Music Musings

Where does one’s love of piano come from? A very difficult question to answer. Yet so many of us have fallen really hard for the king of instruments and the exquisite music written for it. I intend to ask my fellow Prestopiano devotees, all big piano lovers, and report in the future. But I will start with me.

As a child I was enchanted by the big black Emerson player piano in my grandmother’s house, banging on it from time to time, noticing the arrangement of black and white keys and the low and high registers. I heard the musical voice of the piano only when my mother occasionally played a popular ballad by ear, when my uncle played the 2 pieces he had learned by rote, or when someone activated the piano rolls on one or two holidays. But I wasn’t drawn to the greatness of the instrument until a certain Sunday after church when the family turned on the Polish Radio hour which always began with the famous Chopin Polonaise in A Major My ears were magnetically drawn to it. I happily listened to its strains each Sunday not knowing it was Chopin! To me it was just beautiful sounds made by a piano! (I never listened to the rest of broadcast; it would be decades before I would learn Polish and actually live in Poland for two years!)

From where did this attraction to classical music and Chopin come? Many years later after I became a reasonably accomplished pianist loving the classics, my elderly mother one day volunteered that a concert pianist had lived in the apartment next door when I was a newborn in Brooklyn! She did not elaborate. But probably through a wall, through a womb, and some really early exposure, I had heard the exquisite voice of the piano and seven years later, living in a different city state and home, suddenly found that sweet music again!

Where did you learn to love the piano?