Confidence

If you didn't already know this, I'll tell you now: I'm a terrific musician.

I started playing the piano by ear when I was three-and-a-half years old. I don't remember the momentous event, but my mother has told me the story a number of times:

My brothers, aged eight and ten at that time, were taking piano lessons. Evidently they didn't love the process, although Jerry still sits down and plays "Ridin' On a Mule" whenever he's around a piano. One day Mother was in the kitchen preparing dinner and she heard the boys' lessons being practiced. She was thrilled that she hadn't had to coax them to practice. Then she glanced out the kitchen window and saw them playing outside. Curious, she walked into the living room and saw me sitting on the piano bench, feet dangling, playing the simple pieces Jim and Jerry were supposed to be learning.

For Christmas that year, Mother and Daddy gave me a toy accordian they saw in a catalog. I mastered it so quickly that they got me a real accordian and enrolled me in lessons at the music school on Colonial Drive. The next year I started some sort of rhythm lessons (music theory for babies) and, at age five, began piano lessons with the minister's wife. After she taught me for about two years, she told Mother she couldn't teach me any more and Mother enrolled me in the Creative Arts division of Rollins College. I took piano and theory every week, started playing piano duets when I was about nine, began playing for my school's choir when I was ten, took clarinet lessons and played in the band in fourth grade, took up oboe in fifth grade and played that through the end of high school. I took organ lessons in second grade and again my sophomore year of high school, but never could master the registrations. I began singing in the church choir when I was in second grade and accompanied the choir from about age ten on for a number of years.

When I was auditioning for the church choir, the choir director played something and told me what to sing. I asked, "Do you mean the 'A'?" He looked at me and told me to stand behind the piano. He began playing single notes, then intervals, then triads, then blobs of notes, asking me to name the notes. I hit them all perfectly. He said, "You have perfect pitch." I had never even heard of perfect pitch before that moment.

In an ear test that the high school band director administered, she pronounced that my ear was the closest she had ever seen in any of her students—I scored the highest she had ever seen on the test.

When I enrolled in Florida Technological University (now University of Central Florida) as a music major, I had to take voice lessons from Dr. Schoenbomm (whom we disrespectfully called "Dr. Noi Noi" for the voical warmups he had us do in choir). I was lost. Truly lost.

Sit me at a piano keyboard and I'm home. I know where everything is, how to get the sound I want, how to—really—make magical sounds waft from the inside of that instrument. But tell me to place my voice here or there and I'm totally lost. Wanting-to-sob lost. Scared-of-failing lost.

I always think I get into choruses on the strength of my ear. As I said good-bye last night to the alto who has sat next to me this season in Tucson Symphony Orchestra Chorus, she said, "but what will I do when I lose the note?" She loved having my perfect pitch to help her.

I try to match my tone to the people around me whose voices I like. I rarely have confidence that what I'm doing is right, but occasionally I'll hear good sounds coming from my mouth and I try to remember what I'm doing when I hear them, hoping to reproduce that sound.

This week forty of us are singing six of the Brahms Liebeslieder Walzer (Love Song Waltzes) with the Symphony. Instead of altos together, sopranos together, and so on, we have been placed into couples, then into quartets. We will stand across the front of the stage Tenor-Soprano, Bass-Alto. It's so much fun hearing all the other parts all around me rather than hearing the basses at a distance. Lupe, my big Hispanic gay partner who is a real sweetheart, belts his bass into my right ear, and Paul lofts his lovely tenor sounds into my left ear.

As we concluded last night's rehearsal, Paul turned to me and said, "I love your voice." I could have died and melted into a pool of liquid gold at that moment. I always think "I don't have a voice; I have an ear." Paul's saying that to me made my day, my week, my month.

Paul's statement might even give me the courage to try voice lessons again so I can understand what I'm doing and how to produce the sound I want.