Hello all,
I'm new to the piano forum, and I'm delighted to find this little haven on the web!
This intro area seems to be about as close to a chat room as anything I've seen here so far. Such a wide diversity of people and places! What a nice thing!
While I got an early start at music, I never got very far until I was grown. My parents studied with great teachers in New York during the 1940's, and were symphony string players with a regional orchestra in Richmond, Virginia. They started me on piano and violin at around 5, which lasted until I was 8, when they allowed me to quit in a fit of ennui. I guess they just tired of the battle to make me practice. I sang in a choir for a couple years too. I took another year of lessons at 14, then sort of lapsed at the piano. Well, I continued studying piano in a desultory way, but I took only a few lessons a year till I was 18, and during this time I learned nothing, and I do mean absolutely nothing about theory. I could barely read the notes, and everything I learned was in this bizarre combination of puzzling out the notation by a painfully slow combination of reading and remembering the sound by ear, from listening to recordings. As pathetic as this approach was, I nevertheless learned to play some fairly hard pieces, such as the Chopin Preludes in C, G, and G minor.
In high school, I studied the french horn for three years. I could read its single line of music okay, but I still knew very little about theory. I got good enough at the horn to tootle my way through all the Mozart horn concerti, and I had a decent sound. I enjoyed it, but I quit when I got braces on my teeth. My embouchure was incorrectly based on too much pressure, so I kept shredding my lips until I just gave up.
The year I graduated from high school was the last year of the Vietnam War's lottery system for the military draft. I "won" the lottery, meaning my birthday was the second one out of the bin, so I knew that Uncle Sugar was gunning for me. Like everyone else in my circle of friends and family, by this time (1970), I believed that the US pursuit of this war was a cynical pose on the part of a government that was too proud to say, "whoops, we screwed up and shouldn't be here after all."
I was trying to figure out what to do with myself, since I had many other interests too.
I prepared a piano audition at the North Carolina School of the Arts. They must have been REALLY hard up that year for piano students, because they accepted me! I studied with Marjorie Mitchell (anybody know whatever happened to her?) and worked really hard and began to learn the tiniest bit about music theory. I performed Beethoven Op. 14/1 in E for Claude Frank in master class, and the little Mozart Concerto in A, K.414, in another master class. Then the Army caught up with me (there being no more college deferments by this point. I thought that a better, braver man than I would have fought the draft in court, on the basis of the US Constitution's 13th Amendment, which prohibits not only slavery, but any form of involuntary servitude, but a draft counselor told me that I stood a 99% chance of going to jail for 20 years, if I were to take this stand. And from what anybody could know then, it seemed like going to Canada would have meant leaving my friends and family forever, so I reported for induction in June, 1972.) As luck would have it, I was sent to Germany as an avionics technician on helicopters. Whew!
Eight years later, I had become a commercial pilot, flying for a corporation in Saudi Arabia (which would not have been possible if I had told them I had a Jewish grandmother, some generations back, because the officials in charge of work visas in Saudi Arabia operate by a policy that sees a Jew behind every bad thing that's ever happened in whole history of the world, and they try to boycott anything Jewish.... They weren't too fond of any of us Western infidels, to tell the truth, but they couldn't find enough Saudis to do all the technical work they needed, so they hired thousands of us.) When I returned to the US, I worked for a series of really sort of dirtbag commuter airlines, flying geriatric refugees from the old airliner's graveyard, earning no more than peanuts, and I decided enough of this! I went back to school to get what nowadays passes for a top drawer liberal arts education.
At New College of Florida, I studied piano with Gray Perry, who once had a career as a concert pianist back in the 1930's and '40's. He'd studied with Isador Philipp at the Paris Conservatory, and Ernest Hutcheson, in New York. Gray's students include Marc Silverman, the chair of the piano department at the Manhattan School of Music. (Marc also went to New College, and once told me that Gray was the only teacher he ever had who really had an interest in telling students how to go about building technique.)
I studied composition with Ron Riddle, who studied jazz piano with Oscar Peterson, and earned his PhD in ethnomusicology from Illinois, specializing in Chinese opera, of all things. What a wild perspective he had! What a sense of humor, and what a fount of encouragement!
So there I was, at the age of 28, and, as I said, I could play a few hard licks, but I really knew nothing about what makes music work. I couldn't read with any fluency, I knew play only a couple scales and arpeggios in anything but a halting way. and the music bug bit me in a big way.
Actually, what happened, was I fell in love with playing the piano. This was the year just before I went to New College. I was still flying old DC-3's for the commuters by day. I had an old Yamaha upright, which I lent to a friend who ran a ballet studio in Tampa. I had a key to the place, and I would go there, after work, when everybody had gone home for the night.
This is the crux of how I fell in love with music: I enjoyed a freedom I had never known before. I could go into that empty ballet studio in the middle of the night, and I could play anything I wanted, without feeling that anybody was listening and passing judgement. I could play badly, and nobody was there to give a hoot! I could play badly, and therefore begin to learn how to play well. So this is how I began, slowly, and haltingly, to learn to improvise and play by ear, and it was this that gave rise to my interest in composing.
At New College, Gray Perry assured me, "Son, you're not a musical failure, you just don't know beans about it yet.... Now here's how you begin to unpack this difficult phrase of music...." He really knew how to help people. Three years later, after practicing for an average of 6 hours a day every day of the year, I was invited to perform a solo recital for a National Music Club benefit concert in Sarasota, Florida, and nobody threw vegetables at me!
At New College, I also took up the viola, to learn something at first hand about writing for strings, and I became good enough to navigate my way through a Bach cello suite without provoking dogs into howls of pain. Well, not many dogs anyway....
I wanted to put together a life as a musician, but man needs to eat, you know. So I stumbled back into flying. People Express Airlines hired me in 1983, which led to my current position as a pilot for Continental Airlines. I've lived in and around New York City ever since, where I've continued slowly to nudge along my musical projects, and enjoy the special pleasures of family life and rearing my children, two girls who are now 12 and 9.
As an airline pilot, I enjoy far more free time than most, which allows me actually more freedom to do what I want, musically, than I likely would have found, if I'd ended up teaching harmony and counterpoint to reluctant undergraduates. What I do miss is the immersion in music that would have come with a life as an academic or symphony player.
I think what may be interesting about my story is how it demonstrates that one need not be a child in order to start working at music, and that one can make great progress at any age, if only one approaches the matter with rigor and intelligence.
Anyway, I've gone on too long already, but if this has piqued your interest, you can discover much more of what I think about musical matters by clicking on my name and opening up some of my other posts.
Best,
Eric Nolte
Topic: Introduction