YAY! Isn’t celebrating the piano on Saturday, March 29th better than celebrating National Pita Day? Both of these are new “named days,” but Piano Day is world-wide and the esteemed Pita Day is only national so we are going to focus on Worldwide Piano Day here and for a special reason, my new audiobook with embedded music releases today!
I have a love/hate relationship with the piano. I love the music it makes. Who doesn’t love the power of the sustain pedal? My parents did not take me to piano lessons as a child. I begged them for lessons as a teenager when I learned that my band teacher, who I deemed “the nicest person in the world” had a wife who taught piano. She also wore cool, wild-printed, maxi skirts and huge earrings and wore her hair in a gigantic bun. Since I was 16, I could drive to piano lessons so they agreed to pay for them. My mom was tired of driving me to all those flute lessons and symphony rehearsals every week, three towns over the river.
Even though I could read music, albeit treble clef, learning the piano was hard. The bass clef was like a foreign language. Why are the notes not the same? It would be so much easier. We didn’t have a piano at home which left me practicing after school in the band room. I repeat, learning the piano was hard and I felt embarrassed by kids coming in and hearing me plucking out scales and painful arpeggios. Thankfully, the “nicest man in the world,” Mr. Pinter didn’t mind. I played until I left for college and then I dropped out of lessons until I turned 40. That’s a long hiatus from a musical instrument!
We bought a piano for our three kids, a Boston made Vose & Sons and I couldn’t resist learning how to play it. 
I will never forget walking into my first 40 year old lesson with our son’s teacher. She asked me, “What do you want to play?” Immediately, I responded, “Beethoven.” Without blinking she said, “Let’s start there.” Obviously she is GREAT piano teacher who gets the effectiveness of learner-centered pedagogy. Beethoven’s Sonatina in G became the first official piece I played on our beautiful piano. I overcame my fear of the bass clef. I practiced at night, after our kids went to bed. I fell in love with the piano alongside an open french door with crickets harmonizing outside in the moonlight.
We had a few “hard” rules in our home. Tell the truth. Be kind to others. The expected ones, but an usual one was, you all have to play the piano until you are 18. We stuck to it and now our two sons can REALLY play the piano and our daughter became a professional dancer, yet she kept up her lessons despite dancing around 30 hours a week while doing full-time school. Her keyboard is waiting for her in the basement of her new home while her twins sleep in their cribs upstairs. She will come back to it. The magical sound of the piano is inescapable once you sit down and take it in beneath your fingers. Even if you don’t sit down and try, it’s mesmerizing. I remember my Uncle Mark Dull telling me about Chopin, Berlioz and Bach’s piano music as a little kid. How he adored his albums, their fidelity and specific recordings even though he did not play the piano.
So, in celebration of Worldwide Piano Day my first novel is releasing as an audiobook with gorgeous piano music embedded into the story. For some unknown, unexplained reason the original publisher did not release this book as an audiobook even though it is all about music! Now I’m doing it with the help of gifted narrator Adam Blanford, ACX and some extraordinary musicians. It has taken far more hours than I can count, listening to Adam’s voice and all the music to get it set as a perfect subtextual compliment to the story itself. Figuring out when to start the music and when to stop it with so much gorgeous music to play is a challenge. The listener needs enough of a taste to want to hear more and not so much that it overpowers the text. Hopefully, we struck the right chord (Ha!) of balance and intrigue. So welcome to this concept of listening to a musical love story with the music playing, at your convenience.
I want to thank a few folks for making this possible. My current publisher, Ambassador International who introduced me to Adam Blanford when they brought him on to narrate House of Honor, my new novel. Thank you to Adam Blanford. How in the world do you do all those accents and distinguish between Clare and Clive so clearly with your one voice? You are a gift! Thank you to Bonnie and Trevor McMaken and Janna Williamson for their phenomenal musical recordings that greatly enhanced this book. Thank you to ACX who figured out how to make the music work in an audiobook. Thank you to my lawyer husband, Charlie who gets licensing agreements, contracts, all the things and listens to my artistic rants at dinner. Thank you to Nathaniel Philbrick who encouraged me to buy great headphones, indispensable for this project. Thank you to Caleb Philbrick and Dr. Karol Sue Reddington who were my O.G. original inspiration for writing this book. You shared so many hours at the piano, so much love for this instrument, worth it! Thank you to Mrs. Pinter and Carol Ishman, my dear piano teachers.
I’m delighted to give away two free copies of this audiobook with embedded music! If you’ve read this far, you deserve it! The first two readers who email me at [email protected] will receive them. Enjoy the sound of my story and the music of so many truly great composers and performers. A new audiobook with embedded music! Why don’t they all have this? Be blessed!
photo: Janna WIliamson recording Brahms Waltz in A flat major and Schumann’s Traumerei