piano lessons (for Havilah)

I never decided to become a musician. Apparently, and I don't really remember this, when I was very young I would sit at the piano and "play" (or more likely bang on it). I did it enough that my parents sort of didn't pay that much attention to it until somebody came to visit and noticed that I was playing "chords". When I was maybe 7 or 8 I started asking for piano lessons. If asked what I wanted for Christmas or my birthday, it was lessons, or a teacher. I do remember that. The parents were a bit doubtful that I'd stick with it, so they made me a deal that if I got through a beginning piano book and still wanted to take lessons, they'd find me a "real" teacher. 

My first teacher was my paternal grandmother. She and my grandfather were visiting, and she played piano, so she started teaching me. She got me most of the way through that beginner book before they left, and my mom coached me through the rest.

Then they found me a regular teacher. I don't remember her name, but I do remember that she was a minister's wife. Not sure what denomination, but it must've been something along fundamentalist protestant lines, because... I'd somehow gotten hold of one of those books of "63 Songs You Love to Play" or whatever. It had some old standards and folk songs and some more contemporary popular songs, including "Joy to the World". Not the Christmas carol, but the 3 Dog Night Song. I wanted to learn it, but my teacher wouldn't work on it with me, not because it was a pop song, but because of the lyric "But I helped him drink his wine, Yes, he always had some mighty fine wine." Of course wine was evil, so I couldn't learn that song. Well, I did learn it, just not with her help. 

After my family moved, during my 4th grade year, I found a new teacher. It was group lessons at the Faye Langdon school of music. I don’t remember that teacher’s name either. It wasn’t Mrs. Langdon. I took lessons there for a while, then quit for a while, then started lessons again. Just around the time that I was starting to play moderately difficult things, we moved again.

It was the middle of junior high for me, and we moved to Mississippi. I hated it at first. I never found a teacher there, never even looked for one. I didn’t stop playing; I just wasn't taking lessons. I always liked to play, but I didn't ever practice much. My parents never pressured me to practice or not practice. When I had wanted lessons, they paid for lessons. And when I’d wanted to quit, I don't recall their making a big deal about it. 

I started playing some times in church, and I started buying sheet music for some pop songs I liked. That’s when I discovered how playing the piano is attractive to girls. I would play during a break at church camp or in the school choir, wherever, and a gaggle of girls would gather and watch me and listen and comment on how great I played. I was not the type to take advantage of that. I never really talked to these girls, but I did enjoy the attention. When I was 13 or 14 this group of girls who were 13 or 14 wanting to hear me play felt pretty awesome. Of course as I got older, they stayed the same age. Not the individual girls, of course, but the group. By the time I was 17 or 18 it was considerably less awesome.

When I went to college, I started as a music major, but pretty quickly changed to undecided. It was actually called “General Studies”. It was a department where you could go in for career testing and stuff, and there were a few classes. But I didn’t do all that stuff. I just sort of ended up in psychology. But that first semester as a music major I’d started taking piano again, after about 5 years of no lessons. After that semester my teacher went on sabbatical, and the second teacher I had at college gave me a B because I didn’t want to keep working and polish and memorize a piece after I’d learned it. I’d always read well, and learned how to play things fairly quickly, but I was never really a great memorizer. And at that point I wasn’t’ a music major any more. I had no intention of performing whatever those pieces were. So why should I memorize them? That was my feeling.

I wasn’t going to continue piano after that. But I was taking composition by then, and my composition teacher told me I should keep taking piano, to keep my technique up. So he arranged for me to take with his friend who was head of the piano faculty, whose studio I never would’ve gotten into as a non-major, and that I would work on whatever I wanted as long as it was decent stuff. When I composed my first piano sonata, we worked a little on that in my lessons. When I started accompanying for the opera program, we would sometime work on that stuff in my lessons. When my teacher realized I liked accompanying and was good at, we worked a whole semester on a set of songs and piano reduction of a piece for orchestra and soprano (Hermit Songs and Knoxville, Summer of 1915 both by Samuel Barber).

So I kept up lessons until I finished school. I knew I was never going to be a concert pianist, and do big solo piano recitals. I was never interested in that. And I had absolutely no desire to teach piano or be a choir or band director. Other than maybe being a pop musician, I had no idea of anything else you could do for a living as a musician. I’m sure I knew that an accompanist was someone who played piano for some other soloist or group. But for the first few years of college I had no idea that someone could work as an accompanist (etc.) and make a living at it.

After I started accompanying there was a point when I realized that I couldn't not be a musician. I was a psych major, but I spent much more time in the music department, and I stopped thinking I was gonna be a therapist or whatever and kept doing music. In fact, I considered dropping out of school, taking a few years off, and eventually coming back to do a music degree. But everyone I talked to about it said that was a bad idea. They all suggested I should finish a degree in whatever I was closest to finishing. And then taking whatever time I wanted to figure out what to do with myself. So I finished the psychology degree, but with more actual music hours than psych hours. Undergrad psychology isn’t a really complicated or intensive degree, but music is. I wasn’t even close to having the right line-up of hours for a music degree. There were several ways you could minor in music, and I qualified for all of them except the one which was more history and theory (academic music) heavy.

I’d majored in psychology ‘cause it was something I was really interested in and thought I’d be good at. I had always liked my therapist in high school, and for a time I had actually thought I would be a therapist. I’ve always been pretty good at listening to people, cutting through the bullshit, and giving advice. But I’m a musician. I accompany, I coach, I do music direction, arranging, orchestration. And now when people find out that I have a psych degree, they often ask if I ever use it. I always say. Pretty much the same thing: Are you kidding, of course I use it; I work with singers and actors and dancers all the time, and they’re all crazy.