When Sara and I were eight years old we started taking piano lessons. Contrary to the popular depiction of children being forced into learning piano in movies and television, Sara and I actually REQUESTED the lessons. We ended up completing nine years of classical training and theory on our own accord.
At age 15 we became interested in a guitar that our step father kept under the stairs in our basement. Secretly, we took turns playing with it in the afternoons after school while our parents were at work and then storing it before anyone caught us. After a few months we got brave and asked if we could take lessons. My parents agreed, although we were to still partake in weekly piano lessons. After just six guitar lessons we quit, (just as my parents thought we would) and at the end of that year we stopped piano lessons as well (to my parents’ surprise).
During the last years of high school we were too busy with friends and school work and just general teenage behaviour to remain interested in classical anything, but both of us continued to use the guitar and the piano in our house to write our own music. By the end of high school we had joined a band, started recording our own demos at home and at school and were arranging weekly gigs for our friends and their friends. Although the lessons had stopped, our interest in music had not.
Even with nearly eight years of classical training, if you sat me at a piano right now and asked me to play “Für Elise”, I could play the first few bars but that would be the end of it. My sheet music reading skills are nearly all gone and I never write music in a traditional format. But over the past 13 years, as I have been playing more and more keyboard on stage, I feel the dust blowing off the keys in my head (metaphor) and I am starting to familiarize myself with the theory I once knew and the training I once coveted.
And so, when approached recently about creating sheet music for our more popular songs, I jumped at the chance. If for no other reason than to have the opportunity to see what we’ve created on paper in a format that was once so familiar to me. So here it is. If you too want the chance to see it, play it and own it click here: www.teganandsara.com/shop/#sheetmusic
-Tegan
