Photograph by Mauricio Alejo

Two summers ago, I was playing concerts in Santa Fe, some five hours’ drive from where I grew up. Travel is more difficult for my parents than it used to be, but they made the trek to hear me. They brought along a strange gift—a black notebook with my name on the front, written in my best prepubescent cursive. It had been excavated from a closet and smelled faintly of mothballs. I’d forgotten it existed but recognized it instantly: my piano-lesson journal. Starting in 1981, when I was eleven, it sat on my music rack, so that I could consult, or pretend to consult, my teacher’s comments. Week after week, he wrote down what I’d played and how it went, and outlined the next week’s goals.

I paged through nostalgically, reflecting on how far I’d come. But a few days later I was onstage, performing, and a voice made itself heard in my head: “Better not play faster than you can think.” It was the notebook talking. I was indeed playing faster than I could think—sometimes your fingers have plans of their own. The notebook voice went on. “Keep back straight,” it said. “Beware of concentration lapses.” Through several subsequent concerts, it lodged complaints and probed weaknesses, delivering opinions worse than any reviewer’s. It took me weeks to silence the voice and play normally again.

In popular culture, music lessons are often linked with psychological torment. People apparently love stories about performing-arts teachers who drive students mad, breaking their spirits with pitiless exactitude. There’s David Helfgott in “Shine,” Isabelle Huppert’s sadomasochistic turn in “The Piano Teacher,” the sneering Juilliard judges for whom Julia Stiles auditions to redeem her mother’s death in “Save the Last Dance.” (I can testify that the behavior of the judges at my real-life Juilliard audition was even meaner and funnier.) I’ve often rolled my eyes at the music-lesson clichés of movies: the mind games and power plays, the teacher with the quaint European accent who says, “You will never make it, you are not a real musician,” in order to get you to work even harder. But as the notebook recalled memories of lessons I’d had—both as a child and later, once the piano became my life—I wondered if my story was all that different.

When I was five, my parents, desperate to find me an outlet, noticed that I had a thing for music. Family lore has me singing the Hallelujah Chorus in the checkout lane at a grocery store—an early warning of my classical predilections and their dire social consequences. We were living in Englishtown, New Jersey, and one day my dad drove me to a nearby Suzuki school, where I observed a long row of child violinists playing “Twinkle Twinkle,” their bows all moving back and forth together, as if tethered. They faced a wall of mirrors, so that each child duetted with a diabolical backward twin. I threw a tantrum, and the violin was nixed.

Not long afterward, I began taking piano lessons with Mona Schneiderman, who lived down the street and had a spinet covered with tchotchkes, next to the kitchen. There was a candy bowl, and sometimes the smell of cookies or chicken soup. She taught me to read music—Every Good Boy Does Fine, and so on—and before long suggested a more advanced teacher, Lillian Livingston. Livingston had a dedicated music room, with two grand pianos, and a dark waiting room, where you endured the last moments of preceding lessons—other seven-year-olds playing their Clementi and Kabalevsky, music so transcendentally mediocre that it is thought a child cannot ruin it.

When I was ten, we moved to Las Cruces, New Mexico, and I began lessons with a teacher named William Leland. He taught at New Mexico State University but consented to take me on after an audition. He insisted that I get a new black composition notebook for his weekly comments. At first, lessons were at his gloomy campus studio, but later they were at his house—a ranch house in a modest neighborhood with an enormous, shiny, improbable Bösendorfer grand greeting you as you came in the door. Like my father, he favored a gently ironic tone of voice.

Leland’s notebook is surprisingly visual. In place of the paste-on stars used by piano teachers everywhere, Leland drew stars by hand, giving nuance to his praise: sometimes the stars were beaming with pride, sporting halos or crowns; sometimes they had sidelong glances, to reflect mitigated success; some stars were amputees, and limped on crutches; and sometimes things were so generally disappointing that he drew a slug, or a caterpillar, or even, on one terrible occasion, a toilet. There were other artistic annotations, such as a drawing of a large check from the Screwball Bank of West Burlap, dated April 7, 1981, and made out to me for a million dollars: I had at last remembered to play a correct F-sharp in place of an erroneous F-natural.

On a typical page of the notebook (March 12, 1981), Leland writes, “Scale practice is getting sloppy.” He suggests practicing scales in a series of rhythms—eighth notes, triplets, sixteenths—and urgently switches to capitals: “USE METRONOME.” This heartless device is invoked constantly: “Metronome! You need an outside policeman every time the inner policeman breaks down”; “Use Metroyouknowwhat”; and on and on. Anyone who has taken music lessons knows the indignity of emulating a machine until every last human vagary vanishes. The clicking monster was also part of Leland’s cunning scheme to prevent me from playing everything as fast as I possibly could. In response to my performance of William Gillock’s “Forest Murmurs,” Leland writes, “Forest Murmurs, not Forest Fire!” Below a carefully drawn portrait of a sullen Beethoven saying, “Man muss zufrieden sein! (One must be happy!),” he complains that my tempo “sounds like a Hell’s Angels motorcycle race.” At the bottom of another page, there is a “Quote of the Week”—“It’s amazing what you can do when you go slower!”—attributed to me in the act of discovering this brilliant truth.

Most of all, Leland required my conscious attention. In 1982, he wrote, “Practicing a passage is not just repetition but really concentrating and burning every detail into your nervous system.” When I failed to focus, he drew diagrams of my head, mostly empty, with a pea-size brain rattling around inside. There were surveillance stratagems: once, two-thirds of the way down a page full of advice, he wrote, “If you’ve read this far, call me up.” The word “detail” is everywhere. Reading it now, I notice that technical corrections are enumerated very specifically, but that the musical observations tend to be generic: “2nd mvt. beautiful! now this is making music!” or “This is getting very musical.” This is a common redundancy. After a concert, you often hear people saying, “It was so musical,” as if they had expected something else. Seeing these comments makes me realize something about my teen-age self: how I withheld from Leland some of my most personal feelings about music, in the same way that you hold things back from your parents, who are all the more infuriating for having your best interests at heart.

Learning to play the piano is learning to reason with your muscles. One of the recurring story lines of my first years with Leland was learning how to cross my thumb smoothly under the rest of my hand in scales and arpeggios. He devised a symmetrical, synchronous, soul-destroying exercise for this, in which the right and left thumbs reached under the other fingers, crablike, for ever more distant notes. Exercises like this are crucial and yet seem intended to quell any natural enthusiasm for music, or possibly even for life. As you deal with thumb-crossings, or fingerings for the F-sharp-minor scale, or chromatic scales in double thirds, it is hard to accept that these will eventually allow you to probe eternity in the final movement of Beethoven’s last sonata. Imagine that you are scrubbing the grout in your bathroom and are told that removing every last particle of mildew will somehow enable you to deliver the Gettysburg Address.