Down memory lane, part II

I was about five years old when I started playing piano. My brother (three and a half years older) had started a little before he was five, and his teacher at Westminster Choir College was so ecstatic that she wanted to send him to Curtis to play for Jorge Bolet. My parents opted out, something that dad, at least, regretted for years.

All things considered, I was a disappointment. I was all right, but not terribly diligent about practicing. It probably wasn't a boon to my education that we shifted teachers a few times for financial reasons. I started off with Ena Bronstein, who is not hugely famous in a performing way but studied under Claudio Arrau with Daniel Barenboim ("Danny's a genius," she always used to say). You will also find her listed in Arnold Steinhardt's wonderful memoir Indivisible by Four as one of the many pianists the Guarneri Quartet played with in their time. She was lovely, and much too good for me. We then switched to a lady whose name I will not mention, may she rest in peace, but she was an awful teacher and drove me to tears at least once -- and I was a fairly stoic child. We might have taken a break around here. In general, I was not really enthusiastic, not much for practicing, and definitely lazy about memorizing scales, which I now regret a lot.

At this point, say fourth grade, I was Seashore-tested for pitch and musical aptitude en masse in the school cafeteria and scored very high, leading to the band director trying to persuade my father to put me on French horn. But I wanted to play flute, and I think my dad thought that this was a good instrument for a girl, so flute it was. I was never very good at flute. My musical training obviously gave me an advantage, but I don't think I ever had very good air, and only a decent tone. A flutist friend of mine recently kindly said that she thought I just don't have a good facial structure for the flute -- I'd like to blame it on physiology, but I think talent probably fits into the story somewhere.

Then it was back to piano at Westminster, my brother back to Bronstein and me to a gentler teacher named Elise Yun. More laziness, more boredom. I was playing a lot of Bach and Clementi at this time. To jump on the soapbox for a moment, I wish someone had seen along the way how I learned rather than following the old classical style of conservatory training. Goal-oriented child. I would have spent a lot more effort (and did) trying to play things I liked, and fighting through two pages of the Moonlight Sonata probably did more for me musically than a lot of Clementi. Who cared about finger strength? I was never going to grace Carnegie Hall as it was.

Somewhere in here I discovered modern Broadway, and for one birthday my parents cracked and bought me the Les Mis and Miss Saigon songbooks. They heard "Stars" a lot.

I don't remember when I gave up flute. Maybe ninth grade. Piano trickled on... another teaching switch to an old tyrant of a teacher in my home town, who was terrible. I wanted to quit, and my mom caved after the first concert. When she heard how heavy-handed even the more advanced students were, she decided it really wasn't doing me any good.

That was it. No more musical training, ever. I bought a keyboard from another student in sophomore year of college and trucked it around till a couple of years after graduation. My old student flute being out of commission, my aunt found me one that was in a little better shape at a garage sale last year. I played it a bit, but I've lost my air completely.

But guitar's great. It's making me work, it's making me think, and I like the challenge. I never wanted to play a stringed instrument as a child, so maybe I had to grow into it.

More on my musical taste development another day. A little preview there with the Broadway mentions!