Festive holiday decor fills the Paulsen Center’s second-floor foyer as people stroll by its restaurant, offices or nearby skywalk. The downtown nook also plays host to an almost hidden treasure for a midday boost – live Christmas music.
Each December, the space gains a piano and a player for about 10 days near the staircase, where visitors will find Spokane musician Michelina Tyrie, 83. She’s booked there to play holiday music for three hours on work days Monday-Friday through this week.
It’s part of a longtime tradition for the historic downtown building – and a paying gig – that Tyrie has done for more than two decades. She started this year on Dec. 5.
“I had to think about it, but I’ve been doing this here for over 20 years,” Tyrie said. “I’m very fortunate. Music is my passion. I do love performing, teaching and accompanying.”
Tyrie said she’s always heard that the tradition of bringing a piano player into the building for live holiday music was a wish of the last Paulsen family member, Helen Paulsen, who died in 2009 and lived in the building’s penthouse. She said Paulsen was still alive when she started playing there, but Tyrie never met her .
But like clockwork, the building’s manager has continued to request Tyrie to perform each holiday season, she said. “There were other pianists before me.”
Tyrie brings with her a long list of classic holiday tunes running the gamut from old English carols to modern Christmas songs, and even some improv numbers and music from other countries. People might sit at the nearby tables for the Daily Grind, which serves breakfast and lunches, or others just linger for a bit while wandering to a next appointment.
Sometimes, Tyrie has performed on different pianos brought into the Paulsen Center, from a Steinway to digital-style ones. But in recent years, Tyrie said an attorney in the building has arranged to store his personal baby grand piano there and have it brought to the floor each December.
“I’m very grateful; it’s wonderful to perform on a baby grand,” she said.
“I get wonderful compliments. I’m very pleased that people really enjoy it and I guess they like live music after hearing all the elevator stuff, although I think toward the end of the season they might think ‘Oh, more Christmas music.’
“But people seem to enjoy it. A lot of them are longtime renters, I assume, but I recognize some of the people.”
The building hosts at least one holiday gathering for tenants while Tyrie is performing. She said she tries to play with feeling and a festive flare, “without being too loud or too aggressive,” if people want a quiet meal.
One of her favorites, and a crowd pleaser, is “What Child Is This?” or “Greensleeves.” She often plays traditional songs such as “Joy to the World,” and “Hark! the Herald Angels Sing,” but likes to break them up by blending in less well-known seasonal songs.
About five years ago, Tyrie said a group spontaneously came up to her piano and started singing. At least one of them worked in the building and was part of a quartet.
“So the flash mob happens sometimes,” Tyrie said, while laughing. “There were a few who were members of professional quartets who would sing. One of them I know particularly was also an insurance person in this building, but he also sang on the side. He’d come marching out and others followed him. It was all of a sudden. That was probably the most unusual event that has ever happened.”
She plays typically from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m., or 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. “It’s flexible,” she added. “It’s mostly the building people, or people who come down here because there’s the little coffee shop and they sit at a table.”
Tyrie also has performed over the years in many of the Spokane region’s churches, retirement homes and for theaters. Her daughter Sheila Bosco jokes that Tyrie has likely taught piano lessons to about half the people in Spokane since moving here in 1975.
Tyrie has played at “hundreds and hundreds of weddings, funerals,” and for singers, Bosco said. Since the pandemic, Bosco and two of her sisters regularly have used Skype to return to taking piano lessons from their mom.
Growing up in Chicago, Tyrie first began touching the keys at age of 5. Her three older brothers all played piano, so she’d copy after them. She had to wait until nearly age 10 to start formal lessons, and never stopped. She performed viola in orchestras for a while, but always returned to her beloved instrument.
At 19, as a student at the Chicago Conservatory of Music, she competed in a contest and won a chance to perform with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
She graduated from the conservatory in 1963. She and her first husband, fellow conservatory alumnus Edward McCarthy, soon opened the Court School of Music, teaching piano and voice in Wisconsin. Between 1964 and 1975, the couple had seven children: Brian, Sheila, Colleen, Candace, Dawn, Bridget and Leslie. Three of them went on to become professional musicians.
In 1981, their mother earned a master’s degree in music at Eastern Washington University. Six years later, she married Rich Tyrie. The couple has lived in Spokane ever since.
Tyrie still regularly plays her Steinway piano at home and continues to offer lessons mostly online as a freelance musician-teacher. Some of her former roles included about 10 years as accompanist for the German Concordia Choir in Spokane, Project Joy choral director and as Corbin Senior Center activity director. She’s been the pianist for a few Spokane Civic Theatre plays, as well.
Today, Tyrie still gets tapped by regional churches regularly to fill in for services or performances. This Christmas Eve, she’s booked to play at the Lidgerwood Presbyterian Church.
And she continues to enjoy being a pianist at retirement centers. Tyrie said she’s witnessed Alzheimer’s patients stand up and sing as she played, when they otherwise hadn’t even talked.
“I really feel like music is a universal language because it reaches people no matter where they are from or what ethnic group they’re in. I feel it’s important especially for retirement homes, because they say it activates a part of the brain that nothing else does.”
While playing music, she knows songs by heart but keeps the sheet music in front of her.
“Sometimes, it jogs my memory, or I might improv on it. Normally, some pieces aren’t very long and it’s kind of fun to add different melodies to it or sometimes I improv the whole piece. We were taught how to do that in the Chicago conservatory. The professor said, ‘More than likely as a musician, you’ll work in churches, so you’ll have to learn how to improv. It has helped because they’ll say, ‘Just play some gathering music or some music as they walk out.’
“Many times you don’t want to be shuffling through papers, so I learned how to improv. That’s what I teach my students also, if they’re ready for it. It keeps me sharp.”
English (US)