Most days, I spend an hour or so playing the piano. I started learning as an adult, so my technique is fairly limited, but I’m accomplished enough to enjoy playing a variety of music — Bach preludes and fugues, sonatas by Haydn and Clementi, easy Chopin (the pieces marked “Largo”).
I have exactly one friend who is in a similar situation musically, and he lives in Seattle and/or North Dakota, somewhere up there. Yesterday it occurred to me that I might be able to find people with whom I share this interest using the Great God Google.
No luck yet. A search for “amateur pianist” yielded several competitions for amateur pianists, a group in Boston, a teacher on YouTube who loves to r-r-r-roll her ar-r-r-r’s, and not much else. I think it’s great that amateurs can enter competitions, but I’m not playing at anywhere near that level — nor am I interested in competing. Competing for awards in musical excellence strikes me as a bone-stupid waste of time.
Given the frantic pace of modern life, maybe it’s understandable that there are not a lot of adults sitting around playing Bach for fun. Still, it’s kind of sad.
