The CMR Spotlight
Gary Lloyd

Picture of Gary, along with a shot of his large reach

Gary D. Lloyd was born October 3rd, 1948 in a small town outside of Poughkeepsie, New York. As a child, he lived within easy walking distance of his grandparents home. As fate would have it, his grandmother was an accomplished piano instructor, and as a result, became his first and best teacher.

According to his family, Gary's musical talents began showing themselves early on. Not only could he sing almost as soon as he could talk, but he also sang perfectly on key. He was blessed with what is commonly called ‘perfect pitch’, or the ability to discern and identify notes precisely as they are heard, without assistance from any other source. This talent ran so deeply that he was able to pass the final exam for "sight-singing" before even starting the first class. In doing so, he was exempted from the entire course.  For those of you unfamiliar with the term "sight-singing", it describes how well and accurately an individual performs a piece of music, having never see the manuscript or score for it beforehand.

The entire family, including Gary's grandparents, moved to Ft. Lauderdale in 1953 when Gary was five. It was not until Gary was eight when he gained access to a piano. His aunts shipped a very unusual spinet piano to him, a piano with only 85 keys where the top key was "A" instead of "C". When Gary's grandmother started his musical instruction in the art of piano, she realized from the outset that he picked up everything at an accelerated rate. She saw that Gary simply could not stop himself from trying to read every piece of music in sight. He prgressed from John Schaum to Rachmaninov and Chopin in a bit over two years. Gary had also developed an affinity for listening to music on records and on the radio since before age five, and at about age nine, he began buying his own records with money he earned doing lawn work for the neighborhood. At about the same time, he began listening to musical works like Franck’s D Minor Symphony, Brahm's Violin Concerto in D (with Nathan Milstein), Wagner overtures and anything by Chopin he could get his hands on. Gary speaks of this:

"We had a recording of the Tchaikovsky Bb Minor Piano Concerto, but when a family friend gave me the famous recording by Horowitz and Toscannini, I threw the other recording in the garbage. When Van Cliburn became a national hero, and most people went nuts over his Tchaikovsky Concerto recording, people gave me strange looks when I said it was boring in comparison to Horowitz’s recording."

By the time he was ten years of age, Gary had already started to chose his own recordings and choosing which music he wanted to play. He was a small child, with hands that could barely stretch an octave when he started to play, but because he at least tried to play works by Chopin, Liszt and Rachmaninov, he forced his hands to extend so that his thumbs and fifth fingers of both hands opened in a virtual straight line. He remained under five feet tall until the beginning of tenth grade, when he shot up ten and ½ inches in the next three years. His hands could now reach anything written for piano and were unusually powerful. This reach and hand strength are gifts that Gary's utilized ever since. At the same time as he was growing physically, he continued to read everything piece of music in sight. When he got Beethoven Sonata books, he played all of them -  he played all the Mozart Sonatas -  he played just about everything written by Chopin. He also tried to read through all of Bach’s Preludes and Fugues.

"I’m sure I murdered many of the notes, and the playing must have been dreadful, but the reading experience helped me develop the ability to learn things almost instantly because of my exploding sight-reading ability."

Because he was self-taught to a large degree – he surpassed his grandmother in playing ability by about age thirteen.

"I developed a very quirky technique that allowed me to master some things that most pianists have terrible trouble with but that also crippled me in other areas. In short, I had an incomplete technique, great for some things, terrible for others."

A local teacher with a good 'reputation' was brought in to help continue the development of Gary's talents. The new teacher was a believer in the teaching method ascribed to by the Guild of Piano Teachers. She also had the annoying habit of making a big deal of the fact that she was a pupil of Harold Bauer.

"Bauer was a fine pianist and a very fine musician, but I doubted this teacher was even close to one of his better students. She – I won’t mention her name – sat on a couch during my lessons, claiming to be getting ‘the big picture’ and failed to write anything of importance in my music or give me any kind of important guidance. She was the worst teacher I ever studied with, and the years with her from about age fourteen to seventeen were completely wasted. "

Gary almost quit his piano studies because of her. However, she may have done him a service through her incompetence, because he was forced to work out all his own problems, find his own fingering, work out technical difficulties, and solve difficult rhythms by himself. These events only served to further his abilities.

In seventh grade, he took up a second instrument, the euphonium (also called baritone horn). He joined his junior high school band and continued to play brass throughout high school and college.

"Playing in concert band is like playing in an orchestra without strings, so I got an invaluable experience in group playing. Playing in a band or orchestra teaches you how to play together with others and how to balance your playing. It gives a pianist a much larger picture of what music is about, and it teaches you how to hold a steady beat better than any metronome."

At the end of high school, the only choice he had for a college was Florida State University, because it was the best school in Florida at that time for music, and it was within his parents’ budget because of its status as a state school.

"We were not poor, but we also were not rich. My piano playing was too erratic to get a large scholarship based on my playing (I did get a small one), and my grades were only a bit above average in high school because I hated school and would have dropped out if I had not been involved in band."

