Friday, December 31, 2010

Introduction

I've started writing this blog primarily as an aid to myself for remembering what was said during the lessons and to have a record of this that's online so that I don't lose all my notes if I misplace the hard copies of these notes. I can also imagine this blog being useful to piano students, especially those at the intermediate-advancing level.

I started playing the piano at the age of 8. We moved to a different State one year later and I was fortunate enough to find a better teacher there. I consider him my first teacher (Fr. Thomas Chakkalamattath). He taught me the basics of piano playing and gave me a lot of important ear training in my early ears. He himself had a very good teacher, Handel Emmanuel, I think his name was. I remember hearing some recordings of Mr Emmanuel's a long time ago and they were pretty good! I learned under Fr Thomas' watchful eyes for maybe 7-8 years subtracting the breaks I had in between due to health related and other (read laziness) reasons. I stopped taking lessons after the 10th grade and practiced much less frequently. After the 12th grade, I went to New Delhi to prepare for the JEE (which is the entrance exam for the IITs). That year was an important one for me, musically. I spent all the money that my Father gave me on cd's (so many that music world gave me some special membership which let me buy classical music cd's at discounted prices). I read a lot during this time (mostly Russian classics). It was also during this time that my friends took away my cd's for a couple of weeks and gave me some Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd to listen to. That was the first instance of me opening up to other kinds of music. I was hooked! I didn't realize at that time that two years later, I would do a Floyd tribute show where I would meet my future wife..

In any case, to cut a long story short, here I am in Ohio, with my wife. I'm in the second year of a graduate program in Psychology (made a shift from Physics, which I did for 5 years and decided that it wasn't my cup of tea). The only piano lessons I've taken in the meanwhile was in 2008. I had gone to Vienna for an internship at the Acoustics Research Institute. I spent all my earnings on piano lessons at a music academy there. I had a wonderful teacher there, Blazenka Arnic, who did wonders for my playing in the short span of a month and a half that I took lessons from her. I've finally decided to resume taking lessons. I found somebody whose profile I was impressed with. I had my first lesson with her today. It was good and I'm looking forward to more. The next post will contain the notes for the first lesson.