Life notes, 1 of N.

Sat Nov 16th 2024.

I think I should one day make a YT video and story time about this: essentially I somehow always wanted to play the piano, but frankly I have no idea where this desire came from. I simply recall that every time I saw a piano on TV, I would start going crazy as a child, I would finger point the TV, and I would beg my mom to sign me up for classes. When I was around 6yo, I dragged my mom to a music store during Christmas time, forced her to buy a little ‘self-teach’ book about learning how to play the piano, and told her: “since you know how to read, please read this book for me, and after you learn, teach me how to play the piano” - sure Sherlock.

One day, while waiting for my mom to finish cleaning the home of one of her clients (she juggled this side hustle on top of her full time job - time management skills at its best as an immigrant mom), the lady that owned the house saw me bored while silently waiting for my mom to finish mopping the floor.

She asked me why I was bored, and I said that I didn’t like to watch TV - classic Vitoria. She asked me what I would rather do instead, and I pointed my fingers to her piano in her living room. My mom was mad at me because I should never bother her clients - but the lady calmed her down as it was the lady that approached me, not the other way around (phew). That same afternoon, that lady, let’s call her lady C, drove me to Valeria, an old lady in her 80s that taught piano to several children during her retirement - who also taught lady C’s daughter a couple of years prior. Lady C’s daughter wasn’t really interested in piano, but took lessons because her mother really wanted her to. I was ecstatic, I frankly didn’t want anything else other than this. My mom though was mad at me, not because she didn’t love me and didn’t want to support me pursue my passions: but frankly, she couldn't afford it. You see, imagine being in my mother’s shoes: cleaning someone else’s gorgeous and spacious home to round off your monthly grocery bills because you can’t afford to buy milk more than once a week, and your wealthy client introduces your broke daughter to a fancy, upper-class, high-class, elitist and expensive hobby. It must have been nerve-wracking, and almost heart-breaking. Later on in my adulthood she expressed me how much she felt so ashamed for not affording sponsoring my way to education fully and almost undeserving to mother such a curious child - I sincerely to this day I cannot understand how she dealt with me - but this is beyond this story line.

Essentially, because of the light in my eyes, Lady C and Valeria, had their arrangements for a ‘discounted price’ for my classes. The rest is too much to cover here, but essentially I grew up playing the piano from the age of 8 to 18 where I practiced on average at least 6 hours a day, 10 a day in the weekends. Yes, all my neighbors loved and hated us. I remember coming back home from school at 1pm, rush eating something, and play from 2pm to 9pm on average. There was nothing else on earth I cared about. Grades, were an after-thought. I would focus in the morning in my classes, metabolize information fast enough, to get all my homework and exams right. I was essentially minimizing learning time and maximizing focus - all so that I could maximize the amount of time available to practice. I excelled at school, but I couldn’t care less about it.

Fast forward, I make it to the Conservatory of Venice at the age of 16. By this time, I have attended concerts of incredible humans on a weekly basis during my childhood. I have been lucky enough to watch concerts of folks of the likes of Beatrice Rana, Leonora Armellini, Davide de Ascaniis, Alexander Gadjiev, Michelle Candotti any many others, right before their incredible musical careers took off.

Looking back, I only now as an adult I am able to recognize what an incredible childhood that has been, what an incredible privilege it has been to grow up thinking that practicing every day, listening to music constantly, having opinions on favorite pianists, was ‘normal’. Thing is that, even with all of that, at the age of 18 I made the tough decision to walk away from all of this. You see: for each of these incredibly talented folks, there were at least hundreds as many that didn’t make it to the Chopin Competition’s arduous selection process, that didn’t make it to the Tchaikovsky Competition, or The Cliburn Piano competition - the path forward for a living would be to become a piano teacher. The reality is that, for the daughter of a Latino immigrant, whose mother sacrificed everything for me to get an education, a college degree, and a job that would get us out of poverty, continuing with piano for my higher education would essentially mean to decide not to exercise the very expensive call option that my mom purchased for me with her entire life’s work.

Nonetheless, I have learned quite a couple of life’s lesson from this incredible journey:

• You always have time to practice, if you don’t, you are making excuses.

  • When you find something you actually do care about and do give an “f” about, you will make time to work on that thing.

• Perfection doesn’t exist, but it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t pursue it.

  • It is not about not making mistakes, but it playing with intentionality can only happen if you have thoroughly mastered the inside outs of a piece, its historical context, the life’s story of the composer when they wrote that, and the “micro” meaning of each voice within. Fine, Beethoven used to say that “to play a wrong note is insignificant, to play without passion is inexcusable” - but you cannot be passionate about what you don’t even know or understand. There is no excuse for not putting the work of breaking something down and giving each masterpiece the time that it deserves.

• Timing is actually everything

  • I used to hate practicing with the metronome. Turns out, that learning rhythm, how to pace myself, ended up being the solution to a lot of problems in my life. There is time for everything. There is time for sound, as there is time for silence. There is time for pauses. You can make those count too, you can make pauses meaningful too. A room doesn’t always need to be filled with sound to be impactful.

• You can do the same thing in a thousand different ways.

  • And they can all be excellent, and they can all be right.
  • Many folks could say “what is the point of playing the same piece over and over again? Why all pianists end up playing the same stuff?” - Maria Joao Pires’s Mozart is completely different than Friedrich Gulda‘s Mozart. They couldn’t be farthest apart. Same thing for Ingolf Wunder’s Chopin and Maurizio Pollini’s Chopin. Yet, each of these performances are masterpieces

  Even with the same person, the young and the late Ivo Pogorelich do simply sound completely different to each other.