Playing piano with my 16 year old ears
“How much have you practised?” my piano teacher would ask at our weekly after-school lesson, her tone hopeful.
“Yeah, sorry, I just never got around to it,” I’d reply, casually, like any other teen who was not paying for her own lessons. (Ten years later when I began studying cello, I’d still show up unprepared but much more wracked with guilt, it being on my own dime.)
Grimacing, Mrs. Alton would go over the previous week’s piano lesson yet again. I always left her place with good intentions, but practising Beethoven sonatas didn’t have the allure of getting up to no good with my friends or sitting comatose in front of Dallas.
Whether through luck or some glimmer of unrealized talent, I managed to find my way through some big pieces. I loved Chopin waltzes and could hammer out Rachmaninov’s Prelude in C# Minor too, shaking mom’s photo gallery in the next room. As we got close to a recital, exam, variety show, or music festival I would put a little more effort in and give a reasonable showing. I even played at a friend’s wedding a couple of years after high school.
For years, I was piano-less and focussed all my musical effort on cello. Again, not hugely accomplished but, for 15 years, I was a solid sectional player in a number of amateur orchestras. I knew to air-bow through those pesky fast passages so as not to spoil the experience for everyone else. But in those bits where I felt confident, I sawed away with gusto, basking in the deep sonorous beauty of what is clearly the best orchestral instrument. At least that’s how I remember it.
In my early 40s, mom was downsizing her things and delivered to my condo the piano I’d learned to play on. It’s not that great - a Heintzman made in Hanover in the '70s - but it feels like home to me. I tentatively started playing again, conscious, though, of how sound travels to other units. When Jack and I moved to our Weston house, my piano ended up in the basement, already a shrine to the ‘70s with its panelled walls and retro bar. Many evenings, Jack would be smoking in his chamber and I’d be in the next room, working away at all my old favourites, including a piano arrangement of the New World Symphony, and, Jack’s #1 choice, Clair de Lune. I never got as good as I had been but it was starting to come back.
For the last 18 months though, the basement became a staging area for the things I planned to bring to Chandlerville. In fact I hadn’t been able to get close to the piano in three years. This week, it became uncovered again. As I near the time when tenants will occupy the house, it suddenly became pressing that I play.
As I stumbled through Dvorak, Debussy, and even the last piece in my favourite book, God Save the Queen/King, I heard myself as I remember being 40 years ago. In my 16 year old ear, my rhythm was strong and unwavering; the notes were all where they should be under my fingers; my crescendos and decrescendos were musically sensitive; I didn’t over-pedal; and I created breathtaking melodic and harmonic moments. Oh I wish that were all true. Then or now.
***
“How do I know what was said or exactly what happened?” memoirists ask. “I don’t trust my memory,” they go on to report.
To that I respond, “who cares?”
As my sister, Cathy, would say, there are three reasons to lie: to avoid hurting someone’s feelings; to get yourself out of shit; and, most importantly, to improve the story. And while neither she nor I advocate lying, memoir-writing is not about what happened.* Memoir is about why what happened matters: the sky-writing, as memoirist,Alison Wearing, calls it.
So even if our rear view mirrors should be labelled “objects in mirror are closer than they appear,” we should bravely tell our version of the past - our “truth” in the current lingo. Even distorted facts can resonate with a reader. Or at least that’s my hope!
* to be clear, everything I write I believe to be true. The point is I could be wrong. Just like this week my ears conjured a false version of my teenage piano playing.
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