Growing up in a dysfunctional musical family...?

[dcstudio]

So, I come from a very musical and equally very dysfunctional family... did any of you?  Please share your experiences...  this is my story.


Mom's a classical singer with a degree, got a sister who's a pianist with a degree--another sister who is a trombone player with a doctorate from Columbia...  and a brother who is an engineer with a collection of vintage guitars.   My dad tried to play ragtime piano....

and then there's me...college drop out... black sheep.

  Without going into ugly details--when I was 15--I got a 21 year old stepdad...lol...try explaining that at your high school.  Mom met him when he was 16 and she was 39--he worked at my parent's business.   they had an affair right there at work for at least 2 years before mom left dad--  yea mom's a classy lady what can I say.  He was interested in me--he bought me drugs came in my room...and...of course I refused...my mother threw me out of the house when I tried to tell her about  it...lol..and me suffering from classic abuse syndrome thought it was all my fault.   This was a long time ago guys..  I'm ok now.  


I will give you a classic benign example of my modern family dynamic.

Trombone sister calls me up and asks me to write an original arrangement of a chart so she and I and my husband the guitar player can perform together at her master's recital.   I was playing 5 nights a week and doing quite well at that time---living in Miami.   The recital was in Houston but I was really thrilled that she wanted me there.  So I write a chart, reschedule and cover my gigs, and my husband and I drive 18 hours to Houston to play with her and see her graduate with the first advanced degree ever in the family.   The performance goes amazingly well---too well.   Afterwards her professor and her friends showed my husband and I a slew of attention and praise.   Her prof was a principal with the symphony--he invited us to his house the next day where he pulled a piano outside on the lawn and I sat there playing with his students and some of his symphony buddies all afternoon...it was a blast...  I thought...wow...I did something good...my family is happy.

I week after I got home my sister calls me up and tells me that I purposely showed her up--that I only came there to make her feel bad....  she never even said thanks...lol
It was my mother who put the idea in her head, too---mom had made a similar comment to me as I came off the stage right after the performance.  I, of course, thought maybe that was my real intention...and I felt guilty.  This continued to be a sore spot with her for years.

this is known as "reframing" and it is one of the tactics that keeps the black sheep the black sheep.  Even though my intentions were pure...and I went so far out of my way-- they were twisted into something mean and selfish...

and everyone took my sister's side...lol...  because she is the golden child and it is not possible for her to have done poorly... so naturally--it was my fault...  just like always..lol.  She couldn't cut down my playing...so she cut me down.   She's not evil...just misguided and a bit self-absorbed.

...it was actually at this point though when I thought---wow, maybe I am good at this...really.  I totally devoted myself to the piano because I believed it was the only way I would ever be able to prove to my family that I was a worthwhile person.   as crazy as that sounds...that's what I thought.   I might add--it didn't matter though---no matter how well I played no matter how advanced I became...  no matter how many views my YT vids got  (1.6 million and counting)  I was still the black sheep..    My mother did slave me out to accompany her voice students though--always acting like she was doing me the favor--even though all her students insisted that I play for them...   My sister called me up once and asked me to come and transcribe something for her...  it took me about 40 minutes.  I wrote it all out for her, put it in the computer--and I was feeling pretty good about myself...   She says to me as she's leaving---oh yeah...I will pay you 35$--if you come and clean my house tomorrow.

again very subtle way of telling me...  as a musician I was worthless--but she would pay me to be her maid...LOL

just wondering if any of you have experienced this....   it can so totally screw you up as a performer.   Eventually though...you become impervious to the comments and opinions of others and you just keep going... or you quit.   I know that this made me a better musician...  that I would have probably given up long ago...  had it not been for my screwy family... wild as that sounds...it's true.  

so did any of you grow up with this crap?     and if you did--how did it change you?

are any of you in this situation?    

