2022 Spring Contest Winner: Learning to Play
By Lizzie Roberts
Photo by Geert Pieters, courtesy of Unsplash.
One day the piano in the hallway of our apartment in Berlin began to tease me. I wanted to touch it but I didn’t know how. I had stayed away from black and white keys until this point, the phase in life when you start to regret the chances you have missed more than the mistakes you have made. The next day I asked Konrad, my son’s piano teacher, if he would teach me, too. He shrugged and I took it as a yes.
I grew up in a home full of music. Actually, two homes. Dad’s was a ranch house in suburban Grosse Pointe, where there were two grand pianos and so many unvoiced expectations of me. Dinner was a square meal at seven o’clock – meat/carb/veg – garnished with more tension than anyone could stomach. The other home was Mom’s string of grungy little apartments in Detroit, where there was always a Yamaha synthesizer plugged into an amp but not much else. No money, no furniture, no silverware, no rules. There was peanut butter toast or chicken chop suey for dinner, a shoulder to cry on, a stack of library books. I moved back and forth every two weeks. The distance between these opposing poles seemed infinite. No matter how often I was asked, I refused piano lessons, avoiding the one thing that might have bridged the gap.
After a few lessons this much is clear: Konrad is certainly up to the task, but I’m not sure if I am. Reading music entails converting visual stimulus into physical movement; it requires a state of mind that is loose and giving, yet also disciplined and controlled. Too much focus and I seize up, too little and I veer off course; I fumble for the right keys as for a switch in the dark. I’m chasing the music but it rushes ahead without me as I mumble the outdated mnemonic like a prayer – Every Good Boy Does Fine, Every Good Boy Does Fine – praying the darkness won’t swallow me.
“I can’t read the notes fast enough,” I wail in panic.
“You can read them,” Konrad says. “But you touch the keys before you read the notes. It’s like stepping on the gas when you don’t know which way to turn. You’re impatient. You waste your energy.”
~~~
Mom took the baby grand when she left Dad, but had to sell it soon after to make ends meet. She composed on the Yamaha, sad songs about losing men and finding grace, songs I couldn’t (and still can’t) bear to hear her sing – the gushy sentimentality of the words, her voice quivering with emotion, her frail body swaying as she played.
Dad’s new wife was the perfect opposite: She sat erect, lips pursed in concentration, picking out the keys with machine-like precision while the metronome ticked away like a bomb. She would play Liszt and Rachmaninoff on the glossy black Steinway. Dad played popular songs on the walnut Baldwin. For a while I would sit down and fool around, teaching myself fragments of the “Moonlight” sonata. But if anyone stopped to suggest how I might improve, I would get up and walk away. Eventually, I stopped sitting down.
~~~
Mom can barely contain her joy now that I’ve started to take lessons. She has always told me I’m special, exceptional, gifted – a barrage of encouragement that has left me leery. Perhaps because Dad sent a different message.
She asks, “Did you tell Konrad you can play the ‘Moonlight’ sonata?”
“Don’t start,” I plead.
“Well, you could,” Mom insists.
At my son’s recital, a little girl dressed up in velvet plays the Bach piece I’m struggling to learn, her fingers skipping where mine stumble. I love watching the children at the recitals. They reveal the essence of their personality the moment they sit down – erect with bravado, slouched in self-doubt. The lucky ones are completely unaware anyone is watching. Some kids bolt from the stage as soon as they’ve aced a Schubert sonata; others take numerous bows after messing up “Jingle Bells.” The velvet-clad princess has a satisfied smirk on her face before she even touches a key.
For years I’ve watched Konrad at the recitals, appreciating the way he makes minute adjustments to his demeanor with each pupil. But now that I am one of them, his presence makes me nervous. I feel naked. I miss notes, start to sweat.
“I’m sorry you have to listen to this.”
“It’s my job. You’re paying me.”
“I’d have to pay for an audience, wouldn’t I?”
I wait for a laugh, but Konrad just shrugs, his focus undeterred by my cut-rate humor. “The problem is you’re afraid of being listened to.”
~~~
My son recently taught himself “Smoke on the Water.” His style is entirely devoid of finesse and totally suited to Deep Purple. He struts around, humming the riff in satisfaction after another vigorous rendition. Could the problem be that I’m playing the wrong song?
Konrad suggests “Scarborough Fair.”
Velvet Princess could get away with it, but a middle-aged woman playing “Scarborough Fair” strikes me as maudlin. I would like to ask Konrad if the song also makes him think of Mrs. Robinson in her leopard coat, so bitter with regret. I would like to ask him if he thinks there’s still hope for me. Instead I ask him what it felt like when the country where he was born ceased to exist. The yearly celebration of German reunification has just passed.
