Poor Kids Don’t Get Pianos: On Music, Class, and Gatekeeping

Let’s be honest: creativity doesn’t cost anything. It starts with a rhythm in your chest, a thought while walking, a lyric you whisper into your sleeve before you forget. It’s free. Natural. But in the music world, creativity alone is never enough. It’s not serious unless you paid for it.

Gatekeepers love to talk about authenticity. They fetishize it, even. They want you to be “real,” “raw,” “from the gut”—but only if that gut has passed through the conservatory, swallowed ten instruments, and come out neatly certified.

It’s funny how authenticity is never allowed to be poor.

I remember my music teacher encouraging me to keep going—said I had something. But when it came to lessons beyond school, there was nothing left to give. Thirty dollars an hour might as well have been three hundred. Most weeks we could barely afford dinner. Music lessons were not a priority. Survival was.

Still, I carried on. Quietly. Messily. No theory books, no exams, no expensive tutors. Just what I could figure out, piece by piece, like patching a boat with string.

Apparently, that disqualifies me.

Because I didn’t earn music the right way.

Because I didn’t suffer in the ways they expect—the elite kind of suffering. The noble kind that ends with a degree, a panel interview, and a job in a system that was never built for people like me in the first place.

It’s exhausting how many people believe music should be difficult for everyone, as if struggle somehow purifies the sound. But let’s be real—what they mean is: music should be difficult for people who didn’t grow up with access to it.

I’ve heard people look down on accessible instruments, on “self-taught” musicians, on anything that breaks tradition. As if music should be a sealed room, not an open field.

But the irony is: creativity thrives in limitation. It thrives when you have nothing, when you’re not supposed to succeed, when the doors were never opened for you.

So no, I don’t play twenty instruments. I didn’t have that luxury. I had silence, and I learned to fill it. I made something out of what I had—like so many others whose names won’t make it into the glossy conservatoire brochures, but whose voices are more authentic than any theory exam could measure.

If music is supposed to be universal, then why do we keep pretending only the privileged deserve to make it?