ᐊ

When my parents asked me what instrument I wanted to learn to play, there was no hesitation in my answer: the accordion. Bummer. That was a no-go for my mother, who associated that instrument with traditional Swiss music, which she literally hated. I don't remember why I was so attracted by the accordion, maybe because it had so many buttons? Or because of its sound? Anyway, we finally agreed that the piano also had a lot of "buttons", to be more precise, 88 keys, and that it was a good start.

So, at age 8, I started taking piano classes at the local music school. I had several teachers over time, one of whom would even misspell Mozart as "Mozarth"... I hated playing Bach (too technical), Chopin (was not able to convey the emotions), but liked Beethoven and Mozart. As you see, a very classical learning "career". Oh, and let's not forget Czerny, who was technical too, but in a different way than Bach. It was just mechanical and repetitive. I kind of liked playing his exercises by gradually increasing the speed of the metronome with the dream of reaching the speed indicated. Which, of course, I failed to. All in all, it was hard work, sometimes frustrating, but there was some fun too. And I was proud to be playing that instrument.

Came the time when I was tired of the same classical genre. This is why I enrolled for a jazz class instead. I would go to the teacher's appartment who would sit in her couch and listen to me playing while smoking her cigarette. She would cheer me up by saying (in English) "pleasant, pleasant" and encourage me to play a bit less following the scores but by improvizing. When I asked how to improvize, she sat herself at the piano and showed me how one could improvize along that tune. She never told me the technics though, so I kept playing according to the scores... I took this class only during one year, then I quit, as I was too busy with school and I was disappointed by the teacher's attitude. The good part of this class was that I could gather a ton of scores she photocopied for me. This is how I discovered George Gershwin.

Rhapsody in Blue is my all time favorite. It mixes classical music and jazz, it has such a "pleasant" swing beat, syncopes and triplets, I couldn't get enough of. And this was the first tune that let me use the whole keyboard from bottom to top. Since then I never took piano classes again, but learnt to play new tunes by myself. I reckon, I got stuck at the level I had then, but I still like to play the piano, and I think that's the most important part of it.

I had a long hiatus, during which I barely touched the piano as I was too busy with my studies. When I moved out, my mom wanted to keep the piano, so she bought me an e-piano which I still have now.

When my own children started to play an instrument, I started to play again on a regular basis, in order to show them that regularity is key to success. In this process, I discovered the musescore website where I got my scores from. In the past year however, I didn't touch the piano at all, because I was too busy learning languages...

ᐅ