Lessons in Music and in Social Nomrs

Like other people who wrote about music, I also feel that it is one of the central ideas in the book. The narrator had natural musical skills which his mother decided to enhance by arranging for him to take lessons. Later in the book, when he goes to the "Club" for the first time and hears ragtime music, he mentions that the player hadn't had any lessons and was a natural musician, just as he used to be. He wonders what would have happened to the player had he been trained and comes to the conclusion that he would never had accomplished anything great. You need to be "unpolished" and free to be a great musician. That reminded me of the narrator, as a child, how he was "trained" to feel black and to see himself as different from white people. He could never again be free because he has accepted the norms of society just as most musicians accept the right way to play music. That made me think how we are only true to ourselves if we haven't been taught how to be what other people expect us to be. Which brings me back to something the narrator said about his music before he started taking lessons: "I remember that I had a particular fondness for the black keys." I thought this was interesting because at this point he didn't know he was black, and he had an attraction to the color. The "I remember" part makes it sound like a distant nostalgic memory of the time when he still hadn't realized the negativity associated with that color, the time when he was free to enjoy life and the variety it offers without worrying about artificial labels put by society.