Piano Imposter Syndrome

In case the existence of this blog hasn't clued you in yet,  I 💜 piano.  Always have.... from when I was four years old and learning the little pieces out of John Thompson's Teaching Little Fingers to Play. (Fellow 80s piano kids, did a mental image of that iconic red book just appear in your head along with the words and tune to "Birthday Party? If so, you're welcome.)  One of my favorite things to do was to try to play all the way through the book perfectly, counting all the notes correctly and not making any mistakes, finishing up with Home on the Range, the very last piece, where you finally got to use two hands at the same time. LOL.  There was a certificate at the end of that I'm sure I filled out for myself at some point. 😂

As an adult, if real life didn't interfere, I would play for hours and hours a day and not get bored of it.  (Sometimes I do, at the expense of adult responsibilities.... 👀) My goal isn't to perform (shudder) or pass any kind of exam. Lessons add accountability,  help me get out of my own way and tackle things I was never comfortable with before so I can have more fun with it.  I just want to keep moving forward, collecting and learning new pieces along the way because playing makes my brain happy and calm.  Learning a new piece and being able to play it well is truly satisfying.  

In the grand scheme of piano learning, I have some knowledge gaps, but I'm probably solidly intermediate.

All that to say..... 

Absolutely NONE of the above truths about me change the fact that much of the time, I feel like a piano imposter. 

Here is a sampling of things my dumb brain tells me on a regular basis: 

"What business do you have playing playing fancy pieces? Do you actually think you can make them sound good? Why are you posting videos? There are so many things wrong. You shouldn't bother!"

It goes on and on.  My brain is a jerk. 

Anytime I think about learning a piece that has any real expression to it, I truly feel unqualified to even TRY.  It makes me feel like big faker. "Look at you, thinking you can express emotion with your playing? Do you actually think you're a real pianist or something? STOP." 

I think this is probably why I like a lot of Bach pieces, especially his fast ones -- because they're very mechanical and as long as you play all the right notes in the right order, you can sound pretty competent. There is no pedaling or places where you're supposed to know to improvise the rhythm a little or let a note linger to convey something abstract like sadness or longing... or to build tension.  There are just notes, one after the other, like a music box. Playing one of those pieces well is so much more straight forward and objective. 

I do know I'm not alone in feeling like a big faker. A lot people feel this way about things they are trying to do or be. 

I'm a writer too. I've been a writer my entire life. Even still, it still makes me kind of cringe and feel weird to type the words, "I am a writer". What right do I have? I know... jerk brain. 

So, I have a new piece this week and at first glance it was a zillion light years outside of my comfort zone. The first time I listened to it, my thought was, "Well, I'll try it.... but this isn't going to be pretty. I'm definitely not good enough to play with all this emotion and nuance. It will be a miracle if I can pull this off. This is where I fall flat on my face." Suffice to say, it's not a piece I would have chosen for myself for all the reasons I've mentioned... 

....which is why it's actually perfect. 

I dove in and it's going much better than expected. I'm getting more confident that I might actually be qualified to play this. It's so pretty and I do hope to be able to eventually do it justice. 

Maybe it's time to stop feeling like a piano imposter?

I'm a sheet music hoarder. Our piano bench is overflowing and I recently had to add a crate next to the piano to hold more.  Anytime I hear a piece I like and might want to learn, I buy the sheet music.... or the whole book.... or .... every book I can find by the composer..... yeah, I may have a problem. 

Sometimes this works out, other times (more often than not) I realize I'm in over my head, get discouraged, and abandon it. 

So, I finished my Beethoven piece a couple of weeks ago and was searching high and low for something new to tackle. I went through ALL my books, searched the internet, scoured YouTube, listened to probably hundreds of pieces of music, and even played around with a couple I liked, but nothing really struck me. 

I decided to throw caution to the wind and just turn the decision process over to my teacher. I asked her to choose something that would be challenging and would help me work on something I need to learn.  I could SWEAR I heard an evil cackle when she realized the power she now wielded.  

I promised to learn and play whatever she picked.  Now, you should probably know, I'm  kind of a control freak (understatement) so this was BIG.  Despite my begging, I received zero hints other than it was fast and Spanish. I discovered when she said she wouldn't send it to me until five minutes before my lesson, she meant it. I literally brought it hot off the printer right over to the Zoom screen. 

C: (points to the image below) Now, don't freak out.

 

Me: (immediately freaks out)

I asked what skill this particular piece was going to teach me. The basic gist was to learn to read music that looks complicated and to not to give up a when notes are all standing close together and on top of teach other like they're at a pre-covid happy hour. 

(also chords, I think, because chords are not my forte. Ha. See what I did there?) 

Okay, so I'll be perfectly honest, I *definitely* would have gotten to this point in the piece and chucked it right out the window the minute I saw this mess.  BUT! After an explanation of what I was looking at, it turned out to be much easier than it appeared.  Also, with someone else having chosen it and also setting the goals, just giving up wasn't as easy.  Score one for accountability!

So off I went. Thankfully, I've had a lot of downtime the last couple weeks because we are back to staying home all the time again.  Many hours of practice later and a few back and forth video attempts, I was finally successful!  Pretty proud of this one because really, I NEVER would have stuck with a piece like this in the past. 

And yes, I'm totally wearing pajamas in this video because I definitely didn't think this was the final round.

I was expecting it to get kicked back to me with a new goal for the week. LOL.   Oops. 

Since this video has minimal mistakes, I figure I'll save myself the anguish of trying to record a decent play-through again! 

SPANISH DANCE No. 5 "Andaluza"—Granados

Ready for something new to round out this crazy 2020!  Stay tuned! (my gosh, the piano puns just keep coming!)