Before I was a genius, I was a drudge

Dear all,

 

Here is another message….  You may read it or you may not --- maybe I’m getting old, and specially now that I teach in school, maybe I am getting preachy…. But just take it as a message of a person who have committed many mistakes and learn a lot of lessons in life, and who want to share it so that others don’t have to commit the same.

 

Thank you for the accolades about the piano music, but no…. talent has nothing to do with it.

 

It is always flattering to be called talented, and to believe that God has endowed you with superior skills and it is always a shortcut explanation as a reason why some other succeed, and some don’t…..   But no , if I have a talent, it is certainly not for music.  Maybe a talent for hard work….

 

                 

I studied piano for seven years while in high school and college, and went through three teachers.  If there was something common on the teachers, it was that they were all female, they were not married, and their average age 45.   None of them were exactly beautiful, nor did they care to be.  Their idea of learning music is to give you a book to play exercise upon exercise and classical music.  Many of my friends gave up, but I did not.   Even worse, I had no talent…. My classmates who persisted were advancing better,  and what got me to keep going was my denial -- I refuse to believe that I could not do better than them.  What took some of my classmates one hour of work to do, it takes me sometimes two or three hours, so I had to work harder to get the same results.

 

After seven years, all I got was the ability to play exercises, and some music nobody wanted to listen.  I played in some high school programs, but I ended up my piano lessons with the idea that it all has been a waste of time.

 

For over 20years after college, I hardly played the piano, nor did I miss it.  It would have been cool if I can play modern nor pop music, but I did not have that ability or the training.

 

A few months ago, I decide to revive my piano playing.  Not that I thought it was spectacular, but it was more to make sense out of the thousands of hours I invested before.  It was just like you know you invested in a bad business before, and you want to squeeze whatever it was you paid before for what its worth.

 

 

Anyhow , maybe I am more experienced now, and moreover, the internet offers better resources to study and understand what I did before.   Also knowing business and dynamics give me a better sense of what to play and how to play music that would interests people.  And of course, I got the help of a few friends.

 

And surprise of surprise, the skills I got from playing all those finger exercises that I thought was meaningless suddenly manifest to be useful --- my fingerworks were better than most pianists.

 

Right now, I can play music that is a little bit more exciting, but that is only because I struggled  through a lot of boring stuff that was the foundation of some skills I got.   People also say that I know how to tell a lot of exciting stories.  But that is only because I go through and read a lot of boring stuff to come up with a few good ones….

 

So, ….. talent is essential  -- the talent for hard work.  And life is not always exciting, and especially when you are still learning.  It would be well to remember what Ignace Paderewski , one of the greatest pianists of the 20^th century said when he was told he was a genius…

 

He said, “ Yes, but before I was a genius, I was a drudge.”

 

 

When my children will learn music, I will get them an old spinster who believes in the old school of teaching.  And I will try to insure that they go through all those boring and tedious exercises…  That training will be essential for them as the foundation for much better music interpretation.