When he arrived at FSU, he was considered a ‘borderline case’.

"I was almost rejected as a piano major – the professors there immediately saw my technical faults – but I was accepted by a hair."

In the next four years, he went from being almost unnoticed to being highly regarded. He quickly caught up with the other pianists, and the faculty discovered that he sight-read better than most of them. He was accepted into the FSU Wind Ensemble and played first chair euphonium in this organization. Later, he was told that he would have to drop brass in order to have the necessary time to spend on piano, but instead of dropping it, he joined three different wind organizations and fulfilled exactly the same performance requirements as his friends who became band directors. So in his senior year, he gave recitals in both piano and euphonium. There was a point at which many thought he was a stronger brass player than pianist.

"I’ve often joked about spending as much time playing pool and tennis as the piano when I was at FSU. Music was easy for me, so I had a ton of time for socializing and just having fun. My musical years at FSU were among the happiest of my life."

Because of his sight-reading ability, he was able to start making money as an accompanist by age fifteen, so at FSU, he paid a lot of his bills accompanying students all the way up to the doctoral level. He also got a scholarship as accompanist for FSU’s Univeristy Singers. By his senior year, he was being encouraged to start entering piano contests, but he simply ran out of money. He also discovered that a degree in music is worth almost nothing in the real world.

"Since music students start immediately in their major, we were allowed to finish our music courses before taking basic study courses, so after I had fulfilled all my music requirements, I was left with basic studies to fulfill, and it was like going back to high school. Reality struck, and this time I did drop out, and although I eventually got that degree, I’ve never needed it and would just as soon use it for toilet paper as hang it on a wall. To me it means nothing."

Few people realize that even first prize in a major piano competition awards relatively very little money, and he already had educational loans to pay off for his undergraduate degree. This is a major reason why he never considered entering piano competitions.

"I decided to teach for awhile in order to see if I could earn a living and perhaps put away enough money to go back to school, but I fell in love with teaching and decided that working with people is much more satisfying than conventional performing. Since I’m much to much of an individualist to work comfortably in any system, I decided to teach privately, a decision I’ve never regretted. Almost everything I’ve learned in my whole life, including the German language, I’ve learned on my own. I hate school and consider the American public school system close to the worst in the world. I loved studying music at FSU, but this was before I had to take those awful basic studies!"

At age 21 or 22 he was somewhat the typical ‘classical music’ snob, but he needed additional income and started playing ‘gigs’ locally to aid with everyday expenses of living. At first he was terrible at playing ‘pop’ music, and for the first time he discovered that taking a simple blues progression and improvising on it demands a skill that he totally lacked. He also discovered that he could read anything that was written out, but he couldn’t read a fake book. All those A’s he made in theory in college were useless, so he had to teach himself how to read a melody and improvise chords. Later he discovered that the ‘pop’ chord notation is infinitely more flexible and useful for seeing the chord structure of any music and works as well for Beethoven as it does for Brubeck.

Gary began branching out, writing arrangements of all sorts of ‘pop’ music, and he began listening to more jazz.

"Today the only kind of music I don't like at all is rap, but since I don’t understand the words in rap, I’m not willing to dismiss it as either worthless or inferior. I simply have no opinion."

Gary's been teaching for almost 30 years. He has continued to work on his own technique, slowly ironing out problems that started when he was a teenager. He went about the arduous task of rebuilding his technique from the ground up. He hasn't not practiced a scale or any kind of exercise since high school, and he believes that any technical problem that must be mastered is contained in at least one famous piano composition, so he uses difficult spots in all the music he owns to keep his fingers in shape and add new skills. He does teach scales, but he teaches them later than most teachers, and he insist that no one should play scales with the hands together until both hands have mastered them separately.

To really get to know Gary D. Lloyd, you have to make mention of his family.

"I’m eternally grateful to my mom and dad for keeping me away from the people who exploit prodigies. If   I had been exposed to a top teacher at age four or five,  I might have been ‘discovered’. But I’d almost surely be miserable and  I would know much less about the world. My grandmother taught me that music was fun, magic, and that there is nothing negative about it. Every page of the books I used with her have a big compliment at the top of the page. I was never forced to practice one minute more than I wanted to, and I had the freedom to spend as much time in high school shooting pool as playing the piano."

The most important person in Gary's life is his wife, because it was with her encouragement that he started getting serious about performing again and by using this very new MIDI technology.

"Without her support, none of the files under my name on the Net would even exist, and I would not be writing this. If you are interested in finding out more about both of us, please visit our web site: Gary's Piano World

Gary's performances are part of the the CMR Permanent Collection, and are featured at several other respected Classical MIDI Websites. Among those are one of my favorites, Les Winter's Classical MIDI Connection, and also Daniel Klebanov's Diskklavier site. Additionally, in order to convey the performance exactly as Gary wishes, The Classical MIDI Resource has posted a performance by Mr. Lloyd of a work captured on an MP3 file, to the CMR MIDImp3 page.  The work is the Paganini Etude No.3 "La Campanella" by Franz Liszt.  Give it a listen.