As promised in the last post, more about patience–this time, on the music front. When I first came back to piano two years ago, I would constantly beat myself up mentally for not being able to play a piece well after a couple of days of practicing. Some people can fake their way through and play pretty decently just by sight-reading, but I’ve never been one of those people. I have to practice the jumps on the keyboard incessantly before I can be sure that my fingers will land in the right places. And even then, it’s never a sure thing.
What changed for me was engaging in the same process I used in writing. I’d learn a piece to the best of my ability at the current moment, then put it aside for a few weeks or months. When I came back to it, there was often a day or two where I had to ease the notes back under my fingers, but suddenly it was there, and I wasn’t thinking about the notes anymore. Instead I was thinking about the important things that differentiate “cookbook playing” from a more authentic and personal musical expression–nuance, dynamics, shading. As my fingers were finally able to fall comfortably on the notes, I had more slack to consider different ways to express the rise and fall of each phrase. Sometimes, especially with some of the technically harder pieces I’m learning, I still came across passages I couldn’t play, but I’d try as best I could to shut off the negative voices and drill some more before putting the piece away again for more simmering.
One of the first pieces I visited on my journey back to piano was Mendelssohn’s Venetian Boat Song #2. This is a fairly easy piece that I first learned somewhere between fourth and sixth grade, but I still had to struggle with all the left hand jumps and the right hand trills. And even when I got the notes down again, I could never count on a foolproof, mistake-free rendition. But recently, especially as my post-collarbone fracture arm still can’t hack too much hard practicing, I’ve pulled it out again after the third or fourth simmer, and voilà, my hands are sailing through and I can just lose myself in the bobbling waves of the canal.
My recovery from the collarbone injury has also taught me a lot about patience. I generally have about 15 good practice minutes under my belt before my arms start to ache, which has meant that learning Chopin’s Nocturne No. 19 in E Minor, a new piece I love and have never played before is taking forever. I can practice one or two phrases at a time, and then I’m tired. And the next day when I go back to the I phrases I thought I learned, I realize they’re still far from smooth. But slowly, this, too, will change. After all, a month ago, I couldn’t even raise my left arm to the height of the piano bench. I’m not one for aphorisms, but whoever said patience was a virtue knows something I’m still learning.
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“An artist needs to be something like a whale swimming with his mouth wide open, absorbing everything until he has what he really needs.”–Romare Beardon
Both have inspired a lot of writing, and watching the awe and wonder with which Manu approaches the world fills me with a poignancy hard to describe without resorting to clichés about both the preciousness and fragility of life, and how one of the most healing things we can do for grief (at least for me) is to continue to practice gratitude and look forward, even as we continue to struggle to make sense of the cracks in our past.
No one expects the audience to have a great musical experience hearing them; yet, this teaches these children early on that they have a voice and what they are saying through their music matters enough for people to listen to them despite their flaws and inexperience. This is an important lesson not only for the children, but for everyone in our goal-oriented society. Our all-or-nothing approach when it comes to fame and accomplishment minimizes the personal sharing of one’s art on whatever “level” it’s at, and amplifies only those who reach the highest bars of success, causing many to quit and abandon their own artistic voices when they realize they’re never going to reach that level.
Yet there’s a subtle beauty to the season, we just have to take a little more time to find it. Poem #29 touched on the varying shades of November: ochre, rust, mauve, sienna, even if at times the month feels like treading shadows. Today, a foggy rain is covering the farm. The autumn leaves, all raked up, are in the shed, eventually to be mixed into the compost to nurture spring’s new growth.
I knew I wasn’t supposed to stop, so I kept playing, making up something that was kind of like the piece, which was also cross-handed and in b minor. As I traveled an unmarked trail through the thicket of the keyboard, I felt the audience’s eyes like the eyes of wild animals in the dark, tracking me until I finally decided I’d had enough and landed on a final b minor chord. I stood up and bowed, waiting in an endless moment of stunned silence until a trickle of applause finally came like a faint drizzle, as I steeled myself to remember to walk, not run, off the stage.