How did you develop a taste for both music and piano? Jean-Jacques Bedikian: Simply in the family context. My father liked to gather at home friends or relatives who were amateur musicians, and he enjoyed these improvised concerts which took a large part of traditional, popular, or film music, as well as the classical repertoire. I would stay up as late as possible to listen, I would even wake back up to do so, and this is how the first contact with music took place, and also the awakening of the desire to get my hands on the piano keys. In fact, when I heard a piece of music that moved me, I would try to play it, without having taken any lessons, to replicate first the melody, then a semblance of a harmonic framework. So I had the desire to learn the piano, which is why I was introduced to my first teacher. She asked me if I knew how to play anything, and without apprehension, I played by ear the main theme from the music of Nino Rota’s Godfather and the Waltz from Dmitri Shostakovich’s Jazz Suite No. 2. She accepted me as a student, and then prepared me for the entrance exam to the Marseille Conservatory.
