One of the most fabulous gifts my parents ever gave me was piano lessons. I started them in second grade. Once a week, after school, I’d walk across town from the Oxford elementary school, where my mom was a fourth grade teacher — across the bridge that spans the Chenango River — and make my way to my piano teacher’s house. Her last name was Scarlet and she was a Miss. Miss Scarlet. I didn’t know about the other Miss Scarlet yet. My Miss Scarlet lived with her sister, also elderly, also unmarried, in a house that was very still and full of lace and furniture that I didn’t dare touch, barely dared to look at, and her piano was weighted down by the white ceramic busts of composers that, to me, all looked alike, unconnected with anything except their own glossy anonymous whiteness.
Miss Scarlet was the organist of my church and had advocated that our school district teach Latin, so she would tell me what pieces she was going to play at next week’s service and was very pleased when I began taking Latin in high school.
I took piano lessons from her until probably about my junior year, and then I took lessons again in college when I found out I could take them as part of my courseload and actually earn credits for it.
Then, for many years I lived without a piano. Pianos are not suited for an itinerate lifestyle — for living quarters split among students, for moves that seem to come along every six months or so, moves you manage with your own car or maybe the help of a friend with a truck.
Now I have a home in the suburbs — a spot where I’ll be staying for awhile.
It wasn’t easy to pick out a piano, from among the used pianos at the store. I had no idea how to choose. I knew I needed something small, and inexpensive. But it had been so long, at that point, since I’d played (15 years?) that I felt funny even trying them.
But a black Wurlitzer console caught my eye. It was reasonably priced, and the right size.
I played a few keys. I liked its sound. It sounded, to me, like a bigger piano.
Nobody else likes it. The man who tunes it volunteered that he likes a piano with a softer tone. My mother’s console sounds downright muffled in comparison — she doesn’t much care for my piano’s sound, either.
But I love it.
I didn’t play much even after I got the piano, maybe six years ago — I was busy with a preschooler, it was hard to make the time. Then last year I started again a bit more seriously. It was a bit disheartening. I felt I’d lost whatever ease I once had. Then I contracted a frozen shoulder, left side, and between the pain and the loss of mobility I had to give it up.
At long last, now, I am back at it again. And for some reason I’m at a loss to explain, all the old stuff has suddenly come back. I’ll sit down to try a piece I haven’t touched since my early 20s and my hands remember it. They get ahead of me sometimes, I’ll realize I’m playing and with the realization I’ll suddenly lose my place and sit there laughing at myself.
And the piano’s sound: yes, it’s loud. It’s a ringing tone, it’s loud, it’s brash, brassy. But I love it. I love what I can do with the dynamic range. I love that I can ham it up. I was playing Gonoud’s Funeral March of a Marionette tonight, and it’s like I never connected with the piece before — I can remember that it used to bore me, I’d play it part way, then get bored. But not with this piano. This piano is somehow letting me find what this piece is about, the peculiar, precise hard drama of it.
I’m not a performer — I’ve never liked playing for people. But what I do love is to work up my own emotional response, and my little piano lets me do it.
Aaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhh.
I love my piano.
(Btw, this is interesting: an abstract of a study that compares the auditory response to “pure tones” vs. piano tones. Piano tones elicit the stronger response . . .)
