What attracted you to start music?

[floydcramerfan]

I have loved music all my life and I've been singing ever since I could talk.  My grandparents wanted me to play the piano when I was a kid, but I wanted no part of it.  I started going to a school for the blind (yes, I'm blind, which is why I talk about braille music) when I was ten and there was a lot of music there.  They have an awesome music program.  I got to hear a lot of people play.  The next year, I skipped sixth grade and started seventh, so I was allowed to join the chorus, which really got me hooked.

I started sort of wanting to play then.  I would sit down at the piano and just put random notes together and say that I was composing, lol.  Then a lady brought an autoharp and I freaked out and had to learn to play it.  Again, I just played random chords and thought I was really playing.

In my eighth grade year, a girl started the school who was a piano prodigy, I mean like she was playing by ear when she was like four, seriously.  This girl immediately became my best friend, and today we're closer than sisters.  I loved to listen to her play.  Then one day she was playing something, I can't remember what it was, and she started doing the slip note style of Floyd Cramer.  I was like, "oh man, that sounds cool."  She told me that Floyd Cramer played like that.  I was like, who???  She started playing Last Date, and I was hooked.  A few months later I sat down and just started teaching myself to play.  The next year they let me take piano lessons and the rest is history.

[chopinlover23]

Watching my mom play got me started to play music, after hearing her play piano I'd go to the piano and play C major till I graduated in playing complex scales then played basic pieces. Even though I stopped piano at age 10, I played again after watching Martha Argerich in a video, then I brought music back to our house and it wasn't to late I never forgot the things taught to me!! I love music!! that's how I was attracted to it, by watching other people play and I get insprired

[pianoplayjl]

Nothing attracted me to start music. My sister was playing the piano for 1.5 years, she was in 2nd grade and mum pressured me to learn the piano. I was forced to learn it. 5-6 years ago I remembered I was sitting in the car and we were going home after shopping. Mum casually told me that I would be having half an hour lessons the next day. I felt disappointed and angry. the first lesson wasn't too bad.

[zeusje]

Even though my mom studied piano in conservatory, she never inspired me to start piano or to start listening to classical (well we were seperated when I was young, that might explain). Some classmates of me in highschool listened to alternative music, and I was curious so i listened to any strange music I could find on the radio, the stranger the better. Then slowly I started tuning to the classical radio, I still remember the first pianopieces I heard on radio, I think I was 16(20 years ago), and they quite struck me. I heard the slow waltz from chopin in a-minor by horowitz, by which I was quite blown away. And I also heard first ballade from chopin, played by Katzaris, I taped it from the radio and listened to it over and over. Then I slowly started borrowing cd's from the library and sheet music and tried to play it at home.

[pianoplayjl]

the catalyst for me starting the piano is as I said my sister. My sister naurally loved the piano and it's music. a few months before we bought a piano we as a family were watching a Chinese drama series set in the 1700s. One of the instruments featured rpominently in the series was a piano sort of thing. you play it with your fingers but the keys are replaced by strings. So essentially it is a hybrid between a piano and a guitar or other string instrument. So that is one of the things that inspired her and hence me to learn the piano.

[mcrosbie]

For me it was exposure to the piano while staying at my auntie Lucy's place.  I was four years old and the piano was there in the house and I was permitted to "play by ear."  I was not scolded by my aunt and uncle for "fooling around" on the piano.  The following Christmas uncle George and Auntie Lucy gave me an LP of Chopin's piano music - on it was the Grande Valse Brilliante and the Waltz in C sharp among numerous others.  Those two stood out in my memory.  Then my friend, Louise, started taking piano lessons and I pleaded with my parents to buy a piano and let me take lessons. I got a piano at age 11, and progressed rapidly with my excellent teacher.  I have played ever since and I am now 62.  (Took numerous exams through the Royal Conservatory of Music of Toronto).  I play at the grade 8 level.  I think I started a bit too late, as high school academic exams and other interests squeezed the piano into the background for several years and I was unable to take the grade 8, 9, and 10 exams and the counterpoint, history, harmony, and composition courses needful to get the ARCT degree.

[pianoplayjl]

One of the pieces that stood out in my memory was fur elise. when we had reading time we went to the hall and someone would play the piano. Everytime it was reading time I could hear Fur Elise. This was just before I learnt piano. Fur Elise was one of the pieces I wanted to learn as I began my piano studies.

[Derek]

I was exposed to a lot of music from an early age. Highlights include: Boogie woogie (not a day went by without hearing my dad improvise some boogie or walk into his study and hear Meade Lux Lewis on his record player), Beethoven (symphonies, piano sonatas), Chopin (the nocturnes, both on records and practiced by both of my sisters), Vivaldi, Saint-Saens, and a handful of others. Not to mention a lot of pop and rock from my sisters, such as Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, The Phantom of the Opera...etc. etc. I loved all of it.

I probably first fell in love with music when I began playing video games around age 9 or 10. And then when I was about 14, I was without most of my games for about a year, and sort of re-discovered vivaldi on my own, this time some concertos I had not been exposed to in my youth. I also recall buying a cd of Bach's organ music. That really started it off. Following that there was the Matrix soundtrack, which got me into metal. Eventually I got my electric guitar, played in a christian death metal band for a while, began playing piano on the side, and then never looked back after I met Ted Jones here on pianostreet and opened up an indescribably vast universe of possibilities via piano improvisation. Rather chaotic, but I'm glad where I ended up!!

[pianoplayjl]

Before starting the piano I never payed much intention to the music in this world, both modern pop culture music and classical music. The only composer that I knew was Beethoven and the only thing I knew about him was that he became deaf in his later years, a great tragedy for a musician. I used to think Mozart lived in the 15th century.

[countrymath]

he became death in his later years

He only became death after he died 

[jimbo320]

I first was introduced to music was listening to classical music being played to calm all the kids in the boarding home I was in. They played it in the bedrooms soothing us to sleep.
As far as playing music it started sometime in later grade school when I played a guitar and people would listen. Then I was asked to join a band and the realization of playing with others making songs sound like they should thrilled me. Then we started playing gigs and got paid, wow.
To actually get paid for doing what I love.
Years later, a few bands later and still wow.
Now playing the piano I find myself being drawn back to the music of my youth.
Sort of like a full circle thing now that I think of it...

[deepakkamani]

I like musics, but not much. Earlier i was totally avoiding musics. But sometimes when i gets angry or get upset i listen musics. One time i had heard instrumental musics and i liked it so much that i started searching instrumental musics on internet. Then slowly i started listening only classical and instrumental musics and i don't like hip-hop and Rap musics.   

[megadodd]

I heard the Chopin - Nocturne no 20 in C# minor.
I bought my grand grandma's piano.

[williampiano]

I remember I first started piano when I was 5 (turning six a month later) because my cousin and some of my friends from kindergarten had started playing it. I took group lessons at a music shop in my town and played on an electric piano for two years until I finally got a real piano and a private teacher. During my group lessons at the music shop they never taught me proper technique, so I played with flat wrists and hunched shoulders. That bad technique was very engrained and I suffered the fall out of that for quite a while until I fixed it later when I was around eleven. I remember I got 'really' into music when I started improvising and composing, which was when I was about 9. That was when I really began learning more about music and composers and what not. Although classical was the first kind of music I listened to, I have always found it important to listen to all types of music such as rock, jazz etc. because music as a whole is truly wonderful.

btw, when I was really little, my mom always played Bach CD's for me, so that also could have been why I was so interested in playing classical music when I was five. Bach has a really familiar sound to me.

[pianoplayjl]

The thing that made me pursue music right now in high school is the fact that I play piano. 

JL