MY CAREER AS A PIANIST (Biographical)

My mother was a pianist and organist of local renown. Back in high school in Owatonna, Minnesota, she performed with a girl’s singing group called the Black Birds in addition to studying the piano. When she graduated from high school, she went to the Chicago School of Music for two years and stayed with a German family. After all, her name was Schoen and our nearby relatives had names like Otto Hartelt and Ed Mierke so it was to be expected, I guess. But she told an interesting story about how after a large dinner of sour braten and potatoes, the mother of the family she stayed with brought in a large platter of wieners for dessert. We thought that was very funny.

My mother aspired to be a concert pianist, but, after she heard Rachmaninoff play the piano, she decided she couldn’t compete and returned home to Owatonna. She became sufficiently admired for her proficiency on the piano and organ that some churches scheduled their services so she could perform there. My father’s family had a long relationship with our German relatives in Owatonna because a much older sister of his married Great Uncle Ed Mierke. Although I do not recall how my parents met, my father loved music as an observer and probably met my mother at a get together between the two families where my mother played the piano, perhaps more than once.

At the age of three, my mother discovered me at the piano trying to pick out a tune she had played earlier in the day. You can imagine my mother’s joy to discover that she had a budding Mozart on her hands. So the tedious lessons began. I could not read music nor play a piece upon hearing it without painfully picking it out on the keys, then playing it over and over memorizing it. Even then, there were often a lot of discordant notes or even forgetting how to continue playing a piece. Nonetheless, I was taken various places, even let out of school, to perform little recitals. Hearing me play at, say, the age of four or five or six was a bit like watching a dog walk on its hind legs. The dog doesn’t do it very well, but you are amazed that he does it at all. All my relatives were very supportive and complimented me and oh’ed and ah’ed no matter how poorly I played, which I had to do every time they visited. The peak of my performing career came in the first grade when I was let out of class to perform for the third grade. Now that was really something, playing for the big kids! I probably never reached such heights again.

My mother, who had given children’s piano lessons before she had children, began giving them again, including a few adults. Except for me, she was very successful at this and many of her students excelled in local and state piano contests. We had three pianos so, by the time they had played on these plus the ones in their home and at their church, they were not surprised at any piano in the contest. In the fourth grade, however, a pupil of my mother’s by the name of Joyce Rader (I’ll never forget her.) suddenly could play the piano better than me and not by just a little bit. Before the fourth grade was over, two or three other students surpassed me as well. There I was at the age of nine, looking for a new career. It was devastating.

I loved chemistry, and my mother encouraged that too and helped me perform little experiments she had learned in high school like generating oxygen. So since my performing years as a pianist were over, I decided to become a chemical engineer, not that I really knew what a chemical engineer did, but I liked three syllable words, four would have been even better. My mother, however, didn’t give up. I did not like to practice the piano or to take lessons. Certainly later I rebelled pretty strongly. My mother did everything in her power to keep me going on the piano. My mother had, well, let’s say an artistic temperament, so there was a lot of yelling. Yelling had an adverse affect on me because I was a timid child. Her students, however, tended to eat it up. Apparently they craved discipline that they didn’t find at home. A few would come for their piano lesson even when they were too ill to go to school. As my mother quickly developed a long list of students-in-waiting, there was a fear of being "fired." After a bad lesson, some students would even say something like, "You aren’t going to fire me, are you?"

I would have liked to have been fired, but my mother tried many ways to keep me interested in the piano. Since taking piano lessons from her were not working, she tried sending me to one of the piano schools. When that didn’t work, I was sent to a man to learn to play popular music. In fact when the first didn’t work out, she tried a second. Now, I want to emphasize that my mother was very proficient in music. It always amazed me that, while she would wait in a doctor’s office, she would memorize sheet music. When I told her of my surprise, she replied it was no different from learning a foreign language. One thing I did like to do was sit at the piano and compose little pieces of music. Naturally my mother encouraged this too and even sat with me and wrote down some of the pieces. In spite of her expertise, this was a slow, painful process, and I think there came a point where we both decided not to pursue recording my compositions any further. But I continued to compose until finally at the age of 15 or 16, I began to compose pieces I could not play, which killed it for me.