Leopold Godowsky in Bangkok, Thailand: how Mew discovers the pianist who wrote a Java Suite and 53 Chopin studies, and checks for a pickup before her AI piano lessons

Mew is eleven and lives above her family's small printing shop in Bangkok, Thailand. The shop smells of ink and warm paper, and the rattle of the machines means she has learned to hear music through noise. One evening her uncle, who collects old classical records, played a piece that seemed to ring like bronze gongs. He told her it was written by a European pianist who had visited Java a century ago.

That surprised Mew. She had always assumed that classical composers stayed in grand European cities and never came near Southeast Asia. Her uncle handed her the record sleeve. The composer was Leopold Godowsky, and the set was called the Java Suite. She copied the name into her notebook so she could look it up after dinner.

Godowsky was born in 1870 in a small town near Vilnius, in what is now Lithuania. Most famous pianists of his time studied for years with celebrated teachers, but he was almost entirely self-taught. He gave concerts as a child, spent a short time at a music school in Berlin, and then learned mostly by playing, reading and listening to others.

A self-taught boy from near Vilnius

His career took him across the world. He lived in the United States as a young man, moved to Berlin, and from 1909 led a master class for advanced students at the academy in Vienna. Pianists of the time spoke about his hands with awe. He could make complicated, crowded music sound calm and clear, as if it cost him no effort at all.

His best-known project is a collection of 53 studies based on the études of Frédéric Chopin, written over roughly twenty years from the 1890s. Godowsky took pieces that were already very hard and added new layers, combined two études at once, or rewrote them for the left hand alone. Many professional players still treat them as one of the toughest challenges in the repertoire.

Mew laughed when she read that, because her own left hand is the lazy one. She has been taking piano lessons for about eight months on TIGA ALPHA, an online piano learning app her mother downloaded during a long school holiday. The AI piano teacher inside it listens to each hand separately, and it often reminds her that the left is lagging behind.

Godowsky's travels interested her most. In the 1920s he visited Java, then part of the Dutch East Indies, and heard gamelan orchestras of bronze gongs and metal keys. Afterwards he wrote the Java Suite, a long set of piano pieces describing gardens, temples, a puppet play and the gamelan itself. Mew could hear the ringing gong sounds in the recording.

There is one more family story she enjoyed. Godowsky's son, also called Leopold, became a violinist, and together with another musician, Leopold Mannes, he helped invent Kodachrome colour film in the 1930s. Mew showed this to her father, who has printed colour photographs for decades, and he admitted he had never known that two musicians were behind it.

Her own pieces are far simpler than anything Godowsky wrote, but reading about him gave her a routine. Mew glances at the opening line before her hands go anywhere and asks herself one question: is there a pickup, a short incomplete bar whose notes arrive before the first strong beat? If there is, she counts the missing beats in her head so the melody starts in the right place. It is the simplest way she knows to play piano with confidence from the very first sound.

Her piano course on the app explains why this matters. A song like Happy Birthday begins before the main beat, and if you treat the first note as beat one, the whole tune leans the wrong way. Since she started checking, the app has stopped flagging her opening bars, and she feels far less nervous at the start of each exercise.

At school Mew's music lessons are shared with forty other children, so there is little time for individual help. She told her teacher about the Java Suite, and the class listened to a short movement while looking at photographs of a gamelan. Several children were amazed that a European composer had once tried to copy Indonesian music on a piano.

For children who want to learn piano, Godowsky is a useful reminder that there are many paths. He did not have a famous teacher, yet he became one of the most respected players of his age through curiosity and steady work. Mew finds that encouraging, because she mostly practises alone after the shop closes.

She keeps a list of goals taped inside the piano lid. One is to play music by a composer who travelled to Asia, so a simplified page of the Java Suite is now on it. Another is to make her left hand as reliable as her right before the end of the school year, which she checks with the app every Sunday.

Tonight, while the printing machines finally go quiet, Mew will sit down at her keyboard, look at the first line of a new piece, count any missing beats, and begin. Somewhere in her head the bronze gongs from her uncle's record will still be ringing.

Frequently asked questions

Q: Who was Leopold Godowsky? A: Leopold Godowsky (1870–1938) was a pianist and composer born near Vilnius in present-day Lithuania. He was largely self-taught, toured as a child prodigy, taught in Berlin and Vienna and later lived in the United States.

Q: What are Godowsky's Studies on Chopin's Études? A: They are 53 reworkings of Chopin's études, written between about 1894 and 1914. Many are extremely difficult, and some are arranged for the left hand alone.

Q: What is the Java Suite? A: It is a set of piano pieces Godowsky wrote in the mid-1920s after visiting Java, then part of the Dutch East Indies. The movements describe places and sounds he met there, including gamelan music.

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