by krisis
memories
Pennies
I used to have this dream when i was sick that i entitled “the penny dream.” It would have been more aptly titled “the repetitive stress disorder” dream, or more colloquially “the Chinese water torture” dream, and maybe now you get the idea.
In the dream there was a set of balanced scales, and on one scale would be something improbably heavy, like a refridgerator, or a Buick. On the other scale, its weight would be ticked off by pennies steadily dispensed by some unseen hand. And, though the scales were large, inevitably as we approached the actual weight of the thing, one of the pennies would land just so that it sent dozens of other pennies cascading off of the scale, leaving me even further away from equalling the weight of the elephant or RV on the other side.
Any run of the penny dream that made it to the penny cascade more than twice almost always ended with naseau. Which brings me to today’s topic: the Hanon Exercises. Charles-Louis Hanon, evil genius and bane of piano students everywhere, penned The Virtuoso Pianist in 60 Exercises, a series of repetitive runs, arpeggios, and trills meant to strengthen all of the bits of the hand that are typically weak and lifeless.
Fine in concept, but then you merrily unwrap the book from its swoosh encoded box from Amazon to discover that past the first few exercises, just reading the exercise is going to be an exercise. And, furthermore, what looks like a fairly simple sequence with one or two skipped keys is actually the slow penny-dream-like torture of your pinky finger, until at the end of the first time you make it through four repetitions without hitting a stray note (for me, about forty minutes of warming up) and your pinky stretchs for the last perfect bass C you think, “yes, i will actually vomit on this casio fully weighted, graded, lifelike keyboard if i have to push down that key with my pinky.”
It’s after i reach that point with Hanon that i moved into the Bach, staying to the blessedly non-accidental keys and playing at approximately one eleventh of the speed that a professional player plays the exercises at, because professional players read eleventy times faster than i do. (Actually, i’ve discovered that if i’m allowed one run through a measure to screw it up i can usually do it correctly the second time, which means all of my Bach practices run doubly long, but i’m getting much surer much quicker than i expected to).
And, if i managed to get through the Bach relatively in one piece and with most of my dinner still intact, along with my pinky finger and my sanity then, depending on my mood and level of death-defying counting skills, i either play Tori Amos or Radiohead.
I don’t know if i could have ever really endured these piano-practice pennies as a child – i had a lot of patience, but not a lot of endurance, if that makes any sense. As an adult i realize that, occasionally, something tortorous is in my best interests.
Ivory Towering
At some point in an early childhood filled with US history flashcards and learning math from Monopoly my mother realized that i was just as precociously intelligent as she had hoped i would be when she started those Better Baby Institute classes as a pregnant woman just barely having her quarter life crisis.
As much as this development affirmed her tireless educational exercises (starting with painting my room with the B.B.I.’s specified shapes and colors), it also meant she would have to redouble her efforts for the future in making sure she kept me on a strict schedule of constant didacticism. Her two-pronged assault on my four-year old world was a holistic one. By day i was enrolled in a Montessori school, and by night i was intended to begin my instruction on the violin.
This latter initiative turned out to be a spectacular failure. My mother, lacking in any prior musical experience in her entire extended family, just couldn’t grasp what was wrong. She brought me to the lessons in some nice woman’s comfortable living room. She made the violin available to me at the prescribed rehearsal times.
What she could not comprehend is that i had no relationship with this instrument i was supposed to be growing to love. Why a stringed instrument rather than a wind, or why not enroll me in a boy’s choir since i was hopelessly enamored with singing along to Jem tapes in the back seat on long car rides? I didn’t understand why this awful wooden box full of shrillness had been imposed upon me then, and i still don’t. I viewed my lessons as thinly veiled torture for some unknown crime, and at home i would scowl at the instrument tucked away in its case above the china closet.
(Why was it above the china closet? What harm could have come in letting me play around with it (as, i believe, is suggested by current pedagogical theory)? Maybe i might have liked it.)
I remember the whole violin experience as snapshots right up through my last lesson, which i remember in silent 8mm verité. We arrived in the instructor’s homey living room, and my mother informed the woman that i would no longer be studying violin, and she clucked in disappointment. What to do, then, with this last lesson? She was clucking, but i already knew the answer.
Her piano, upright, against the wall just through the arch into the next room. At every lesson i would stare over the see-sawing of my bow as it squeaked out nursery rhymes at the stately wooden bench and covered keys. On this occasion the keys were uncovered (from a prior lesson?), and as she spoke with my mother i wandered over to the piano. So, my last violin lesson was my first and only piano lesson. As the frames of the memory flicker and fade i can almost hear her words, “and this one is called ‘middle C’. Go on, you can play it.”
The piano subject was oft-pursued with my mother from that day forward, but she always held the party line that it was too expensive a thing to accomodate given the chance that i might just carelessly give up on it, the way i did the violin.
I could be imagining it, but i recall a sort of cruelness beneath this reasoning – as if she was upset at her first failure in the path to rendering me a perfectly rounded child and refused to accept that i had some alternate plan for myself.
(The first in a long line of our stubborn standoffs, which are best exemplified by the time in ninth grade when i locked myself in our car so i couldn’t be taken to get a haircut, as i wanted mine to grow long.)
Playing our new digital piano all day today produced a bittersweet satisfaction. Here, two decades later, and i finally have a full-sized keyboard in my own home. Aged twenty-four and i am playing the same “Mary Had a Little Lamb” exercises i once bowed on my lap on that violin, but finally on the instrument i’ve always coveted and prefered.
