I talked about electric guitars and loved the stories you told.  This post is intended as momentary recess from a troubled day; we should go outside and get a little fresh air.

With guitar, it's sweetly personal.  You have to cradle it all day, so you become a monogamist. 

No such luck with piano.  You play what you're given, and if it looks, sounds and feels like garbage, that's too bad.  I had that experience with a high school choir director who asked me to accompany some tune or other at an assembly in her acoustically perfect gymnasium.  She had one grand and two spinets of fresh character, but she carefully selected the heap of spider nest stored in some far off dark pothole.  That's just what you wanna see: the custodians dragging Otis Campbell in for a dance just before the music starts.

Piano is difficult.  If you go see a good community choir — there's one in my town — you will see an outstanding pianist holding it all together.  She will be dressed modestly and will defer to the director, but I assure you that that accompanist has delicately but firmly placed two hands, one foot, and all of her very powerful brain on everything you've just listened to.

They are so brilliant.  They have to be in order to fathom the incredible web of historical literature and pianistic thought the instrument has inherited.  It's as though everybody involved through the centuries has added a special and unique genius to the piano universe.  It might be some question of finger play or perhaps a special brand of overtone ballet, but it's just wonderful.  I had to practice all summer in order to assemble the fifty or so pieces that would constitute the bulk of my three choirs' repertoire for the coming term, but I didn't dare accompany them on piano at a concert; you leave that to the pros who really know how to play.

The first day I taught at one school, exactly eleven sweethearts informed me, "We are the junior high choir."  I don't recall it expanding to much more than thirteen all year.  Word gets around all societies, and the next year they numbered in the thirties.  The third year, it went to eighty, and out of the woodwork materializes a fourth grade teacher who tells me she is a pianist and used to teach music.  She might have told me two years sooner had she ever pushed herself past "Hello."  

I gave her the music in early October and scheduled rehearsals for mid-December.  She walked into the first one unpracticed.  She could sight-read her way through, but she didn't know that music.  A low standard had been set; at concert time, the kids knew the music miles better than she did.

A genie then appeared in the form of a pianist/mother who had four children.  They represented a stake in the action.  She enhanced and elevated our program for almost two decades.  I'm still grateful.

If you ask me about piano, I just don't know.  I don't know how, with all the lessons, I manage to come off only a little better than Harry Truman or Richard Nixon.  After all, they had way less practice time.

I'm just not smart enough to really play the piano.  The piano itself reminds me of that fact every day.

Don't tell me it's not personal.

Michael James has been a professional guitarist and public school music educator for over forty years.