# On Resuming Piano Lessons

In August 2025, I started taking piano lessons again after a 15-year break. It has been fun and rewarding, and I wanted to write down some of my thoughts about my personal history with the piano, my intentions and goals, and the process of finding a teacher.

## A (not so) brief history

I took piano lessons from age 8-18. For the first few years, I learned the basics under my mom's instruction. Around age 12, she decided it was time for me to have a different teacher, one Mr. Bailey at the local Yamaha music store. Then when we moved to Utah at age 13, I started lessons at the USU Youth Conservatory. Meghan, a nice girl with whom I did not quite click on a personal level, was my first teacher at the YC, but she graduated and moved on at the end of my first year. She recommended me to the YC's teacher of the year, Luke, who was a master's student at the time. He became my next and final piano teacher before my long hiatus.

Luke was a great teacher! I felt very comfortable working with him, and he immediately began pushing me much further out of my comfort zone on the piano than anyone had before. He choose Chopin's Waltz in A-flat major, Op. 69, No. 1 as our first piece to work on. To my teenage self, this felt like my first piece of "real music" in the sense that I would feel proud to be able to perform it and not feel like it was a silly kids song. I'm not sure how well I ever managed to play it, but I enjoyed learning it and my eyes were opened to the possibility that if I practiced consistently, I might be able to get pretty good at playing the piano.

As I have been learning more about music history recently, I realized that over the course of my lessons with Luke, I got a well rounded exposure to many of the most important composers of the canonical piano repertoire. We studied pieces by Bach, Scarlatti, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Mendelssohn, Brahms, Debussy, Mussorgsky, and Kabalevsky.

As I thought about what I wanted to study in college, I considered auditioning for the Piano Performance and Pedagogy program at USU, but ultimately decided against it. My young mind was lured into studying economics as a way to make more money. Even though I wasn't a piano major, I decided to continue my piano lessons with Luke, but we both got busy and piano became less and less of a priority for me. By the end of my freshman year, our lessons had ended.

For the next few years, I played the piano only rarely, mostly because I didn't have a piano to play on. When I moved to Arizona for grad school, I took my mom's Yamaha P-60, a basic digital piano with weighted keys. Every once in a while, I would feel like I should start practicing more seriously, but I didn't like how different the P-60 felt from a real piano so I never stuck with it much. I did spend more time learning to play some country, rock, and pop songs either by ear or with some simple guitar tabs.

A little after we got married, Morgan began learning to play the cello, which felt inspiring to me to get back to practicing the piano. But I still had the same problem as before, no piano. I always dreamed of owning my own small grand piano. My parents gave an upright piano to most of my siblings as a wedding gift, so when Morgan and I got married, I asked instead for the cash value of what they would have spent on an upright piano to use towards my eventual purchase of a grand.

One day in July 2024, after some hemming and hawing and looking around online at various options, I finally decided to pull the trigger and drove down to Daynes Music in Salt Lake City. Although I would have loved to spring for a Steinway, the Essex fit much more comfortably in my budget (especially since I already had plans to quit my job for a while at the end of the year). I have been very pleased with my purchase, and my piano is probably my most prized possession.

I quit my job at the end of 2024 to focus on training for the Bear 100, but then I hurt my knee in May 2025, and suddenly had a lot more time and energy on my hands. I found myself playing the piano for hours a day. As my skills began to return to where they once were and I made progress learning some new pieces on my own, this became a virtuous feedback loop where I wanted to spend more and more time at the piano. But I kept running into some hiccups with my technique that I didn't feel like I could figure out on my own. To make the kind of progress I wanted, I would need to find a piano teacher.

## Intentions

What kind of pianist would I have been if I had majored in Piano Performance and Pedagogy at USU? Certainly a better one than I am now. I like to set big goals. The ultimate achievement of those goals is not that important, but I find them to be inspiring and they require me to commit to a consistent process to have any chance of success.

For the piano, my big goal is to improve my playing to a point where I could conceivably prepare for an audition into a graduate piano program. I don't know whether I ever will want to do that, but I want my skills to be at that level.

I'm seeking an evolution in my playing ability. I feel like I need to improve (or perhaps redevelop) my fundamental technique to allow me to consistently create the sounds that I want to at the keyboard.

Above all, I want to consistently spend time at the piano each day making sounds and music that I enjoy.

## Finding a teacher

There were three things I was looking for in a piano teacher:

1. Highly skilled pianist
2. Experienced teacher
3. Personal fit

I wanted to find someone who has been where I want to go on the piano. I have some lofty goals for what pieces I want to play, so I need to find someone that actually knows how to play them. But just because someone is a good pianist doesn't guarantee they'll be a good teacher, so I wanted to make sure they had a good track record of teaching. My teenage experience switching from Meghan to Luke showed me how important it is for me to feel comfortable with my teacher on a personal level. I've always been a bit picky when it comes to interpersonal relationships, so I was wary of just working with whomever.

I first asked my piano tuner for recommendations. He used to be in charge of the Youth Conservatory at USU, so I knew he had some good connections in the area. And he knew my old teacher, Luke, so I explained how much I liked working with Luke and that I would want to find a teacher like him if possible. My tuner gave me a few names to consider, and I decided to reach out to Ben Laude to see if he was taking on any new students. Unfortunately (for me), Ben is focusing his efforts on online piano content creation. He told me he has one last student that will be graduating this year, and that he is not looking to take any additional students at this time.

My tuner also mentioned that he thought Luke was living in the Salt Lake area, so I decided to try to look him up. I found his website online, which showed me he was teaching piano out of his private studio in Draper. This would be about an hour and forty minute drive from my home in Logan. That's a long way to go for piano lessons, but after thinking about it a while, I decided to go ahead and send Luke a message to see if he had any availability to take on a returning student. He was excited to hear from me and we set up a time for me to come down.

At our first meeting, we spent a fair bit of time just talking and catching up. It felt comfortable and natural and even before we sat down at the pianos, I was already feeling great about my decision to give it a shot despite the long distance. After chatting for a while, I played him the piece I had started learning a few weeks earlier, CPE Bach's Fantasia in F-sharp minor. And we went over exercises and some technique fundamentals. We went about an hour longer than we originally planned, and it felt like no time at all. By the end, I knew that I had made the right choice.

## Progress

At the end of our first meeting, Luke sent me home with a book by Tobias Matthay, The Visible and Invisible in Piano Technique, which I quickly devoured. I felt like I was in the midst of an awakening. My practice quickly became more intentional, and I focused more on actually listening to myself and paying attention to how I'm moving my arms, hands, fingers in a way that maintains freedom and is part of a consistent technique.

It has now been a couple months since I started back at lessons, and after that initial burst of revelations coming out of the first lesson, my progress has become incremental. I'm more focused on the minute details of my technique and tone production, which has slowed my pace of "learning" new pieces. But I definitely feel like I'm playing better now than I was before I resumed lessons.

Overall, I have loved returning to piano lessons after my long hiatus. Music is a beautiful, fulfilling part of life, and I'm glad that I have the opportunity to enjoy my time at the piano each day.