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It was on a particularly gloomy night that I remembered I was a pianist. The grounds of the American Academy in Berlin on the shores of Lake Wannsee were dimly lit, the boats of the yacht club bobbing on the inky waters just beyond the glass pavilion of writing studios. A friend and I had come to Berlin to visit another friend, Josh, at the Academy, and it was while we were waiting for him downstairs at the Academy’s stately 19th-century villa that I saw the Bösendorfer concert grand in the reception area, folded back its quilted cover and began to play.
That evening surprised all three of us — my two friends because until then they’d only known me as a journalist; and me because of how much music — Handel, some Schumann — my hands had improbably remembered in the decade since I’d last played. It was on the way to dinner, thinking out loud, that I first voiced my intention to relearn the piano, and perhaps audition for a conservatoire.
The intensity with which I revived piano playing after that night now looks more like a compulsion than a conscious choice, part pact, part punishment to myself for letting something I’d loved drift away from me. After subsequently reorganising my life around relearning the piano and preparing a conservatoire audition programme, it was a relief, a year and half later in the summer of 2020, to receive an email informing me that I’d been accepted for a one-year course at the piano department of Tbilisi Conservatoire.
Like most music colleges, Tbilisi Conservatoire is not in the business of producing amateur musicians, which made my arrival as a 31-year-old journalist a decade out of practice something of an anomaly. The supremacy of the Moscow Conservatory, a piano training behemoth, leaves Tbilisi Conservatoire in a relative obscurity that belies its storied history. But the footfall of legendary Soviet pianists fleeing war and persecution in 20th-century Russia to Georgia has helped forge a piano department that’s formidable to this day.
“Why are you doing this?” my piano teacher Manana asked me the first time we met. With most of my conservatoire peers born after 2000, I am by far the oldest of Manana’s students and, judging by the prodigiously executed études emanating daily from practice rooms, likely one of the worst.
We were sitting together on a sofa sandwiched between two grand pianos, a warm breeze blowing in through the windows of her high-rise Tbilisi apartment. It’s commonplace for teachers to ask what goal — usually to become a professional — they need to help their new music student achieve. But having just uprooted my London life to relearn the piano in Georgia, and with my particular troika of age, technical limitations and journalism career precluding a second career as a professional pianist, this question, phrased awkwardly in Manana’s third language of English, sounded existential. Why was I doing this?
I gave Manana the broad strokes of my interrupted musical life. That from the age of four until 18, when I went to university instead of conservatoire, playing the piano and cello formed the core of my life. That it was at university and then during the early years of my journalism career that music disappeared from my life in much the same way as Mike in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises describes how he arrived at bankruptcy: gradually, and then suddenly. And that it was by accident that I found my way back to the piano.
It took some time before both Manana and I could make out the reason I was asking her to teach me: because I love music.
Music, particularly song, holds a central role in Georgian culture, which has made being a student of music in Tbilisi both fun as well as revealing. To a certain extent, Georgia’s varied musical traditions trace the contours of the country’s historical tensions: between the preservation of Georgian national customs and the foreign practices imposed by the dominant empire of the era. The endurance of Georgia’s famed traditional polyphonic singing, an old form of a cappella thick with plaintive, dissonant harmonies, stands partly as a testament to a stubbornness of identity that has survived Georgia’s many invaders.
The piano department of Tbilisi Conservatoire, by contrast, is a direct corollary of Soviet piano pedagogy and the “Russian piano school”, an uncomfortable fact in a country to which Russia, then as now, is a looming menace. To visit the small conservatoire museum on the second floor is to see a tribute dedicated largely to the swell of brilliant Russian musicians who performed or taught here: photos of composer Dmitri Shostakovich and pianists Maria Yudina and Sviatoslav Richter, mingling with Georgian pianists, fan across the walls. In the centre of the room is a closed Bechstein piano, which used to belong to Rachmaninov.
