Not a lot of people know this about me, but I'm a piano player.
And when I say I'm a piano player, I don't mean that I took lessons for two years at the age of seven and occasionally plunk out a song on the piano. I mean that I'm good. I started taking lessons sometime between the ages of six and seven (I don't recall the exact start time) and took them all the way through my senior year in high school. It's been over five years since I graduated high school, and I still play. If you do the math, that means that I've been playing piano for 16-17 years.
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I can play beautiful arrangements of all kinds of songs. I can play classical concertos, sonatas, and sonatinas by some of the world's most famous composers. Bach, Liszt, Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Clementi, and more.
When I was younger, I thought I was going to grow up to be a professional pianist. My uncle is and he was my favorite uncle. He's the reason I started to play piano -- because I wanted to be like him when I grew up.
But as I got older, I realized that even though I was good at piano, I wasn't amazing.
I met people who could sit down at the piano and play amazing and beautiful songs just by making things up. I met people who could hear a song three times and sit down and play the same melody with beautiful flourishes, trills, and arpeggios. And then there was me.
I could play beautiful music, but only if someone wrote it first. In fact, I could read music much better than a lot of the people I knew who could play beautiful songs by ear and make them up at the drop of a hat.
That increased knowledge diminished my desire to become a professional pianist. But I never stopped playing.
Because even though piano was no longer the thing that would make me millions of dollars, it was still so special to me. Piano was my release. It had a way to calm me down and let me escape from the world for a little while.
I could sit down at the piano, pull out a piece of beautiful music, and go to work. Fingering through the notes. Playing the right hand and the left and then adding them together. Adding in tempos and dynamics and rests. After some time, I hardly even need to look down at my fingers as they deftly move over the black and white keys, hitting all the right notes at the right time to create beautiful music. I become so engrossed in the world of the song that I lose all sense of the world around me. It's just me and the piano.
A lot of people don't know that I play piano at all, much less as well as I do.
My theater friends learned this partway through my senior year of college and immediately began requesting the use of my services. I helped them prepare for auditions. Served as accompanist for various events. Each time astounding more and more people at this talent I'd had but kept hidden for so long.
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For a long time, I wanted everyone to know that I played piano and that I played it well.
I secretly hoped my piano teacher would ask me to play the offertory at the church. I would play in different places, always hoping someone would come over and tell me just how wonderful my piano playing was and how talented I was. It was about performance and spectacle and recognition.
But as I grew older, that changed. As my focus shifted from piano playing as a primary artistic outlet to things like theater and more writing, piano wasn't in the spotlight anymore. It wasn't the thing I did that got me recognition. It was the thing I did because I loved it and because it made me happy.
Piano has an ability to capture my soul like few things in this world do. I can be in the midst of a serious conversation and catch a wisp of beautiful music, and immediately my soul is taken away to a completely different place.
I still perform occasionally, but more often than not, when I play in public it's to accompany myself singing. Piano has taken a backseat on the performance stage to other talents.
It initially went there because I wasn't "as good" as everyone else and so I didn't think people would want to hear me play when they could hear someone who was twice as good as I am play. But I'm glad for this, because now piano is something that's almost completely mine. It's what I do when I want to escape for a bit and not think. To be swept away by beauty and by art and by splendor for a brief respite. To take a break from the harsh reality of this world through the beauty of simple melodies.
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Image from Fotopedia. Used through Creative Commons License.
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