Hello friends! It’s been so long - how are you? I’d love to hear from you, just reply to this note and let me know what’s new. I’m currently hiding from my children whose school was cancelled due to the extreme cold. In MY DAY…
I took a seat next to my 10-year-old child and admired the lineup of little girls on my piano teacher’s plush couch: a puff of blonde frizz pinned back with fat purple and blue flowers, layers of tulle under a shiny purple skirt, a minidress of red, pink, and white checks glinting with metallic thread, ponytails swinging. They giggled and teased each other, legs sticking straight out from their seats, no sign of the creeping dread that I - their peer in piano - was feeling a few seats over.
I started learning piano about a year and a half ago. Until that fall, I hadn’t ever picked up an instrument, really, other than to mess around or hand one to someone else. I love music, but save some fantasies about belting out jazz standards on top of a piano a la Michelle Pfeiffer in The Fabulous Baker Boys, I never saw myself as someone who made music. Like many people in this stage of life, though, I’ve been questioning the stories I’ve absorbed and told myself about what I could or couldn’t, should or shouldn’t do with my one wild and precious life. So when a spot in my kids’ teachers’s schedule opened, I took it.
The first time I played a version of Ode to Joy adapted for adult beginners, I cried. Wait! I am someone who plays music? What does that mean about every other tale I’ve told myself about myself?
For the past 16 months I’ve plunked along, building knowledge and confidence one adapted classical standard at a time. It’s among the most humbling exercises I’ve ever taken on, in part because the outcomes are predictable. If I practice consistently, I’ll progress. If I let life elbow piano time deep into the margins, I’ll stall, maybe even go backward. Either way, the progress - as glacial as it is - is up to me.
A friend recently gave me a book called How to Write One Song, by Jeff Tweedy from Wilco. There are some cool exercises for playing around with language (more emphasis on lyrics than music, this book), but the main gist is: show up. Want to write a song? Listen to a lot of music, then sit down and mess around with words. Make it a habit. Want to channel Jon Batiste for someone you love? Sit down and mess around on the piano every day. Make it a practice. Invite inspiration in on a regular basis - don’t wait for it to come to you. Make the process itself one of your goals. Sigh - the advice is the advice is the advice.
A year ago, I sat down for my very first piano recital. Sandwiched in the lineup between elementary school students, I didn’t feel my nerves until I faced the grand piano in a cavernous church sanctuary our teacher had lined up for the event. I took my seat, and my brain and body parted ways. My neurons couldn’t send the message to my fingers to move to the right keys and play the right tune. The sheet music was an unknown cipher. I bluffed, butchered, bungled my way through the songs. Shame prickled my scalp. I caught a piteous look from someone’s grandmother. The feeling I’ve been trying to avoid my entire adult life - the mortification specific to public failure - sat on my chest like an ogre’s turd.
Oh the internal drama! I boycotted the next recital. When I downloaded sheet music for After the Goldrush by Neil Young, my teacher looked at me with bemused patience. I learned that in order to really learn a new song, first you have to play the notes in the treble alone, slowly, until you can flow a bit. Then you do the same with the bass notes. Only when you’re solid with both can you play with both hands together, and then it’s gonna be bad for a while.
And so you suck, and repeat the sucking. You take it bar by bar, so slowly the song doesn’t even sound like a song. Gradually, you start to hear and play the relationship between the individual notes and flow through the whole thing in an approximation of the way it was written.
And that’s just the beginning. You can know the notes, know where to put your fingers, and follow a tune, but there’s a point in the process where you internalize the music - learn it by heart. It’s memorization with embodiment, which you can see in people who are really at home with the instrument. They play with their fingers of course, but really with their whole bodies. Heads and necks, shoulders and arms, backs, legs, even feet. As a beginner, getting to that point of mind-body connection is one goal, only attainable, ugh, through lots of practice and process.
When it was my turn in this year’s piano recital, I sat down and right away, my hands started shaking. I knew my song so well - I’d been practicing it almost daily for three months. I’d played it ten times that morning, just to let it sink in even further. I took a long breath, and began. When I missed a note, instead of letting my brain take over and freeze me, I slowed down. When I played the wrong notes in one section, I paused, breathed, and continued. Despite a few obvious mistakes, I managed not to choke - and I played a song almost by heart.
And then I watched while more advanced students made mistakes, slowed themselves down to get centered, and continued. Turns out, plenty of people mess up in a recital, not just the melodramatic ones :)
To me, the real progress was not just playing a song better than I had the year before. It was trusting my ability enough not to worry if I hit the wrong note or fat-fingered a couple of keys; in having the confidence to slow down when I needed to.
When in doubt, slow down - it’s something I say to my kids (and myself) all the time now. It’s not a new insight in this world, but it doesn’t come easy - in piano or in life - especially not in a culture fixated on speed and outcomes and especially not when you’re trying to master a skill. Whenever I feel a song start to click into my muscle memory, my first instinct is to push on the pace. This, invariably, doesn’t do much for my mastery of the music.
Whether we’re learning a language, writing essays, making love, having hard conversations, playing a new song, cooking from a new recipe, building an organization, growing into a relationship, or whatever we’re learning, if we take it slow and allow ourselves to sink into the process, I think our chances of finding satisfaction - whether that’s in the process itself or in a more exciting, delicious, or durable outcome - are that much higher.
And then we can begin again, and again and again and again.
XO,
L.
ps - Loved this read from Griefbacon: There is not one thing in the world that you can love enough to hold it fixed forever in the form in which you first loved it.
I loved this! Going to steal my husband’s copy of “How to Write One Song” from his nightstand now... (and my son’s namesake is Neil Young, we’re big fans of his too!)