This is an ongoing story, meant to be read in order. If you’re just arriving here for the first time, please start at the beginning by following the index.
NOTE: If you’re reading this chapter as an email, I recommend clicking the chapter heading and reading it in your browser instead (or in the Substack app linked below.) Viewing it in your browser will allow you to read and listen to the connected music1 simultaneously.
“Curve your fingers, Peter! Straighten your back. That’s a C sharp, not C natural. It’s in the key signature. Always be aware of the key signature. Curve . . . your . . . fingers!”
Mr. Meztler, my first piano teacher, is offended, sometimes becomes apoplectic at the sight of straightened fingers on the keyboard. It probably doesn’t help that my fingernails our encrusted with dirt, while his are elegantly manicured, polished with a translucent finish. We make fun of his manicured fingers behind his back—and continue for years afterward.
I’d be struggling through a Bach minuet or something, trying in vain to translate the notes on the page to my fingers on the keyboard. Then, just when I think I’m getting it right—there’s Mr. Meztler.
“Curve your fingers!” I jump every time I hear him say that. Well, at least for the first few years I study with him.
* * *
After two and a half years of noodling—picking out odd bits of tunes off the radio and records, and in general, trying to figure out which notes were to be played when—my parents decided I was ready for lessons. I was six and a half years old.
Why did they wait so long? Maybe it was the money. Before they set up Amy and me with Mr. Metzler, I was taken to a bizarre group lesson, where the teacher had five or ten of us kids playing on mock-painted keyboards that made no sound.
The keyboards were just plain dumb. Nothing but moving wooden keys. The theory was that if you removed sound from the equation, you could more easily focus on the mechanics of pressing down, then releasing keys with your fingers.
That’s what we were told, anyway. But maybe it was simpler than that. Maybe it was like that so the teacher didn’t have to hear the sonic mayhem resulting from a bunch of five-year-olds banging away at real pianos. In any case, once any of us mastered an exercise, we were invited up to the teacher’s real piano, where we got to play the exercise with sound.
The teacher was a friendly young man and meant well. But that didn’t change the fact that his method seemed stupid to me. I’ve no doubt that my mom was well aware of my feelings. She’d drag me, along with a couple of friends and their moms, to the group lesson. The whole thing really was like a playdate outing, except we didn’t really play, did we? So after a month or two, my mom let me join Amy, who had already begun lessons with Mr. Metzler six months prior.
Ironically, forty-odd years later, I taught group piano lessons much the same way, but at the college level—and with better technology. It was Keyboard 1 and 2 classes at Columbia College Chicago. I taught sixteen students, eighteen- to twenty-year-olds, who were fulfilling the keyboard requirement for non-pianist music majors. Typically, they were guitarists, drummers, and bass players.
They sat at two columns of Yamaha digital pianos, plunking heavy-handedly away in silence. Of course, they could hear themselves in their headphones. And I, sitting at the master keyboard at the head of the two columns, could push some buttons on a console to hear any one or combination of them in my headphones. We could even chat through our headsets. I rebelled against this system too—and occasionally had everyone turn their keyboard speakers on so we could all play in inglorious cacophony. More often, I just walked around with my headphones and plugged into the second headphone jack of each student’s keyboard, then talked to them in person. Actually, I found the whole surreptitious, listening-in-on-them thing to be creepy and big brother-ish.
When it came to picking a teacher, I was, at six, at the mercy of parents who loved music but didn’t know a thing about how it was made. Or more precisely, I was at the mercy of friends-of-parents who were slightly more experienced in this department—people who also didn’t know a lick about music but who had nevertheless put their children through a year or two of private lessons on the recommendation of slightly more worldly but musically clueless parents before them. That must be how mediocrity perpetuates itself down through generations.
So Mr. Metzler, who would become my sole teacher for the next seven or so years, came highly recommended. And, more importantly, he made house calls. He didn’t own a car—he took the CTA bus and walked from lesson to lesson. He avoided the trains, fearing black people, we learned from an offhand remark he made to my father.
Mr. Metzler wasn’t a bad teacher, but he wasn’t particularly good either. He taught Amy and me the fundamentals of reading and piano playing. Truth is, there may be no pleasant way to learn how to read music. It didn’t matter. I hated the process. It felt like torture. The idea of trying to translate dots and lines on a grid to the movement of fingers, then to sounds in the air. I’ve always had near-perfect vision, but I felt my eyes watering over the lines and dots, blurring as I tried to coordinate these seemingly disparate actions.
