Category Archives: piano

Getting to Carnegie Hall

Posted on by
Reply

Today my mother turns 90!

While I have many reasons to be grateful in my life, one of my biggest sources of gratitude is having healthy parents who are still enjoying and making the most of their later years. My mom–and my dad, who is 92–are cultural aficionados. They love going to Carnegie Hall and Broadway. In fact, often when I announce my plans to come into New York, they search for tickets to something they think I would enjoy. In their eyes, tickets are one of the best forms of showing love.

The COVID years were hard for them. “It’s like jail!” my father would grumble. But as vaccinations have become abundant and restrictions have relaxed, they’re out in the world again.

© Jorge Royan / http://www.royan.com.ar

How do they get to Carnegie Hall? I know you’re thinking–practice! But they’ve paid their family musical dues and don’t need to practice any more. They take the subway–about a 30-minute ride. That they’re still able to do this is a wonderful privilege for people in their 90s, but when I mention it my mother looks confused. How else would we get there? she asks.

When I wrote my memoir, Imperfect Pitch, about the generational baggage of coming from a family of musicians and my struggle to meet what I perceived as a family expectation to be the next in a line of musical “prodigies,” I was pretty nervous about sharing the book with my parents. Not everything in the book I wrote about them was complimentary (LOL). But I realized, as I delved into the material, that they were just as much victims of the generational expectations as perpetrators. Like me, my parents both played music through high school, but didn’t have the ability–or (unlike me) the desire–to play professionally. And also unlike me, both of them accepted their limitations and went on with their lives, getting their “musical fixes” at Carnegie Hall, rather than from their own playing.

While I had a much harder time letting myself off the hook for not being able to play better than I could, I also moved on to my own life, spilling my creative passions into writing. But in 2020, my way of dealing with “COVID jail” was to return to the piano bench–tentatively at first, with a lot of finger stumbles and tears–and now, with a fluidity that pleases me. Even if I’m never going to win accolades for performing music, I’m happy to spend around 30 minutes every evening (the same amount of time it takes my parents to get to Carnegie Hall) to play for an audience of one–me! This is another thing that I’m profoundly grateful for.

And a final note of gratitude: when my parents did read my book, my mother said, I think this book will be very helpful to people in our family. We’ve gone through many birthdays together, and seen many shows at Carnegie Hall, but of all the gifts I’ve received, this affirmation is the one I cherish the most.

Happy birthday, Mom!

Subscribe at ddinafriedman.substack.com

Poem Wrestling

Posted on by
Reply

Today I completed Poem #30 for the 30 Poems in November fundraiser for the Center for New Americans–a day ahead of schedule, Whew!

Since tomorrow is still November, I may attempt a final poem. Usually, I like to write a cento (a collage poem using lines from other poems) from all the poems offered as prompts over the month. That will enable me to drop a poem that’s not working when I compile my collection of 30, kind of like having the option to eliminate the lowest grade on a series of quizzes!

Of course, at this point, many of these baby poem-drafts aren’t working too well, and getting rid of only one won’t solve that problem. That’s where poem-wrestling comes in. My December writing focus will be on honing these poems into a shape I can share with those who donated to the fundraiser without being too embarrassed about them, even though most of them will still be far from my perfectionist standards.

But perhaps, part of this practice is also about being more comfortable showing my flaws in public–as I did, last weekend when I was asked to be part of the rotation of family musicians and play five minutes of background music on the piano for the appetizer hour of my nephew’s wedding celebration. I NEVER play the piano in front of other people, as those who are familiar my journey back to claiming my piano-playing past (which I wrote about in my not-yet-published memoir, Imperfect Pitch) already know. But I said yes, because I’m loyal to my family and my brother assured me no one would be listening. So, here I was, first on the list of the family players approaching the ivory among the (thank heavens) rising din of chatter. I pretended I was alone and played the pieces I’d prepared, even adding a little klezmer-inspired tune I’d composed on the spot the day before when humming to my grandchild to get him to take a nap.

