PAIN-O

When the lesson you get at the keyboard isn’t the one your parents signed you up for. From the annals of personal resistance.

When I was nine, my parents bought a used baby grand and signed me up for paino piano [geez] piano lessons.

There’s a reason why I always mistype “paino” when I mean “piano.”

I was not very good at piano because I never practiced. Or maybe it was the other around: I never practiced because piano didn’t come easily to me.

This being the 1970s, my parents did not attend the lessons and take notes, as I did years later for my own children. My mother dropped me off at the curb, parked, and waited in the downstairs waiting room with the other moms. The other moms read from a pile of old ladies’ magazines while my mom worked on press releases and ad copy for her business.

My mother was ahead of her time in many ways—none of the other kids in my class had moms who worked. But, exactly like the other parents, she didn’t oversee my activities—it was on me to do homework and practice music, or not. Naturally, I did as little as possible and spent most of my unsupervised time on my belly reading Nancy Drew books and playing on the railroad tracks with my siblings.

So far this seems like an ordinary story shared by many people of my generation who did not practice piano because nobody made us. The next sentence goes something like, “But I wish I hadn’t quit.” I’ll say this upfront: I’m glad I quit when I was finally allowed to. I believe that putting an end to something that makes you miserable is an important feature of self-autonomy—but that’s not what this essay is about.

One difference between me and other reluctant piano kids of my era was that I started out a head full of Rachmaninoff, Liszt, George Walker, you name it. Classical music was the only music played in my house. I would go so far as to say it was the only music allowed in the house because the idea of listening to another kind of music was so far outside of our orbit that the subject never came up. As you can imagine, this situation put me at a social disadvantage starting around fifth grade. By high school, I had isolated myself as the weirdo who listened to Shostakovich’s 8th quartet on repeat at heart-pounding volume while reading Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Halfway through college, my friends had to stage an intervention to teach me about popular music.

In our house, the local FM classical station, WFLN, played in the background whenever my parents were in the kitchen. Every album on the hi-fi shelf was classical, except a few children’s records (Babar and Tubby the Tuba) and the three Broadway albums my parents had acquired before my mother started her business: Camelot, My Fair Lady, and The Singing Nun. When my parents were out of the house, I sometimes blasted them on repeat, belting along with the lyrics. Why can’t the English teach their children how to speak?

The company my mother founded in the late sixties was an arts management firm. Her work was managing the careers of classical musicians on a national and later international scale. All variety of musicians—singers, violinists, string quartets, conductors, and, especially, pianists. For the first several years, her offices were on the third floor of our house. My father, a graphic designer who ran a small agency, worked there, too; soon, his business was absorbed into hers as the in-house art department. Musicians from around the world came by for meetings and sometimes stayed overnight with us, bringing with them the worldly perfume of instrument varnish and cologne. It was impossible to reconcile my exotic home life with my knee-socks-and-saddle-shoes day at a local Catholic girls’ school where we memorized hymns to the Blessed Virgin and all the verses to patriotic songs (I love thy rocks and rills), and my classmates were in love with Michael Jackson.

In many ways, my mother’s venture was audacious. She had no background in business or classical music—just eerily accurate intuition and devotion to “her artists” so deep that she stuck with it, despite having to work seven days a week, often till 11 pm, to keep the business solvent. Her firm thrived for more than half a century—thrived, in that she continued to support her artists’ careers and pay her employees, even while most other classical artists management firms, including the very biggest, collapsed. Perhaps her advantage starting out was not understanding in advance how difficult, how misogynistic, how racist, how brutal the industry is. The other advantage was that her idea of success was divorced from the concept of personal financial gain. No one goes into the arts or into arts-adjacent work for the money. If you care about money, it is much easier to go to dental school. And it takes a special frame of mind to commit to self-sacrifice in the name of an art you do not practice.

My mother grew up the middle child of nine in a poor family. Her father was a machinist (“an engineer without a degree”) and an alcoholic. She was born with a cleft palate and a serious speech impediment. Her Irish twin brother had a clubfoot. Somehow, their mother, who also ran a business (a hosiery shop in their storefront home), managed to shepherd the two of them through multiple surgeries at the children’s hospital. Of course, my mother did not have music lessons as a child, though she would have liked that. Her family was focused on survival. After her unlikely journey through university into the educated middle class and somehow into the musical arts industry, I’m sure it made sense to give her kids the music education that had been denied to her. For me, these lessons seemed to be just another part of the unstoppable machine of childhood.

