When Robinson was a 9-year-old student attending PS 44, she began teaching piano at The Stuyvesant School of Music. “My mother wasn’t home when I would come back from school. She would have some adult students waiting for her,” she recalled. “My mother said, will you give them lessons? You know what to do. So, I assisted my mother, but I had my own students.”

The Patricia F. Robinson Music Studio has continued her mother’s legacy for generations of Brooklynites. One of her former students, opera singer Paul Grosvenor, now teaches voice at the school. He has performed at the Metropolitan Opera and won a Grammy Award for singing in Porgy and Bess. “I think that it was so wonderful that he would come back after all these years,” she said. “Most of my students become doctors, lawyers and other professionals. Music is the thing that takes you someplace else in terms of your mind. It’s stimulating the learning process. I advise students that between your homework to practice your music. It helps to relieve that stress. Music is a discipline.”

Students from The Patricia F. Robinson Music Studio have performed globally. The children have been involved in international competitions where they compete against other music students from Germany, Japan, China, Australia, Canada and Columbia, South America.
In addition, she’s established a relationship with a sister school, The Thrive Music Academy of Africa in Uganda, “Our kids have Zoom meetings with the kids in Uganda,” she explained. “They talk about the instruments. We have concerts with each other on Zoom. We also sent instruments to Uganda, including a baby grand piano.”

Robinson is a graduate of the Mannes College of Music at The New School, where she studied piano, voice, and violin. She’s a very active vice president in both Mu-Te-Or, the Brooklyn branch of the National Association of Negro Musicians and the Brooklyn Music Teachers Guild.

Although she only teaches piano, there are a variety of instruments available at the school. She takes children beginning at two years old if they show readiness. She also teaches several autistic children. “I think we’re pretty good with the autistic kids,” she said. “They don’t come showing a special talent. They just fool around on the piano and then they begin to play just wonderfully.”

For almost 100 years, these two piano teachers have changed thousands of lives one musical note at a time. “I love seeing what music does for kids in their lives. My students teach me how to teach them,” said Robinson. “They will let you know how they learn. Then you take that and build.”