My 12-year-old stood agape, eyes as big as saucers, as they say. She'd just heard Dad say: "Mom's going to be taking piano lessons". Each of my children has been yoked to involuntary servitude at the piano bench; she finds it incomprehensible that anyone would willingly choose such a fate.
Well, it has been a long time between drinks. I started with a couple of years of lessons in Korea (around the time Neil Armstrong was walking on the moon), but stopped when family circumstances (too many moves, too little money) made it difficult to continue. I kept at it on my own until leaving for college, but didn't get a piano in living quarters again until we bought our Yamaha upright when our first child began her lessons several years ago. Surprisingly, I found that my fingers still worked, and, oddly enough, that my ability to read music had actually improved. About five years ago, I took a stab at starting lessons again, but the combination of infant in the house + dawn-past-dusk job precluded being able to get in a lick of practice, and I gave it up after a few months.
In the past couple of years, I've been able to make more time to feed this obsession that's burned like a lifelong, low-grade fever. There's not one iota of the performer in me, so I don't try to play for others or look to playing as a means of outward expression. Instead, I use it as a way of "close listening", to try to understand why or how a piece manages to push my buttons, whether it's a bit from Schubert's "little" A major sonata:
or from Beethoven's sonata no. 24 (op. 78 in F sharp major; my favorite, although I can play only a few fragments of it):
On the plus side, when the synapses in the brain fire, the fingers listen (aided, no doubt, by decades of daily contact with the typewriter keyboard), and (as a little-known beneficial side effect of years of training and practice in the law) I read music well. On the minus side, I don't play fast or with power; when I play softly, it's watery; and, like an aging actress who insists on the Vaseline-coated camera lens, I tend to leadfoot the pedal to gauze over my lack of legato.
What are my hopes? I'd like to improve technically and to play more expressively, but most of all, I'd like to be able to play without causing the contents of a grave or two in Vienna's Zentralfriedhof to heave and spin.
My first lesson is later today. Will I crash and burn from the anxiety of playing for someone whose job it is, after all, to observe, judge and (constructively) criticize? Will I finally be brought to confront the limits of my skills in the harsh light of day? Will I have acquired more self-taught bad habits than I can unlearn? Is it too late for this old dog to be taught new tricks? Stay tuned.
Scales, scales and more scales with sprinkles of chords and the metronome ticking.
That is how I remember my daily piano practice when I was young. Oh and the sound of my friends playing outside ...
But that was in those Neil Armstrong years as well - maybe it's not done that way these days.
So ... have fun.
Posted by: Mia Goff | June 15, 2005 at 10:11 AM
Good for you! Just don't mention it to Jeff and James. They've been campaigning for years for me to take lessons. "If it is so good for your brain, Mom, ..."
Posted by: Anita | June 15, 2005 at 10:24 AM
Waydago, Chan!
May I recommend Professor Longhair?
J.
Posted by: Julie | June 15, 2005 at 12:05 PM
Congratulations! Have fun, and keep us posted on your progress.
Posted by: JohnL | June 15, 2005 at 12:12 PM
Thanks for the encouragement, everyone. The lesson went very well! I'll be working on the little A major sonata with a teacher whose favorite composer is Schubert...I can barely contain my excitement.
Posted by: Chan S. | June 16, 2005 at 07:20 AM
Good on you! Yip! Yip!
Posted by: Robert the Llama Butcher | June 16, 2005 at 08:43 AM
Excellent!
N.Y. Tourist, to cab driver: How do I get to Carniege hall?
Cab driver: Practice, practice, practice!
Scales can be dreary, but helpful later (as in the Beethoven). Scales and arpeggios, until you can do them while holding an animated conversation. But break up the drills with pieces you like.
Start slow. Play it Largo until you hit every note right, then gradually build to up tempo.
A long time ago, someone asked a concert pianist how she learned to play a particularly difficult piece. She replied, "I learn first the hard parts."
Some people recommend learning a difficult set of measures by thinking of it as setting a bone fracture: play the hard parts over and ovre, then add the measures before and after, over and over.
Once the piece is "in your fingers", then you're as much listening as playing, and then things like phrasing and dynamics will take care of themselves.
Do you know the first movement of the Moonlight? Always a good one to play. Beethoven had a fiendish sense of humor: first movement, fairly easy; second, a lot harder; third, forget it.
Posted by: MikeZ | June 16, 2005 at 01:34 PM
Robert, thank you!
Mike, thanks for the wonderful advice. A freakish quirk of my personality that will serve me in good stead, I think, is that I actually *enjoy* practicing, even scales. The third movement of the Schubert little A is chock-full of scales and arpeggios, so it'll give me quite the workout. And yes, the Moonlight was one of the first Beethoven sonatas I "taught" myself after my lessons stopped way back when--but the first two movements only! When I want to hear the third, I listen on CD to someone who can *actually* play it.
Posted by: Chan S. | June 17, 2005 at 07:13 AM
How wonderful! I hope your first lesson went well. Being able to read music and play an instrument adds immeasurable pleasure to one's life. And I like how you are doing it just for you :)
Posted by: Randa | June 21, 2005 at 09:16 AM
Thanks, Randa. The first lesson was great, and I'm looking forward to (instead of being nervous about) the next one...progress already!
Posted by: Chan S. | June 22, 2005 at 10:08 PM