My wife told me today, "You know, I've got to admit, I enjoy listening to you play." She hasn't always said that. For years she's been telling me I was hopeless - that my playing was clunky, noisy, stilted, bangy, unmusical. She wasn't being mean - just honest.
I took my first piano lesson when I was eight years old. I'm made good progress for the first year or so, then stopped improving somewhere around the late second grade level. For the next sixty years, I made no significant progress, despite hundreds of lessons and tens of thousands of hours at the keyboard.
Then John Mark Harris got hold of me. I've known Mark forever, ever since he and I were both piano students at the University of South Florida. He was a young talent, I an old hacker taking one more shot at learning to play the piano.
If you know John Mark Harris, you know that he's gone on to become an enchanting pianist and a superb teacher. I want to elaborate on the 'superb' part.
Mark and I had tossed around the idea of my taking a lesson from him for several years, but never quite got around to it. Part of the problem is that he lives in San Diego and I divide my time between Florida and the Midwest. Mark raised the possibility of doing a lesson over Skype and in March of 2016 it finally happened.
In our second lesson I asked Mark why I was able to sing in tune but couldn't for the life of me play the piano. I don't remember exactly what he said - something about the keyboard being in between the notes on the page and the musical sound, and something else about the piano requiring playing more than one note at a time - and I don't understand exactly what about his answer proved so illuminating, but from that moment, I began to make progress.
For sixty years I had been stuck in a pianistic limbo. Learning a new piece was a rarity, requiring an enormous expenditure of time and effort, and, once "learned", it sounded terrible - full of wrong notes and rhythmic stumbles - and it was easily forgotten. When it came to being able to include dynamics, phrasing, and pedaling - forget it. It was too much work just to play the wrong notes.
In the past 21 months I've learned dozens of pieces including but not limited to most of the Goldberg Variations, a Chopin Nocturne, and movements from Beethoven piano sonatas. Better still, many of my performances are verging on beautiful.
The revelation from the second lesson is just one of several transformational moments in the course of my lessons with Mark. Don't get me wrong, Mark didn't do it ALL. I've put in plenty of hard work, and the better I get, the harder I work. But the harder I work, the more I benefit from Mark's teaching. His lessons are packed with good advice. In the course of a single lesson he may offer a dozen bits of wisdom and if I'm lucky and work hard, I'll be able to internalize three or four of them before the next lesson rolls around.
In my estimation, what John Mark Harris has been able to do for me is nothing short of a miracle, the realization of the dream of a lifetime. read more