“One’s ability to master a Chopin étude depends on your behind,” Manana told me in a lesson once. This wasn’t another Russian proverb I had no idea how to translate; the meaning was more straightforward. “You need to sit at the piano and work,” she explained. “A lot.”
The fact that I’m the only one of Manana’s students who will remain an amateur doesn’t alter her instruction. Her amalgamate teaching style — of unflinching, Soviet-esque devotion to repetition and technical precision, with a Georgian proclivity for unabashed expression — has, combined with her relentless cheerleading, nurtured an increasingly dependable technique undergirded by self-belief. As musicians, we practise so that, at our instruments, we are free. A great teacher is deliverance.
The problem with the dominant taxonomy for artists — professional or amateur — is not only that it’s a reductive binary but that it forces comparison: the amateur becomes less than a professional, amateurism the unsatisfying endpoint of a journey terminated early. How many times I’ve heard versions of “I knew I’d never become a professional” as the reason for abandoning a cherished pursuit in youth that’s later regretted. When we denigrate the amateur, we dismiss the fact that the origin of the word “amateur” is the Latin verb “amare” — to love. Our passions are what make up our inner life, a place of consolation where things of meaning are stored and preserved, ready to be drawn on whenever we want or need them. They should be cultivated at all costs.
For most of us, the choice is not whether to be a professional or an amateur at something. It’s whether to be a good amateur or a bad one. The main separating tissue between the two is hard work. Elevating amateurism to an art form raises the bar and makes moments of creativity more accessible. When I play the piano, it’s not only an act of delight and self-expression, but of curiosity and stepping into the unknown. There is a certain amount of mystery in creation: you can never be sure exactly what you’ll get. Herein lies the excitement.
Returning to the piano as an adult has doubtless been transformative, but more than that it’s been empowering, because it’s shown me the limits of talent and the possibilities of discipline. The year that followed that night in Berlin, I practised the piano like my life depended on it. Given how much technique I had lost over the years, I had to, and it was only my obsession with passing the audition that got me into the conservatoire and prepared me for what it would take once I was there. If I had any musical talent when I was a child, it counts for very little now. As Manana often tells me, the quality most valuable to musicians is patience. Acquiring any skill, including music, is a process of making something unnatural feel natural, taking a movement, a language, an instrument, and working on it until your actions mimic instinct. To do this as an adult takes a lot of focus and time. The rewards, however, are profound, and I’ve found that there are few greater thrills than hearing a piece of music you love sound from your own hands for the first time.
A friend in Tbilisi likes to tell the story of the first time we met at a media conference in Kazakhstan, and I left a drinks reception early to take two buses to an Almaty suburb, where a distant acquaintance had agreed to let me practise on her piano. It’s amusing and reflects my quasi-obsession with the piano, but it’s an accurate picture of what prioritising time to practise and access to a piano — which is what being a good amateur requires — actually looks like. It’s often hard, inconvenient and at the partial expense of a social life.
In the novel Outline by Rachel Cusk, the narrator recalls a conversation with an acquaintance about making time to write. “You never hear someone say they wanted to have an affair but they couldn’t find the time, do you?” he asks the narrator. “No matter how busy you are, no matter how many kids and commitments you have, if there’s passion you find the time.”
The same can be said for playing an instrument. The two necessary ingredients to learn — time and desire — are linked and they help locate each other. On the way to dinner that night in Berlin, Josh asked me, half in jest, whether there’s a shortcut to learning the piano. My answer would still be no, but with hindsight I’d have flipped the question: if what you want is to learn the piano, even minimal time will sculpt the craft. Improvement at playing an instrument is about fine-tuning, refinement. Time is what affords this.
