Piano Lessons
In the house where I grew up, in suburban New Jersey, there is a photo of my mother, her sister, and their parents, surrounding her brother sitting at a black grand piano. It sits on a table on the staircase landing between the ground and second floors, maybe 20 or 30 feet away from where the piano at the center of the picture now resides. A Hardman apartment grand, this piano (as I learned a long time ago) was at one point in time an original player piano, of the variety that used mechanical piano rolls that famous pianists and composers made when the technology was in fashion at the beginning of the early twentieth century. This functionality was stripped from the piano long before it ever made its way to me, but the piano was still the piano, fully functional from keys one through 88.
My earliest memory of this piano must have been when I was about five or six years old, in my grandparents’ house in northern Florida. Growing up, my mother and her siblings had all taken lessons, and so had my grandmother, but I think by this point my mother was the only one who still played when she had the opportunity, which in this case meant playing at her parents’ house. Once when we were visiting, I remember her playing a Beethoven piece, Für Elise, and cliché as it may sound, five-or-six-year-old me was hooked.
I don’t really remember how events progressed from there, but I do remember that maybe a year or so later, when I was in the first grade, I took my first ever piano lesson with my first piano teacher, who lived in a retirement community and had two Steinways in her house situated next to each other, but facing opposite directions so the two players could make eye contact while playing. It was here that I started reading music while I learned to read the printed word, and also was introduced to very rudimentary music theory — learning my scales, my intervals, and qualities of chords: major, minor, augmented, diminished. I would sit on the floor or lay on the rug in the living room at home, filling in the numbers and notes of my theory homework at the ripe age of six or seven.
If this makes me seem like I was a model student, allow me to thoroughly disabuse you of that notion. I had a love-hate relationship with practicing piano, although my mother could reliably get me running to the piano if she herself started playing, because nothing makes a six or a seven year-old appreciate something than watching someone else play with the toy they’ve previously ignored.
Also, that piano I first remember hearing my mom play in Jacksonville, the one from the picture, was now in our living room. My grandparents gave it to us so I would have something to practice on.
My mother has sometimes said that if she wanted me to be a concert pianist, she would have left me with my first piano teacher. Which is not to say that this teacher was mean or strict (I remember her being quite kind), but she certainly pushed me quite hard. While I enjoyed ear training (which was easy for me for reasons I would not understand until later), reading rhythm was the bane of my young musical existence, and would continue to be until I joined marching band in high school, at which point it went from being a bane to a nuisance. It was hard, it involved math at a time when I had not even started learning multiplication, and had certainly not yet mastered addition and subtraction. So around Halloween, when I was seven or eight years old, I was given a vaguely Halloween-themed piece that was simply too much for me and my lack of patience. I switched teachers, and started with another local piano teacher within a couple months.
Actually, here was probably where rhythm really nearly broke me. I believe I made it maybe a year with my second teacher, who as I remember would force me to sit and play the same measure of the easy-piano arrangement of “Puff the Magic Dragon” over and over for the duration of our lesson until it sunk in. It was almost never about pitch, it was always about defeating my now mortal enemy, rhythm. Although I quite enjoyed the presence of my second teacher’s cats (she had several and some of them would sit around us during lessons) these single-measure-per-hour lessons pushed me to a breaking point. By this point, I loathed playing, and loathed practicing, and loathed lessons. So sometime mid-year, when I was in the third grade, I took the longest hiatus from lessons that I can remember (and to this day the only hiatus I ever took from piano while I was in school, barring the yearly summer vacation).
I needed a new teacher, and one that would let me play pieces I wanted to learn in addition to ones they wanted to assign to me. So eventually, I found my way to a small music school located a couple of blocks from where I would one day attend high school, meeting my third piano teacher.
He and I worked together quite well for the couple of years I had him as a teacher. I started learning pieces from Star Wars in addition to the pieces from the piano book designed to make my technique better. My mother occasionally tells me that this was around when, at the year-end piano recitals for all the teachers, most kids would go up, play a few short, maybe minute-long pieces, or pop songs, and I would walk up to the instrument and play my five, six, or seven-minute Star Wars odyssey, because I marched to my own beat.
