Saying goodbye to my baby grand

Welcome back to?Your Big Idea,?the weekly newsletter where I share tips, tricks, and resources to help you turn your passion into an idea worth sharing. I’m glad you’re here.

If this is your first time reading the newsletter, you can learn a little more about me and what I do by?clicking here! This week is a very special edition - it's a tribute to my baby grand piano, which is being taken away today to be disposed of.

I bought her for $550 as a gift to myself for taking the leap and starting my own business. It was a lot of money at the time - so much that I cried when I paid for her, and prayed that she wouldn't be the difference between me going broke and having to close up shop.

A day later, she moved into my studio apartment, into a space that had held a desk and a book case. I had gotten rid of almost everything in order to have her in my life. And so began our whirlwind romance. I knew I'd likely be her last owner - the seller had priced her to move.

I practiced for my Carnegie Hall show on her - it was a program full of virtuosic works by Fred Ho and Igor Stravinsky and me. I would practice in the middle of the day, since I was now working from home, but the musicians of the building began to find me anyway.

"Hey, was that Rzewski you were playing the other day? It's sounding great."

I moved her twice, spending at least triple what I paid for her in moving fees. But that wasn't before I lost my grip on a cup of tea and spilled some inside her, ruining some of the dampers.

I quit music for a bit in the fallout of #MeToo. And then, years later, I came back to my art, different this time, grateful that I still had her. We wrote a few musicals together. I would always make apologies for her when sending along a recording to a collaborator. "Sorry, she's janky. I haven't had her tuned in forever and some of her dampers don't work correctly. But you get the idea of what this should sound like."

Life happened. Work happened. I signed a lease on a Manhattan apartment. I celebrated loudly.

And I realized I would have to say goodbye to her.

Saying goodbye to Frederika

I named her Frederika, after my late composition teacher, Fred Ho. Like Fred, she was scrappy and loud. And, too, like him, she taught me a few lessons that I've taken with me over the years. I hope they will be helpful to you in search of your big idea.

It's just stuff.

We musicians tend to grow very attached to our instruments. These inanimate objects are things we pour our hearts and souls into, perfecting and honing our crafts. We spend significant portions of our lives with them. We learn the nuances of our particular instrument, learning how to use its quirks to our advantage. And so our instruments become an extension of our very selves.

Frederika was an old piano, so I had no qualms about getting inside her and experimenting. I learned techniques like muted strings, plucked strings, overtones, and singing into the soundboard. It was one of the benefits of having a cheap piano - I wasn't inadvertently ruining an expensive instrument by touching the strings too much. You can check out one of my little experiments here and here.

And at the end of the day, a piano is just a thing. I tried to give her away first, but every piano tuner I spoke to told me the same thing: every piano is destined for the dump one day.

So are most of our ideas.

Stick with me here.

The only way to get to a big idea is to have many small ideas. The majority of them will be thrown away. The small ideas might not work well, or they might be stepping stones to your big idea. But as easy as it is to fall in love with our ideas, it's best to know that the majority of them will be discarded as we work.

At the end of the day, it's all just stuff. And sometimes we must be willing to part with something we love in favor of what's going to make a difference in our lives and the world.

Our ideas are not our identity

For the last six years, I've been the girl with a cheap piano. The girl who quit her job and spent virtually her last dollar on the instrument at exactly the wrong time to be spending money. The girl who could have seen an abject failure but instead has an astounding story to tell.

I bought a piano and quit my job for two dreams at once - entrepreneurship and music.

My piano was a symbol of one of the biggest leaps of my life. And I was fortunate enough to land on my feet.

But that's just a story - an idea. It's not who I am.

Letting go of piano means going on in search of my next instrument, my next big project, my next endeavor. Sometimes, in order to do so, it's best we shake everything up, shed our old ideas and belongings, and start fresh.

Things change

This is my piano's final lesson to me, and also the final lesson taught to me by Fred Ho.

Fred passed away on April 12, 2014, after an eight year battle with stage-four colorectal cancer. When I began my work with him in 2011, he was clear with me. He wasn't just looking for a student - he was looking for someone to learn his sound, his philosophies, his politics. I was the inheritor of one of his bands, which I continued on my own for three years, and his sheet music.

If you would have asked me in 2014 what I was to do with the rest of my life, I would have told you it was to run that big band. But things change.

It turns out that I was meant for so many other things - to run a business; to help people with their ideas; to write musicals and screenplays. The big band was a part of my life for a time, but as time passed and things changed, it no longer fit into my life the way it once did.

And that, it turns out, is okay.

Things change. Our ideas change. Our needs change.

And that, my friends, is the last lesson that my piano taught me, too.

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