Megan Slay: The Mystery of Music

by Charles McGuigan 09.2023

Music flowed through the house for as long as she could remember. Sometimes it fell gently as a spring rain, and other times it pelted the very air with a soaking downpour, accented with thunder. Every cell of her being had been informed by these sounds since she was an infant.  As she grew older, Megan Slay would often watch her mother’s fingers move across the keys, fingers with a secret knowledge of every note they could coax from this grand piano. And then her mother would raise her head and begin to sing along with the music, and sometimes this would bring tears to Megan’s eyes, and she began to understand the meaning of each syllable of this transcendent language called music. 

“When I heard Mozart’s ‘Requiem’ for the first time, it made me cry,” Megan Slay tells me. “I think I was around eight years old. It had a profound effect on me.”

Megan grew up in the big white house on Hermitage Road, the one with the black shutters, and a pair of dormers on the third floor. She has two older brothers—Patrick and Andrew. Her father Joe, a partner at the Martin Agency for many years, was on the team that developed the award-winning tourism slogan Virginia Is For Lovers. And Megan’s mother, Martha, possesses the voice of an emphatic angel, and as a mezzo-soprano has performed in operas from Cincinnati to New York, from Wolf Trap to the Carpenter Center (since renamed). Although voice was her passion, Martha was also an accomplished pianist. 

Virtually every day Martha would practice, and the house would ring with music. Megan would often join her mother on the piano bench, and watch her fingers tickling the ivories and tapping the ebonies. Martha began teaching her daughter piano when the girl was just six years old. “She just worked me through those beginner skills and I kept going,” Megan tells me.  “Richmond is just a great place to grow up if you are into arts and music. It’s everywhere.” Like many a Richmonder, Megan grew up with the seasonal tradition of attending the annual performance of The Nutcracker. “That music to me is still some of the most beautiful music I know,” says Megan. 

Along with her brothers, she attended Collegiate, and through those years wherever she went Megan carried her Sony Walkman with headphones clapped to her ears, and she would listen. “I would listen to any kind of music growing up,” she says. “But Mozart was definitely my go to.”

And one of the very first songs Megan learned to play on the piano was Mozart’s Turkish March. “I just loved playing,” she says. “It was a kind of escape for me when I was little, but I did have a lot of encouragement from my parents to play, classical stuff like Chopin.”

After finishing high school, Megan attended Virginia Commonwealth University where she would earn a Bachelor of Music degree in Piano Performance. It was there she encountered a very important influence, an instructor named Ruta Smedina-Starke. “She came from Latvia and studied here, and she really pushed me to the limits,” she remembers. “The education at VCU I got was just really life-changing. It challenged me in a lot of ways. The faculty provided good experiences to their students and they are focused in what they ask of you. And that was the start of performing for me.”

Megan performed solo programs all over town. “I always loved performing at retirement communities in the area,” she says. Among them were Imperial Plaza and Hermitage Richmond. 

After graduation from VCU, Megan applied to the master’s program in music at George Mason University.  She auditioned for and had trial lessons with Dr. Linda Apple Monson, the director of the school of music and the piano department there. 

“We just clicked,” Megan says. “I liked her teaching style, which was very enthusiastic. She always said to us, ‘Make it happen, make it happen.’”  

Megan received a generous scholarship and would soon become friends with a man who was something of a legend. He was a founding member of one the largest engineering firms in the country, and was extremely generous with his wealth. In his mid-seventies he began taking piano lessons at George Mason and was appalled by the instruments being used in the classrooms and studios. 

“We can’t be having uprights, we need real pianos here for the students,” Sid said. So he stroked a big check and replaced every single upright with a brand new Steinway and overnight the School of Music became an all-Steinway school, a prestigious title. 

His name was Sydney “Sid” Dewberry and he passed away last summer at the age of ninety-five. George Mason’s music school is called The Reva and Sid Dewberry Family School of Music. 

