by Heather Baldwin - February, 2022

Recently, one of my adult students stood up after his lesson and remarked, “Piano is hard. How do people like Erroll Garner play without taking lessons?” It’s a great question, and one I get from time to time – usually at a particularly challenging moment in the music-learning journey, or after someone has seen a video about a great musician who doesn’t read music. Behind the question is another, unstated one: Is there an easier way to do this?

There are lots of famous musicians who never learned to read music or had formal lessons. In addition to Garner (who composed “Misty”), big names like Stevie Wonder, Bob Dylan and Paul McCartney are all self-taught and don’t read music. And many of the jazz greats learned to play by ear rather than by reading notes. But if you dig a little into the backgrounds of these musicians, you’ll spot a couple commonalities. First, they all started learning when they were very young. Second, they were wired for music in the same way that some people are wired for art or for understanding physics or for working with machines.

Take Garner, for example. He started playing piano at age three. His older siblings were taking lessons and any time the teacher sat down to demonstrate a piece of music, Garner could replicate it perfectly just by listening. How? He was genetically gifted with both perfect pitch (the rare ability to hear a note and know what it is without any reference tone) and an amazing memory. His New York Times obituary tells the story of Garner attending a concert by a Russian classical pianist, then rushing home to his apartment and playing a large part of the concert from memory. No amount of formal music training could have given him that ability. (As a side note, I had a teacher in high school who could do that process in reverse. A Russian pianist with perfect pitch, she could look at a musical composition on paper, hear it in her head while looking at the notes, then execute it on the piano by playing what she heard in her head. It was quite remarkable).

Or let’s take another one on the list who grew up very differently from Garner. Stevie Wonder was blind and grew up in the projects in Detroit. He not only didn’t have older siblings taking lessons, his mom didn’t even own a piano. So how did he learn to play without either lessons or sight? One day he came across a neighbor’s old broken-down piano. The first time he touched the keys, he thought he’d stumbled upon a miracle. He returned to that piano again and again. Using his extraordinary ear (Wonder, too, has perfect pitch) and sense of touch, he was able to replicate music he heard on the radio. Then he took it a step further and created his own music. At age 11, he was signed by Motown Records. 

So, to return to the original question: How do people like Erroll Garner learn to play piano without lessons? There isn’t a single path, but most who find their way to stardom without lessons or reading music are blessed with a confluence of a natural ear for music, access to musical instruments in their youth and an intrinsic pull to develop their musical skill at an early age, in addition to that undefinable magic that produces geniuses in any field. Unfortunately, there is no shortcut or secret formula they discovered that the rest of us can copy or imitate. It is more that music was their life’s calling – and they answered it. The rest of us can answer that call too; it just takes us a lot more practice.

Still looking for an easier way? In Part 2, I’ll share the story of one my adult students who investigated a couple different “learn piano in an afternoon” courses. Spoiler alert: you can’t learn piano in an afternoon.