Mary Piercey-Lewis can close her eyes and vividly picture the old pump organ in the Fortune house where she grew up.
The instrument is still there, she says, its age showing a bit more now than it used to when it fascinated her as a little girl.
Piercey-Lewis plays it whenever she goes home to visit.
“I think there’s a little small hole in the bellows, so when you’re pumping it now, you have to pump a lot to get a good sound,” the director of music at Inuksuk High School in Iqaluit, Nunavut, says.
The house in Fortune had belonged to her father’s parents, and Piercey-Lewis’s grandmother, Grace Piercey, had been the organist at Fortune United Church.
Piercey-Lewis never had the opportunity to get to know Grace; she died when Piercey-Lewis was just three or four years old, she says.
No doubt she would be pleased to know just how influential music has been in her granddaughter’s life, however.
“I still have some music from when I was a young girl, and I still have my grandmother’s hymnbook and her music,” Piercey Lewis says, recalling how she struggled trying to play the songs and her passionate desire to learn them.
“I’d get up at like six in the morning and Mom and Dad and everybody would still be in bed, and I’d be pumping away on that organ, waking everybody up, to try to figure out the songs.”
Church opening
As much as seeing the pump organ everyday awakened her curiosity in music, so too did going to church every Sunday.
“Music was and still is quite big in that congregation,” Piercey-Lewis said of the United Church in Fortune.
One day, she told her mother how much she really wanted to learn how to play the piano, and so around the age of seven, she started taking lessons. A pivotal moment occurred a few years later when Piercey-Lewis was 12. The church’s organist at the time was leaving.
“By then, I had been playing for four or five years. I was still very young, but the choir leaders were looking to me then to play the hymns and that’s how it started,” she explained.
Each week, Piercey-Lewis learned and added a couple more hymns to her repertoire.
The support of the church’s congregation and senior choir inspired her passion for music, she says, and improved her musical abilities, as well, particularly in performing with congregations and choirs. She played the church organ until graduating high school.
“It was something that I loved,” Piercey-Lewis said.
“I practiced endlessly to try to get the hymns ready for Sunday morning. It just became a big part of my life.”
Fulfilling career
Piercey-Lewis’s parents encouraged her passion and found Neil Power, a piano teacher in Marystown, to help her.
They dutifully drove their daughter to Marystown every week for the lessons, which were only supposed to be for half an hour, Piercey-Lewis said, but Power often spent an hour or two with the eager-to-learn teenager.
Power helped Piercey-Lewis get into the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto for a couple of summers, she said.
“She was very bright, very musical, very talented, very pleasant,” Power told The Telegram.
“I knew her family right well, so I advised them what my opinion was, that she should go for the big prize in Toronto.”
At 17, Piercey-Lewis sent an audition tape to the University of Toronto and was accepted into the school’s Faculty of Music on a scholarship.
She would complete two bachelor’s degrees and later finished a master’s degree in music at the university. (In 2015, Piercey-Lewis earned a doctorate in ethnomusicology from Memorial University in St. John’s.)
Among Piercey-Lewis’s early teaching jobs was at a private school in Toronto.
“There were a thousand kids and four music teachers, and our concerts were at Roy Thomson Hall,” she said. “It was a really wonderful music job, but I was craving something a little bit more.”
She has found it in Nunavut.
Twenty years ago, an opportunity presented itself for her to join a school in Arviat. Piercey-Lewis has been at Inuksuk High School in Iqaluit for the past 13 years.
Over the last two decades, Piercey-Lewis has immersed herself in teaching music in Nunavut, compiling Inuit music and creating programming for her students that is culturally relevant.
Recently, she was recognized for her efforts as one of five nominees for the 2021 MusiCounts Teacher of the Year award. The music education charity is affiliated with the Juno Awards and the Canadian Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences. The winner will be announced later this spring.
Piercey-Lewis is thrilled with the nomination but says she gets the most satisfaction from her students.
“The love of my job comes from the success of the kids and I’m very lucky that I get rewarded everyday with seeing them grow,” she says.