Utahn's classical piano training led to musically varied life, profession

If anyone seemed born to play the piano, it was Anne-Marie Hildebrandt.

"I started taking piano lessons at age 3," Hildebrandt says. "They tell me I started begging for them a year before that. Early on, I was pegged as a 'piano person.' I took lessons from good teachers. I got up at 4:30 and practiced for four or five hours a day."

She wanted to be a classical pianist. "My entire identity revolved around that." She studied hard, she got accepted at Juilliard, she studied harder.

And then — halfway through her studies — it all changed.

"I realized I didn't want to be a classical pianist anymore," she says. "I didn't like all the pressure. I didn't like the competitions. I preferred the idea of music for enjoyment."

She studied ear-training — methods of understanding the aural language of music that not only help students play by ear, but also improve their abilities to sight-read and play music — which she ended up teaching for five years at Juilliard.

Hildebrandt began exploring her passion for traditional Irish music.

She already had a harp. While growing up in Washington, D.C., she had noticed a Celtic harp in the window of a music store. "It wasn't anything I felt I could ask for but I visited it for two years. My Dad finally got it for me for my 18th birthday."

She taught herself how to play it, and then picked up an Irish fiddle, as well.

Then she moved to New York and began to play folk guitar on "the cocktail circuit" — at parties and other events. She got into jazz. She was called as choir director for her Manhattan LDS ward. "And I started writing choral arrangements.

"I actually wrote my first spiritual song when I was 14. I was at a workshop at BYU, and it came to me in the middle of the night. I couldn't turn on the lights in my bedroom, so I went to the bathroom to write it down."

What all this means, says Hildebrandt, is that "it took me a long time to define myself as a musician. I have so many interests. I've been waiting to see what I could do with all the skills I've collected."

Now living in Sandy, one thing she does is teach — not only ear-training, but also fiddle, voice and piano.