Learning to play the piano: it's just hard

One of my lifelong goals has been to learn to play the piano. That seems like a natural desire for me since my parents both have strong musical talents including having been music teachers and church musicians. In fact, my mother has long taught piano lessons, and attempted to teach me as a kid.

It didn't take.

I had two problems: the main one was that I just couldn't stay dedicated enough to practice as much as I apparently needed to; the other was that I didn't seem to be coordinated enough to be able to move more than one finger at a time.

Well, I recently purchased a musical keyboard in hopes of finally learning. I have been using a combination of a book and software program to pick up where I left off so many years ago. Not the same personal touch as Mom, but it seems to be going OK so far.

Trying to learn at this age has been very enlightening. I've come to the conclusion that playing the piano is just a very difficult thing to learn. And I think that was the biggest reason I gave up as a kid: I thought it was supposed to be easy and because I struggled so much, I figured it just wasn't for me. I thought it was supposed to be easy because my parents made it seem effortless. They often played all sorts of impressive music at church and at home. My mom had a parade of piano students arriving night after night, most of whom seemed to be learning it pretty quickly.

I had no problem learning to read music; I was an above-average trumpet player and a top-notch singer in school. I had a good ear and great rhythm and excelled in marching band, jazz band, and chorus. Why was the piano so hard for me?

I had no trouble learning touch typing. That's been invaluable for my computer career and I continue to be a great typist.

So what is so different about the piano?

Well, I've realized there's one big leap I never had to make with all those other things: playing more than one note at a time. With the trumpet, singing, and the computer keyboard, you only ever have to do one action at a time (not counting the occassional SHIFT and CTRL key combos on the computer keyboard). I'm convinced it's a tough skill to achieve. As long as I'm playing one note at a time on the piano I'm fine; making that leap to polyphony is just really difficult.

And so, I now see that all that practice really is necessary. Most pianists are good because they just worked really hard at it. I suppose there are people who can just sit down for the first time and play, but I think for most of us, if we want to really learn to play, it's going to take a lot of effort.

Knowing that has given me new hope. I feel like I have a pretty good chance of learning this and even getting pretty good if I just keep working through it. It's going to take plenty of time and effort, but now that I know that's what's needed, I should be able to stick with it.