I spent thirteen years in Calcutta Boys' School from 1991 to 2004. The only musical instrument that was there in my school was the piano. The school had three pianos: one in the music room, one grand piano in the Junior Chapel Hall, and one upright piano in the Senior Chapel Hall. There were two music teachers during my time: Mr. Jogen Khan and Mr. Susanta Das Chowdhury, both of whom taught singing, rather than the piano but both of them played the piano and asked us to sing along with it. The junior school English teacher, Mr Stephen De Souza, even made us learn singing some songs from the hymn book during the morning prayers in the Chapel Hall.
Mr. Jogen Khan retired when I was in class 3 (1994). Mr. Susanta Das Chowdhury also taught us Bengali in class 4 (and he was a very good teacher of Bengali who impressed upon us the difference between সাধু বাংলা and চলিত বাংলা). I have very vague memories of Mr. Jogen Khan (he had a booming voice? I later on learnt that not only did he play the piano but also the organ, the violin and the bassoon) but I have vivid memories of Mr. Das Chowdhury playing the piano. When we moved to the Senior Chapel Hall in class 6(?), Mr. Guy Kenneth Dantes, the English teacher, used to play the upright during the morning assembly. I had once even watched him playing Für Elise during a break.
I fantasised about learning how to play the piano when I was in class 8 but it remained a distant fantasy given that I had no musical training and it seemed a remote possibility that I would have one.
I once won a DK Multimedia Encyclopaedia CD-ROM in a quiz competition in class 9. I managed to get a few MIDI files from the internet at that point of time. That CD-ROM and those MIDI files were all that I knew about Western classical music in school. It was only when I was at university, that I started finding MP3s. Curiously enough, I have never bought a CD or a DVD in my life. I had bought audio cassettes but they were Bob Dylan, the Beatles and such.
The fascination for the piano ebbed in my life but maybe it was buried deep inside my subconscious. So, in the first few months of 2024, I started expressing my fascination to my spouse. She egged me on and supported me in my fantasy of trying to learn the piano. With her encouragement, I bought a Yamaha P-145 digital piano on 30 April 2024 and enrolled for thirty-minutes-a-week piano lessons with Mr. KG who lives just near my house.
He has started me off with Smallwood's Piano Tutor (published in England in the 19th century by Francis, Day & Hunter Ltd. and published now by Faber music). He assured me that learning the treble and bass clef notation system would not take more than a month. To my amazement, within a month, I was comfortable reading the notes. It has been two months now since I started music lessons for the first time in my life at the age of 38. My spouse is even learning from me and we are learning together. Let's see how this journey turns out!
