Old dog, old tricks.

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For this month’s Open Letter, I wrote a piece on Katie Hafner’s new book, A Romance on Three Legs, and it made think about the piano again, as I have started to do, seriously, these past couple of years.

Here is a paragraph Hafner wrote:

Gould sometimes said that he hummed in order to compensate for the shortcomings of an unfamiliar or inferior piano. But he had another explanation for it: It represented wishful thinking, the perfect, ideal phrasing he had in his head that he could never quite achieve in real life. It was probably a little bit of both: The humming expressed his ideal vision of the music he was playing, and it probably became more prominent in situations when an inadequate instrument subverted the realization of that vision.

And here is what I wrote in response:

For amateur pianists – those who, like me, were initially forced to the instrument by enthusiastic parents, but who perhaps later in life discovered they could take solace in the keyboard and actually enjoy the playing (yes Mom, you were right) – the idea that a piano’s imperfections needed compensation is mystifying. It was a struggle merely to comprehend the music, to plunk it out on the ivories; there existed little excess brainpower to devote to a piano’s feel and response, though naturally most people can notice out-of-tune or sticking keys easily enough.

And one thing I will say, is that this is entirely true. Hafner’s book forced me to think, for perhaps the first time ever, about the physics of the piano, about how it achieves its tune and tone. We had a piano tuner, a wide man in overalls, who came once every couple of years, and we hid upstairs when he was there, my sister and I, but we heard him with his tuning fork. If I could meet him now, the first thing I would say would be, “Thank you,” because – and I didn’t realize this – tuning a piano is no mean feat. The deftness of touch, the tone, the lightness, are all things partially in the piano, partially in the pianist, and partially in the tuner or technician.

This is why Verne Edquist, sometime hero of Hafner’s book, has this to say about the Voyager I:

When I heard that, it was like a dream. There’s Bach writing the music, Glenn is playing the music, and it’s my tuning that’s giving it voice. And it’s going somewhere in outer space.

Which is, all in all, a beautiful thought. You’d think it would be a little arrogant, but if you’d read the book, it would be, honestly, a beautiful thought.

But doing this review made me rethink, once again, my own relationship with the piano, which was, when I was growing up, almost Catholic in its turn, how I worshipped the brown beast, how guilty I felt when I didn’t practice, how I adhered to a set of holy texts for such a long time, how I took my teachers’ words as gospel, how I deviated, how bad I was, and how excellent I could be when I put my mind to it, when I really loved it.

It’s a hard thing, to think of that, particularly now, when I’m realizing that so many of my adolescent troubles could have been solved with a drop of wine or two. Seriously, I did think that, just this past Saturday, when I was alone in this flat that we’re letting in Clapham in London, and taking a break from writing I sat down to tickle the ivories – as they say – and I had had a glass of wine, and was having another, and I thought that if only I’d had a glass of wine when I was fourteen or fifteen, I would have loved the piano like I did only when I was seventeen or eighteen.

Or twenty-eight, and almost twenty-nine, and so close to thirty. How I wish now I had a piano. In 2005, when I was going through a horrible, rough time, J and I were walking along 5th Avenue pre-Christmas, when we passed the Steinway shop. How I pressed my nose against the window. How I wished it were within my power to buy one. How I remembered, the year previously, that our English grad student email list had had a plea, from an old woman on the Upper East Side, who was moving, to take her old, out-of-tune, baby grand Steinway, that you’d only have to pay for moving and maybe storage. How I wish I’d taken her up on that, how I wish I had a piano to my name.

Because now we’re in this flat in Clapham, and here’s what I see every day, a C. Bechstein:

and you can’t know how much my fingertips itch to press its keys. I could sit there for hours, going over and over the scores our letter has, going over and over my own score of Bach’s Goldbergs that I brought with me, how much I could devote of myself to those perfectly counted-out notes, over and over until I got them perfect, the satisfaction building each time, without tiring, without getting bored or resentful like I did when I was younger.

I am so sorry, Mom. I am so sorry for all the shit I gave you, when you ordered me to practice. And I am so sorry to my teachers (Glenna, John, and Horatio – the last whose marks I see in my scores and it gives me little smiles), for not doing the drills your ordered me to do, for disregarding the fingerings you gave me, for disregarding the phrasing you gave me, for not putting my mind to it in general.

