Piano Lessons: Music, Love & True Adventures

by Noah Adams (Delacorte Press 1996)

Noah Adams, host of NPR’s All Things Considered, had always wanted to learn to play the piano. This book chronicles, in monthly chapters, the year that he finally purchased a piano and learned to play (sort of). He did not, as I expected, engage a teacher and take weekly lessons. At least not at first. Instead, he purchased a computer program called the Miracle System and attempted to learn from that. The Miracle took him only so far. Later in the year, he attended a piano “camp” for adults, where at least he had lessons from actual living, breathing teachers. (I confess I am prejudiced in favor of live teachers.) And throughout, his goal was to learn to play Träumerei, from Scenes from Childhood by Robert Schumann. People kept telling him Träumerei is actually very difficult to play, trying to persuade him to set a more realistic goal; but he forged ahead. And he manages to play it (slowly) for his wife at the end of “December”. (Actually, I get it; when I was a teen taking lessons, I was motivated to learn to play the Waldstein Sonata, which was way out of my league! I was less successful than Adams, though I did make it through the brief second movement. And as an adult, my motivating piece was the Goldberg Variations. Again, I had some limited success; I couldn’t learn more than the Aria and four Variations.)

The book is not solely about Adams’ quest to play the piano; he includes a number of interviews with pianists and piano teachers. For me, the most interesting thing is in “November,” when Adams interviews piano teacher Denise Kahn in New York City. Apparently, current practice is to get students play with their entire bodies (“with free movement”), not just their fingers. All those scales and drills aimed at strengthening the fingers? Useless! Even harmful! Kahn tells Adams, “Once you understand that you can avoid the percussive effect on the fingers, that the arm is really supplying the motion, it’s like being let out of jail. You make larger, continuous motions behind a group of notes, and so you overcome this inherent problem of the piano, which is that the keys go up and down but the music goes horizontally.” This was something I had never heard before.