[ted]

Firstly, you have to be congratulated on overcoming all that nonsense, making something of your life and developing your music to such an accomplished level. I was just the opposite. I had an idyllic childhood, in a stable, loving family, full of common sense and encouragement. It was not musical in any very serious or professional way, aside from my father, who was a wonderful ragtime and party pianist, and my early years were full of the daily sound of piano music.

Provided a difficulty is not so great as to be overwhelming, it can sometimes be a positive stimulus. Had I not had such a wonderful early life, which I still draw on mentally to this day, I might have done a lot more with my music in the external sense. As it is, I just played and created incessantly for myself and have had nothing to do with the professional music world, eschewing all competition and comparison, and choosing the life of a happy, creative pig over that of a wretched Socrates.

It can only ever be speculation really I suppose, but in any case good on you for getting through it all so well.

[outin]

so did any of you grow up with this crap?     and if you did--how did it change you?

Sounds like you have come a long way...

While there are no professional musicians in my family, it was always taken for granted that music is important and we were encouraged (if not very well supported) to study it.

I grew up in a quite dysfunctional family as well (one of those where everything looks good outside but isn't), but it could have been worse. Already from a child I had a very strong temperament and it never even entered my mind that there could be anything wrong with ME. I questioned my parents as soon as I learned to think and never even tried to be a good girl. Instead I fought or manipulated everyone until I got what (I felt I) deserved. Had I had a different childhood I may have become more self-diciplined and worked harder for some things. But everything concerned things have turned out quite well.

But one can never completely erase the experiences from childhood I guess...I still get quite annoyed with my parents if I spend too much time with them. And I have almost no contact with my older siblings simply because I feel we have nothing in common.

[indianajo]

If you want to see someone make a (scary) living out of stories like this, and achieve minor league fame, see the current episode of Bluegrass Underground TV show, with Davina and the Vagabonds.  
Davina plays blues/jazz keyboard (88 keys) AND she has a hot trombone player.   Also string bass, trumpet, saxophone.
Also Etta James, Big Mamma Thornton, Billy Holiday etc.  You don't have to be black though to have family problems.  Some of these gave in to the temptations of the road, drugs or alcohol. I'm glad to see your addiction has more to do with the internet - much less side effects.  
My family has come up from poverty to where I have a college degree (BS only)  my own acreage, a couple of thousand of LP's and CD's,  3 pianos and 7 organs (3 fully working).  To think great great Gma possibly learned English from the lining out of the  lyrics of hymns, in the mountain Church of Christ tradition.  She wasn't even allowed to hear instruments in that church.  I've come a long way to being an instrument addict of sorts- a cheap hobby with few side effects.  Hint- ggGma probably spoke Delaware, although she told her grand daughter she was Cherokee.    (ie civilized, not a savage like the Apaches.)  It was Mother that discovered Beethoven on the AM radio. Grandpa (the german looking one with the Deutz name) liked banjo and "oldtime" string band music.  Gpa the native looking one, bought the first piano, a really *****y "Cincinnatti" that was flooded before a teacher could be found for my Mother. Mother bought the Everett piano after WWII and had two years of lessons before moving back to the mines. Dad discovered FM radio, I discovered hifi and had SIX years of private piano lessons with practice on Mother's Everett.  Isn't culture fun!
Pity I live in such a sane part of the world, I can't find a teacher that knows anything about hot licks on the piano.  I watch HDTV and study what the keyboard player is doing but so far my idea of a hot lick is to fill the 4 beats of a hymn whole note with other notes of the chord on 2,3,4. With my left hand, I can't fill with the right hand to save my life.  There are some guys in Nashville, only a $150 road trip away. Sigh.   

[dcstudio]

so far my idea of a hot lick is to fill the 4 beats of a hymn whole note with other notes of the chord on 2,3,4. With my left hand, I can't fill with the right hand to save my life.  There are some guys in Nashville, only a $150 road trip away. Sigh.    

hmmm I hope you don't mind if I ask you a few questions...maybe we can figure some stuff out.

