December 16, 2023

I did not have a standard pianist upbringing, as far as classical piano goes. 

The “ideal” standard classical pianist upbringing looks like this: start lessons young, maybe 4 or 5. Have an acoustic piano at home to practice on. Have weekly lessons for your entire musical upbringing, and progress through the RCM grades, or a similar program. Challenge those exams and get high marks. Do lots of performing, do lots of classical competitions. Do the classical performing degrees in university. 

I started late: around 8 years old. I did not have a full-size weighted digital piano until I was in grade 8, and did not have regular access to an acoustic piano until university. I had three years of lessons as a child, and two years in high school. I did challenge RCM grades in high school, but did very poorly in them!  I had very little performing experience, and did not enter any competitions. Frankly, it’s a miracle I got accepted into the university program. 

Do I regret this? Do I wish I had a more “standard” (read: privileged) upbringing? No, and I’ll tell you why. 

Yes, my parents couldn’t afford a piano, or even a decent keyboard. But I spent countless hours with the little keyboard I did have, playing along to its demos, playing with the rhythmic grooves and chord progressions of the backing tracks, playing the different synthesized sounds. Yes, I didn’t have access to the most decorated and expensive teachers. But my first teacher, a high-school student, was so bright and warm, and nurtured my love of music above all else.  Yes, I wasn’t grinding away at RCM grades, expanding my technique and playing and reading ability. But what I did instead was PLAY: hearing my favourite songs and learning them by ear, finding whatever sheet music I wanted from the library and trying it out. 

Yes, I had an entire suite of bad playing habits, which led to tendonitis and pain in my right arm. But that afforded me the opportunity to build up mechanistically-sound playing strategies from the ground up. It gave me the drive to research how to teach beginners to play without tension. I reap those benefits, and I pass those benefits to my students. 

I am now a musician who does it all: I perform classical repertoire. I make arrangements of my favourite songs, learning them by ear. I read and play from chord charts and lead sheets. I improvise. 

One of my highest priorities for my students is to cultivate the same in them.  I improvise with all of my students. We learn our favourite songs by ear: first the melody, then chords. We make up our own arrangements. We play from chord charts. 

I love and value Classical music. I really do. But I am always interrogating the elitism of it: the unexamined notion lots of us have that Classical music is the “pinnacle” of artistic expression, the highest class and the very best that music has to offer.  Classical music says we can only do what the composer says we can do, and that we should do it in a stylistically appropriate way.  Classical music is for the privileged: think of the “ideal” upbringing I outlined at the beginning, and how it relies on things like having stable housing, affluent financial resources, access to teachers, and a university fund. 

Here is a too-common occurrence: a classically-trained pianist will go to a house party, and there’s a piano there. Their friends will usher them to the piano and say, play us something! The pianist doesn’t have any music in front of them, and doesn’t have any repertoire fully memorized at the moment. And they’’ll say, “I can’t, I don’t have any music here”. 

Classical music is not the only music. It’s not the best music. It is the result of the cultural activity of the limited geographical range of Western Europe. It’s very beautiful, and moving, and even transcendent. But do you know what else is? Sitting at the piano, breathing and feeling at one with the instrument, and then playing – allowing your hands to move, no self-editing, no evaluating, just being in the flow and flux of creativity and creation.