Sonatina in G on repeat
About six months ago, I started re-learning piano. Now, my relationship with piano is complicated. I never really learned 'properly'. All my sisters had piano lessons, and then I hitched a ride with their teacher, figuratively speaking and had a year or two of lessons in my early teens. The last piece I remember playing was Sonatina in G - don't ask me whose it was. My mother must have got sick of all four of us playing it over the years. However, when it came to my first new lesson, I recalled little or nothing of technique but I did remember the basics of reading sheet music and notation. Now, I could play a bit. As a guitar player, I had learned some basic chord shapes on the piano so I could use my guitar chord books to play songs I liked. I plonked around with little sense of timing but did enough to write the odd tune.
Learning the piano properly has been a revelation - not all good! I feel like I'm learning the grammar of a half-remembered language, as if I'd been born Welsh but had only ever heard my grandmother speaking it. It's everything from the touch, the rhythm - and the insistent patterns that I both decode mechanically - or reach for instinctively. It's a mental process as much as a physical one. There are times when, struggling with a particular passage, I feel like I need to think myself into the right way of playing, almost surrender to something - yet at the same time maintain an absolute clarity of control. It's an astonishing process. Chapeau to my patient teacher, Will, for leading me along this path. But equally, for opening up my enjoyment of the world of the piano. No longer do I simpy respond to a beautiful theme in a sonata; now, I'm listening for other things - a pattern, a shape, or the way a piece declines to follow its obvious path. Now it's a new sort of beauty: simple and complex at the same time. I understand more, but, like all learning have discovered the oceans of ignorance I didn't know existed. The unknown unknowns, if you will, are now the known unknowns!
Deeper well
I sometimes wonder if all learning is like this - but I'm not sure it is. I think learning a language is a useful analogy, but I think that misses something of the physical. Yes, you speak and turn your tongue around the words, and add gesture to your communication, but there is something about the magical process of repetition and melody, of the way even the simplest exercise can have echoes of something - from the nursery song to the symphony, or the blues to the ballad - which penetrates at a more profound level. As Kacey Musgraves sings, 'I've found a deeper well'.
One consequence of learning the piano, is that I am not writing creatively. At least I think it's a consequence. Perhaps it's more of a correlation than causation. Playing the piano fills some of the time I would perhaps have been writing, and like starting a new poem or story, it has the benefit of being new, of there being a sort of honeymoon period where I'm discovering new lands. Of course, this can be true of writing fiction - of finding new characters, plot-lines and fixing on a voice to tell your story in - but I think that quietness of writing, certainly of poetry and prose, makes a difference. With piano there's always a present, physical voice speaking back to you - present in the room for you and everyone else to hear, if they haven't rammed the door shut (family - I'm talking about you).
Backhand compliment
In a strange way, I see playing the piano as being more akin to sport. You learn all the techniques - the angle of the racquet head, the position of the feet, the point of impact, the follow-through, the breath, the set-up for the next shot and the mental agility to see the game as it unravels its own notation across the court. Often, these don't come together: your shot hangs limply and drops weakly over the net or balloons wildly over the fencing. But, at others, everything coheres and your backhand flows in a perfect arc by the side of your body, the ball pinging off the centre of the strings effortlessly, tracing the arc of an ascending and descending scale across the net and past your opponent. In that moment, the physical and the mental collide in a harmony of momentary perfection, which lasts as long as the next bum shot or, in the case of the piano, note.
Whilst I feel proud to call myself a writer, a big part of me would love to add 'musician' to the description. I'm not there yet, but I'll be practising 'Twinkle Twinkle Little Star' until the stars themselves have had enough, and hide their fires. (Actually, just now it's 'Dolce Prelude' and I need to go and practise that difficult descending scale while the left hand bangs out its regular triad of bass notes. Wish me luck.)
Mike Gould, August 2024
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