Ghost Music
Finding my way back to the music I loved when I learned to play piano
I’m sitting at my office desk, scrolling through emails, fingers in a kind of dance — Delete Delete Delete. Pause — when a beckoning sound, rich and melodious, filters in from the living room. My piano is being tuned, and the technician, nearly finished with doing his magic, is testing his handiwork.
I follow the sound to the alcove where the piano, a Baldwin baby grand, is nestled. Finished with the fine-tuning, the technician is putting the music shelf back in place. Later, when I will sit down to play something from the sheet music and books that stand on that shelf, I get only a hint of the warm, rich sound that floats through my house like ghost music when someone else is playing.
Before he leaves, we talk about musicians and pieces of music we have a special appreciation for. I admit that I don’t play as much as I would like to. Frustration at mastering a piece gets in my way. He reminds me that there are music books with the simpler (not simplified or edited) pieces that composers wrote.
Beginner’s mind goes far beyond Zen meditation.
* * *
I learned to play piano on a cardboard keyboard —
Three panels that folded in on themselves, easy to tuck between the books and notebooks I carried back and forth to school, spread out on the table at home when I needed to practice. Piano lessons were being offered at school. I wanted to learn to play, so we met every week, a group of like-minded music lovers, taking turns sitting at the piano in the auditorium, the real deal, ivory in place of the flat cardboard keys that were a staple teaching tool in the 1950s.
If I showed enough interest, maybe I’d get a piano one day.
A good friend of my father’s had a blind son who played piano. I marveled at the way sound and touch seemed rolled into his fingers, nothing he needed to see, except what he pictured in his mind and felt in his heart. He was musically gifted; I would practice hard, become good enough.
One day, maybe months into my lessons, I came home after school, no expectation that it would be a day different from any other, a snack before homework. Certain surprise moments are indelibly imprinted, this one as vivid in memory as the day it happened, an upright piano, a gift from my grandmother, imposing itself in the living room.
The upright would eventually be replaced by a spinet, more compact and richer in sound. A small plaster bust of Beethoven would sit on the piano, a reminder not only of genius but also of the power to imagine. If I could not fathom composing music without actually hearing the notes, all I had to do was look over at the statuette. Beethoven wrote of his despair. But he also knew, despite his deafness, that he had unfinished work, possibiy his best, according to scholars.
Practicing scales in a small Brooklyn apartment takes more courage than one might imagine. Hard to pretend you’re not being listened to. “Play ‘Pagliacci,’” my mother would call out, by which she meant “Vesti La Giubba,” the heart-wrenching Puccini aria about the clown crying inside/laughing on the outside; and this from my father, a regular comedian: “Do you know ‘The Road to Mandalay’? Take it.” Nobody had to ask me to play Chopin, my favorite. And all bets were off re: who’s listening? when my brother began playing drums.
I left the piano behind when I moved out on my own, the apartment I first lived in too small and my distractions too great. The time would come, and with it the space, a larger studio on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, when my spinet, unplayed for too long, would find its way back to me.
Marriage, a child, another move, it was all too much for the spinet even if I somehow knew I would one day have a piano again. It’s a craving of sorts, the desire, more a need, to feel the touch of the keys, look at the notes and notations on the page, a language all its own. How else to explain why I’d kept some of the sheet music I used to play?
As it happens, within a year or so of moving into the house that would be deconstructed and reconstructed in keeping with my husband’s design vision, I would be surprised for the second time in my life with a piano — a baby grand this time — sitting in the alcove where it was always meant to be.
Sometimes when I sat down to play, my dog would come over, place her two front paws on the piano bench, lift one to my arm. Was I reading too much into this not-so-subtle gesture, her sensitive ears making a request for me to stop? Or was this nothing more than a playful variation on a scheme of hers: often in the middle of dinner she would place her paw on my husband’s knee — time to go out for a catch?
The bottom line — even in a large house, there is no playing — the graceful, melodic arpeggios juxtaposed against the clunky, dissonant wrong notes — without the self-consciousness that someone is listening.
In my city years I lived next door to a young concert pianist. Hearing him practice was a gift that infused me with a longing to take lessons again. He would be my teacher. I would look in on his cat when he was off to competitions. I would also get to play his Steinway, which taught me that there are degrees of sound in every key. It’s all about the nuance of touch.
Some amateur pianists play mostly when friends are gathered around the piano.
Others, like me, play mostly for myself. I marvel at what my fingers remember, what I can manage with relative ease despite the stiffening that comes with age. I marvel too at the stumbllng over the very same difficult passages I could only fudge even in the days of more consistent practice and playing.
Sometimes when my husband and I are watching a movie, I’ll hear a familiar piece of music, the name of which I don’t quite have at my fingertips.
Sometimes the composer of the piece, and with it the name, will spontaneously move to the surface of my consciousness.
Other times I’ll surprise myself when I sit at my piano, start thumbing through a music book and voilà — there is it — that simple piece I could not quite name but my fingers, even if a little less nimble, knew I had more than once played.
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