As with Dr. Monson, Megan struck up an immediate rapport with Sid Dewberry. Turns out Sid was from Gretna, just a hop and a skip from Chatham, where Megan’s grandmother grew up.  “So he loved that and we clicked on that,” says Megan. “We would even correspond, and I miss him because he was like a grandfather to me. It was an interesting friendship. He’s the reason I went there because of the funding he provided. He developed those scholarships that helped me and many others with our music education.” 

The program that Dr. Monson created at Mason challenges the students. “We played at different venues,” Megan says. “We did chamber music.” She recalls her performance of Charles Gounod’s “Faust Waltz”, a very complicated piece. “It’s an eight-hand arrangement; so two pianos and two people on both pianos. It’s a lot to coordinate.”

After receiving her masters, Megan began working on her Doctor of Musical Arts in Piano Performance at Mason, which she should complete this spring. As part of that program, and to defray costs, Megan has taught keyboard skills as well as music appreciation to freshmen in the school’s bachelor’s program. All the while she has been performing and honing her skills, and to great effect. She has won award after award in piano competitions. Just this past summer she won the Bronze in the piano solo category of the Carles and Sophia International Piano Competition; the Silver in the Glory International Competition; and the Platinum in the Franz Schubert International Music Competition.

After listening to several of her performances on line I was absolutely stunned by the precision of her work on the keyboard: It is flawless. This sort of expertise requires a lot of hard work, and just the right amount of encouragement. “My mom was obviously a very big mentor, because she always encouraged me to practice, and she taught me originally,” says Megan. And my piano teachers have always been more than piano teachers, they’ve been life mentors.” She mentions her very first piano teacher, Ann Davis. And then Ruta Smedina-Starke, Dr. Linda Apple Monson, and Magdalena Adamek, an assistant professor of Collaborative Piano Megan studied under at VCU. 

“I’m thankful to the people who pushed me,” Megan says. “You have to prepare. That’s a big part of music. Be there and work hard and try your best. Practice every day.” For Megan that’s often four hours a day, depending on what she’s preparing for. But too much practice is not a good thing. “Time away is equally important,” she says. “It’s more important to expose yourself to life. I’ve learned that, finding that balance. Just be a human being, not a robot. Music is about expression and sharing something with others, and if you can’t identify with others you can’t share with them.”

Megan considers some of her favorite composers. “I love French music,” she says. “You can’t put your finger on the emotion it evokes because it’s more of an impressionistic sound. That’s why I’m a huge fan of Ravel and Debussy.  Gaspard de la nuit was one of the hardest pieces I ever worked on. It is an amazing sound. It completely takes you away.” She also listens to a fair amount of jazz and hip hop, and has grown very fond of the music of a lot of Latin music out of South America. 

“I would like to live somewhere abroad, maybe Brazil, and have a chance to perform,” Megan says. “I’m really interested in the music of Brazil. I love samba and the rhythm of Brazil. I’m also very impressed with music coming out of Argentina.” She recently had the opportunity to perform Danzas of Argentinas by the late Argentinian composer Alberto Ginastera. “This music was inspired by the Africans that lived in Argentina, and the native people living in rural parts of that country,” says Megan. “I love the driving rhythm. It’s in the accented six eight beat. It’s just really exciting music to me, it’s hot blooded. It’s called bi-tonal you have the left hand coming in on all the black keys, and the right hand on the white keys.” I watch Megan’s hands wandering across an imaginary keyboard on the table top she sits before. “You’re using both the black and the white simultaneously so it has that dissonance,” she says.

She feels more than a deep kinship with music, it is part of her and always new, and she relishes this. 

“I feel like it’s a mystery of life itself,” Megan Slay says. “And you’re trying to dig to discover the treasure trove of answers. But you’re never really done. I mean that’s the thing that’s interesting for me. Even for one single piece of music, there are a million angles and different feelings. One day you feel one way when you listen to a piece, and the next day it’s another emotion altogether. It is a mystery.”