I actually had fun, because I really was able to play as if I were alone in the room. And I think that’s what I’m going to have to do as I wrestle these 30 poems–pretend I’m alone in the room and see where they want to go without thinking too much about the added pressure of having to share them.

What will poem wrestling entail? Many things, but briefly–zeroing in on what the poem is really about and then thinking about whether each image builds on that or feels like a random aside. Also, looking closely at language and form: how do the words sound on the page. I play a lot with rhythm and repetition of sound patterns. I also look for places I can improve enjambments or use space more strategically.

And because I’m a perfectionist, I’m often writing 3 or 4 or 5 versions of each poem, then letting a version sit for a couple of days before reviewing it. Sometimes I’m so bemused by what I’ve done as in that funny Christine Lavin song, What Was I Thinking, I go back to an earlier version.

And as the days of December wane and my deadline for sending the poems to donors looms, like the cat hesitating at the open door, (an image in the poem I wrote today) I’ll just have to go bravely into the headwind.

 

 

Back to Bach

Posted on by
Reply

On January 6, 2021, as reports from the Capitol insurrection filtered through the news channels and my social media feeds, I sat at the piano and worked through Bach’s Italian Concerto, note by endless note. Playing enabled me to return to breath, lassoing my mind away from the pictures and videos that were plastering the news. And Bach had an order that could be anticipated, a calming hand on my shoulder saying things would be okay.

As my social media feeds heat up again with the war in the Middle East and I find myself holding the pain, fear, and anger of people I love–whose perspectives range from strongly pro-Israel to strongly pro-Palestine–I find myself back at the piano with Bach. This time, I’m trying to learn a fugue. While I can take some pleasure in seeing how far I’ve progressed in my piano skills–especially when I take time off note-learning to play the Italian Concerto and see how smoothly it’s sailing through my fingers–the bigger issue that gnaws at me is how we as human beings can ever pursue paths of peace.

I have no answers to that (even though the ever self-chiding part of me thinks I should) but I keep coming back to Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s TED talk, The Dangers of a Single Story. Someone with a pro-Israel perspective is going to tell a very different story of the situation from someone with a pro-Palestine perspective, and each will be influenced by their own experience and values. Since the situation is so complicated, there will be truth in both versions–as well as in the many versions and perspectives that lie somewhere in between.

In fiction writing, a common character development exercise is to switch the point of view. It’s amazing how much you can learn when you suddenly assign the narration to a different character in the action. In the process of deeply inhabiting someone else’s mind, you discover what previous experiences shaped them, and what’s at stake for them as a result. Taking the time to understand your story from another character’s point of view also helps to make sure you don’t develop flat one-sided characters, and that you understand and are able to project the humanity in your chosen “villains.”

My hope is that wherever we are, we can take a step back from ourselves and see the very real emotions this conflict has raised for everyone involved in it. And to also take a moment–or many moments–to mourn for everyone, especially the children, who have been hurt or killed, regardless of which side they come from. I’ve felt a glimmer of hope from learning about a group called Standing Together, an Israeli grassroots movement pursuing “peace and independence for Israelis and Palestinians, full equality for all citizens, and true social, economic, and environmental justice,” who warn of the dangers of choosing only “one side” of the story to cling to.

So, as I go back to the fugue, I’m going to try to amplify the different voices as best as I’m able to bring them out. And hope that maybe some time in the future, the voices in Israel/Palestine, while still contrapuntal, will resolve from dissonance into harmony. It’s a dream, I know, but as the people in Standing Together say, “where there is struggle, there is hope.”

Vulnerability, Writer’s Block, and Performance Anxiety

Posted on by
2

I’ve fallen in love with a new Chopin Nocturne I’m learning, Op. 9, No. 2. There are a few different versions of this on youtube, but my favorite is this one by Tiffany Poon. Sometimes it’s hard to listen to professional pianists play the pieces I’m learning, as they remind me, even after I get the basics down, how far away I am from ever playing with such fluidity and ease.

