I began to take formal piano lessons at about age 10. As I wrote in an earlier entry, it was due to the association with the boy choir and with its director Jim, that I and my parents were able to get me a good piano teacher. I arrived for the first lesson at the apartment of my teacher, a young woman and recent graduate of a major conservatory in the city. My mother took me to the lesson and I remember being very nervous. Nervousness has always dogged me in my life, and I have struggled in all of my musical endeavors, with it and how to control it. I think that I had a right to be nervous, especially as my teacher was an excellent musician and a beautiful woman to boot. I was immediately smitten and knew instantly that I wanted to work hard at my piano playing, to prove to her that I was a good student and that I was worthy of being in her studio.

The first year of lessons is indelibly etched in my memory – they were weekly and I remember establishing very early on, a routine and discipline that meant I made quick progress. I began with the standard course of Thompson piano books, moving through them quickly as I most of the little pieces were not beautiful and did not arouse any emotional passion, only the satisfaction of getting the notes and rhythms right, so that my teacher could assign me the next several pages of the book. My teacher was aware of my diligence and she began to give me exercises (scales and arpeggios) and made sure that I began right away to learn my key signatures and other musical terms. This approach was reaffirmed for me in the choir, as Jim would regularly work at teaching us to read, not just to learn our parts by ear. Between choir and piano, it took me only months to begin to be able to read and thus set the pattern of regular practice and to seek the reward that comes through learning and performing music. I saw, right from the beginning, a purpose to my music making – a critical piece that now I consider to be part of my fundamental philosophy toward education and teaching. Learning in a vacuum for the sake of learning is an acquired taste – it is also very sophisticated as it presupposes that learning is an amassing of knowledge for the sake of self-improvement – a much more nebulous and lofty aspect of education. The real learning environment happens rather when there is a specific goal – and I don’t mean getting an A. The goal in choir and the reason why I worked hard in rehearsal is that we HAD to sing at Mass every week. We would thus learn music with the specific goal of ending the process with a performance – not just to learn the music because it was beautiful. The appreciation of that came much later for me, as I began to enjoy the satisfaction of “owning” a knowledge base that would help me better understand my musical proclivities and what my future relationship with music, and with other intellectual pursuits, might entail.

By my second year of piano, my teacher began to assign me real pieces by composers whose names I had encountered in either school music class, or in the boy choir. I progressed quickly and I had no trouble executing both the music, as well as the exercises that I was assigned. The first composer that really had an impact on me, and would later become the central figure in my musical pursuits, was Johann Sebastian Bach. My relationship with Bach had nothing to do with the fact that I thought that he had a cool name and that he was, along with Beethoven and Mozart, the most frequent musicians’ names that I encountered. It was rather the music itself, its author unknown, that was what brought me to this music.

The experience that was the real spark to my wanting to sing and play piano took place before I got into the boy choir or had taken my first piano lesson, was hearing Jim play the pipe organ in church. Newly appointed as music director and organist of our church, I first heard him play at Mass. It was the music at the end of the service that touched me in a way that made me almost instantly realize, even in a very simplistic way, that this was the music that I wanted to play. I was mesmerized by the power and the beauty of the pipe organ, and the music that Jim was playing was loud, complex, and instantly spoke to me in an emotional way. When the final chord has finished echoing through the sanctuary, I begged my parents to come with me and go up to the choir loft to find out what that music was, and to see the magnificent instrument on which it was played. It was on that day, after Mass, that I learned from Jim that the music was a Prelude and Fugue by Bach. Of course I had no idea what the terms Prelude and Fugue meant, but I did remember the name Bach. And it was on that day that my soul was awakened and I moved from my fantasy of pretending to play the piano in my basement, to really start understanding the life changing effect that this music had on my life – so much so that the music of Bach eventually became the focus of my musical life.