Sometimes i wonder: what if somehow my mother conjured up a piano for me to play when i was four years old? Would i have begun lessons and quickly given them up as being too tedious, just as i did for the violin (and, eventually, guitar)? Or, would i have been completey entranced by the instrument, as i was today? Would i have kept at it? Did i have some natural, predisposed love and talent for music that would have ben unlocked then, rather than in some diminished form a decade later when i received my first guitar? Could i have perhaps eventually becoming my own Rufus Wainwright or Tori Amos, effortlessly mingling classical conventions with catchy melodies?
I am upset about that possible lost potential, but that alternate reality is one of my many schrodinger’s cat pasts, equally full of a virtuosic me and one whose skills are simply dead in the box.
As much as i like to think the best of myself, maybe it’s better not to glimpse into that world. Better to just believe in what i want to do, and to learn it the best that i can.
With All The Resolve I’ve Had
In the subway they were all doppelgangers, or perhaps zombie invaders. Each one, be-suited or bedraggled per normal routine, but additionally distorted in a sort of post-holiday-euphoria crash. Not enough leftover cold turkey sandwiches and big ticket gifts to sustain the serotonin levels. Too many overzealous resolutions already dashed against the cold ground of winter.
I find myself subconsciously deferring to other people’s resolutions, as if by osmosis. (No, i will not eat that cookie if you won’t eat that cookie either.) Really, i think i am still too self-satisfied about keeping my 2004 resolution running to bother making any other ones.
In any event, i resolve things all the time. On one sleepless evening in seventh grade i resolved that starting the next day i would be incredibly attractive. So much so that i would be irresistible to all thirteen (and possibly fourteen) year old girls to cross my path. I attempted to plot my means of attracting them as i drifted off to sleep, but the next day i was the same, simple me.
I lose count of how many times in any given year i resolve to become more attractive, or more practiced, or more active – no need to artificially inflate the total so early on in the proceedings.
If only i could have fast-forwarded my frumpy seventh-grade clock forward a decade i would have realized that all that stood between me and the hearts of tweenagers everywhere were a few well-placed acoustic Kelly Clarkson cover songs.
Looking Up to Something
Having never had siblings I always feel a little awkward with Elise’s brother. On one hand I completely identify with him, because he’s dragged around to adult-stuff all the time and all he really wants to be doing is reading or playing a video game. On the other, what could some twenty-something year-old have said or done for me to cheer me up on all of those occasions of my youth?
Elise and I brainstorm sometimes about finding him some cool teenagery hobby; she had batted around drumming and web design for a while, but neither really went anywhere. So, imagine our surprise last night when Elise’s mother remarked as we approached her truck, “You’ll have to squeeze into the front; the bass is in the back.” Apparently Elise’s little brother (who, incidentally, is now about as tall as we are) got an electric bass over the summer.
When we returned to our house the four us us sat around chatting and catching up and, much as I’ll play guitar through any conversation just for the sake of playing guitar, out came the bass. However, it was out of tune from bouncing around in the back seat. Tuning isn’t a problem in our house, considering Elise and I are both in-tune-freaks and own four tuners between the two of us.
While her brother proceeded to tune up and noodle I fetched a guitar with broken strings and fixed it up. Once I was restrung I began to quietly follow along with his noodling. I thought I recognized the song, but I wasn’t sure. Not wanting to embarrass him, I waited until Elise and her mother headed upstairs to examine something in the bathroom.
“Is that ‘Seven Nation Army’?”
“Yeah, but internet tabs are always wrong,” he grumped.
“Yeah, they suck. It’s better to trust a site that specializes in one artist, especially for bass, because random people never really know what positions or techniques a certain player tends to use. Do you know what Occam’s Razor is?
He gave a half-wince of understanding.
“It’s the idea that the simplest explanation is almost always the best one. So, the simplest way for that bass player to play the song is probably the right way to play it.”
(Elise, passing through (or was it later?) commented: “Yeah, like Dave Matthews will always play something in in the most obscure possible way, but Ani will will do it the easiest.” I smirked, and inexplicably failed to also include Joni Mitchell in our comparison.)
“Well, let me hear it.”
He did, and it became apparent that there was a slightly easier and more-correct way to play it. And, since Jack White isn’t necessary a king of bass-playing technique, I didn’t really have qualms about changing up the positions to make it a little simpler.
“Hey, hold on, I have that record.”
Over to the CD collection I bounced, and back I came with Elephant. We listened to the song and i immediately realized that his riff was transposed by a fourth (effectively, a string) – easily fixed. And, then, ten minutes after playing a bad internet transcription in the wrong key he was playing along to the song! I pointed out the quick walkup at the end of the verses and then improvised some chords to accompany him (since the whole song is almost all bassline and guitar solo).
Elise and her mother came down at about this point, both looking somewhat bemused at the White Stripes jam that has sprung up in our living room. Later he told me the other song he was learning was “Money.” I told him I had that too, and that I was impressed, because it’s notoriously in a weird time signature. I put it on, but just listened; my brain doesn’t have the higher level functions required to count upbeat guitar stabs in 7/8. He was pretty good at it.
(Aside: Elise, her brother, and their sister all have ridiculous natural musical aptitude, which always makes me wish I had grown up in more musical family. More musical, I mean, than lip-synching Madonna into hairbrushes and sporadically breaking out into “Let The Good Times Roll” in the kitchen, both of which traits came from my father’s side.)
I’m really happy to have found a connection with Elise’s brother, and even happier to have gotten to be the cool older kid instead of the unspeakably geeky one, if only for once. Before he left I tabbed out the version we worked out and slipped it into his bag along with a copy of Elephant and White Blood Cells.
I bet I would have been a cool older brother.