Piano Lessons

Why I couldn’t stay with this love of mine

Photo by Michael Hystead on Unsplash

From my 17-year-old self:

The Audition (1961)

Today the dawn broke cold and clear

It seemed the worst day of the year

My mother called, alarm clock shrilled

And I in warm bed lay quite chilled

I squeezed my eyes and held my breath

And still came not sweet welcome death

So as I suffered in prone position

I faced the fact: today, audition!

I’m on the train still feeling numb

My eyes are blind, my voice is dumb

We’re off to Boston without any slack

Should I get off at Hartford and take the bus back?

We got to Boston safe and sound, me hoping

I’d fall through a hole in the ground

Then past the mist a building gray

And on the door — SFAA

I gulped great breaths of fresh clean air

Could be the last for one so scared

When in the school I felt surprise

Real people walked right past my eyes!

I listened to my knocking knees

My fingers seemed no part of me

I said a prayer forevermore

And fell past the forbidding door.

Here at the piano now I sit

Silently screaming “This is it!”

My fingers crash a thunderous chord

I’m blacking out — I know no more….

Here come I now with head held high

So very calm — no qualm have I

Whatever happened — it was done

Who me? Nervous? Why, I had fun!

I sit in chair and talk with ease

No dizzy head, no shaking knees

And then came what I least expected

Those magic words, “You’ve been accepted!”

As if those words were just too flip

Was added then “with scholarship”

No more nerves or nails to chop

For now I’m just in simple shock!

At about age 9, I knew I wanted to play piano and begged my mother to let me take lessons. She loved the piano, but groaned inwardly. When she talked to me about learning an instrument, she hadn’t meant for me to choose the largest one. But I was persistent. So she signed me up for piano lessons at the Bronx YWCA as a first step.

Piano lessons at the Y meant being in a large room with five other beginning students around my age, sitting at five pianos. All of us were playing the same piece at the same time. It was the cacophony you would expect it would have to be. After many months of lessons, my resolve remained unshaken. Yes, piano it had to be for me.

Realizing that I still wanted to learn, my mother mentioned it to my grandparents who gifted us the old upright piano my mother had played when she was a girl. That upright had been a gift to my mother from Tante Rebecca, my grandmother’s older sister.

When I was growing up, Tante Rebecca was a thin, silent old woman sitting sternly in the corner during the special occasions she came for family gatherings, like Thanksgiving and Passover. Though she scared me and my cousins, I knew that she had been through the Holocaust and was a generous person.

For some terrible reason, someone had painted that old upright black. Over the course of many months, my father spent his weekends carefully stripping the paint and restoring the wood to its original rich brown luster. While ancient, it stood proud with its natural wood finish.

My mother found a teacher with long thick jet-black hair twisted into two huge buns pinned at the base of her neck like guards. She was strict, intimidating, humorless, and uninspiring. But I kept practicing my scales and the standard fare that every beginner learns, like “Für Elise.” On many afternoons, my practicing competed with the televised McCarthy hearings my parents were watching in the same room.

In 10th grade, I got a new teacher who was also the jazz band director at the high school I attended. Over the years, I developed a wild crush on him and was inspired to practice at least four hours a day after school.

When it was time to decide what colleges to apply to and what to study, I couldn’t think of anything but music. My mother understood why I was compelled to choose that major despite my self-consciousness playing for other people. She wisely knew that my passion for piano might cool being away from my piano teacher. While she never embarrassed me by bringing up my very obvious crush, she did convince me to apply to regular universities along with the specialized music colleges.

After several excruciating auditions at all the schools I applied to, and even being accepted to one of the music colleges, I decided to go to Boston University (BU). My mother likely took a deep sigh when that decision was made, knowing that if music didn’t work out, I would have myriad other choices to major in. She was hoping for the obvious one, English.

Ultimately my love for the piano wasn’t strong enough to overcome my fear of performing in public. Stage fright was a big topic in the School of Fine and Applied Arts (SFAA) at BU. I envied the music and drama students who were able to work through their anxiety by losing themselves in the music or the role and forgetting everything outside of themselves.

I will always remember the utter fearlessness of one drama student who was so committed to becoming an actor that even her uncontrollable stutter did not prevent her from taking on speaking roles. Every word she struggled to get through was deeply agonizing; you could feel the whole audience getting tense, waiting. I was so nervous for her I stopped breathing. I felt I could never do anything that courageous.

My one year as a music major had been a disappointing time. The warren of tiny practice rooms in the basement was a horrible environment. The rooms weren’t soundproofed, making it impossible to screen out the distraction of other pianos, trumpets, drums, and everything else people were playing in those little rooms.

It was increasingly difficult to practice with the same commitment I had during high school and too agonizing to play before the piano faculty for midterm and final exams. During the last exam, I was so nervous that I played a Beethoven piece so fast that my fingers flew off the keys and froze, lost in midair, so paralyzed that I had no idea where I was and had to start all over again.

I switched out of music at the end of freshman year and then drifted, taking classes for the next two years that interested me but that led to no major. Disheartened that I would not be able to graduate, I took the bus from New York to California for the summer and then found myself too much at home here to leave. And I stopped playing piano, even for myself, a choice I deeply regret now.

Eventually I returned to school and graduated, even got a graduate degree. But the self-consciousness, the fear of performing — be it piano or speaking in public — stayed with me for decades.

Ironically, the path I could have taken all those years ago was what ultimately led to me finding confidence and my own voice. It was joining a memoir writing group when my husband Ed and I were co-writing our story. That’s where I read my work to a group of people I learned to trust because they kept me safe, supported and encouraged us during the deep dives we took to write the most vulnerable, painful stories.

After a while, I was so into writing, I didn’t notice the moment I felt utterly comfortable reading to them.

Today I am a different person and grateful for it. No matter it took a lifetime to get here.

Thank you for reading. If you liked this piece, you can read more of what I write here.