Eighty-eight keys

When I was a kid (some fifteen years ago), I did the whole piano lesson thing. Even studied with a pretty darn good teacher (Irene Peery-Fox) for a couple months. But back then I didn’t care so much for the piano, so I’d try my hardest to minimize practice time, and lessons were excruciating at best. My mom would teach me for a month, and then I’d finagle my way out of it for a few weeks, and then she’d start me up again, and so on.

I can’t remember how long that lasted, but somewhere in the foggy mists of my adolescence, something changed. Where once was apathy, in floated interest. Passion, even. I grew to love the piano, and my mom no longer had to try to get me to practice — I did it on my own.

Granted, I still wasn’t very disciplined, even towards the end of high school when I studied with a formal teacher again for a few months (maybe a year; I really can’t remember). Avocation, not profession. I played hymns each week on my mission, and for seven months I toured Bangkok with as the accompanist to the mission choir (we did musical firesides). And as a result, I can sightread pretty darn well, but I don’t have a single piece memorized. Not one. I can play the first six or eight measures of David Lanz’s “Cristofori’s Dream,” but that’s it. I can’t even play the pieces I’ve written. ~sigh~ It’s like forgetting your kids’ names.

Someday, though, I’ll get a piano in my apartment/house, and it’ll be like a family reunion. I’m dying to wake my skills out of their long hibernation (all I’ve really played since my mission is hymns every once in a long while, with one time accompanying a French horn at a stake music fireside) and start honing my technique. And then I’ll start memorizing classical pieces like mad. Mmm. That’ll be the day. :) I’ll also start composing again in earnest. (Not that I need a piano to compose, but it sure does help.)

In the meantime I resort to singing in the shower…

Ben, I like this thought. When I was a young girl (ages ago, right?), I took formal lessons and I loved it. I loved to practice, I even recorded myself with a tape player we had in the closet, I begged to go to the recitals my teacher put on at her church (a very large Baptist building), and rejoiced through the nearly two years I learned how to sight-read.

Then came the fateful day when my family decided to move and my mother was talking to the teacher about me continuing with another teacher in our new state….

My little hopes and dreams were then shattered when my piano teacher looked at my mother and said, quite matter-of-factly, “I really wouldn’t bother. She has no natural talent and she has progressed little in the time I’ve been with her.” OUCH. I haven’t really touched a piano since, despite my mother’s encouragement. Now I find myself itching to play again….

I can’t wait to get a piano. I’ve memorized plenty of songs over the years, but I’ve only retained a couple.

I knew several students of Irene Peery-Fox. They were excellent - Dustin Gledhill and Marilyn Nelson (though I’m sure Marilyn has a different last name now).

Sally: It’s amazing how much of an effect a few words can have, isn’t it. As for talent, while it certainly makes playing the piano easier, I don’t think that it’s quite as important as we make it out to be — all talent does is make it easier to get good, but how much you have (or don’t) going in doesn’t automatically determine how far you can go. At least I don’t think so.

Bart: Pianos are big. ~sigh~ Right now there’s no room in my apartment for one, especially with all the extra bookshelves I’ve had to bring in. But someday! I haven’t decided yet whether I’ll just get a keyboard in the meantime, so I can at least play something. But keyboards are too electronic for me — I’d almost rather just wait for the real thing.

Wow, I didn’t know Dustin Gledhill studied with Irene. Cool. :) I wish I’d stuck with it longer, but oh well, what’s done is done.