Many times, when someone in college can play an instrument, they’ve been playing it for a number of years before they even set foot on campus. But that’s not my story — I just began piano lessons as a second-semester junior.
It’s not like I haven’t wanted to try an instrument in the past, I just didn’t have the initiative when I was younger or the opportunity during my high school and early college years.
When I was in middle school, I picked up trumpet for a couple of years dreaming that I would quickly be able to master the instrument and play music with the skill of greats like Louis Armstrong.
At first, playing the instrument was exciting. It was fun to discover the different sounds the trumpet made when I learned the fingerings for new notes on the scale and it didn’t take long for me to master the songs in the beginner’s trumpet booklet.
But soon enough, the trumpet lost its luster for me and I quickly grew tired of logging my required three hours of trumpet practice a week.
My skills stopped progressing, I stopped being able to master new songs, and I often spent large portions of “practice time” buzzing randomly into the trumpet’s mouthpiece and staring as the seconds on my practice timer ticked by way too slowly.
After two years, I quit band.
I didn’t have the maturity to commit the significant amount of practice time necessary to make playing trumpet second nature. If I would have known the valve fingerings on my trumpet as well as I knew the layout of the buttons on my GameCube, I could have been a much better trumpet player.
For a number of years, I was pleased with my decision, and I was happy that I didn’t have to log practice hours any more. But during my senior year of high school, I started to get the urge to play an instrument again.
There’s something creative and special when music is made on an instrument. I desired the refinement that comes from being able to play an instrument well as well as the rush of creating beautiful sound. Compositions like George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” filled my imagination.
I decided that if I had the opportunity to learn how to play an instrument, I would try to learn piano this time. I had matured a lot since middle school and now was more interested in learning how to play scales, then how to throw alley-oops in NBA Live 2006.
And from the moment I decided I wanted to play music again, the piano had a certain majesty which drew me to it over any other instrument.
But musical ambition was deferred for my first four semesters of college and my time was spent writing for The Collegian and running for Hillsdale’s cross country and track teams. When I stepped away from collegiate running at the end of my sophomore year, learning to play piano became a possibility again.
After not being able to get one of the piano lesson slots last semester, I began piano in January.
While learning the basics of piano as a young child may have made picking up piano in college easier, I actually think starting to play as an adult has had a lot of benefits.
Unlike my experience playing trumpet in middle school, I now have the discipline to put in practice hours and actually get something out of it.
I have a lot more appreciation for instrumentation than I did when I was younger. And perhaps most importantly, I didn’t come into my piano lessons with a lot of bad habits to lose.
Over the course of this last semester, I went from knowing nothing about how to play piano to being able to play the major scales and learning simple songs.
I’m glad I decided to try piano this semester, and I plan to continue playing piano during my senior year at Hillsdale. I now have a musical skill I can carry with me through the rest of my life.