1. "hot lick"  -- please describe where you heard this phrase and who said it to you first
2.  why did you stop taking lessons after six years?  
3.  when was the last time you made on honest effort to land a fill with your right hand?
4.   is there someone else in your life or nearby who you feel is a better player than you? what is your relationship to this person?   what exactly can they do that makes them a better player.?


are  you a church musician? you mentioned a hymn...  is the better player at church?



when students make statements of exclusion... "I can't--to save my life"--there is almost always an event... or a person--who told them implicitly or explicitly  that they "can't do it"

so I am just going by your words...    and my own experience  


you don't have to answer...and I am making statements based on very little information--really just guessing.

[indianajo]

Uh, I was going to delete that off topic part but thanks for reading. I have the idea you are a jazz or pop player, and you teach, but you are in DC, $800 away.  
1.  Don't know about hot lick, might have made it up.  Did listen to Jazz all this morning on FM radio while WUOL was stuck in the middle ages (Harmonia).  
2.  After six years, the band director suggested I drop piano and concentrate on the $350 bassoon the school had so generously lended me.  HS band involved road trips on busses, contests we won, and girls, so I followed instructions.  I made top TMEA All State Band, Revelli conducted some wonderful repretoire.  The piano teacher in the fourth year had told me "Riders in the Sky" was a "tired old chestnut", and refused to help me figure it out by ear.  I like classical music, but I like other things.
3. I have a riff I sort of stole from Good Golly Miss Molly for RH, but it is not up to speed.  I've never actually done a RH fill, just the left hand ones I've been trying out this summer at Otisco Methodist church.    
4.  I hang out with the SIAGO, a bunch of professional organ players, and they are way better than me on mainstream church music and classical organ repretoire.  I love their 10 free concerts a year, and am learning a JS Bach piece I've loved since 1962, but I'm getting all the help I can afford on that front.  My church detests that sort of "high class" music.  The Methodists out in the country (all 16 of them some Sundays) like what I'm doing to the hymns,  and tolerate my rugged attempts at gospel piano.  Today the bluegrass guitar player complimented me.  I was awake this week.  
As far as piano licks, Dave Alvarez and the Guilty Men had a hot keyboard player on Austin City limits at the hardly strictly bluegrass festival.   Honey of Ron Piazza's Might Flyers is really first rate, and had a great solo act before on Grey Goose channel from CA.  There are people on KET's Jubilee at the WC Handy festival that are really good, but I don't get to see the fingers on that much.  There was some black guy named Johnson on KET's "In Performance at the governer's Mansion" that was doing nice things to Duke Ellington pieces, but that was a 1982 show and he is probably dead.  Davina (Sours? Sowell?) I lost the paper on the ride home) I mentioned above was really hot but she is really powerful, I can't emulate her, I'd break my wrists.  
I play "Count on Him"  (basie rip off) Take the A train and Satin Doll out of an arrangement book but those are strickly note by note arrangements.  
When I play for the indigent at the charity dinner downtown, I play 3 Scott Joplin rags, some hymns. Malaguena, Playera, sometimes Pictures at an Exhibition( not quite perfect), sometimes Moonlight Sonata (3rd movement slow)  At Christmas all the carols in the dry cleaning book like Mother used to have, plus my transcription of George Winston's Holly and the Ivy. Next Christmas maybe Lyapunov's Christmas night".     When I played Holly at my church 15 years ago, the next week the minister told me the piano needed to be played by someone with a Master's degree in performance, then they hired one. 

[dcstudio]

2.  After six years, the band director suggested I drop piano and concentrate on the $350 bassoon the school had so generously lended me.  


 When I played Holly at my church 15 years ago, the next week the minister told me the piano needed to be played by someone with a Master's degree in performance, then they hired one.  

and there they are..  there is the event and the person.  not sure which one crushed  you worse...the band director or the minister...

my questions were just to get you to start talking... so you would tell me why you can't land a fill with your right hand...  who's opinion got to you.


these seemingly trivial things can have profound consequences upon the oh so delicate ego of the pianist.  It's seriously amplified if these statements come form positions of authority or from those whose opinions we respect.

