Improvisation_009

Improvisation 009

Robbie's first encounter with music was at the age of 6 when one of his aunts gave him a bugle to play on. Few months after Robbie was alowed to rehearse with the local fanfare and kept playing the bugle for 1 year and the baritone 1 year after that. After getting his 'A' diploma, Robbie then returned the lent baritone and said: "Now I have enough" and stopped playing a brass instrument. Yet, a few years later, when he was 11, he found a keyboard on the attic and played it fondly. When his parents could not hold out much longer to hear the same tune over and over (pippy longstockings), his mother then decided Robbie needed 
piano lessons and brought him to a teacher in Groningen: 'Jan Meiborg'.

Quickly became clear that Robbie enjoyed this much and took lessons for 7 years. Here he learned much about improvisation in blues and learned to get more in touch with the piano in general. The last study was on a piece of Franz Liszt: 'Liebestraum no.3'. Jan dared a bet: "If you can play this piece well within 4 weeks, I'll buy you a chocolate cake." So the challenge was accepted. Yet... Robbie was young and became more busy with other things than the piano and Robbie knew he was going to fail.

Thus, with a loss, yet with no side of the bargain, Robbie bought a chocolate cake himself for Jan, and without any words, the both of us knew that this would be the last time of the study. 

Which became more clear the coming year. Robbie did not even touch a piano for over a year and was hanging around with his friends more often. Yet after that specific year, he came home to his parents house... Looked at the piano... Thought to himself: "Could I?... then... Should I?" and began improvising with no one else in the room. Finally he accepted that this had to be his main course. 

** Read the full story on artificialis.nl ** (available in lots of languages but dutch is the main language and the rest is probably pretty poorly translated by machine translation)

Improvisation 009

Robbie de Groot