I was retouching a group of pictures for Asian Tiger moms on the verge of a nervous breakdown. They entered their tots in a Carnegie Hall piano “competition.” Everyone is awarded a trophy at the end…so it seems more like “pay to play,” or “pay to fulfill every Asian Tiger Mom’s fantasy,” or the most obvious “pay for a photo op to produce pictorial evidence to bludgeon other competing Asian Tiger Moms into shame because your 2 year old son / daughter has made it to Carnegie Hall.
Unfortunately, the photographer messed up.
He must have done a few hits of crystal meth before the gig, because the results were slightly less sharp than Monet’s paintings during his blind years. So that’s where I came in, frantically Photoshopping one bowl haircut onto another head. It was the superimposition of one Asian fake onto another. Throughout this whole procedure, my boss stood behind me and asked why I was shaking my head.
I told him it was because none of these kids- not one of them – will be playing piano in ten years. They probably won’t be involved in making music either. When I was their age, my parents – like many Asian parents did with their kids – sent me to piano lessons. It was as rote as potty training and learning to sleep alone in the dark. I hated it. The only thing that made it bearable was the niceness of my teacher and her younger sister, both posh daughters of our local Presbyterian minister. So I endured the torture.
All four lessons.
As luck would have it, my parents had the intuition to call it quits after a month. They saw I was not spoiled and undisciplined. I was just downright miserable. I was more at home playing with my stuff animals and building legos that looked nothing like what was pictured on the box. So my training as a prodigy that could run Liszt’s glissandi up and down the piano with my toes promptly ended.
The other kids weren’t so lucky. It’s not as Amy Chua puts it: it’s not always the dramatic threats being issued from the parent. Oh sure, many were kicked, whipped, branded, smacked, timed-out, and caned through 8 grades of piano hell to the beating of a metronome, but you can never underestimate the lengths children will go to to please their parents. And that’s what makes the accounts that much more tragic. By the time I was old enough to live outside an infant resuscitator capsule, they were already farting Leopold Godowsky’s 18 Studies on Chopin Etudes through unchanged diapers.
Why do I think none of these Asian prodigies will be playing piano in ten years? It’s because you have to to understand this isn’t about making music. It never was. It’s purely about achievement; not one of musical insight, but the attaining of a status symbol. The piano represents culture to the Asians, much like anything with a British accent represents class to Americans. Richard Curt Kraus wrote a fascinating book on this topic, entitled Pianos and Politics in China: Middle-Class Ambitions and the Struggle over Western Music. So smothering your child into a scherzi daze serves a dual prong: it announces to neighbors 1) I have the parenting pizazz to discipline my zygote to reach grade 8 before the third trimester 2) We are cultured.
My question is this: WHERE IS THE MUSIC?
These days, when I run into the prodigies I grew up with, I would ask “wow, I remembered you passed the highest levels on the piano. Can you play me something?” And the answer is always the same:
I don’t want to go near that thing. I want nothing to do with that….that….thing. Every time I look at it, I want to bring a torch to it. I’ve fantasized about burning that thing to charred ruins for years.
It’s little irony that Steinway started out as coffin makers. Who knew their pianos would come to embody the death of music?
As I’ve said before. I only took four lessons. I still play the piano today. It doesn’t sound polish at all, and I falter quite a bit, but I love making music on it.
