An overly detailed history of Howard Yermish

Please note that this page is way too long for general consumption. But if you have an afternoon to kill and are a little bit obsessed, read on. You have been warned. Also note that this is a work in progress.

A Piano Teacher with Vision

My sister was a talented piano player. I wasn’t. I hated to practice the piano because I couldn’t get it to sound like my sister, let alone anything that resembled what I could hear inside my head. We both studied with Annetta Lockhart, a wonderful piano teacher and composer that studied with Vincent Persichetti, not that I realized that when I was seven.

Once Ms. Lockhart realized that I wasn’t going to be practicing, she encouraged me to write my own little pieces to play. This worked for me because I wrote things that my hands could do without much effort, but she made me perform them at the annual piano studio recitals. Eventually, we all realized that the piano wasn’t the instrument for me.

Tolerating Crash Boom Bang

It was either listening to Stewart Copeland of the Police, Tony Williams from Miles Davis albums, or the glorious “Hungry Like the Wolf” by Duran Duran, but something told me that the drums were for me. This is of course every parent’s worst nightmare. So my father made me practice on a lowly practice pad for at least six months while studying with the local music store drum teacher before he would consider bringing an actual drumset into the house. To his astonishment, I stuck to it, which marked the beginning of the Tylenol years for my parents.

Los Angeles

Danielle and I headed cross country, in near record driving time I might add, in the summer of 1994 in my shiny red Saturn SL1.