The importance of asking "Why?"
Most of us were drawn to the piano through curiosity. When I was a child, we had an ancient upright piano in the house and one of my first memories is of listening to my mother sing and play hymns at night while I fell asleep. During daylight hours, I was determined to figure out the magic of this warm, friendly instrument. I studied the grain of the wood case. I pressed the keys, very quickly learning that all the black keys sounded good together while clusters of black and white keys weren’t always musical. I improvised my own little songs—always on the black notes—and at age 6, my parents enrolled me in piano lessons.
In lessons I learned the correct way to sit, to hold my hands, to read notes, and to count. I still liked the piano, but learned that there was a right way to do things and a wrong way. The spontaneous improvisation stopped. Structured practice times started. And suddenly, playing the piano was about pleasing the teacher and doing things correctly—it became worrying about whether or not I got a sticker on a completed song or needed to practice the music another week. I still enjoyed it, but the wide-open curiosity was gone.
My story isn’t unique and telling it isn’t an attempt to denigrate my first teacher. I wouldn’t have become a pianist without formal lessons, and her instruction lived on in my own teaching when I started working with students of my own. But I wish I hadn’t internalized the discipline to the point that I lost curiosity. It wasn’t until I was an adult, working as a professional pianist, that I was able to start shaking off the “right” or “wrong” labels and unearth my dormant musical curiosity.
My doorway back to this repressed part of myself came through working with living composers. Where most of my classical piano training taught me to play within extremely strict parameters, composers (most of whom knew more about these parameters than I did) walked outside the fences, sought new sounds, and (other than those answering to narrow academic tastes) used conventional thought when it worked for them and abandoned it when it didn’t. They were adventurous. They broke rules. Unlike many of my narrow, careful, nitpicking classical piano colleagues, they were curious about life and how music reflected and interacted with it.
I never became a composer, but I’ve adopted their example when practicing and it has changed the way I approach every piece of music I play. The most important lesson I learned? To ask “why?” If this is the way everyone tells me I should play a piece, why? If the composer marked something unexpected in the score, why? If I find I’m playing a longterm piece in my repertoire the same way every time I approach it, why? That little question has pried open many things hidden in the score and has allowed me to understand and either accept or reject the musical dictums I’ve been given.
“Why” is powerful because it forces us to dig beneath shallow acceptance. We may choose to take a traditional path, but when we do, we understand exactly why we’re doing it and will play with more depth and conviction. “Why” allows us to take ownership of our musical experience. It forces us to dig deeper. And deep study of something is intrinsically interesting. As the physicist Richard Feynman once said, “Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough.”
Curious musicians are interesting musicians. We’re flexible—both in our thinking and our attitudes. We take risks. Curiosity allows us to throw off the mantle of fear and others’ expectations. It teaches us to stop thinking about being “right” or “wrong” and to play simply and authentically without ego. It gives us something original to say, even when we’re playing music that has been played by others for hundreds of years. Curiosity opens us up to everything (at or away from the piano), and that openness brings the colors, flavors, joys, and sadnesses of the world into the notes we play. Curiosity makes us interesting people.
And so I pass this gift on to you: whatever you’re facing in your practicing, whatever you’re hearing in your lessons, ask why. Ask why, and keep asking until you find your way to answers that make sense to you. Chances are, you will find that this question changes your playing and your life.