"There was nowhere to go to talk on the phone except in the garage or outside," Lisa recalls.

If you were wondering if it is possible that five children practiced piano all those years without complaint or threatening to quit, the answer is no. Ryan, who once hid for several hours to avoid practice until a familywide search discovered him in a cardboard box, told his parents one day that he might want to quit.

"But when my parents asked me, 'Do you really want to quit?' it hit me," says Ryan. "Wow, I didn't want to quit."

"Who wants to work when you could be outside playing?" Greg says. "We ended up loving it because we started playing so young, and we understood that it was to express emotions through sound and the joy you get with that."

As the kids grew older and piano became more demanding, the Browns discovered there wasn't enough time in the day for five children to practice piano, attend school, do their homework, eat meals and get to bed on time, even after waking up at 4:45 a.m. daily. They were setting school records for tardy slips.

"They didn't have time to be kids," Lisa says.

The Browns turned to home schooling, with Keith and Lisa sharing the teaching duties. They started the day at 6:30 a.m. and were finished with piano and school by mid-afternoon.

"They were free to play," Lisa says.

The Browns were no piano geeks. They liked pop music, sports and school activities. Football was off limits for Greg and Ryan because of the injury risk to their hands, but they played baseball through Pony League, albeit while wearing ski gloves at the plate during the spring piano contest season.

"We were worried about inside pitches," Keith says.

After earning their diplomas, Desirae and Deondra planned to study music at BYU, but on a lark Keith suggested a grander scheme.

"Why not try the conservatories?" he said. The girls scoffed: "We're not good enough. Our teachers say it's really hard."

Keith arranged auditions at the six best conservatories in the country — Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y.; Boston Conservatory; New England Conservatory of Music; Manhattan School of Music; Juilliard; and Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Cleveland — simply hoping that one school would accept both girls.

As the Browns tell it, the other kids who showed up for the auditions were throwing up in the bathroom and doing breathing exercises in the hallway, while the Brown girls were giggling and "joking around," oblivious to the import of the proceedings and the burden of expectation.