Learning to play piano...again.

My love of music really started when I was 7. My mother had an organ and would play it occasionally, and she allowed me to tinker around on it. In one of her monthly organ music magazines (I swear this was a thing!), she had received what I remember her calling a 'skeleton,' a heavy paper...thing...that you place over the piano keys, which tells you the name of the note and what it looks like on the music staff. Although she didn't need this, as she'd taken music lessons as a kid, I used the crap out of that thing and taught myself how to play a one-handed version of Silent Night. (This also came in handy in plunking out the same song on my cousin's set of bells that he played for band, after he had bet me that I couldn't play a song on them. Ha!)

I continued plunking around on her organ until my parents got me a smaller sized keyboard of my own when I was twelve, which was about the same time I discovered my aunt's old piano lesson books at my grandmother's house. I really wanted lessons, but this was the early 90's and it was a little harder to find people who taught back then, so I just started teaching myself. Finally, after I'd whipped through all the books, my parents found a teacher and I began to learn just how much I didn't know.

I was 13 when I started, 16 when I stopped due to parental divorce and difficulty in getting to the lessons. I wasn't the best piano player in the world, but I've been the pianist at a family member's wedding and I've accompanied several people for public performances. But as an adult, playing the piano really fell by the wayside. My eighty-eight key keyboard never really had its own space, so it lived in the closet and became a hassle to pull out, and once my daughter arrived, forget trying to play. When my mother bought a new piano, I inherited the old one, and we have video of my daughter yanking my hands off the keys over and over again so she can smash them with her own tiny hands! Adorable and hilarious, but what it meant was that even though I had access to a piano, I still couldn't play.

Now that she's a little bit older, I started wondering if maybe it was time to get back into it. "What if I practiced a little every day?" I wondered. "Nothing crazy, just maybe at least fifteen minutes... How far could that get me?" I used to have quite a few songs memorized, so that when I came across a piano, I could sit down and whip one out, but that was all years ago, and those memories have all been wiped out and replaced by things like what hours the local pharmacy is open, and what my daughter's current shoe size is, and what time my son needs to be picked up from his late choir practice. You know, life stuff. ;)

So I decided that if I were to get back into playing, I would need some goals in mind. One piece at a time. Practice it daily, play it until I can play it through with minimal mistakes. Learn a few pieces by heart. Improve my playing; improve my sight-reading if possible (I've always been garbage at sight-reading.) And then I'd go from there.

My first piece was one I'd picked up from a book sale a few months back, Beyond the Sea. I remember hearing my grandparents play music like this when I was young, and Kevin Kline sang the French version of it on the soundtrack to the movie French Kiss (I listened to this obsessively in the last two years of high school). I took it slowly; it's been a long time since I really played seriously, and I need to get used to the feel of the keys all over again, relearn what the distance between the notes feels like. My hands aren't as familiar with them anymore, but they're finding their way back.

It took about a month (with some days of zero practice, because, well, life), but I've got the song down now! I played it straight through this morning, and my daughter, who was playing on the floor behind me, sighed and said, "That was nice." I consider that a definite success. :)

I'm still going to play Beyond the Sea daily for practice, but I'm going to move on. Yesterday, I started working on Angel Eyes by Jim Brickman. My hometown radio station used to play this song all the time, and since that was the station we usually listened to where I worked in high school, I heard it constantly, and it reminds me of those times, so I figured that would be a nice one to move on to. I got to a tricky part this morning, where my hands and brain don't seem to want to work together, but I'll get there, with plenty of practice (and plenty of sour notes and groans of frustration). I'm really enjoying playing again, and I'm excited to see how much I'll have improved in a year or two.

Is playing music part of your daily life? Have you gotten away from it? Are you planning to get back at any point?