Though “Duel of the Fates,” (arguably the single greatest thing to come out of 1999’s Star Wars: The Phantom Menace) was probably what most of my family remembers me playing obsessively around this time period, I also remember sitting at the piano with my walkman and the second disc of the soundtrack to The Empire Strikes Back, trying to learn Darth Vader’s theme by ear, because all of the sheet music I found was in the wrong key, cut out the middle section entirely, or worse, both.
Unfortunately, this teacher moved to Cincinnati, so once again I was in need of a new teacher. By this point I think I was almost done with elementary school, and the music studio I took lessons at had moved to the next town over to a larger space that it still occupies to this day. The studio had hired someone new, who I believe was fresh out of college when she joined, and I became one of her first students. Over the course of the four or five years I was studying with her, I graduated from Star Wars to the Beatles as I moved on from a Walkman to a SanDisk Sansa MP3 player. My technique improved, and I could be convinced to practice and understood the value of doing so willingly without parental cajoling. Scales became easier, rhythm remained that recurring foe, the so-called Big Bad at the end of my pianistic story arcs. I understood what perfect/absolute pitch was (the ability to recognize and differentiate between musical pitches without needing to hear them in relation to each other), and that I had it.
I don’t remember what exactly brought me to start writing music (I often feel extremely, unjustifiably, irredeemably pretentious when saying that I compose music), but by the time ninth grade rolled around, I found myself the author of one rock song and the composer of a piece that someone would later point out to me partially ripped-off the theme from the American adaptation of The Office. This was despite the fact that I had never actually seen The Office at this point in time.
I spent a lot of my free time scribbling my best attempt at dictating my piece (once again, it was always rhythm that gave me headaches), and at one point showed this to my piano teacher, asking if we could start to learn more in depth theory so I could compose more. Eventually, she explained to me that her focus was really more in teaching beginners, but knew of another teacher within the studio who would be able to teach me more about theory and composition.
So after several years, I found myself starting with my fifth piano teacher. I learned some very interesting and very useful theory that I have continued to rely on ever since. He was more jazz-oriented, which, while interesting, was not always the best fit when I really wanted to go in more of a classical direction. Still, much of the theory I learned from him would remain relevant and useful for years to come. For a time, it worked, and I was playing Chopin and Debussy alongside Thelonius Monk and Dave Brubeck, and occasionally writing a piece carrying over influences of both genres, albeit biased towards the former.
This lasted for about two years, at which point I started with my sixth teacher. He was German and Turkish, and we pretty much clicked immediately. He split his time between jazz and classical, though we focused more on the classical side of things. This was around the same time I started playing mallet percussion for my high school’s marching band, and the constant focus on keeping a consistent tempo led to a dramatic improvement in my rhythm reading and musicianship as a whole. I was also his oldest student, playing Chopin and Bach at my recitals, and even feeling brave enough to tackle some of Beethoven’s more difficult work.
Unfortunately, I had started with my sixth teacher about two years before college. While I did have the option of taking summer lessons the summer before my freshman year, he was not teaching that summer, so I briefly worked with another teacher for the intervening two month period.
College was the first and only time I have ever had to audition for lessons, primarily because of the sheer volume of students who were interested in lessons. I remember feeling terrified walking into the small audition room at the top floor of the towering music building in September of 2013. I played a Chopin waltz and the last piece I had learned with my old teacher — a Bach fugue from The Well-Tempered Klavier. Thankfully, I didn’t have a problem getting a teacher, my seventh.
We worked together for all four years of college, playing Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Bach, Debussy, Mendelssohn, Ravel, Scriabin, Grieg, and frequently Shostakovich, a mutual favorite. Over the course of four years I learned much about shaping phrases, tone, and understanding the patterns and arcs within the pieces we studied together. I certainly had my ups and downs, since, as a college student, I was perpetually busy for one reason or another, leading to weeks where I was unable to practice as often as I (or my teacher) would have liked.
I do wish I had played more piano when I was home after graduation. Now that I am in an apartment without one, I miss it, and often listen to piano pieces thinking about how much fun I might have trying to learn them and learn from them. But I am sure I will be reunited with the piano in good time.
