I've been working on my piano skills lately. I have dreams of one day being good enough to tickle the (now usually plastic) ivories in a public setting, but, really, it's mostly for my own amusement. I had a piano teacher for a short time in high school, but she decided to move to Florida. During that time though, I did perform in a recital, and at the time, she had really like the piano part to a clarinet solo I was working on, so I played the clarinets solo at the recital, too.
Most of my 'real' piano training happened in college, where all music majors are required to take at least four semesters of piano. I did learn quite a bit, like how to read a lead sheet, how to construct a chord and harmonize a simple melody, and I learned that playing scales on a piano is more annoying than it is to play scales on an instrument. Each finger is assigned a number, the thumb is 1 and each finger is labelled 2,3,4,5. So that your fingers land on the right keys when playing a scale, the player needs to memorize finger patterns. And the thumb needs to pass under the rest of the hand at certain times to make the scale end on the correct finger. As I successfully passed my piano classes, I could do this reasonably well, but it is still something that I need to work on.
Some really beautiful piano works aren't too hard to find, as piano is an instrument that's had music written for it for centuries, but I am fond of Debussy, Chopin (the Preludes are divine), Bach, Satie, and of course Mozart and Beethoven.
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