My first piano teacher was one of the artists on my mother’s roster, one-half of a duo piano team. If that were not uncomfortable enough, my mother was also on the board of the music school. This arrangement created an anxiety feedback loop for all involved. Certainly for Mr. Engel, whose not-insignificant talents were being wasted afternoons teaching reluctant nine-year-olds who smelled of recess sweat and Twizlers. As if things couldn’t get worse, he was now awkwardly stuck with his manager’s unteachable kid. What a delicate set of circumstances (that I did not appreciate until I was an adult.) Mr. Engel, a natty dresser with a formal way of speaking, was infallibly polite and patient towards me as we repeated the same beginner lesson every week for two years.

And then there was my mother, who had to drag herself away from her tantalizing office every Thursday afternoon. When the lesson was finished, Mr. Engel would trot downstairs behind me to greet my mother, whom we would find in a cracked-leather armchair in stocking feet with her knees folded under, deep in some paperwork. He would smile politely and report that I was “improving” (which is a euphemism for “staying the same”) as I hung my head and waited for it all to be over. The two of them would talk business for a moment until the next student, a perky high school girl in miniskirts, breezed through the front door with a stack of Bach preludes under her arms.

Lather, rinse, repeat. After a year or so, my mother announced that I would now take piano lessons from the music nun at our Catholic day school. Obviously, this was a demotion—my mother had nothing that was not whithering to say about the quality of music instruction there—but she insisted otherwise. It would be easier, she said, and the nun would also teach my little sister.

Because it was summer, the lessons were held inside the convent, a foreboding Victorian building that smelled of boiled cabbage. My heart pounded at the sight of the other nuns, our teachers during the school year, as they silently slipped up and down the grand stairway in their floor-length habits, pretending not to see us. My mother stayed for the lesson, as there was no waiting room.

My sister went first. The music nun was an elderly woman with cat-eye glasses. Her wimple was askew. She held up a giant flashcard.

“This is middle C. He lives one line below the staff. We call him Charlie.”

My sister was seven; I am sure she had no idea what was being told her with this strange sequence of words. But she took it in stride, as one does with the odd things you hear from adults when you are seven.

“And this,” continued the nun, “is Donald D.” She taped an arthritic finger on the note that lived in the space below the staff and cocked a wise eye to our mother.

“We used to call him ‘Darkie D,’ but you can’t say that anymore, you know, with so many of them in the school. Even coming in for piano lessons now.”

My mother gasped. It was the 1970s, and we lived in a neighborhood that was nationally famous as a model of racial integration. Our school, which was founded in 1917, had been integrated from the start. There was a framed photograph of the first graduating class, white girls and black girls flanked by nuns in white wimples, towering headpieces, and long black habits—the same penguin suits they still wore. By the seventies, half the students were Black. As for my mother, a red-haired Irish woman, she belonged to the Women’s Political Caucus and the local Democratic Party. The musicians on her roster were mostly Black, unheard of at the time among classical music managers. (And what do you know? Pretty much still, today.) Being an outsider herself, this choice was not revolutionary to her; it was natural. Before the internet, people in the business often assumed my mother was Black until they met her in person at a conference. Sometimes (she would imitate them hilariously when she got back), they would blurt, “You’re white!”

“That nun wasn’t a very good teacher,” our mother explained dryly on the way home.

We got the summer off from lessons, and the next year, I found myself back at the proper music school, this time with a four-foot-nine-inch elderly Viennese teacher who beat time on my back with the side of her tiny fist. I was so terrified of her that I actually did practice—a little. The Viennese teacher decided I should “sit for a certification exam,” which meant playing a program of scales, etudes, and a Schubert sonatina in front of a committee of strangers. In other words, the worst thing that could possibly happen. My father, who had been Very Good at Trumpet as a child, was recruited to help me prepare. Night after night, he banged out time on the piano lid as I struggled through my sonatina, unable to keep a steady beat. Every fifth or so bang, the lid would begin to slip, and he’d catch it with his other hand just before it slammed down on my fingers.

When it came time for the exam, I waited on a bench in the hallway outside with my stomach in a twist, listening to some infant prodigy performing Paganini’s fourth caprice on violin. At the end of the piece, there was the sound of scattered but enthusiastic applause. The door flew open, and the triumphant young musician exited.

