#88: I Find an Old Music Score Upstairs in the Attic

How It Reminds of All the Notes to Come

My mother, a pianist and teacher, starts me on a career in music. I play piano before I am one year old, beginning formal music lessons at four…accordian first followed by piano at five. At thirteen I ask if I might take voice lessons.

But, I never hear you sing, she says.

Even though I don’t sing…at least where she can hear me… she sends me for voice lessons. I sing my heart out and six years later enter music school in NYC. All my music teachers, from elementary school through conservatory level, learn I also play piano, and as an avid sight-reader I end up on the accompanist bench, too. Being both soloist and accompanist gives me the experience of breathing with a soloist, knowing when more support is needed, and also when we can soar together.

A friend, who is a conductor and pianist now working in Germany, stops by on a trip to the US. It is decades since I am an accompanist under her baton and we think it would be fun to make some music together while she is here. I head up to the attic and pull down 1 piano/4 hand scores for us to read through and a volume of Schubert lieder just in case her husband, a tenor, might be inspired to join in the fun, too. The three of us play, sing, laugh, and over lunch make tentative plans for me to visit and perhaps even collaborate on a concert while there. While going through numerous boxes full of scores, I spy a pale blue tattered volume. It is the piano/conductor score of the musical Oliver, the first show I play as a pit musician well over fifty years ago, and oh the memories it brings me.