Like anything—hitting a baseball, flying a plane, brain surgery—once you get it, it seems perfectly natural. But it’s not. Music isn’t a visual medium. To translate written symbols into sound and vice versa is anything but natural. The brain and body are being forced into an uncomfortable alliance between the sonic and visual realms.
Are painters required to paint the world by listening to conversations? Do actors learn their lines by tasting them? No, because the correlation between what is written on the page and spoken on stage is clear cut. They are words in both cases. But music has no real correlation in the visual world—notating music is like notating the ether, like trying to capture a passing cloud. You can say that notated sound is what music looks like, but it’s not really true. Music doesn’t look like anything.
So as painful as it was, I’m glad I learned it young—this beautifully awkward system for representing music in visual form. Glad I learned it, that is, before I could learn to justify avoiding its essential weirdness. The ability to read and notate sound, as imprecise as it is, unquestionably opened up worlds of musical knowledge and experience that would have otherwise been unavailable. It also allowed me to compose music that would be impossible to conceive, let alone execute, without music notation.
Mr. Metzler wasn’t exactly a German taskmaster. He had a playful sense of humor beneath that sometimes-angry exterior. And he was a fine player. But he possessed almost no creativity in his approach to teaching piano. More importantly, music.
When you’re as young as I was, you’re not just being taught an instrument, but the fundamentals of the art. If the pedological approach doesn’t take into account how and why the music is put together the way it is, then you’re just learning a rote process.
For someone like me—with natural musical instincts—it was the wrong approach. I needed to have my innate musicality nurtured through a creative process. I needed someone to teach me more how to compose than play.
* * *
Every summer, we dress up and play one or two piano pieces in the annual recital at the home of one of Mr. Metzler’s richer suburban clients. I love the post-recital desserts—hate getting dressed up and dread the actual performance.
What was it? I certainly like the music, but I can’t stand the formality of this type of performance.
This annual ritual is completely unconnected from everything else in my life—school, baseball, basketball, and later, girls. Not to mention disconnected from most of the music I was listening to.
In these younger years, the music of Europe seems like it comes from another planet. It has an otherworldly perfection and timelessness that bears little relation to our world. It appears to have always been there, just as it is—eternal, perfect, unchangeable. Like God.
And that’s how music is being taught to me. Like the revelation written on tablets—a received wisdom that I’m not to dare question, let alone alter. I love it but am not melding with it creatively. I’m not ready for the vital lessons it would teach me about composing and improvising.
Still, even if this is the wrong way for me to be formally introduced to music, it’s the only way. Being from a non-musician family, classical piano lessons are the only game in town. Jazz pedagogy is in its infancy—its art being passed down mostly as an oral tradition or in African-American neighborhood schools. Certainly not in my part of town.
* * *
After seven years studying with Mr. Metzler, I’m at my final recital—performing the “Quejas ó La Maja y el Ruiseñor” from the Goyescas suite by Enrique Granados. This beautifully evocative piece, with its Spanish-guitar-like harmonies, is a bridge to some of what I would find so attractive in jazz.
The chromaticism.
The improvisational freedom.
My dislike of the recital format notwithstanding, I want to perform it well. I worked tirelessly to master it. Mr. Metzler clearly sensed my passion for the piece. Sadly, my innate distaste for the recital format took over—and my performance was less than stellar.
“What do you think—how did I do?” I push a piece of dessert around on the plate with my fork before getting the courage to look up at Mr. Metzler.
He shrugs his shoulders. “Well, not as good as I expected.”
Musically speaking, this chapter is all about J.S. Bach, one of my all-time heroes. Specifically, it’s about the beginning of his keyboard masterpiece, The Well-Tempered Clavier (Das Wohltemperierte Klavier.) But if you happen to know that work, you’ll notice that my performances here are not so much interpretations of the opening Preludes and Fugues but reimaginings.
For example, in the first track, Prelude #1 (remix), take Bach’s first prelude in C Major and improvise over it. In fact, I take what Bach wrote for both hands and put that in my left hand alone while improvising over it in my right. You may think I’m showing off, but that is not the point here. The point with that and the subsequent tracks is to highlight the creative possibilities inherent in Bach’s music. His is not a music set in stone; it is a living monument to creative possibilities.