Beginning Piano Again In 2023

"Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good. It’s the thing you do that makes you good." – Malcolm Gladwell

At the beginning of 2023, I was seriously contemplating ditching my piano. I hadn't really touched it since 2017. I had a compressed ulnar nerve in 2022 which wreaked all kinds of havoc in the pinky and ring finger of my right hand and I was not sure I would ever completely recover all my feeling in those fingers. (I have -- mostly -- I'm currently at 90%.) Neglected piano sheet music was housed beneath my bookshelf in a cabinet, an uncomfortable reminder of the many stops and starts I'd had over the years with piano.

I had always liked the piano, even as a little girl. An aunt, I recall, had an upright piano in her living room. I remember sitting down at the piano bench with legs that didn't yet reach the floor and working out the melody to "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star."

In high school, a friend of mine had been taking piano lessons since she was a child and she offered to teach me to play. The school that we attended had an auditorium with a grand piano for choir concerts, shows, and student assemblies. So at 16, in the 30 minutes or so before school began, I started learning to play piano. My friend had learned on the Edna Mae Burnam piano lesson books. These books were published in the 1950s and are a rather fascinating piece of modern piano pedagogy history. They had vintage drawings in a similar style to the "Dick & Jane" books that are so famous as reading primers. My parents bought me a Casio 61-key keyboard so that I had an instrument at home to practice on. The keyboard did not have weighted keys which made developing finger strength virtually impossible. But it was still very helpful to have and I pressed on; I was able to learn how to read both staves as well as how to play basic rhythms.

Eventually, I graduated from the Casio to an old and ridiculously heavy upright piano from 1908. The woman who gave it to me kept her plants on top of it, so, besides its pervasive musty scent, the wooden cabinet had considerable water damage. The piano would not stay properly tuned even after professional tunings twice a year -- but it was an acoustic piano and it was mine. I made my way through the first four Edna Mae Burnam lesson books on that wonderfully indomitable vintage piano. I'd love to hear the stories it could tell about its early turn-of-the century beginnings in a time when ragtime and jazz were booming. While it wasn't the prettiest sounding piano, it did have a surprisingly decent touch and I was finally able to develop some finger strength and to get familiar with the action of weighted keys.

In college I took lessons from a university piano teacher and upgraded out of the 1908 piano to an upright Kawai acoustic that was, thankfully, odorless. This teacher made me count, to my dismay, every rhythm I played -- aloud. I hated it and I'm sure I shot him daggers every time he made me do it. But I did eventually learn how to be much more precise with my rhythms and this really helped with my sight reading accuracy. He got me to a what I would say was an early intermediate level.  I was playing Clementi sonatinas and the easier Bach inventions, things like that. This is the period of my life when I played piano the most and progressed the furthest. 

After college, I didn't study piano formally any more and I definitely lost, over time, some of the progress that I had made. I've remained in a kind of piano stasis, only picking up an occasional piece here and there. Although we put our hobbies away for a time, they are always waiting quietly in the wings for us for the day when we finally give them the nod to make an entrance again.

I realized that I did not want to give up on piano. It has been a part of my life for 32 years even if I have not nurtured the skill as much as I wish I had. At a rather hectic time of my life, a very busy work schedule and working on my MBA, piano has been a wonderfully stable point. I started playing again on February 25th, 2023 and I have not missed a day of practice. It's become habit -- a habit I am going to strive to keep up.

When I play piano, everything else slips away. I have to concentrate so hard on what I'm doing that I can't think about the latest task I'm working on at the office or the appointment I have next week or the to-do list I have for the house. Many people fall into a kind of Zen mode when working on a task that requires deep concentration and attention. It's a nice space to fall into and a much-needed respite from this crazy world when you need a quick reset.

Why this blog? Honestly, I just want to talk about piano. I want a motivational space where I can journal the experience of re-learning piano and keep the momentum going.