A friend of mine who is co-authoring a book I’m editing writes about his past experience with writers block: I labored under the mistaken notion that writing was a gift from the muse, he says. You either had that gift or you didn’t–and obviously and sadly, I wasn’t one of the chosen few. This is how I feel about piano, except that when I was a child my parents and extended family led me to believe that because I had perfect pitch, I was one of the chosen few. But I couldn’t actualize “that gift” because my fingers were never as good as my ear, especially in a performance setting. I played exactly one piano recital when I was nine–a special concert for “teachers’ best pupils” in a fancy hall in New York City–and it was an unqualified disaster, as I wrote about in detail in an earlier post: Reframing a Past Mess-Up.

I want to feel that spending the last three years returning to piano, a process that has required not only frequent practicing but also a deep dive into my family history in order to decode and defuse a long line of harmful generational messages, would put me past some of my performance anxiety. However, I don’t play the piano if anyone other than my husband, Shel, is in the house. (And if he went out more, I’d probably wait until he was gone, as well.) Even as I’ve managed to turn the screech of my inner music critic down to a low murmur and generate enjoyment from my own flawed renditions, I’m terrified of anyone else’s judgment. So, it was an odd leap of faith to impulsively ask my visiting younger child, Raf–who is a professional musician, nonetheless–if they wanted to hear this new piece I loved and was in the middle of learning. I could do this–even if it made me more vulnerable, I told myself.

How wrong I was.

Man sitting on a chair covering his ears. Earworm concept, also know as brainworm, sticky music, or stuck song syndrome. <a href=”https://depositphotos.com/vector-images/places.html”>Earworm Concept. Man Sitting on a Chair Covering His Ears. – depositphotos.com</a>

Even though I could already play the piece decently with just a few rough spots, knowing Raf was listening made me miss the easy notes as well as the hard ones. My baseline totally fell apart and it seemed to be a matter of chance as to whether I was going to hit the right chords or the wrong ones. Keep playing! I told myself, even as I could barely breathe. Focus on the expression–why you love this piece. Somehow, I managed to finesse the melody, finally landing pianissimo on the last few chords, their soft reverberations calming my shaky insides.

It will be a long time before I do that again, I said to myself. But something had shifted. Unlike the time I was nine, the minute I stood up and walked away from the piano bench, I left the incident behind me. My inner critic didn’t take this little blip as a chance to screech with delight. It stayed at its current murmuring level, which I could easily drown out the next time I tackled the Chopin.

My friend writes about writers’ block, Now I accept without pain that I am a reasonably competent writer. I don’t need to be special in order to enjoy the writing I produce. While I prefer to use “aspiring,” rather than “reasonably competent” to describe my musicianship, the last sentence rings true. I don’t need to be special in order to enjoy my piano playing. Even if I may not be ready to play for others very often–or at all; for myself, I can play well enough to express what’s in my heart. And in any art we might pursue at whatever level we might be at, that’s what should matter–whether or not we choose to make ourselves vulnerable by sharing.

To subscribe, sign up at ddinafriedman.substack.com

 

 

A Writer is Someone Who Writes

Posted on by
Reply

One of the most annoying questions people ask me when I say that I’m a writer is, What have you published? While I can counter that parry because I’ve published a lot (two novels from major houses, upcoming short story collection from a smaller press, poetry chapbook, and numerous poems, stories, articles and essays in newspapers and literary journals) I don’t consider myself any more or less of a writer than someone who hasn’t published.

As my writing mentor, the late Pat Schneider, founder of Amherst Writers & Artists put it: A writer is someone who writes. Period.

If you are driven to put words on paper to try to make sense of your inner and/or outer worlds, or because there’s something inside you that you are driving to express, you are a writer. And what you have to say matters.

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t strive to make the pieces you write more vivid compelling, clear, unique, original, and powerful. When I play the piano, I have no need to be in a musical spotlight, I just want an outlet to express the deep feelings the music holds within. But it’s still important for me to drill and practice so I can do this more effectively. There are many craft elements from conceptualizing a book-length project to writing a perfect sentence that are absolutely essential to learn and practice, even if they take a lifetime to master, or even if we can never fully master them. This likely means that, like me, you may have days or weeks or months of metaphorically banging your head against the wall trying to wrestle your incoherent thoughts into a pattern of words that flows smoothly on the page. That’s what makes you a writer–not whether some public entity casts a yay or nay on whatever you ultimately offer them.

