My life - Part 39

Not everything in my life is unfortunate. One lucky coincidence was that when I went to a music school to look for a piano teacher, I met this woman who had recently moved from Kuala Lumpur to Kuantan, following her national hockey player husband who had a coaching job here. She was a piano teacher there at the music school, but she offered to teach me piano lessons in her house for a lower fee. I preferred that option and although I didn't know her credentials as she was new in town, I decided to take a chance with her because I really liked her and I could see that she was passionate about music.

And I was right about her. Generally I am a good judge of character, a lot of which depends on my intuition. Sometimes I just get a feeling that a person is not good, and I keep my distance. Of course, my opinions can change but it very rarely happens. And then of course, sometimes I ignore my instincts and plunge headlong into the arms of the devil. But that's another story.

I loved this piano teacher! All my previous teachers were very exam orientated, so that I only ended up playing exam pieces and little else. This teacher was really different. She first asked me to play a few pieces by different composers, and she told me that I had a heavy touch on the piano, meaning Mozart pieces were not suitable for me. I was more Bach and Beethoven. That's what I already thought, but the other teachers didn't care about all that and chose 'easy' pieces to play rather than which composer was suitable for me.

Whereas for my Grade 8, I chose the composer rather than the composition. And my teacher gave me books to read about the composers whose pieces I would be playing, including the history of a particular song they composed. And not only that, she made me play other pieces by the same composers as well, although they were not exam pieces, so that I really got to know their style. 

I looked at music very differently then. It was not just an exam to pass but a creative journey. The history behind the pieces I was playing made me understand the composition better, and if I put myself in the composer's shoes, I could almost feel the emotions they were feeling when they wrote that particular piece. I travelled back in time and with imagination and a lot of feeling, I lost myself in those compositions.

I had very little time to prepare for my Grade 8 exam. But now I was playing music like I never did before, or since. I passed my exam.