My experience playing piano for the last 20 years has been colored by a remarkable contrast between inward fulfillment and outward struggle ranging from sentiments of over-praise and under-praise, appreciation and misunderstanding, love and repulsion. I first started banging away at my mother’s Schafer and Sons upright piano when I was about 5. My parents enrolled me in weekly piano lessons soon thereafter and my mother lovingly forced me to 30 minutes per day unless I threw a big enough fit. When I was 12, my favorite babysitter, the son of my piano teacher, introduced me to jazz. My life would never be the same.
Forget the egg timer, I was hooked. Forget classical training, give me jazz theory and improvisation. Within 2 years my piano teacher was out of tricks and sent me on my way. Friends and I chased band dreams in high school with a project called Left On Red. I accompanied the high school mixed chorus and was the young piano sensation in our school jazz band until I was relieved of my duties by our drill sergeant because I wouldn’t memorize standards, chord changes or solos. Good riddance.
I play piano. For me. It’s my outlet not my struggle. I spent hours at home and at school in practice rooms. I can’t honestly remember in which class I was supposed to be. But after years of practice growing into hours per day, one of my instructors and biggest admirers informed me that all my music sounded the same. I was crushed.
She was right. But so were the people who loved my music. And so are the people who have yet to hear it. Music is easily experienced and described by many, but understood by few. We’re each entitled to our own taste in music and I would never tell you otherwise. The fact is, every time you hear a note, whistle a tune, move to a beat, your coloring your experience of music and tailoring your understanding and appreciation. Given your experience and training, you may or may not enjoy, appreciate or have any idea what’s going on in any given musical situation.
For me, playing piano has always been a very selfish emotional outlet. I’ve rarely deviated from self-centered, pure self-expression. In fact, one of my lifelong goals is to be entirely uninhibited in my self-expression in the presence of others. My primary goal in playing piano has been to connect by brain as effectively to the keys as possible. When I play, my fingers dance the patterns of a mind and heart at war. My music is a purely honest, albeit abstract confession of my heart and soul.
I push myself to grow in all aspects of my life. Through periods when pianos are readily available, I retrain myself and explore the extents of my brain to fold and break the patterns inspired by my heart. I challenge my heart to let go and pour freely as though I were crying naked on my bedroom floor. I ask my soul to rid itself of the constraints of my understanding of the worlds expectations of the sounds I produce with my instrument.
I do not care to be admired causelessly, emotionally, intuitively, instinctively — or blindly. I do not care for blindness in any form, I have too much to show — or for deafness, I have too much to say. I do not care to be admired by anyone’s heart – only by someone’s head.
A man would be deluded to feel love by the love of another for his product. It is only through understanding, with an open mind were yours closed, that you may come to know and love the source.
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“Miss Taggart, how many people are there to whom my work means as much as it does to you?”
“Not many” she answered simply, neither as boast nor flattery but as an impersonal tribute to the exacting values involved.
“That is the payment I demand. Not many can afford it. I don’t mean your enjoyment, I don’t mean your emotions – emotions be damned! – I mean your understanding and the fact that your enjoyment was of the same nature as mine, that it came from the same source: from your intelligence, from your conscious judgment of a mind able to judge my work by the standard of the same values that went to write it – I mean, not the fact that you felt, but the fact that I wished you to feel, not the fact that you admire my work, but that you admire it for the thing I wished to be admired.’ He chuckled. “There’s only one passion in most artists more violent than their desire for admiration: their fear of identifying the nature of such admiration as they do receive. But it’s a fear I’ve never shared. I do not fool myself about my work or the response I seek – I value both too highly. I do not care to be admired causelessly, emotionally, intuitively, instinctively — or blindly. I do not care for blindness in any form, I have too much to show — or for deafness, I have too much to say. I do not care to be admired by anyone’s heart – only by someone’s head. And when I find a customer with that invaluable capacity, then my performance is a mutual trade to mutual profit. An artist is a trader, Miss Taggart, the hardest and most exacting of all traders. Now do you understand me?”
Ayn Rand – Atlas Shrugged
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