My music teacher fired me last week.

You may remember that I began taking voice and piano lessons earlier this year and progress has been good on the voice side and just okay on the piano side. We’ve worked on several interesting pieces of music, and I did a performance solo of You Shall Go Out with Joy, and with sang with the bass section of a choir (just two of us) in a workshop session of the opera “Orpheus and Euridice. My next solo was to be Funiculi, Funicular in Italian and I’m using Luciano Pavarotti as a role model. He did a pretty good job

On the piano side, I feel positive about learning a little of how to read music, but I made little progress on musical pieces. My piano book, “Teaching Little Fingers to Play” is the perfect book for every 5-year-old (or musical equivalent) wanting to learn piano. The challenge for me was taking the time to practice. My teacher told me that her rule is that every day that I eat, should be a day that I practice. Seems reasonable and based on that recommendation, I’d only be eating one time a week, and at that, it would just be a quick bite.

When I suggested taking a few months off and beginning again in January, she countered that consistency was important and while I showed talent and a good attitude, my discipline is lacking for the piano.

While this was painful to read, I can’t disagree with her. I’ve always had difficulty with discipline, making up for it with persistence. That is not a particularly effective approach but it has helped me overcome many self-imposed difficulties.

Her message is really a gift to me in pointing out an effort that wasn’t working on my side and maybe allowing me to release myself from learning the piano. We’ll continue to work on voice, and I’ll see if we can get a video that you can put side by side with Luciano.

But now I’m finding myself looking at that damn keyboard and checking out the online course I bought. What if I just snack a bit, every day?

© Richard Citrin 2022