On learning how to be a pianist

I began taking piano lessons when I was in Kindergarten. My mom is a piano teacher; her mother was a piano teacher. “It’s in your blood” is a sentence regarding piano that I have heard at least three times a year since I learned how to listen. My mom frequently reminds me that when I was three months old, sitting in a high chair as she cooked dinner, I began to hum — “and haven’t stopped making music since.”

I identify as a piano student — I’ve taken lessons my whole life save for a three month period when the pressures of middle school popularity, i.e. the soccer team, got the better of me. I participated in all of the recitals, Guild auditions, Syllables auditions, master classes, etc., etc., etc.

So I often wonder why I still can’t seem to let myself identify as a pianist. In a room full of piano students who are Pianists, I forget that I ever sat down at a piano to begin with. I can read music, but only when I’m completely alone and with no time restrictions. The words “sight” and “read” in succession make my heart skip a beat and the word “accompanying” gives me a lump in my throat. While I watch other student pianists grow into themselves and learn harder and harder repertoire, I feel stagnant — and have felt stagnant since I began to identify as a piano student.

On a surface level, I know this isn’t true. I know I’ve become more mature through the years, and I’m obviously working on harder repertoire than I was in highschool. But on a deeper, more intimate level, I feel a constant anxiety that I have somehow raised the expectations of those around me only to ungracefully reveal my own inferiority.

Today at my piano lesson I was having trouble grabbing some big chords in a Rachmaninoff Prelude. My hands kept hesitating as I moved from one inversion to the next and I couldn’t play the right notes and the right rhythm at the same time. I was frustrated. Then my piano teacher told me to close my eyes and find the chords. I did so effortlessly and in seconds. Staring at the page trying to read the black dots paralyzed me. But, as it turns out, I did know what to do. An eery, panicked “Eureka” moment came over me: had I gotten this far without ever learning to read music? Am I the biggest fraud in the history of Lewis & Clark piano students?

Like any classically trained musician after a panicked existential crisis, I hit the practice room immediately. But, knowing myself and having some self compassion, I put my new material aside and reverted to a Chopin Mazurka that has always been a comfort to me. The notes easily dripped off of my finger tips and my wrists and hands felt limber as I floated through the scale passages. The logical voice inside my head gave me a metaphorical cup of chamomile tea and told me that I didn’t need to be Charlie Albright in order to identify as a pianist. I’m a pianist not because I can attempt to stumble through a Haydn orchestral reduction, but because Chopin makes me cry and sometimes Satie feels like the Lynyrd Skynyrd of the early 20th century.

I probably won’t ever get over my inferiority complex when it comes to piano, but that’s ok because I think I will someday get over not getting over my inferiority complex. That’s not what being a pianist is about. I feel more at home on a backless wooden bench than I do the couch in my own home. That’s not a freak accident or a chance fixation. It’s because I am a pianist — it’s in my blood and bones — and it has nothing to do with my ability to read music.