LOUD PIANOS & SOFT FORTES

A memoir by Kurt Mueller
Trade paperback: $15.00

D E S C R I P T I O N

Visiting the Old West, Oscar Wilde saw a sign in a saloon that gave him a moment’s pause. It said: “Don’t shoot the piano player, he’s doing his best.” That compassionate bit of barroom wisdom sums up the author’s plea as a marginally successful student of the piano. After decades of dreaming and practicing, he wonders how it is that his high expectation as a pianist has turned out to be a rather soft forte. If we can’t do something well, is it still worth doing? Aren’t all our pursuits subject to our individual limitations? Loud Pianos & Soft Fortes is a paean to sticking with it in spite of our limited time and abilities. It’s an unvarnished manifesto of encouragement to everyone who’s harbored a childhood dream and wonders, What if, why and who cares?

E X C E R P T

I wasn’t privy to any of the closed-door discussions our parents had about where to look for a new piano teacher, but I’m pretty sure Dad would have insisted that whoever it was had better be a real professional and not some has-been joker looking for trouble and an easy buck. Mom did the expedient thing and went straight to the local Mel Bay Music Store, which specialized in guitars, banjos, mandolins and the like, but the piano not so much. There was a good reason for that. The namesake of the company, Melbourne E. Bay, was a guitarist and banjo player from the Ozarks who founded a music publishing company in Pacific, Missouri, to help returning WWII vets learn to play the guitar. The methods he developed and published were aptly timed for the guitar craze of the 1950s that was ignited by artists like Bill Haley, Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly. By the beginning of the 1960s, Mel Bay had orchestrated his expertise into a chain of music stores from coast to coast, and coasts beyond. Even today, most people who studied the guitar as kids have memories of their Mel Bay music books. As his empire expanded, so did Mr. Bay’s portfolio of elementary pedagogy for just about every instrument under the sun…but the piano, not so much.