A piano lesson that will change how you listen (ft. Lang Lang)
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Why did Charlie and Nate view childhood piano lessons as a chore?
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Welcome to
Switch Tong Pop. I'm songwriter Charlie Harding. And I am musicologist Nate Sloan. Do you remember the first piano piece that you had to perform in a recital? Wow, you're really taking me back to a very fragile time in my life, Charlie. But I I mean, I won't say it's the first, but certainly one of the earliest pieces I remember playing is the Johann Sebastian Bach C major prelude from the well tempered clavier. That one? That's the one.
How old are you? I mean, I started playing when I was five, I think, six, something like that. What was your relationship to it when you started? Who are you studying with? So I love piano. And eventually I started doing this program at the Harlem School of the Arts with a really strict Russian lady who would wrap my knuckles with a plastic alligator any time I made a mistake. She had all these like pictures of the great uh Slavic pianist Stanislav Richter all all over her uh office, the way that some teenagers might have pictures of like Justin Bieber. And uh I didn't really love playing classical music. It felt like a chore and like a labor, you know. I feel like I I studied classical piano for a year when I was a kid.
I feel like a lot of people start and then quickly stop. It's a rite of passage. What stopped you? Well, I was kind of fed up. I really wanted to jam. I wanted to balk out, you know, as as it were. No. And my parents knew I was a little dissatisfied and they said, You can stop playing piano or you can start taking jazz lessons.
And
I was like,
What did
Jazz you say? Let's do it. Well. I started taking jazz lessons. I started to improvise. I started to, you know, make my own music. I never look back. I rediscovered that love of music.
You're a jazz scholar. What's your relationship to classical music today?
Well, now, Charlie, I'm filled with rue and regret because all I want to do now is to be able to play Chopin and and Beethoven counterpoint. And I can't. I mean, I I love now I love taking out classical music and working my way through it. I feel like I have the the patience and the maturity now to to rock with that.
How did Lang Lang’s early training shape his approach to classical music?
So you want more classical music in your life? Is classical music popular music? Classical music is popular music. It's just that most people don't know it.
I think classical music is pop music. It just needs people who are able to convey it in that way. And I think that's what the greatest classical musicians do. They make it pop, they make it accessible, they make it understandable, they make it down to earth. They make these composers into like real people who walked the earth and had their stuff that they were dealing with every day.
This is really cool because I feel like there's probably no better performer in the world of classical music than Longlong, who is so excellent at making classical music available to everybody through his fantastic piano book series where he takes the best piano pieces, like the ones you were studying as a kid and very complex ones, and makes them puts them all together, curates them so that it's like, oh yeah, that is the piano music that I love.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
Why did Charlie and Nate view childhood piano lessons as a chore?
0:00–3:43
2
How did Lang Lang’s early training shape his approach to classical music?
3:43–8:47
3
What does Lang Lang say makes classical music feel like popular music?
8:47–13:12
4
How can a pianist interpret the same musical phrase in three different ways?
13:12–17:55
5
What mental and physical habits help maintain peak performance on tour?
17:55–22:31
6
Why does Lang Lang include contemporary composers in his piano books?
22:31–27:43
7
How does the piano act as a cultural “time‑machine” for listeners?
27:43–32:32
8
What advice does Lang Lang give beginners to fall in love with the piano?
32:32–37:13