Image source: Merlina McGovern
I attended my daughter’s piano recital this evening. She has been playing since she was six years old; watching her progress through the years has been a wonderful experience. Tonight, she played a wonderful rendition of Dmitri Kabalevsky’s Toccatina, Op 27, 12.
I took piano lessons myself when I was 13 years old. I always felt that I started much too late to actually get good at playing piano, but I took enough lessons to be able to comfortably sight read. I learned enough to be able to play when the mood struck me, without needing to take further lessons.
I took my piano books with me to college at UC Berkeley. I remember playing at a beautiful grand piano in the women’s dorm, Stern Hall. The piano sat in a room filled with floor-to-ceiling windows, and there would be warm summer days where I’d play and watch the gorgeous view of the fog slowly rolling into the bay.
I kept playing even when I started working. My last job had an onsite piano teacher, so I took weekly lessons that would take my mind of all the stresses and strains of the day. Over time, though, I found that I had less and less time for that weekly lesson and the daily practice I tried to fit in. I also started taking up yoga and art. Each day, I would try to fit in daily exercise and a daily art session, and that piano practice went by the wayside.
After listening to all this wonderful piano music this evening, I’m inspired again. So, in addition to a daily blog post, daily art, daily reading, and daily yoga, I will now try to sneak in 15 minutes of piano playing. I’ve set myself a goal of just working very slowly through one song until I can feel it flow comfortably from my fingers. This first song that I’ll be working on is Johannes Brahams’s Vier Klavierstücke Op. 119, No. 1, Intermezzo in B minor. I think it may have been one of the last songs I took at my work piano lessons, and I never finished working all the way through it.
Am I crazy for taking on so many hobbies? It’s the feeling of making steady progress that I feel I get addicted to. I’ve kept up my art practice for 5 years now. We’ll see how long this daily blog and now daily piano practice will last.
What hobbies have you started to pick up later in life? Feel free to let me know in the comments below.
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