Piano Lessons

I learned to love music because of my mother.

When I turned 10, my parents discovered that all upper middle-class children were supposed to take piano lessons. It was one of those measures of belonging. So, suddenly, an upright piano was bought and a teacher procured. Not a great deal of time was spent selecting either the piano or the teacher. All that mattered was that their child was now doing what everyone else’s child was doing.

Problems arose when it appeared I was supposed to practice as well. My mother, who had a deaf ear for music, considered this unnecessary and a disturbance of her peace. I was taking piano lessons and that was supposed to be enough.

Whenever I sat down to practice, my mother would immediately think up some chore for me to do. No sooner would I get through three bars of a Bach Prelude than my mother would tell me to go fold the towels or dry the dishes.

I began to look forward with joy to uninterrupted sessions at the piano. Like Pavlov’s dog, my fingers would begin to salivate the instant my mother picked up her car keys. No sooner was she out the door than I was at that piano, joyously practicing Czerny exercises.

Once in college, I lost my enthusiasm. There, one was not only encouraged, but actually expected to practice. Individual practice rooms abounded where no one dared interrupt the practitioner. I couldn’t get used to it. I would play Beethoven with one ear while the other ear listened for footsteps in the corridor, waiting for someone to come tell me to stop and do something else. No one ever did and, within a year, the joy of the forbidden was lost. I stopped practicing.

But I carried on the family tradition with my own daughter. When Katherine turned 10 and began studying piano, I remembered how my mother had fostered that love of music in me. So two or three times a week, when my daughter was busily practicing, I would force myself to call her away to do some minuscule chore.

It worked with her as well. Whenever I returned home from the outer world, if I crept up softly to the front door, I could hear my child practicing. She is now a classical musician and this is solely because my mother made me do chores instead of practice.