One day when I was a small child, my family acquired a strange new piece of furniture. I quickly became fascinated by it and later learned that the huge wooden object was called an "upright piano." At the time, I generally slept very little, often only three or four hours — sometimes less — and yet I had a bedtime, of course. When my father came home from work, generally after I had been put to bed, he would sometimes unwind by plucking his way through a few simple tunes. I particularly remember "Over the Rainbow" and one of my great favorites, "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes." I would pretend that his playing was keeping me awake and go see him. He never got mad at me for being out of bed, and I'd join him to pluck out these tunes. It was a sunny thing in my childhood.

Eventually, I started lessons with a well-meaning local teacher. I loved the sound of the piano, and I loved the process of playing. What I wasn't fond of at the time was, first, the great discipline, and second, even worse: the repertoire! I hated playing piano pieces with "lyrics" like "See the bee, it goes 'wee,' as it travels through the trees." I have few deep regrets in life, but one of them is that I stopped studying piano for many years, not really taking it up with anything like seriousness again until I was in my late teens.

Had I known about and had access to things like Stravinsky's "Five Fingers" or that most celebrated of collections, Bartók's Mikrokosmos, things might have been different. The latter, this month's CCM, is comprised of over 150 gradated etudes, in six volumes. The works start very simply – simple enough for a child to play – and conclude with a series of fairly flashy works, certainly worthy of concert-hall performance. This month's clip is of one of the tamer, "flashy" works.