Leonard Smith, from the Houghton Lake Church, was pushed toward a love of music by the tabletop Sears record changer and six classical LP’s his father purchased when Leonard was barely old enough to operate the record player. In this musical ambience, he learned to play by ear before he learned to read notes.
Rebekah Gordan used to play for the Berrien Springs Village Church, until joining Pioneer Memorial Church. She reports that after the Soviet Union collapsed, the church had a lot of evangelistic programs. Thousands of people were baptized and there weren’t enough pianists to cover the worship. So, Rebekah started to play at the age of 12 because “we did not have anyone else.”
Waukesha Church pianist Marie Dow became a pastor’s wife, which, she says with tongue in cheek, “evidently qualified me to be a church pianist.” For her initiation, Marie had a song with five flats thrust in front of her two minutes before the service began. “It was awful,” she says, but the rest of the service went “fairly well,” and at the end many people at the little church came forward to thank her for her “beautiful” piano playing.
On another memorable occasion, Marie showed up to church one Sabbath morning and there was confusion about whose turn it was to play that day, so she stepped in. The presiding elder made a point to thank her for playing on the spur of the moment. Later, she found out that it was really her turn to play, but since she had looked at an old schedule, she didn’t realize it. Now she jokes about the time she filled in for the mysterious missing pianist, who ended up being herself.”
Stephanie Kasner says that “playing piano at my church (and several others I attended) was a new responsibility because I had to play a lot of songs each week, sometimes taking requests at random. I learned not to play exactly what I saw. It’s ok to skip some notes as long as it doesn’t damage the melody and timing. It’s ok to add extra notes and passing tones that feel comfortable to my style; it helps me keep the timing regular and the congregation can also track when to come in. Personalizing the song goes a long way to making it feel natural. Very importantly, it’s ok to mess up! That was a hard lesson to learn but, in the end, I found out nobody is perfect and the congregation is happy someone is at the piano.”
After about four years of lessons, Caryn Erb of the Wisconsin Conference did not feel pianistically gifted. Nevertheless, when she was around 14 years old, she asked God to bless her enough so that she could play hymns for church. She learned to play five hymns. Then 10. “On Friday evenings,” she says, “my dad would stand at the piano and ask me to play so he could sing. He then gave his weekly feedback, usually something like, ‘I didn’t have much time to breathe but you’re doing very good.’ Ah, thank you, dad,” she says. “Noted!”
Benjamin Calderón from the Paw-Paw Church says, “Music has the power to quiet the loud incessant background noise that as modern people we’ve become so accustomed to,” and that when he is at the piano he tries to help the congregation “forget about the piano, forget about the church, forget about the leader and whatever else, and find a special moment of connection to God, of worship, of reflection, of awareness of His presence.”