He shrugs. “It didn’t really affect me,” he says. “I was nineteen. Other things were more important.”
“Like what?”
“School, finding an apartment. Girls.”
Konrad has the reserved nature I have come to regard as typical for an East German artist-intellectual: hesitant smile, wary eyes. At first I thought he was grumpy, but now I know he’s a person who doesn’t waste time – a disciplined person, maybe even a happy person. But his is a private happiness.
“It didn’t affect you?”
“Not being able to travel affected me, of course. I didn’t feel unfree, though. I didn’t suffer. I’ve been to places like Italy and Africa, now. They’re nice. But I like Berlin.”
I wish I could say that. I’m still not sure I like Berlin after having lived here for over twenty-five years. And I felt more caged growing up in the “land of the free” than Konrad did in a bona fide dictatorship. Though I’m physically healthy, I have little energy and often stumble around in a fog. My thoughts tend to wallow and fester. But at five thirty on Wednesday afternoons, Konrad bounds up the hundred steps that lead to our fifth-floor apartment, immediately present and attuned to every nuance of my clumsy playing. Is it simply a matter of character? Or did learning to play the piano at a young age lend Konrad the resilience and drive I lack?
The corpus callosum – a tangle of nerve fibers connecting left and right sides of the brain – is thicker in professional musicians. Learning an instrument has been proven to increase grey matter volume in different regions of the brain and strengthen the connections between them. I am in my late forties and have had two major trauma injuries to my head and too many episodes of major depression. Is it ridiculous to think that piano lessons will have any significant effect on my battered mind?
I do notice that practicing provides some relief from the anxiety. Until it triggers the anxiety. My shoulders inch up. The notes go blurry. The wrong key elicits a knee-jerk no! I’ve improved, but I doubt I will ever be more than a mediocre pianist. Perhaps the problem is accepting mediocrity.
At least I’ve nailed “Scarborough Fair,” I think – even the complicated eighth-note timing of to-one-who-lives-there. But during the next lesson with Konrad I am stiff and jittery, too fast, too slow. I always thought I had rhythm but now I think I’ve lost it. He counts out the beat and I butcher the song again. Halfway through I give up in distress, pounding my fists on the keyboard in brutish atonal frustration.
Konrad sighs at my theatrics, glancing away. I have revealed everything, like the children at the recital, only not that cute and with much less time to improve.
“I don’t know what the problem is,” I complain. “I could play it the last time I tried.”
“Do you know how many times a day I hear that? It’s now that counts.”
I try again. Certain passages disappear like a swallowed thought or explode in unintentional crescendo. Konrad is more interested in the subtle elements of touch and timing than he is in hearing the right notes. He says you can express the essence of a song with all the wrong notes. You can also miss it completely while hitting every one.
I decide the piano might be the problem.
“Do you think it’s out of tune?”
Konrad shrugs.
~~~
The piano tuner looks like he might expire from the effort of climbing the stairs. His skin is grey, his body bent from the weight of a dented metal tool box that threatens to yank his arm off. I offer the old man a glass of water. He empties it in one thirsty gulp, sits down gingerly, taps middle C.
“Who plays?”
“My son and I. We’re just beginners.”
“Everyone was a beginner once,” he says, offering me the kindest smile.
He inhales deeply through his nose. Suddenly his posture is more erect, his frail hands possessed. They race over the keys, little grey mice effortlessly dancing to the notes in his head. He stops, taps middle C again.
“That was beautiful!” I am stunned. Our piano is a used blond upright, chosen more for appearance and price than quality. I have never heard it create this kind of sound. It’s as if he has completed the Tour de France on a tricycle. With bum knees. And a pacemaker. “Rachmaninoff?”
He giggles. “No, no. Shostakovich. This is Rachmaninoff.” The mice race again. It sounds nothing like the way my stepmother used to play: so constrained, so joyless. This man is a conduit; the music courses through him. Great thundering chords, softly flowing melodies. This piano is not my problem.
I clap and he turns to smile, old again now.
“Can I trouble you for more water?”
When I return he is making adjustments with his tools, engrossed in the absurd task of applying his expert skill to the middling instrument I can barely play.
Saying goodbye at the door, he bows deeply from the waist.