Being published is a choice. (At least, it’s a choice of whether or not you want to try to get your work published.) Some writers might prefer to write only for themselves, or to share with friends and loved ones. And some writers choose to publish themselves–which opens up a whole other set of issues I’ll write about in a future post.  But in the meantime, don’t downgrade yourself if your publishing credentials aren’t as good as you might want them to be. Keep going for that authentic nugget of your own truth and making it sing.

To subscribe to this blog, sign up at ddinafriedman.substack.com

 

 

 

Piano Patience

Posted on by
Reply

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.

 

To subscribe to this blog, sign up at ddinafriedman.substack.com

Manu and the Pachelbel Canon

Posted on by
Reply

About a week ago, my daughter was walking Baby Manu around, humming the Pachelbel Canon. I started improvising the second melody line and soon we were switching back and forth, not paying too much attention to exactly what we were doing, but it didn’t matter. We were both having fun and Manu was transfixed. I noticed that even at a few days old, he responded strongly to music, and that singing could be as effective as motion in calming him. Since I’m still recovering from my broken collar bone and can’t walk the baby around yet, singing has been my go-to in trying to subvert that fussy time where he’s needing (but not quite able) to go down for a nap, or waiting those few crucial moments for his Mom to be ready for his next feeding. It doesn’t really matter what I sing, and often I just make up on-the-spot raps about Manu’s moment du jour, tapping his foot or hand to keep the rhythm. No matter what I do, he’s usually pleasantly distracted, and lately, he’s beginning to smile and laugh. It’s great to have an appreciative and responsive audience.

Of course in our family, it’s sometimes difficult to separate the enjoyment of music from future expectations. At only ten weeks old, Manu’s already been praised for conducting the tinny version of the Pachelbel Canon that accompanies the rocking of his baby swing, reaching his hand longingly at the piano when his mother plays with the baby on her lap, and responding with an interest that seems to go far beyond his developmental age to a violin solo. “He’s the sixth generation,” my mother exclaims proudly, as she forwards the video to the relatives in our extended musical family.

And when I see a picture like this, I realize that yes, I would feel joy in watching my grandchild learn the piano–or any musical instrument–but not out of any need to perpetuate the generations of my family’s musicality. Only because music is a heartbeat within us that, like any creative pursuit, amplifies our inner knowing and makes us more attuned to everything around us.

 

To subscribe to this blog, sign up at ddinafriedman.substack.com

 

Autumn Leaves

Posted on by
Reply

This wonderful video of Nat King Cole singing Autumn Leaves was one of the final prompts for 30 Poems in November, last week. This is one of my favorite old jazz standards, though it’s something of an ear worm. For days afterwards the song stayed in my head, especially after I found and played not just one, but two videos that adopted Autumn Leaves to different classical styles. Of course, that made me want to rush to the piano and see what I could do with Autumn Leaves, which was still an impossibility with my broken clavicle.

But yesterday the orthopedist gave me the green light to start playing again (as long as I “let pain be my guide”–a loaded statement if there ever was one.) To make sure I didn’t overdo it, I set my timer for ten minutes and made sure to keep the left hand bass-line simple–not to play it like Rachmaninoff, or even like Beethoven. There was still a lot to explore in improvising, far more than my ear dared do. I stuck with the basics, not like the walk we took today in the woods, where map-less, we ended up on a different part of the road about half a mile from the car–a fairly typical experience when the unmarked trail is just too seductive not to follow it. I’d like to do more improvisations without a map and not be so worried about where I might end up.

Autumn is brilliant in New England in October–pure eye candy, as you can see in this picture. But in November, and often in early December, as well, the prevailing theme is brown. Chilly and cold.

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.

 

To subscribe to this blog, sign up at ddinafriedman.substack.com