I was cleaning up my website today when I came across this autobiographical nugget I wrote in 2006 upon the eve of my concert at The Sheila C. Johnson Performing Arts Center. I had completely forgotten that I wrote this. It has important information about my formative years.
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| Jennifer Warren-Baker, age 10 or 11? |
The Long Road
originally published on www.musicbyjennifer.net in 2006
By Jennifer Warren-Baker
This is not the story a child prodigy. Quite the opposite, I was an average piano student who struggled to read the notes on the page. In fact, the only awards I ever won were for spelling bees, writing contests, and drama. But my piano teachers recognized my good ear and the feeling I put in my music. This was a sign of things to come.
I grew up in the intellectually rich and affluent suburbs of Washington, DC. My close proximity to the city ensured that a plentiful amount of cultural events were just a Metro ride away. As a young child, I listened to my mother play out of Broadway piano books. She was an amateur pianist, and her greatest hits list included Camelot, Sound of Music, Dance of the Rosebuds, and Tennessee Waltz. My parents took me to outdoor jazz concerts and played lots of movie music and Motown in the home. While mom played her Broadway and sang it to me at night, Dad cranked out recordings of his African-American favorites, including Otis Redding, The Four Tops, The Supremes and the Temptations. And then there was the orchestral music of Superman and Star Wars. From a home environment that favored the jazzy, upbeat flavor of Motown and Broadway, the traditional, Methodist church service was another world musically. In church I heard everything from classical organ and vocal music to bell choirs and Bach.
I suppose these earliest musical influences led me to beg for piano lessons. I wanted to play like my mother and make that music with my own fingers. For reasons unbeknownst to me, I was drawn to music. After teaching myself to read music, my wish for lessons was finally granted.
When my skills were adequate to study the classics, I learned Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Schumann, and others. My teacher was not to keen about expanding my horizons beyond the insular world of classical music, and this may have resulted in the gradual decline of my practice habits. On a hunch, she bought me a book of Scott Joplin rags, and I was immediately hooked. I clearly had a knack for it, and classical was soon on the back burner. For a while, I just played ragtime and composed. It was clear to my teacher that I didn't fit the "mold" and I was not following the course of her ideal student.
With about six years of piano lessons under my belt, my mother said I wasn't practicing what I was supposed to, so she wasn't paying. In reality, I was busy composing my own fabulous stuff and my teacher didn't know how to deal with a creative soul. I was fifteen. That departure marked a painful break from formal instruction that I greatly regret. I went on to compose and teach myself new pieces until college.
In college, I tried to bury my musical ability. I convinced myself that I could never make a living at music, but the truth was, I was miserable without the piano. Although I chose English as a major, I spent every hour I could in the practice rooms of the music department. I played all the time, often composing new piano material. After dabbling in several non-commital majors and wasting a lot of time in two different schools, I married a man who gave me the encouragement I needed to get back on track with music. With his encouragement, I enrolled in the music program at George Mason University.
My five-year hiatus from formal instruction meant that I had a lot of catching up to do, but I kept reminding myself that I was not marketable without theory knowledge and good sight-reading skills. Much to the surprise of my professors, I stuck to my guns and worked hard to refine my classical skills. Once again, I didn't fit the mold, but I did what I had to do. To my relief, the faculty allowed me play one of my original piano compositions at each jury and recital, provided that the full score was in their possession. Composing piano music is still my first love, and I regularly perform my compositions in public.
After receiving a music degree that many termed "useless," I decided to try my hand at teaching piano, more to make a living than to fulfill a divine calling. Let's just say that the teaching worked out. It became my life's work and mission, with the benefit that I had a darned good time doing it. I still love teaching my 50 students, all of whom bless me every day with entertaining anecdotes about the trials of middle-school dating. My five-year old student, Libby, shocked me with her mature conclusion that "Every Good Boy Does Fine" is sexist. For those who don't know, this is a sentence that helps musicians remember that the order of the line notes in the treble clef are E-G-B-D-F. I think she's absolutely right, so we made up the sentence, "Every Girl Better Dress Fancy." Although our new sentence favors the female gender, I'm not sure that the dress code will meet the approval of the feminists.
[The writer wishes to interject here that she quit teaching in late 2013. See "Why I Quit Teaching."]
While maintaining a large roster of piano students, I moonlighted with numerous musical theater groups and church gigs, where my appreciation for song and lyrics suddenly blossomed. The day the Twin Towers collapsed, I found myself alone at the piano in mourning. In tears, I wrote my first song titled "Why Do We Wait?" A year later, my husband had a pulmonary embolism that nearly killed him. While he was in the hospital, I wrote another song titled "It's Not My Time To Go." Although I'm not sure these were my best songs, they marked the beginning of a new direction in my composing.
The next few years resulted in a few more serious ballads, and then I began to try my hand at comedic material. I had played several funny characters in plays during my formative years, and had briefly written a humor column for my college newspaper. So comedy was a natural development in my songs. Serious and comedic, I write from life, and from my experience of the many twists and turns that a woman encounters in today's world.
I expect some controversy over my lyrics, but they are my own voice, and as an artist, I must speak for those who cannot. I hope that for some, my lyrics are more than entertainment. Perhaps some can see their own life in my songs and feel reassurance that they are not alone. There is a mutual pain that all women feel at some point in their lives, and perhaps my songs might help some women (and men) work through their pain, and even laugh about their trials.
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Maybe someday soon I'll get the courage again to share my musical comedy and not-just-piano songs.