~~~
After performing in Detroit clubs in the 1970s and 1980s, Mom settled into the life of an obscure singer-songwriter, producing albums very few people have ever heard, much less bought. She hasn’t owned a piano since I was a kid, hasn’t given a concert in decades. But she never stopped playing and composing. I always hated to hear it – her voice, those songs, that flimsy keyboard: raw emotion served in plastic. It was embarrassing. Why didn’t she just give up?
These days she has an arrangement with a local church, a place she refers to jokingly as her studio. She’s in her late seventies and practices there almost every weekday morning. Lately, a small crowd has started to gather, sitting in the cold pews to listen. She tells me it’s strange to have an audience again.
“It’s not the point anymore,” she says. “I just need to play!”
~~~
Dad often played before we were about to leave for dinner at the country club. Closely shaved and smelling of Dial soap, he would tear through the “Maple Leaf Rag” at an ever-increasing pace. Upstairs in my room, I would be trying to get my hair, my face, my entire self to look different, to look better. The sound of the piano told me time was running out.
Konrad scrawls all over my notes: SLOW DOWN!!!
“You rush to get to the end,” he says. “You can’t wait for it to be over.”
Why? To be different, to be better? To get some reward or punishment? Kids at school used to talk about their piano teachers – old ladies with bad breath who doled out butterscotch disks or slapped knuckles with rulers. Konrad’s only response to my playing is an occasional comment that cuts to my core. Does he know that his words speak volumes not only to my deficits as a piano player but also as a human being? Probably. In old German, Konrad means “keen advisor.”
The problem is, I am nearing fifty and am still hounded by the sense that I am not enough. I want to tell Konrad I’m doing my best, trying hard to make a life out of the notes I can play. Instead I tell him the fourth finger on my left hand can’t reach C-sharp because of a childhood injury, forgetting that old injuries are like dreams – interesting to no one but the injured, the dreamer.
This only elicits another shrug. I used to think Konrad’s shrugs signified indifference. But now that I’ve detected his sly humor and generous humanity, his shrugs have infinite layers of subtlety. I understand them as keen advice. Get over yourself, this one says. We’re all injured dreamers.
~~~
Konrad is going on vacation. He assigns scales to coax my lethargic tendons back into action and tells me to practice only the first notes of the left hand of the Bartok, writing an annotated version of his instructions in the margin: Left only! 2-1-2-1.
This shorthand reminds me of those lopsided swim team drills. 2-2-and-2, the coach would shout out: two left strokes, two right strokes, two normal strokes. I dreaded the sound of the whistle; I could never turn my head far enough to the left, I could only breathe on the right. Somewhere before the end of the first length I had always managed to inhale chlorinated water. My teammates would laugh. I begged to quit. The solitary activity of playing the piano was elective, but swimming was mandatory. The lesson being, if you can’t win one for the team, it’s not that important. “Team sports build character,” Dad said. That’s when I started skipping practice.
2-2-and-2 is a thing of the past, though, along with races and blue ribbons. I remind myself there are thirty years and an ocean between me and that girl in midwestern suburbia. I will not choke if I play the wrong note. If anyone laughs, it will be me.
2-1-2-1 is not a drill or a race, it is merely a combination of four descending notes, the steps of a dance for my fingers. Diligently practicing the scales Konrad assigned has made them more nimble, and as I play the notes in a steady loop, the measured movement of my left hand grows more fluid. The sound lulls me into a sort of trance. I don’t know how long I’ve been repeating the phrase, but at some point I strike an arbitrary key on the right. Then another. Instinctively I look toward the door. Is anyone watching?
It feels like I’m breaking a rule. It feels good. I am simply playing around. But at this moment, nothing is more important. It is a dedicated sort of play, the play of children before an awareness of the grown-up world of achievement and reward sullies their pristine minds. In this serious play I give myself to the music, and the music, in return, suspends me from all else. I understand now why my mother doesn’t care about an audience, what made the piano tuner so young, the secret of Konrad’s focus. I know I will never be the greatest pianist, the greatest anything, and at this moment I am content to be myself.
White keys, black keys, both at once: beloved dissonance! My shoulders relax. My rhythm is back. I am suddenly untethered and free and have all the time in the world. Each note is a leap of faith, a declaration of intent. I am going this way – because I said so! I ascend the registers in major chords, skipping octaves, jumping from rooftop to rooftop. I prance along a melodious precipice for a while before striking random minor notes and drifting back down to the low end of the keyboard. I am strolling along a moonlit street, turning a corner, leaving behind the realm of left and right, right and wrong.
About the Author:
Lizzie Roberts' writing has been published in The Forge, Hippocampus, Litro, Lunch Ticket and Sand, among other places. She’s working on a novel.