My name was called. I was still not sure what a certification was, or why I was doing it, but it was too late for such thoughts. I focused on survival. Inside the room, three stone-faced grown-ups sat behind a long table. It occurs to me now as I write this that they knew my mom was on the board.

I sat trembling at the keyboard. The man-judge spoke. “Play an A-natural minor scale, two octaves.” He’d thrown me a softball. Even a baby could do that, right?

I played the scale like a Martian who had just landed on Earth and had never heard human music until five minutes ago.

We went onto the piece. I began to careen through the sonatina as if I were sight-reading in a dark room through sunglasses. I’d always wondered what it meant in books when the narrator said, “Her mind went blank.” Well, now I knew.

The man-judge interrupted after a few measures and thanked me, which I had the presence of mind to understand meant, “For God’s sake, stop playing.” Hot-faced, I returned to my teacher’s studio, where she awaited news of my exam.

“I think I did okay,” I said.

And, do you know what? I passed.

Buoyed by my success, the Viennese teacher began plotting for the following year’s certification exam—but my mother had other plans.

She’d hired a piano teacher to come directly to our house to teach me and my three younger siblings on the same afternoon. Get the whole thing over with in one fell swoop. No more racist nuns, no more certifications. And best of all, the new arrangement required no driving or office interruptions for my mother. Our new teacher, Eileen, had been a student (in her case, a good one) of my first teacher, the long-suffering Mr. Engel.

Eileen was a pale white woman with long black hair and a sonorous voice. She was young, or so claimed the grown-ups, though I couldn’t see it. By my current back-of-envelope calculation, she was about thirty. She spoke slowly, as if thoughtfully editing her words before allowing them out of her mouth. Which is to say, she was in every way the opposite of my Viennese teacher, so of course, I preferred her. Which is like saying, “I prefer canned lima beans over even more horrible canned asparagus.” At least Eileen gave me some autonomy as the oldest and most proficient of the unteachable Rile kids. The last piece I chose to learn was the Chopin Waltz in C sharp minor. I picked it on a whim because our family had been listening to a Horowitz recording on repeat at dinner. It was wildly above my pay grade. But Eileen presented me with the sheet music anyway.

Between my passivity and her zenlike lack of urgency, we never got far, but low-key, neither of us cared. She scared me once by remarking that if I used a certain fingering, I would risk a “nasty accident.” Bored with life, I felt a frisson of delight at the idea that something as dull as piano could be dangerous, though I could not quite work out how. A fingertip amputated between two keys? A torn hangnail? It turned out the nasty accident she had in mind was an ugly, dissonant chord. Well, I played fistsful of wrong notes at every lesson, so why should she have been concerned about a single awkward fingering? I can only imagine that for the briefest moment, I had reminded her of herself a half-lifetime ago.

My six years of reluctant lessons were joyless and uncomfortable, but they are also a layer of the fabric that makes me me. A little joyless a lot of the time and good at being uncomfortable. I learned that if you show up for something again and again, you will improve. Glacial progress is progress, after all.

My prepubescent body learned keyboard posture from Mr. Engel, and, like an elephant, the body doesn’t forget. When I sit, unproficient, at a piano today, my fingers curl lovingly above the ivories as if expecting the Chopin waltz to arrive any moment. It never does. But, I can read passably in two clefs, and I gained a working knowledge of music theory so that a few years later, I was able to sail through a music elective in college as others around me struggled to understand the circle of fifths.

When my own children began learning violin, I sat on the paino bench every day with my back to the keyboard and doubled the melody to help their little sausage fingers find the right intonation. That’s right, I was playing backwards.

As a child, I’d spent years slouching towards the pain of piano, putting more effort into the avoidance than the task itself. From my kids, I learned that small, daily routine is money in the bank. For the first time in my life, I practiced faithfully, not for myself but for them. It was easy. Who would have expected? I went to every lesson, and, damn it, I sat up and took notes. Before my kids were born, before they could talk, I never imagined a child of mine would study music. Why would I do such a thing to a human I loved? But the surprise of it was that they asked for lessons. They had to ask twice before I said, oh, hell, fine, why not? And, like magic, as if I’d been paying attention all along, I knew exactly how to be and what to do.