A Musical Resolution
I started taking piano lessons in third grade. I quit in ninth grade, a few days after breaking my left arm in a game of touch football. My brother pins the date to a different milestone – “one month after Mom and Dad finally broke down and bought you the new piano you’d been begging for.” It’s true that I harbored a great deal of guilt when I quit. But I was willing to carry that piano-shaped sack of remorse around with me, as long as I didn’t have to play anymore.
It wasn’t that I disliked my teacher, or even the fact that my lessons were early mornings, before school. Mrs. Hargrave was exacting but fair, with far more confidence in my abilities than I ever had. She entered me in regional and state piano competitions and was never as surprised as I was when I emerged with a medal or ribbon. Plus, every once in awhile her sandy-haired teenage son stumbled through the living room looking for his hockey gear, which made the 7:30 am lesson much more bearable.
It wasn’t that I disliked the instrument. Far from it; I was known to sit down in the reception room after church and play a blazing rendition of “The Entertainer” during coffee hour, pretending that I didn’t know I was disturbing the grownup’s conversation. A zesty piano solo was just another way for this youngest of three kids to grab some attention.
It wasn’t that my parents forced me to practice, though the single time in my life that my mother ever raised a hand to me did involve piano practice. I had a terrible habit of missing a note and then – THUNK – kicking the piano. In retrospect, I’m surprised Mom held back as long as she did. I’d provide more detail were it not for my mother’s frequent rejoinder when I tell this story – “If I’d known that one time was going to stand out in your mind so much, I would have slapped you more often.”
The reason I wanted to quit was that I was fourteen years old and worried that piano would prevent me from following all the other avenues that spread out before me in high school: student government, sports, art, drama, dancing, a theoretical boyfriend who might spontaneously appear in my front yard and resent all the time I spent tickling the ivories instead of him. (Hey, 14-year old self! That last one? Not a big concern for you.)
So I quit, promising myself and my parents that I would keep playing the piano, but from that point forward it would be “for fun.”
For fun! See the difference?
Yeah, the difference is I hardly touched a piano for the next 25 years. Then I married a man whose mother is a piano teacher. So now I feel like there are two moms out there whom I’ve disappointed.
About five years ago we bought an upright piano for the living room and signed the eldest child up for lessons. It lasted for a year; when she wanted to quit, I folded like a cheap suit and didn’t even put up a fight. The younger one has expressed a passing interest but I’m not sure when we’d fit piano into our already-full schedule of activities.
When my mother-in-law comes to visit, the highlight is every evening at 5:30 pm when she sits down at the piano bench, blows the dust off the foot-high stack of piano music we’ve collected, and starts to play. While I cook, the most glorious concert rolls through the house, and the girls come and sit on the couch, drawn by the music. One year my mother-in-law came to visit for Christmas and played accompaniment to an impromptu neighborhood Christmas caroling party, one of the only recent holiday parties I can point to that actually embodied the spirit of the season.
So many basic human needs lurk between the notes of a piano composition: challenge in the shape of a tricky passage, achievement when a piece has been mastered, beauty in the music that is created. A moment of peace, a way of blocking out the phone and email and Twitter and to-do lists in order to just be present. I look for those things in so many places in my life, when in fact they’re all contained in a wooden, metal, and ivory block that sits, unused, a few feet away from my front door.
I write about professional musicians all the time; maybe that’s why it is so easy for me to put the piano up on a pedestal and pretend that making music is just for the pros. What I should focus on at a concert is the visible joy that a talented musician gets from his or her virtuosity.
So my New Year’s Resolution is this: I’m going to play piano for 15 minutes a day, just before I start cooking dinner. Let’s say four days out of seven: that’s a whole hour of piano practice a week. Nothing too onerous, doesn’t require a major lifestyle change. My goal is to plunk out some Christmas carols myself next year while my friends and family drown me out with their singing.
And to lose this Steinway-sized bag of guilt once and for all.
Nancy Davis Kho is a freelance writer who lives in Northern California with her husband, two daughters, and a crime-fighting dog. She blogs about the crossroads of music and middle age at Midlife Mixtape.
