The Chopin Influence

 

                                                                                     The Chopin Influence

In my post on “Clubs” I mentioned that I had a couple of friends that enjoyed doing chemistry experiments and reading lots of books. Based on that childhood description, it would be natural to assume that my two like-minded friends and I were a trio of nerds who missed out on the typical boyhood fun and games. But that would be incorrect. Each of us had other interests. I took frequent breaks from my science hobby to play with a different pair of friends, one of which was my cousin and the other a rather shy boy who had recently moved into our neighborhood. We played “Cowboys and Indians”, “Cops and Robbers”, “Allies and Nazis”, “Robin Hood” (we made our own bows and arrows from neighborhood trees and weeds). And we went on unsupervised hikes, which often took us several miles from home and occasionally into harrowing situations. This trio expanded at times to include as many as five or six, and even more when we joined the Cub Scouts, and later the Boy Scouts. But most of our adventurous escapades did not take place under the close eye of scout supervision, but with a small group of no more than four.

This kind of activity served to keep me from becoming too one-sided as a nerd, but it also had an unexpected influence on my later research efforts. A study into the personal lives of highly innovative applied scientists revealed that the one childhood influence that was most conducive to adult innovative ability was unsupervised play, with plenty of freedom to roam and to make mistakes with no adults on hand to extricate the child from the consequences of the mistakes.

One of our activities was to play half-court basketball with 2-4 man teams in our church’s Sunday School building, whose main room had a high ceiling and a hoop mounted at one end. We would move the Sunday School class chairs to the far end of the room where there was also a piano for accompanying the children in hymns like “Jesus Loves Me”. One of the older boys would occasionally sit at the piano and half-play, half-fake, his way through one of the popular songs of the day. I wanted to learn to play, so I got him to show me some basics. 

This interest in the piano was by no means unusual. At that time playing the piano held about as much attraction for kids as playing the electric guitar does now. Of course, electrically amplified instruments were still in the future - but the piano had a somewhat different type of appeal. Nearly everyone liked to sing, because the songs were melodic and tended to stick in the mind. Women would hum or sing at their housework, and men would whistle while working. Many young people desired to play the piano, both because they like to make music and because they coveted the popularity of one who could play and accompany others. But when they discovered the time and effort involved, they often gave it up. When that happened, the piano became a “white elephant” in the living room, and consequently a good secondhand piano could often be had “for a song”. A pianist provided background music in nightclubs and on special occasions, as an accompanist at informal sing-a-longs. Before I began taking lessons, I had a kind of inner vision of myself sitting at the instrument and playing for a group of sing-along friends crowded around the piano.

My first teacher was a fairly well-known pianist who played with a couple of local dance bands. At my first lesson she assigned me some simple exercises and played a few popular songs. Finally, she mentioned that I might want to try something classical, and she played Chopin’s “Minute Waltz”. I was enchanted by that performance; and from that moment the desire to play like that overrode my vision of becoming a sing-along centerpiece.

And even today, decades later, I don’t know why. I have no memory of having heard any such music before. The music that occupied my environment was bluegrass, some popular, movie and Broadway songs, and a smattering of what is now called “folk” music (e.g. “Ole Joe Clark”). But that bit of Chopin thrilled me so completely that, for months, I devoted most of my piano practice to highly simplified arrangements of Chopin’s works.

That little experience with the Minute Waltz was one of that series of events that struck a resonant chord in my psyche, and left a lasting mark. Some of these events, like this one, were initiated by another individual (my piano teacher); some seem to spring from a chance event (reading my first Batman comic, or watching my microbes die from water deprivation); and some just seemed to spring into my mind as the result of some kind subconscious processing of information gleaned from study and experience.

Return to table of contents for this label:

Table of Contents for Memories Label (augustmarsblog.blogspot.com)