In music school--the chair of the dept started watering his plants in the middle of my piano juries...as I was performing....     doesn't sound that directly evil---but it crushed me...lol.

I dropped out of music school not long after.

your training and the sheer amount of time that you have played mean that you can play a whole lot with your right hand--you just think you can't--and you say it, too.   First thing you gotta do is start seeing it as something easy to do--not impossible...like you are seeing it now.

it's easier to think of those riffs we can't play as super difficult or impossible--and sometimes they really are....   but...  not always...

oh yeah--one other thing they told us in music school

put your most talented kids on Bassoon!!!!   I would venture to guess here---that you weren't practicing that Bassoon very much at the time... which is why he made that suggestion...   

[indianajo]

Sorry about the impolite way your music school rater had of grading you.  Watering plants during a performance - about as bad as nose blowing.  
When I was flunking out of senior physics classes in college, the professors were very polite, but kept saying things like "it is obvious that - - - " then going on to say things that were as obvious to me as Sumerian cuniform script.  Quitting was an option only in so far as I would proceed directly to the Army as a private, where all my thinking would be done for me.  There was a war going on, being run very badly IMHO,  so I "went for a single instead of a home run". I transferred from prestigious elite school across town to the stockyards city college, where the  profs were Pakistanni or Indian, but spoke good English and made a lot of sense, using the same texts as elite university.  I made some A's, graduated with no honor at all, but missed that war. I was dragged back in the Army seven years later under a much more effective administration - as a Lieutenant with 8 years experience, which was a nice pay raise, although I had to give up the most fun job I ever had, and the one I was really good at. 
As far as piano versus wind band in high school, the piano teacher was taking me to local meets of piano guild teachers, and the band was taking us to play for the President USA and other exciting events.  The band played the Rose Bowl parade two years after I graduated, I'm very happy for them. When I quit piano lessons I was at the age where some people enter world wide contests, so it was obvious on piano I was not world class.  Being small with an injured third finger may have kept my piano horizons very local, but then the band director's complaint with the bassoon was my thin wimpy tone, which no amount of lessons with Mr *****oni were going to correct.  Aerobic exercise the Army put me through to build up my wind might have helped my bassoon tone a lot, but that didn't start until college military training.  
Glad you are commercially successful as a pianist.  If you look at ms Davina or Carol Wunderland, you may find some material you can modify for your act.  Maybe touring is not your goal, but it would be nice to be as famous as say, a NYC standards singer and piano player that performed here in an 800 seat hall last weekend.  
Good luck with whatever you do.  And don't involve your family in art anymore. My own brother is a complete musical yehoo, related to the Gpa that knew one lick on the banjo and had a couple of Sons of the Pioneers 45 records.  At least your family are successful in their own artistic way, quite different than your way it sounds like.  My brother makes 50x more money than I do, but his job would bore me to tears, besides being very scary and stressful, so more power to him.  

[mjames]

Sounds like you have come a long way...

 I questioned my parents as soon as I learned to think and never even tried to be a good girl.

4

..You're a chick?!

[dcstudio]

yes... I am a 51 yr old "chick"

what made you think I was a man--something I said?   lol..

this is me and my husband on guitar...  if you are interested.

[mjames]

yes... I am a 51 yr old "chick"

what made you think I was a man--something I said?   lol..

this is me and my husband on guitar...  if you are interested.

Not you! I already know you're a woman, I was asking outin. Cause I was under the impression he was a..i mean she (?) was a dude.....

THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING.

[outin]

Not you! I already know you're a woman, I was asking outin. Cause I was under the impression he was a..i mean she (?) was a dude.....

THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING.

Hmm...what should I say...sorry? 

[mjames]

yes.

[pencilart3]

Hey mjames I'm a girl also. You knew that, right?













JUST KIDDING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[outin]

yes.

I'm not sure it's really my fault, but I'll apologize anyway