Growing up, my mom told me I needed to learn to play the piano. I hated her for that. Playing the piano at first was a game to me. I would listen to my piano teacher play the songs she assigned me, and I went home and reproduced them. Because, as it turned out, I have a really good ear.
I was, however, like most piano students, required to practice for a certain amount of time every day. I hated that one hour of my day, and tried to do anything but practice. This was the subject about which I fought my mom the most as a child.
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”
Aristotle (384 BC-322 BC), Greek Philosopher
Years later, I showed up at my new, professional, and very old piano teacher’s house. She was so weird, and clicked her tongue. She would look at my nails and if they were too long, and she would clip them right then and there. She smelled like rubbing alcohol because, before each student would play, she would pull out a cotton ball and swab the entire keyboard of her magnificent baby grand piano. Oh, how I fell in love with her piano!
This very old and strange woman changed the way I viewed playing the piano–and how I eventually learned to tackle life forever. I think it was during my second lesson that she realized I didn’t know how to read music. She stopped me, put this sort of box thing over my hands so that I couldn’t look at my fingers or the keys, and asked me to continue to play the song. I couldn’t, and I felt like such a fraud.
I was embarrassed, caught, and exposed. All I wanted to do was leave my lesson and never come back. My teacher, with all her wisdom, was not trying to make me feel bad, but teaching me a great life lesson. There are no shortcuts to playing the piano. Life it is the same way–you have to learn to pay the price.
“That which we persist in doing becomes easier to do; not that the nature of the thing itself is changed, but that our power to do is increased.” Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 –1882), American essayist, philosopher, poet
She made me a deal that day. I could look through her music and take a few pieces home to sight read and play whenever and however I wanted, but I had to practice and learn to read music on at least one song per week. And thus began my journey of actually learning to read music and conquer the Circle of Fifths.
I have been playing the piano now for 26 years. I have seen many different ways to learn the piano, so much change in technology, and incredible new ways in which to approach piano lessons. And yet there is no way to actually learn to play the piano other than to just do it. There is no app for practicing. Some things just have to be done the hard way.
The good thing about investing so much time and energy into something–being willing to pay the price–is that it is so incredibly rewarding in the end!
Wonderful lesson, well told. Thank you.
Reblogged this on INSPIRE:music.service.hope and commented:
I wrote this over on another blog I manage and write for but I thought it fit here also. There is power in music and an abundance of life’s lessons to learn.