Who are your music mentors? I have a few. I’ll start with one from my delicate high school years.
Most folks I have encountered who have studied classical piano for any length of time have what can best be referred to as a love-hate relationship with the instrument. They love it. But they hate it. They love to hate it. It’s not really the piano’s fault. Playing piano well (doing ANYTHING well, for that matter) takes a lot, I mean, a LOT of practice. Hours and hours. And hours and hours. And I just didn’t put in the required effort.
Mrs. Philpott was my first piano teacher. Lovely name for a piano teacher, don’t you think? She lived over on Canterbury Lane. Picturesque address, isn’t it? I just made it up. I think she lived on . . . well forget it. Something Lane. I don't remember too much of those early years, only, that, well, I preferred to play by ear rather than by note. I would ask Mrs. Philpott to demonstrate a particular passage that I struggled with, then I wouldn’t have to learn to read music. I could just play it back just as I had heard it. I had a good memory for it, I suppose.
Whatever happened with Old Mrs. Philpott, is one for the unsolved mysteries of life. Dr. Kelly, on the other hand, is a completely different story. He was a man from a different generation. Born in 1921 or maybe it was 1923 or 1919, he was one of those tortured souls. Tortured by his love for the piano. He played it constantly. He loved it, more than anything. He practiced ferociously, whipping through degree after degree until finally earning the equivalent of a D.M.A. from Northwestern University. His love for music consumes him. His passion for it, unbounded.
As a piano teacher, Dr. Kelly was a stern, uncompromising taskmaster. He had a pointer he would use, with which he would point to items in the musical score that you had missed, or alternatively, he would use it to tap you on the shoulder to indicate it was time to stop playing because you forgot something or missed something or what have you.
I didn’t always practice as much as I should have. To be completely honest, I don’t recall ever practicing very much in my pre-college days. I practiced just enough to get by. And it was eventually enough to get me into a performance program in college. Dr. Kelly was never very pleased with my playing, at least, hardly ever. And he would berate me for being involved in any extra-curricular activity at school, high school musical, tennis, soccer. Anything that kept me away from time that should be devoted to practicing the piano was . . . can we say that he was jealous for my music time? I did end up quitting piano under his tutelage, about halfway through my junior year of high school (coinciding roughly with the high school musical). Early in my senior year, we had a time of patching together the rough places of our relationship and he helped me get a program ready for my applications to colleges.
He was from a generation where hard work was the expectation, the norm. Anything less is simply inadequate and to be reprimanded. Hard work, it would seem, has gone from being commonplace to being largely absent in the last few decades.
Who is jealous for your time today? Who is expecting more from you than you think you are capable of giving? You do have it in you. Let God help to bring it out of you.
