My piano teacher Sophia P. asked me to address the audience during her piano recital (17th June 2023), suggesting I share my reasons for taking piano lessons and my feelings about music before I performed Mozart’s Fantasia in D Minor. I gladly agreed because it gave me the chance to think deeper about my experience with piano practicing, playing, and listening to others play. Some points of what follows were prepared for that talk. Although the topic requires a lengthy treatment, only some defining moments scattered along my life are mentioned here.
The instrument
The beginning of the first defining moment in my musical story takes us back 55 years ago, when I was a happy 15-year old. I was living with my parents and brother in what was then called Czechoslovakia. I went to school, took piano lessons, had fun with my friends, played sports, and generally led a pleasant existence (despite life behind the iron curtain). There was always music on the radio in our house, and we had, what was in those days an illegal item, one of the Beatles’ album. As in every house that I remember going into in those days, just like in ours, there was a piano and ours was an old upright. I clearly remember my piano teacher (we called her Pani Lassuova), a sprightly, slender older lady who had big glasses, never became mad and who was always ready to smile. The best suggestion she had was for me and my brother to play four-hand pieces. We had loads of fun, laughing at every wrong note! Then suddenly, our life was turned upside down when on the 20th of August 1968 Soviet troops invaded Czechoslovakia (sounds familiar?) and a few days after our family escaped to Canada becoming political refugees. At the beginning, adjusting to life in a new country was very hard, complicated, and sad, as every immigrant and refugee knows. However, after some time, we started to settle down, and my parents bought a house. It barely had a table and chairs. Some 50 years ago there were no computers, no devices, no social media. However, there was TV. One day, our parents asked me and my brother to choose whether we wanted to have a TV or a piano (which would you choose?). Without hesitation, without even looking at each other, we chose the piano. That decision was the first defining moment in my musical story. Without the instrument, there is no playing, practicing, and performing. And the manner in which one relates to the piano determines in many ways the attitude to playing and hearing music. The instrument itself for me is something very precious, amazingly complex, and infinitely inviting. It is not simply a piece of furniture.
Ever since the day that used, upright, no-name-brand piano arrived, piano music has been a constant friendly presence in my life, and I played whenever I could. But there was no money to pay for lessons, and there was no space in my life for a serious commitment.
The teacher
Now fast forward many years, to the second defining moment in my musical story. In Canada, I finished my university studies, married, and had a daughter (who is a piano teacher), and in all these years there was always a piano around. Again, I played, but without any direction. Finally, after I retired, I decided to look for a piano teacher. Many people wondered why. Why did I need a teacher, when I already knew how to play, they said. When I played on my own, I felt like I was going nowhere, just noodling with some simple sheet music, basically floating in the middle of the musical ocean without a survival plan and without a life-jacket. My piano tuner suggested Sophia. Just over three years have passed, and Sophia changed my musical life. Her guidance, advice, and vast experience have made me mature musically. I have spent my career teaching others, and I always believed that being a teacher is a great privilege, but surely even a greater privilege is being a student of a wise, caring, natural teacher. My experience of music has now become so much more joyful, rich, enjoyable, and playful. I know now when and what I need to work on, I am more aware of my shortcomings and flaws. I play pieces which I would have never chosen on my own. In other words, the piano teacher help to draw up a plan for survival in the musical ocean and is instrument in providing a life-jacket.
The musical experience
I used to say that when I practice or play the piano, I fell like I am in another universe. But what does that mean, exactly? It means that while I am playing, the music is all around me and I am in the music, I feel a part of it and nothing else exists. There is no purpose to achieve, no goal to strive for, no good or evil, no judgements. Arthur Schopenhauer wrote* that “Music also answers it [the question What is life?], more profoundly indeed than do all the other arts, since in a language intelligible with absolute directness, yet not capable of translation into that of our faculty of reason, it expresses the innermost nature of all life and existence”. He also claimed that music delivers us from ourselves but offers us an understanding of ourselves. It is enormously exciting to feel this way. It brings me immense pleasure and joy to play and to practice. Furthermore, playing a musical instrument adds to the whole-body experience, since we have to use our arms, wrists, fingers, and feet (for pedals). The total absorption of movement and feelings makes the sound come deep within us and hopefully makes it communicate something to those who listen.
Being a linguist who studied history of languages and their rules, I would never say that music is a language, or indeed a communication system. Music has its own rules which may be described in words, which, however, cannot be applied to any other system, unlike sign language or, indeed any other communication system. It lives in its own compartment, and the only connection between music and the world is embodied in the musician, who promptly leaves the “world” for another, ethereal universe. Granted, there are tricks of the trade which make one piece more heart-wrenching than another, and these tricks are related to culture as well as to the sensibilities of the musician, but all in all, music is its own compact product. Hearing music everywhere renders it banal and commonplace, when in reality it is extraordinary, especially when one plays an instrument.
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- Arthur Schopenhauer, Key Selections from The World as Will and Representation and Other Writings. Edited by Wolfgang Schirmacher, Harper Perennial, 2010.
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