Musician and piano teacher was an artist at heart who loved being a “Nana”
Frances Elizabeth Sherer Caldwell, 78, of White Plains, N.Y., died on November 25, 2020, in Ramsey, N.J., at the home of her daughter, Juliet. Born on August 30, 1942, in Mount Kisco, N.Y., to Mary Brown Sherer and Clark Grosjean Sherer, Frances grew up in Scarsdale hearing her mother play piano and her father sing along with the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts every Saturday. As she once wrote of her early days learning the piano, “I was galvanized by Bach and Beethoven, and practiced so much my parents would leave the house!” After earning her BA in music from Smith College (’64, Phi Beta Kappa), where she studied piano with Robert Miller and composition with Alvin Etler, Frances stayed on at Smith for one year as a faculty fellow in music, then entered the master’s program at UC Berkeley. She married Peter Devigne Caldwell in September 1966 and moved to Paris, France, where Peter was practicing law. There Frances completed her graduate studies under the guidance of pianist Nadine Vercambre, earning a diplôme supérieur in piano performance from the Conservatoire Européen de Musique de Paris. She spoke beautiful French and remained a lifelong Francophile. While living in Paris, Frances (or “Francie,” as she was known to many) gave birth to three children — Nat, Nelson and Juliet — to whom she imparted a deep love of language and the arts. In 1974 she and Peter returned to the U.S.; they raised their kids in New York City and, later, in Pelham, N.Y. Frances also enjoyed a long career as a piano teacher, holding faculty positions at the School for Strings in Manhattan and at the Music Conservatory of Westchester in White Plains, as well as teaching private lessons to countless students, by whom she was much beloved and respected. She gave solo recitals over the years in the U.S. and France, though chamber music remained closest to her heart — she called it “intimate conversation in a universal language.” Frances was a splendid musician and a pianist of great feeling and elegance. She loved to interpret the music of Chopin, Ravel, Debussy, Bach, Beethoven, Schumann, Mozart, Brahms, and many other classical and contemporary composers. She also had a razor-sharp intellect and seemingly inexhaustible knowledge of all things literary, etymological, historical and musical; her family often turned to her as an in-house reference as reliable as Merriam-Webster’s or the Reader’s…
Musician and piano teacher was an artist at heart who loved being a “Nana”
Frances Elizabeth Sherer Caldwell, 78, of White Plains, N.Y., died on November 25, 2020, in Ramsey, N.J., at the home of her daughter, Juliet. Born on August 30, 1942, in Mount Kisco, N.Y., to Mary Brown Sherer and Clark Grosjean Sherer, Frances grew up in Scarsdale hearing her mother play piano and her father sing along with the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts every Saturday. As she once wrote of her early days learning the piano, “I was galvanized by Bach and Beethoven, and practiced so much my parents would leave the house!” After earning her BA in music from Smith College (’64, Phi Beta Kappa), where she studied piano with Robert Miller and composition with Alvin Etler, Frances stayed on at Smith for one year as a faculty fellow in music, then entered the master’s program at UC Berkeley. She married Peter Devigne Caldwell in September 1966 and moved to Paris, France, where Peter was practicing law. There Frances completed her graduate studies under the guidance of pianist Nadine Vercambre, earning a diplôme supérieur in piano performance from the Conservatoire Européen de Musique de Paris. She spoke beautiful French and remained a lifelong Francophile. While living in Paris, Frances (or “Francie,” as she was known to many) gave birth to three children — Nat, Nelson and Juliet — to whom she imparted a deep love of language and the arts. In 1974 she and Peter returned to the U.S.; they raised their kids in New York City and, later, in Pelham, N.Y. Frances also enjoyed a long career as a piano teacher, holding faculty positions at the School for Strings in Manhattan and at the Music Conservatory of Westchester in White Plains, as well as teaching private lessons to countless students, by whom she was much beloved and respected. She gave solo recitals over the years in the U.S. and France, though chamber music remained closest to her heart — she called it “intimate conversation in a universal language.” Frances was a splendid musician and a pianist of great feeling and elegance. She loved to interpret the music of Chopin, Ravel, Debussy, Bach, Beethoven, Schumann, Mozart, Brahms, and many other classical and contemporary composers. She also had a razor-sharp intellect and seemingly inexhaustible knowledge of all things literary, etymological, historical and musical; her family often turned to her as an in-house reference as reliable as Merriam-Webster’s or the Reader’s…