(And of course I am lubricated enough at this moment to think fingering! You would play upon me, you would seem to know my stops, you would pluck out the heart of my mystery, you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass; and there is much music, excellent voice, in this little organ, yet cannot you make it speak. So whence comes this quote? I’ll give you a hint: Tedious old fools.)

But! It’s quite pleasant to have a piano in Clapham. I’m reading Haruki Murakami’s new book now, What I Talk about When I Talk about Running, and I couldn’t help but think that, much as I would love to follow his edict about intertwining running with writing, the thing that would help me more with my writing is the piano.

Don’t get me wrong: I like to run. I can’t really, now, as I’m recovering from some back problems and I have been categorically ordered not to run, when actually that’s the think I enjoy most. But barring that, there has to be something else, right? What should it be?

The piano!

I’ll tell you this: I love playing the piano. It’s a miracle how I barely remember – how my fingers barely remember – the right way to go, the right phrasing, and how much more sharply I can understand phrases and staccatos and slurs and allegros and andantes and the like. How clearly I can see what they were all trying to teach me – and what I, in my ignorance and stubbornness (which comes with the teenaged territory), ignored! Willfully disregarded!

Murakami’s pronouncement for running is equally true for me and the piano: you must get the flywheel going; it’s the hardest thing to get that wheel going, but once you do, you can simply maintain, and what you feel and think one day will carry you over into the next.

So here is what carries me over.

I start with Bach’s second prelude:

I started re-playing it last summer, in Brixton (where there was also a piano), as it was one of the only things that was familiar, that my fingers remembered in their deep muscle-memory. It’s an excellent exercise.

And the last bit is my favorite, where it changes tempo and if you listen closely – even if you are only playing it on the piano – you can hear it on the pipe organ.

Then I move on to the Goldbergs.

This set is a monumental thing to me. It’s one of the things that will never change, throughout my entire life, will always be there when I think of it, will never cease to make me marvel at the infinity of it all.

I think here of what Gould himself wrote on the liner notes to his famous recording (he made the recording and wrote the notes when he was 23! TWENTY. THREE.):

It is no accident that the great cycle should conclude thus. Nor does the aria’s return simply constitute a gesture of benign benediction. Rather, its suggestion of perpetuity is indicative of the essential incorporeality of the “Goldbergs”… It is, in short, music which observes neither end nor beginning, music with neither real climax nor real resolution, music which, like Baudelaire’s lovers, “rests lightly on the wings of the unchecked wind.” It has, then, unity through intuitive perception, unity born of craft and scrutiny, mellowed by mastery achieved, and revealed to us here, as so rarely in art, in the vision of subconscious design exulting upon a pinnacle of potency.

O it is such an undeliberately beautiful thing. So complex in its being almost purely mathematical, so simple in its carrying forward of this light and unchecked theme.

The two variations I like the best are also, coincidentally, the two I can still play – and the two over which my final teacher, Horatio, has written the enigmatic note arms. I can only guess at what it means.

You know, I would know his handwriting anywhere. And I do have a vague sense, of how I should have kept myself light, and my shoulders and wrists untangled, and how I should have let my fingers do the work. I feel as though I only understand this now, how to shape my body around the music, how I should hold myself, I feel – after typing and longhand-writing for so long – how my fingers ought to work upon the keys.

(I will tell you this: At the end of my first year of grad school, I listened to Murray Perahia recordings – mostly Chopin – while I typed my papers, and it kept me moving forward. As it ought.)

But the Goldbergs, as everything, come around to the beginnings of themselves. We don’t advance so much as we revolve. We are doomed to our pasts. I can’t get rid of the piano – despite that now, I don’t want to – I carry it around with me, so many hundreds of pounds of steel and wood and brass and fine-tuning.

My copy of the return of the Aria is unmarked; I returned to the opening Aria whenever I played. There is something foreign to me about the Aria on the far side of the Goldberg variations. It is somehow not the same as the beginning, even though it is, and it makes you realize Gould’s special talents, to separate each note, to make each note sing, to tease forth each melody without diminishing the significance of the others, and how utterly, utterly difficult that is, to do those things, how much it takes for it to be quite easy to balance all those things in your mind at the same time.

So here is not the end, but the beginning once again, with most fervent and sincere hopes that this is not the last time I have the opportunity to play – not so much to run, but to play.

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