ETUDE FOR ALBERT FILLMORE

I played the piano last night. I have three guitars, a piano, numerous songbooks and sheet music and I sing and I almost never make music anymore. I sing all the time but only to CDs or accapella around the house or car or office or shower. I plan every night and every weekend to start playing again but it seems I’d rather nap. Now, I have a play that I’m trying to put up and finish writing and workshopping and a lot of the second half is me dancing and singing and playing guitar and piano. Surprise, surprise, how did all that get in there? So I’m, in an indirect way, trying to psyche myself out to play again. Hey, I was a music major in college. Why would it be that hard?

I started playing piano when I was nine years old. My parents bought me a piano. I guess they could have taken a vacation but I got a piano. A nice upright from Story & Clark. I still have it. I dragged it across the country with me when I moved to California. It needs to be tuned desperately, poor thing. I took my first lessons with a woman who was infamous in the suburban area where I grew up for giving group lessons on 10 or more pianos with students doubled up on them and then giving these magnificent recitals with all these pianos playing at one time. It really was grand, pardon the pun, but she didn’t teach anything. I played the piano once for my voice teacher and she said, “Oh you’re a good faker.” I was self conscious about my playing ever since then. I, of course, played for family gatherings and I could play Christmas carols and pluck out the melodies and then play chords with my left hand but I couldn’t sight read, I never memorized anything and I didn’t know one rhythm from another. In short, I really was a pretty good faker. I only accompanied myself to practice my singing.

Then I got to college and declared a vocal performance major. Then the brilliant department head (literally, because he was bald on top) suggested I “have something to fall back on” and I declared a music education major in addition to vocal music which meant I had to learn how to play the piano. Great. So I had a host of further ridiculous piano teachers, one a nun, who kept me in the elementary books until I was so bored I threatened to lock us in the room and play all the stupid songs from the book until she acquiesced to teach me the intermediate modules. Okay, I didn’t do that and I’d probably be living a different life as an ex-parolee, but you sense my frustration. Those books are meant for children! I mean, where do they get these titles? “The Blue Guitar”, “Out In The Meadow”, “Sammy’s Left Hand”, “JuJuBees Rock”, “Girl With A Pearl Earring,” “Making A Left Turn In A Thunderbird,” you know, stuff like that. These little ditties all sounded the same. And they were not singable at all! No hooky melodies, nothing. Then in my senior year, the new department head (not bald at all but gray) decided she was going to take me on herself. So I learned how to “LLLLift! my wrist and take it down on the key! LLLifft and down.” What? I’m not playing Carnegie Hall lady, I need to learn the notes. No amount of fancy wrist strokes is going to make up for the fact I can’t sight read and I can’t play two hands at the same time. Ugh! What a waste of my parents’ hard earned dollars. At that point, I had been blacklisted in the music department anyway for deigning to study with a voice teacher that the music department hated personally and was jealous of professionally only because this voice teacher was the authentic article. Her students learned how to sing. This was two hands singing, this was sight reading, this was advanced study, professional work, not this crap I was being taught on piano. I knew a good thing when I saw it and I was ambitious (not like I am now, ready to drop everything to read a book at a moment’s notice). I want to study with her, I said. I graduated magna cum laude anyway with or without the blacklisting. Knuckleheads. Lift my wrists eh? If I saw ya today, I’d lift my fists.

All this is leading me to the plum, the golden egg, the piano teacher who made a difference and showed me everything about how to play the piano. Because of that, I grew in self-confidence personally and professionally. Up until I studied with this man, I lived in mortal fear of being asked to play the piano, especially in my elementary and junior high music classes. I couldn’t play the different harmony parts. I couldn’t sight read unless I was playing chords in the left hand. I could play the piano and it sounded good and I could still teach the music parts and vocal parts but I lived in fear of being found out as a “fake” as my long ago voice teacher said. Of course, I wasn’t a fake. I loved music, I knew it with my heart and soul. I knew things you couldn’t teach in college or in a classroom and that’s what I conveyed to my students. I even taught them how to dance! Music is movement isn’t it as well? It’s not just hey, this is 2/4 time and play that beat on the drum. Ugh, how boring! Curriculums! Who makes this stuff up? Do they actually teach it after they come up with it?! Sure, here’s 2/4 time and now let me show you what you can do with it!! That’s how you teach it!

So four or five years after graduation and a couple of music teacher jobs later, I decided to become an authentic piano student and I took private lessons at the Center for Creative Studies in downtown Detroit. His name was Albert Fillmore and he was a composer and musician as well as a teacher and he was well into his 70’s or even early 80’s back then, about 15 years ago. With Albert, I learned how to really play the piano and enjoy and love it. He didn’t use any of those silly graded books. He had me buy the pieces themselves, Mozart Sonatas, Bach Cantatas and Fugues, Debussy, Satie, Two-Part Inventions, Chopin! Oh I was playing Chopin Etudes! And I was using both hands and MEMORIZING the pieces. In fact, I had to memorize them as soon as I learned them, if not before. I had to work with a metronome practicing scales every day. The pieces themselves were advanced levels if not the original pieces written as they were meant to be played. For Christmas one year, he gave me a card he made himself with a composition for a verse. I had to play it for him. I still have it on my piano. That man taught me more about myself in 18 months than all those teachers put together in the history of my playing. He taught me that I had the talent and intelligence, the skills and the confidence to play like a pro. He encouraged me to perform for the weekly recitals after our lessons on Saturdays. I wish I would have performed more. He played the Two Part Invention with me one Saturday, god bless him. I was still very scared of playing in public for fear of my hands. Much of my lack of confidence and reticence to play in public was because my hands sweat profusely when I played the piano. I had to keep a little towel available. I would get perspiration drops on my clothes when I played from the dripping from my hands onto my pant legs. If only I could have had the presence of mind and self-possession I have now to understand I could have overcome the problem. In any event, studying with Albert helped me at a time in my life when I sorely needed someone or something to help me find my self-esteem and this man provided the way through music.

After I had to quit taking lessons, I wrote him a letter telling him how important his teaching was to me and how grateful I was for his care and instruction. It was one of the best things I ever did in my life. It was time for me to move on though. I was trying to make my life a “do over”. I was trying to make right all the wrongs that had happened years before but I had to finally settle for what the truth was in my life. I wasn’t going to be a singer and I wasn’t going to teach music for very long. My life was taking a different direction. Life isn’t a do over, sometimes it’s just making lemonade. Sometimes it’s good enough you can just sight-read. That’s all we do in life anyway isn’t it? We just try to keep playing as we go along. Sometimes we make stuff up too.

Every time I think I should start playing the piano again I think of Albert and it pleases me that I still have all the music I learned with him and some that I’ve yet to learn. Once in awhile I take them out and sight-read them because I can. It’s not very fast and it’s not as good as it was and I certainly don’t have it memorized but it makes me happy…because I know I can.