I began ear training when I was about six months old. My mother was a concert pianist, and she started all of her children with music before they were a year old. Then she began to see that I had a musical gift, and that I should be tutored outside the house, because she didn’t want it to become too much an amateur situation. She wanted it to be objectified. So I started formal piano training when I was four. From there I had little violas, and I had dancing lessons of every sort and description, and painting lessons. German wasn’t taught in the high school, so I had German. And shorthand, in case I ever needed to be a secretary or, if I didn’t need to be a secretary, at least when I went to college I would be able to take all my lectures down verbatim, and then go back and see what the professor had said. That’s the downside of my mother’s education because she made no selections, and she made it seem as though one had a lifetime to do that. That’s not true. A young person has to start making decisions for themselves at a much earlier age than an overbearing parent allows one. I think that in combination with the degree to which a childhood and the ability to socialize was taken away, was eradicated from my life. It was a stiff price to pay for the education that I received. But, you know, six of one, half-a-dozen of another. I have the wherewithal to challenge myself for my entire life. That’s a great gift. The rest of the pieces I work at reassembling for myself.