Behind the Scenes

[This represents my own path to maturity, and is probably why I became a producer. -- The Producer]

It's a long slog to the piney point of pianism. First, you need to be beaten up by everyone in the neighborhood. Then you need to learn judo and beat other people up, until your formerly slim, vestigially sublime sub-limbs are so calloused they no longer fit between the callous keys. Then you have to convince your parents to become cultured music lovers who will send you to some place other than a military academy as soon as you start to make unusual noises in the living room - noises on a piano, of course, not just noises.

    You need a teacher who will inspire you, discipline you, and love you, to get you to not only practice, but to sight read everything from Charpentier to Verdi, and work out note by note the pieces you fake so glibly. Then you need to deal with the issues of survival, that is, how to avoid getting beaten up by adults.

    You need to find, steal, borrow, mortgage your life to a sympathetic piano, a process as difficult as borrowing the right parents. Spiraling spasms of information on the sound board, plate, case, felts, hammers, shanks, flanges, bushings, strings, up and down weights, needling, lacquering, shaping, and so on, will finally give you the vocabulary to tell a technician how to make the music sing or scowl. Without this foreign vocabulary, you are at the mercy of an auto mechanic. Even with the right words, I have had French technicians throw up their hands and shriek in French, "But it's already the maximum! The maximum! It is impossible, more!"

    Then you have to forget everything you learned, so at long last, you can make a fool of yourself, rather than letting someone else do it.