20. Gnawing Old Piano Bones
Ten or so years later, I'm back at the piano, this time in the basement, still trying to figure out what I'm supposed to play.
This is an ongoing story, meant to be read in order. If you’re just arriving here for the first time, please start at the beginning by following the index.
I’m sitting at the piano in our basement in the mid-1970s, struggling through the opening movement of Beethoven’s Appassionata sonata, imagining that I’m playing it well. The descending, then ascending F minor arpeggios remind me of the Star-Spangled Banner. A persistent smell of dog urine envelops the music.
I’m imagining that I’m playing the Beethoven well because I’m not actually doing it—playing it well. I will never really play it all that well. It is my moral duty to not play it that well, though I don’t know this in the mid-1970s.
Imagination vs. reality, the inability to adequately distinguish the former from the latter. It’s a big trap inherent in playing music by oneself. Until you perform something in front of people or with other musicians, your imaginative powers can convince you that you’re good when you’re not. And then, when playing for people, your powers of self-doubt can convince you that you are playing something badly when you’re playing it well.
So you never really know...
The dark brown Steinway in front of me is becoming a bit worn. Franklin, our wildly rambunctious Golden Retriever puppy, when he’s not peeing and shitting all over the basement floor, has been gnawing at the piano’s left leg and all four legs of the piano bench. If he keeps this up, the thing may collapse like a house on stilts.
My dad has put up a long accordion gate in front of the area where the piano sits against the wall. It is meant to keep Franklin away from both the piano and the wide spiral staircase which would take him up to the living room where, with the new modern furniture and oriental rugs, the damage he would wreck would be more costly. So he is locked in the basement when we are away from the house and sometimes when we are there and need a break from his manic energy. He can’t really make it up those stairs anyway: the polished and buffed wood treads are slippery to a dog’s feet and in his wild and diminutive state he’d slip right through the openings between the balusters, landing, perhaps, on the piano where he’d no doubt pee before starting the whole Sysysphian task over again.
Franklin has recently been brought into the family as a kind of time-released replacement for our older, far more dignified Golden Retriever, Winston. Like the piano, Winston is beginning to show his age with similarly worn legs, and a tale whose tip is bandaged and in a cast—the result of banging it against doors and walls when he too vigorously wags it every time my dad arrives home from work. My father engages in a bit of preventative grief amelioration by bringing in the new dog before the old dog dies—he’s worried about my sister Jane’s ability to deal with Winston’s demise. She is particularly attached to him.
So we end up with a very entertaining goofball of a dog, a lightweight court-jester of a canine compared to Winston, but a dog that, nevertheless, does manage to assuage some of the future pain of losing the old one. Though I will always believe that Winston sees right through this ruse, sees Franklin as an impostor, a fraud of his species whose sole purpose is to entertain and titillate us with his clever but meaningless tricks—holding five tennis balls in his mouth!—so that we will slowly forget about him, even as he lives. It kind of works, I’m ashamed to say, but Winston is far too dignified to complain. He suffers quietly because he knows that deep down the man of the house (my father) prefers him even if the children are beginning to ignore him.
***
For now, the mediocrity of my playing can be blamed on a lack of refined technique. Later, I will for a time blame my mom, who, in her misguided loyalty to Mr. Metzler (my teacher now for seven years), kept me from studying with a true master at a young age, thus robbing me of the chance to become one of those annoying young hot shot virtuosos I love to hate. My mother, in this particular model, would be the taskmaster, forcing me to practice six hours a day, traipsing around the country from competition to competition in our station wagon, entering and winning competitions by playing the first movement of Beethoven’s first piano concerto.
Like this was ever going to happen. There is no way she was ever going to be a stage mother; there was no way I was ever going to care about memorizing all 32 Beethoven Piano Sonatas. Thankfully, she was pursuing her own interests, not vicariously pursuing mine.
And my musical passions are beginning to pull me elsewhere. The problem is where exactly? I’m dabbling in the music of pop, rock & R&B artists I love. I surreptitiously purchase the sheet music, and songbooks of various artists I’m into, trying in vain to keep the knowledge from Mr. Metzler by sticking them inside the piano bench, or behind the Beethoven sonata. He would say, it’s OK to have a little fun with the contemporary music, as long as you had a firm foundation in the classics. Later, jazz pedagogy types would say that it’s OK to play rock as long as you had a foundation in jazz, and so on. What will hip-hoppers say when they reach their 70s?
I’d read through the tunes of Cat Steven and Elton John, Stevie Wonder, and Paul Simon. But I was doing it the wrong way, trying to learn the cheesy note-for-note piano publisher’s arrangements instead of using the chord symbols and melodies as a guide to creating my own. I’d look at those chord symbols (“D Maj7”, huh?), vaguely wondering what they meant, but having no real clue. I would, with my mediocre sight-reading ability, frustratingly plod through the songs, never really getting them, and never understanding how they were put together. One time I bought the sheet music for the full 17-minute version of Stairway to Heaven, ambitiously hoping to get through the whole thing. As with the Beethoven, I settled for imagining I was playing it well.
I was clearly missing something, but what? Until I found it I was floating down a beautiful and verdant river without a paddle or a map, inadvertently running into wonderful things, but having no control over how I got there, and how to get to the next thing.
Inevitably, but also inadvertently, all of this bouncing around between shores, getting stuck in eddies, occasionally swirling about in the rapids, and falling out, would lead me to the foundation I needed.
Fate and chance would work together; or, rather, chance would lead me to my fated encounter with the sounds I would need to explore my musical imagination.
A performance of Beethoven’s Appassionata sonata (first movement, not by me.)
And a brief improvisation on the main themes (by me.)