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Tucked away in the Allan Building basement, in a small studio beneath the Kiplinger Library, private music instructor Marshall Anders, 83, is playing Mozart on the piano. “This is how I spend most of my life,” he says, with a satisfied smile.

Now forty years into his McDonogh career and nearly 70 years since he first performed professionally as a young teenager, the semi-retired Anders is one of those lucky people who can say his vocation and avocation have always been the same. “At age ten I decided this is the only thing I could possibly do in my life,” he says.

“My official position is Rollins Fellow in the Teaching of Music, Emeritus—to be available for whatever the school wants me to do,” explains Marsh. At present that includes teaching 22 private piano lessons a week to McDonogh students and also playing piano or organ for the Lower School chapel services, alumni memorial services, and some alumni events. Upon request, Anders plays the organ for weddings. He has reduced his outside, private teaching to one piano student, Paige Unitas, daughter of the late Baltimore Colts quarterback.

Plus, Marsh rehearses weekly and plays monthly in the Sentimental Journey Orchestra, a 17-piece ensemble whose members are mostly senior citizens and lifetime musicians like he is. “It’s more like a club than a professional group,” he says. “It takes me back to my youth.”

Adds Marsh, “It’s a labor of love.” So are the volunteer performances he gives for residents of the Pickersgill retirement community, where his brother lives, and for patients at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, where his daughter, Viki, is a nurse practitioner in the oncology department. Anders, a widower, is also close to son Paul, a sound engineer, and son Alan, finance director for the city of New York.

If his semi-retirement sounds especially active, consider Marsh Anders’ McDonogh career before he retired. Between 1981 and 1988, for instance, Marsh directed all the choruses and bands, gave piano lessons, and ran the music department. “They must have hired 10 people when I retired in 1988!” he jokes.

Marsh likes to say he arrived at McDonogh with rock and roll. In 1964, music department head Gerald Wilson was searching for a part-time chapel organist and piano teacher when local musicians told him Anders was the best around. At the time, Marsh was teaching private lessons and serving as organist and choirmaster at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Huntington by day. By night, he was playing solo piano at the old Love’s Restaurant at Charles and 25th Streets, among other gigs.

Marsh remembers then-Headmaster Bob Lamborn ’35 assuring him that the McDonogh job would fit into his schedule. “I told him specifically, no full-time! First thing I knew, I was full-time.” And he was hooked.

“Even then our military students were a cut above,” Marsh insists. He recounts the grand impression McDonogh choral singers made when he took more than a hundred middle and upper schoolers to perform downtown at an International Optimists Club convention. “Our kids in uniform made a great picture,” adds the World War II Army veteran.

Today Marsh considers his piano students as outstanding as ever, with one difference. “The respect, the discipline is still the same,” he notes. “But children don’t seem to be able to learn the musical language as well as they used to. It could be because they’re so busy.”

He inspires the children by following the style of his beloved teacher and mentor, John W. Kaspar. “I was fortunate that he taught both legitimate classical and popular music. He would give me my formal lessons and then we would play together. …That was really quite an experience,” Anders recalls. “When I’m teaching my students here I do the same thing.”

Marsh was a City College student when he became certified to teach piano. He was hired for his first professional job at age 16, playing nightclubs four nights a week with the Lou Lombardo Orchestra. “I still got my homework done, more or less,” he chuckles.

Four years in the Army followed, during which Marsh became leader of the traveling Skyliner’s Dance Orchestra at Sedalia Army Air Force Base in Missouri. Weeks after his discharge, Marsh was back in Baltimore playing for the Zim Zemarel Orchestra and teaching at the Freitag Music School. He was always in demand as a musician and educator after that. His music resume includes stints with too many renowned, local dance orchestras and combos to list. “I don’t think there are many places in Baltimore I didn’t play at some time,” he adds.

In 2002, Marshall Anders received what he considers the most meaningful recognition of his career: The Musicians Association of Metropolitan Baltimore, Local 40-543, American Federation of Musicians honored him with its lifetime achievement award.

“To be recognized by your peers is very exciting,” says Marsh. He seems equally gratified, though, by the rewards of his McDonogh tenure. Like the time a third-grade pupil was asked to bring her favorite thing to class and she brought him. And, in 1991, when the Alumni Association honored Marsh with its Distinguished Service Award.

“You can’t possibly describe it. It’s so thrilling,” Marsh says of the enduring connections made with students over the years. He keeps a memory book with all the letters they send him, and he loves seeing them in person. Marsh marvels at how a college-age former student, one who took piano lessons in first or second grade before transferring to another school, approached him in a Towson restaurant last summer. “I just can’t imagine how that little kid remembered me!” he exclaims.