88 Keys to Idlesome Folly

The piano melodies of Bach, Chopin, Beethoven, and Brahms echoed around the walls of my small room. Occasionally, my mother would sing an opera or classical favorite from the 1940s while accompanying herself on the piano.

“Mom, stop the noise! I want to sleep,” I’d yell. Then I would kick the wall with displeasure.

This continued for about six months. Then I was born.

The 1922 J.& C. Fischer upright piano has been a part of my life forever. I am not certain how long it has been in the family or even if it was purchased new. My aunt, who passed away when mom was young, was a pianist who played background music for silent pictures. She also went to New York to study piano at Juilliard, but her life was cut short. It may be that the piano was purchased for her and then went to mom. At any rate, it has been with us a long time, sat in five homes, and this year is 100 years old.

In my very early years, ages 0-4, the house we lived at in Anacortes, Washington was so small, the piano was placed against the wall at the end of my parent’s bed. When dad got out of bed in the middle of the night to use the bathroom, he would have to shuffle sideways with his legs against the mattress and his back to the keyboard. It was so tight, his rear end would slide down the piano doing a glissando along the 88 keys from the high notes down to the bass notes. Returning from the bathroom, we got the butt glissando from the bass notes to the high notes. It was a cross between a Victor Borge and a Jerry Lee Lewis mini concert.

These first four years were my introduction to playing the piano, although, with such small hands, my fingers only spanned three notes which greatly hindered my ability to chord. It was sad for me to learn that the cat walking down the keys had far more musical talent than I did at the time.

When I was four, the family moved to Bellingham, Washington. My mom, wanting to earn some money for her own projects, began to teach piano lessons. We had a much bigger house on Marine Drive and the piano had a much larger room of its own. Through the years, almost 100 piano and vocal students came to the house. They would start arriving at 3:00 and stopped arriving at 5:30, five days a week. Also happening at that time were the background antics of three kids, a senile grandmother and sometimes a dog. More than once, the door to the piano room would jerk open and mom would chase someone down the hall with a yardstick.

I don’t know if I was interested or if I was being punished, but mom decided I was at an age that I should also learn how to play the 88 keys so that they made music. This is different than playing “on” the 88 keys with my plastic toy soldiers. I was given my own practice book and a lesson time slot. To think, she kept a paying student from learning piano by giving me their slot. What a waste.

My practice time was after dinner, and I would struggle through my scales and sight reading. I was fine with a single line of notes, but it soon became obvious that to be a concert virtuoso, I would be required to play multiple notes in a chord, through various key changes, and confusing time signatures. My simple brain said, “Nah!”

And then one day, I decided that I wanted to play the theme from the Monkees. I sat at the piano and learned the bass line and the melody. Suddenly, a new world was opened to me. The world of playing by ear. Now I could figure out any song I wanted to play without reading the pesky sheet music.

Although mom thought it was fine that I played by ear, she insisted that I learn how to read music. I got around that by memorizing what the sheet music song sounded like and I would play it by ear. Mom would be in the kitchen making dinner while I was practicing.

She would shout, “You’re not playing it correctly!”

I would say, “Was I close?”

To which, she would storm into the piano room and angrily snap, “Read the music!”

When I wasn’t practicing, I would learn new popular songs by ear. Songs by the Beatles, the Monkees, and high school youth group songs. This irritated my Nana who was living with us.

I would hear her shout from her bedroom, “Stop that idlesome folly. It’s awful!”

I would yell back, “Idlesome folly isn’t a thing, Nana.”

It soon became evident to mom that my time slot for music lessons was much more profitable given to another child who wanted to learn. With lessons over, I had a newfound freedom; the ability to chord and play any song I wanted without being hen pecked. This went well through my high school years, and then I went to college.

Not knowing exactly what direction to pursue as a profession or what training to take in college, I opted for the easy grades, i.e., gym class, music theory, trombone lessons, English as a second language, and piano lessons. Yes, piano lessons. I thought, maybe being older I would catch on to reading music and make my mom proud.

The piano lessons were held in a large room with ten electric keyboards. They were all wired to one keyboard at the head of the room where the teacher sat. During class, the ten students sat at their keyboards wearing headphones which we would use to hear only what we were playing. The teacher sat at her keyboard wearing headphones which had a switcher she could direct to any one of the pianos to listen to what they were playing. It was obvious when she plugged into your piano as there would be a loud crack in that student’s headphone.

Now this was a beginning piano class. I figured that I would learn sight reading all over from scratch. The curriculum assumed that the student knew nothing about the piano, so I quickly became bored.

The teacher, talking into all the student’s headphones said, “Today we will be working on triads. With your right hand, you will be using your thumb, middle finger, and pinky fingers only. Now listen to me as I start on middle C and play: C,E,G,E,C,E,G,E,C,E,G,E,C. Then you will move up a half step and do the same thing from C# and continue up the keyboard.”

All of the students began the exercise and the teacher cracked one at a time into headphones and pianos to listen to their progress. To tell you the truth, this held my attention as I climbed the chromatic scale until I got to the F key. Then I went into a rendition of Lady Madonna.

The teacher, noticing me using odd fingerings, cracked into my headphones. Immediately I shifted to C,E,G,E,C. . .

Into my headphones I heard her say, “Stop that idlesome folly!”

Well, cripes! Maybe idlesome folly is a real thing.

Again, I learned nothing about sight reading from college. I was therefore sent out into the world as a guy who plays piano by ear. Not that it was bad. In 1975 I formed a Christian performance group, and I wrote the music and played the piano for 360 concerts through Washington, Oregon, and British Columbia. Every song was written in the piano room at mom’s house on the old J & C Fischer upright. Today it sits in the piano room in my house.

You may be thinking that since now I am retired with plenty of free time, wouldn’t it be a great opportunity to learn to sight read music?

Maybe, but why?

I have had more fun down through the years, plopping one of my grandkids onto the piano bench next to me and telling them, “Let me teach you a style of piano playing that has worked well for me. I like to call it, Idlesome Folly.”

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