Lisa Donovan Lukas has been a teacher in the Los Angeles area for 15 years.

Tell us your personal piano story as well as how you chose piano teaching as a career.

I started formal piano lessons when I was about 5 ½, almost 6 years old, and studied classical music with the same teacher until I graduated from high school.  His name was Ed Willumsen and he was an excellent pianist and teacher, and he was also a composer and played popular, contemporary music as well as classical repertoire. As I advanced through classical repertoire, he would also have me play a pop song or a show tune or a standard at the end of the lesson, and he taught me to compose my own original music as well. 

We had a piano in our house when I was really little, because my grandfather (who lived nearby) was a self-taught pianist and lived in an apartment building – and he was getting complaints about the noise…so he moved his piano into my parent’s house.  He would come over and play the piano and he also would make up little ballets that my sister and I would dance around the living room to, all dressed up in my grandmother’s petticoats.  I fell in love with that piano immediately and I remember my mother telling me that when I learned to read books I would have piano lessons as well.My mother was an elementary school teacher and taught 3rd and 4th grade, so she taught me to read before I went to kindergarten, and I remember I just couldn’t wait to learn how to play that piano.  I was very extremely shy and all through my childhood I think I thought of that piano like a best friend.  I just always loved it.I was a music composition major and graduated with a degree in music composition from USC, and I also studied piano while I was there, throughout my college years, and afterward as well.  After college, I continued to study composition and orchestration privately for another 4 years with a film composer and orchestrator named Albert Harris.  And I studied songwriting with Lehman Engel in a workshop called the BMI Musical Theatre Workshop.When I was a teenager, I dreamed of being like Joni Mitchell.  I wanted to sing and write my own songs.  And by the time I got to college, my goal was to be a composer.  During college, I worked as a singing waitress and played the piano and sang in a restaurant, and I also played a lot of piano bar gigs, weddings, restaurants, hotels.After college, I continued studying with my composition teacher, and worked in piano bars and restaurants until I finally got a job in the studios, working as a proofreader and a copyist for film composers.  I loved that work because I had the chance to study musical scores all day long.  I ended up doing that for about 20 years.Even though piano study was such a huge part of my childhood, I never intended to teach piano.  I always wanted to be a composer, and that was my total focus.  Being around music preparation did give me opportunity to write music and have some pieces placed in a film or tv show every so often, so I was always on that path of music composition.But, when my son was about 10, I decided to leave music preparation as my career.  The job could be very intense, lots of deadlines, lots of long days and nights, unpredictable schedules, and I felt I was missing out on my son’s life. So, I thought to myself, well, if I teach piano and work as a piano teacher, I’ll be home more and that will be a better career for me, while my son is young.  I loved music prep so much,