By Tom Robotham
In early June, as my 70th birthday approached, I purchased a new piano. When it was delivered a day later, I felt like a kid on Christmas morning. To understand what it meant to me, you need to know some personal history.
When I was growing up, my mother’s piano was a prominent fixture in our living room. My mom wasn’t a virtuoso, by any means—she’d earned a music degree from Florida State in the ‘40s, majoring in vocal performance—but she was a good sight reader and enjoyed playing the popular standards of her era. By the time I was in kindergarten, she’d also started teaching neighborhood children, so it was inevitable that she’d teach me too.
Memories of my first lesson, on a Sunday afternoon when I was 5, remain vivid, and I still have my first book: the Schaum “Pre-A” introduction to piano, which explains music notation and its relationship to the keyboard through simple tunes with names like “Oscar the Octopus” and “Myrtle the Turtle.”
I was fascinated, and within a week I’d learned all 32 songs in the book. Acquiring the ability to bring forth even the simplest melodies and harmonies filled my heart and soul with a sense of accomplishment, joy and power.
Over the next few years, I practiced diligently, working my way through early intermediate pieces like Für Elise. Increasingly, though, I was drawn to rock and roll, especially the Beatles, and wanted to switch to guitar. My parents agreed to buy me one and sign me up for lessons at a local music store, and for a few years I lost all interest in the piano. To my mind—subconsciously, at least—the piano wasn’t cool. It was, after all, my mother’s instrument. All of my favorite music was guitar-driven.
That is, until high school, when I discovered Emerson, Lake and Palmer. Keith Emerson’s dazzling technique on piano, organ and Moog synthesizer thrilled me to no end, and I wanted to play like him. Unfortunately, I lacked the discipline to make a serious effort. It was far easier to just light up a joint, put on my headphones and listen.
Still, the piano maintained its gravitational pull on my soul. When I went off to college, in fact, I almost immediately ventured over to the music building and found, to my delight, a bunch of unlocked practice rooms with Steinway uprights. I’d brought along two music books—the Hanon exercises, a staple for many piano students, and a sonata album—and got into the habit of going over there almost daily.
By the time I graduated, my finger dexterity and my ability to read musical notation at a glance were much improved. When I moved back home for a few months after college, I played my mother’s piano regularly, and when I got my first apartment, I bought my own: a Hardman Peck spinet, just like the one I’d grown up with.
Shortly thereafter, I also started taking lessons from a friend of my mom, a lovely woman named Dolores Harden. When I think about the teachers I’ve had—from kindergarten through grad school—she ranks near the top. With her help, I worked my way through several sonatas by Beethoven and Mozart, a few Chopin preludes, some of Bach’s two-part inventions, some short pieces by Bartok, and my favorite popular standards from the American songbook. I also expressed to Dolores my interest in jazz—which had grown deep by the early ‘80s—so she introduced me to her brother, a professional jazz pianist named Jack Reilly.
Jack was as gentle and generous a soul as his sister was, and after I spent some time with him in his Brooklyn brownstone, he offered to take me on as a student. For a few weeks thereafter, I considered going all in on a bid to become a professional jazz pianist myself—or at least gain enough competence to play occasional gigs. In the end, though, I thought I was too old.
I was 25—and now, as I look back on that “reasoning,” I can’t help but laugh. I often wonder how much I could have accomplished over the next 20, 30 or 40 years had I made piano a priority. I was, after all, given the necessary gifts: a good ear, early musical training as a foundation, the resources to buy my own instrument, and great teachers at the ready.
It is, in fact, one of my chief regrets that I squandered those gifts.
And yet, I never gave up entirely. When I married in 1986, I moved my piano from Staten Island to our apartment in Manhattan—and to four other homes after that. In the process, I taught both of my kids the basics—as my mother had done for me—and continued to play myself, though sporadically and never with any serious effort to advance.
That ended in 2007 when my wife and I separated, and I moved to a one-bedroom apartment with no room for my piano. After living with it for 27 years, my Hardman Peck and I parted ways.
At the time I convinced myself that my guitar was enough to satisfy my need to make music. And for a while, it was. But after a few years, I realized how much I missed having a piano and decided to buy a portable digital keyboard. It was decent, with 88 weighted keys and a good tone. But sitting there on its metal X-stand, it lacked presence. I came to realize that pianos were more to me than instruments capable of making musical sounds.
For one thing, they’re works of visual art. I feel that way about all musical instruments: the brassy gleam of a trumpet; the blended spruce and maple hues of a cello and the feminine curves of a guitar. But to me, the piano is the most beautiful, with its orderly pattern of black and white keys reflecting the very nature of harmony, the texture of its cabinet, and its formidable weight, which feels like an anchor in a world increasingly afflicted by upheaval and chaos.
It is also, at once, the simplest and most complex of instruments. On the one hand, it’s the only instrument on which a rank beginner can produce a pleasing sound, as compared with, for example, the screech of a novice’s violin or the honks and squeals of a beginner’s saxophone. And yet, in the right hands, it can approximate the richness and complexity of a full orchestra.
My new piano is digital as well—a Yamaha Clavinova from Jordan Kitts in Virginia Beach—but is encased in a rock-solid matte-black cabinet. I thought about getting an acoustic but settled on the Clavinova for a few reasons. One was the cost: digital pianos are a lot cheaper and yet the action of the keys and the tone are indistinguishable from a “real” piano. It also has a headphone jack, which comes in handy for an apartment dweller, and features numerous “voices”—various organs, harpsichord, strings and so on—in addition to several different piano tones.
Mostly, though, I just want to play piano, and I have a new motivation for doing so. Six years ago, I developed a tremor in my right hand. A neurologist told me it’s Parkinson’s disease. Last year, it started in my left hand as well. The curious thing is that when I play, the tremors stop.
Not that I can play well at the moment. Having neglected the piano for the last few years, I find that my finger strength and dexterity have deteriorated significantly, and my hands seem to have shrunk; stretching for more than an octave is nearly impossible now. As a result, pieces I used to play with relative ease—the first movement of Beethoven’s “Moonlight” sonata, for instance—have become daunting.
How much of this related to Parkinson’s, I don’t know. Part of it, no doubt, is just the result of neglect combined with the effects of ordinary aging. Either way, the reality is clear: I’m essentially starting over.
The good news is, I was never one of those students who found anything at the piano boring. Even playing a simple C major scale brings me joy—for through that basic exercise, I am bringing forth the sounds of my childhood and thus coming into harmony with the core of my being.