Music conservatoires’ raison d’être — to train and preserve western classical music — makes them, as a matter of course, institutions of tradition. Unlike conservatoires in cities such as New York and London, where larger budgets, modern facilities and an international student body mean that, generally, there’s a better embrace of the contemporary, Tbilisi Conservatoire is about as traditional as it gets. It’s a complaint many in Georgia’s small but vibrant contemporary music scene make, but to me it only makes the conservatoire more appealing. The less modernised the institution, the older the knowledge you’re receiving tends to be, and there’s a certain excitement in the fact that what you’re inheriting has been passed across many decades, even centuries.
At its core, the teaching of piano technique at the conservatoire still stems from the conventions developed by the two founding fathers of piano playing — Liszt and Chopin — augmented only by wisdom from the Soviet pianists who came here to teach. My diet of Chopin études, while adding a needed if difficult vein to my studies, has revealed a clarifying truth that’s a friend of the amateur: for all music’s abstraction, playing an instrument is based on mechanics.
My journey to mastering legato on the piano, while still in progress, is a lesson in technical deconstruction and control. Legato — connecting every note to the next to produce an uninterrupted line of sound — goes against the piano’s percussive nature. The moment the hammer strikes the string is the instant the sound begins to die. To sustain it requires careful finger and wrist movements. It was through teaching me legato that Manana, a disciple of the old masters, taught me a pianistic principle that just as appropriately applies to life: if something is not as it should be, pay attention to the details. At the piano, change the action even slightly and you alter the sound.
Despite suffering from stage fright, I’ve come to see performance as a crucial part of playing an instrument, a rare occasion when the boundary between the inner life and the outer world momentarily dissolves. It was in part thanks to Covid restrictions and my subsequent evasion of Manana’s student concerts that I went in search of alternative settings for sharing music, and settled on the home recital.
A few decades ago in Tbilisi, it would have been stranger to find an apartment without a piano than with one, and it’s a sign of the decline of amateur music-making that now the inverse is true. It has felt appropriate, then, to revive the home as a setting for performance. The intimacy of the chamber, the limited audience and a setting conducive to discussion about music have suited my introversion and made the music salons at my apartment one of the highlights of my Tbilisi social life. I would recommend them to anyone learning an instrument.
What to do with limitations is perhaps the greatest challenge for the amateur. Learning Chopin’s formidable Ballade in G minor has shown me that, if it might one day be possible for me to play octaves, I suspect I won’t ever have the time to make that happen. Searching for freedom in limitation has many precedents, and it’s the Oulipo whose attempts I find the most instructive in my search for utility in my faults. A collective of experimental French writers, the Oulipo turned to the use of literary or mathematical constraints in order, theoretically, to expand creativity. Oulipo member Georges Perec wrote his 300-page novel A Void entirely omitting the letter “e”. Anne Garréta, one of the collective’s few female members, wrote her novella Sphinx leaving out any gender markers. The idea is that, with limits imposed, we can access new areas of freedom.
Admittedly, it’s harder to find a convincing musical equivalence for this kind of literary bondage. It would be absurd, for example, to play a piece of music omitting the middle C note whenever it occurs, or playing without using the left hand. But what might technical limitations reveal to us? An illuminating piece of advice Manana has given me is that difficult passages of music can be eased by playing with musical intention. When I stop thinking about trying to perfect octaves in the Chopin ballade and instead think of the frantic maelstrom they represent, somehow the tricky passages partially resolve themselves. Without technical facility, all that’s left is the music, and having to understand its essence in order to express it is, in part, what generates the meaning. To play music well is to understand this, amateur or professional. Musicality isn’t a replacement for technique. It is the antidote.
This June in the UK, alongside conductor Matthew Hardy, will be the first time I’ll perform outside my home since I was a teenager, and the first time in my life that I’ll be playing with an orchestra. Schumann’s Konzertstück Op 92 is a lyrical, billowing piece of music that, containing multitudes in its single movement, has quickly exposed my porous technique. While I’m practising it, I notice a familiar, anticipatory stage fright already asserting itself. But there is something else too. A feeling of excitement, of satisfaction over improvement, of comfort back at the piano, of having, after all this time, found kin again.
@NadiaWBeard
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