I knew fairly early on in my lessons that the piano was not going to be my first love as an instrument. My real passion was for the pipe organ. This interest was sparked by my having heard the organ in my church, the organist playing music that I instantly fell in love with – music of Johann Sebastian Bach. There was something about the variety and power of the sounds that the organist got out of the instrument that really excited and spoke to me in a deep and emotional way. I immediately wanted to learn more about the instrument and this powerful music. This love of the music of Bach motivated me to work hard on the piano so that, according to Jim, the organist in our church, I could someday graduate to the organ, and would be in a better position to grasp and to master its complexities – namely negotiating the pedals and manipulating the many sounds the instrument was capable of making. So I continued to work dutifully at the piano in the knowledge that I would soon acquire enough skill to begin to take organ lessons.

For some unknown reason, the conventional wisdom when it came to learning to play the organ, there was the strong belief among teachers, that before one studied the organ, a certain amount of piano proficiency was required first. In theory, it is logical to learn to coordinate two hands on one keyboard before attempting to negotiate the pedals play on multiple keyboards, and manipulate the numerous stops. So I dutifully continued with my piano study, while also taking every opportunity to learn easy pieces of Bach, mostly to become fluent in his musical language, as well as to learn to play multiple lines of music with clarity.

I learned my first couple of easy Bach works when I was studying with Diane, my first piano teacher. I had progressed very quickly through the method books that I had been assigned, and was soon allowed to play some of the elementary pieces from the Little Clavier Book that Bach composed for his eldest son, Wilhelm Friedemann, as well as a prelude and a couple of minuets from the Little Notebook for Anna Magdelena Bach – the composer’s second wife. I realized early on that Bach’s music spoke to me in a way unlike any other composer, and I decided that I wanted to focus on his music. My instincts were right – I really wanted to do more than just learn to play the notes – I wanted to study the music, figure out how it was put together, and to be able to play it with expression, just as I heard my teacher play it. What I really should have done, and now realize I needed to do, was to play only Bach in order to acquire the technique that I would need in order to play his more difficult works. I should not have only learned one invention – I should have kept at it and learned all of them. It would be many years later that I took the time to commit to studying and learning all of them.

The tendency in those days, was not to spend lots of time on once composer, but to move on to discover other composers’ music. For most beginning pianists, this was perhaps the right way to go, but for me, it stunted my development, and began to sow the seeds of confusion about harmony, style and technique. I was one of those young students for whom Bach was indeed the “alpha” and the “omega”. Not taking the opportunity to investigate Bach more, robbed me of a deep understanding of his music which, I believe, was at the heart of my inability to really develop an individual style of playing that reflected who I was, and where my musical interests lay. But that was not the case, and I quickly moved on to Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, MacDowell, and other composers whose music was as varied as the spoken languages among various European countries. Along with only a superficial understanding of the music that I played, came the unintended consequence that I continued to play piano, and thus did not move in the direction that would have led me to begin organ lessons.