I don't play by ear, I have to use my hands

I wasn’t sure what I was going to blog about until I decided to read PaintingChef’s site. She has a really funny post about piano lessons. Go read it, you’ll enjoy it.

My mother is a very good pianist. She also can play the pipe organ. Okay, you guys, remember I’m talking about my mother here! She was the head organist (I’m warning you) at the church we attended when we lived in Kentucky. She also gave piano lessons when she was first married.

Of course, she expected us to learn to play piano. I do thank her for this. All kids should take some kind of music lessons. You might have gathered from Bucky’s stories that our mother was not too strict on us by that day’s standards. She figured we’d never practice for her the way we would for a nun.

The Catholic school we went to had very inexpensive piano lessons for the students who were also members of the church. That made sense with the big Catholic families. The nuns didn’t need to do much more than cover the music supplies.

I started taking my piano lessons from Sr. Marguerite when I was in third grade. She was strict but she wasn’t a knuckle-beater. My mother had already taught me the treble and bass clefs so I had a bit of a head start. What I had to learn really wasn’t that difficult and I only ended up taking lessons for three years. That was when we moved to Michigan and there were no inexpensive teachers around.

It was kind of nice, to not have to practice anymore. But there was one thing I regretted. In sixth grade was when you learned to play the pipe organ. Learning would have been fun, but it also meant being conscripted into playing early morning Mass during the week.
I still read music and have fun playing. I’m not that good, I just have fun with it. I can’t play by ear and I’m not anywhere near the level of Bucky’s playing. But I’m not going to stop playing until my hands won’t let me anymore.