The Piano

I know, I missed two days. My mind was on other things on Friday and Saturday. I'm back now.

My mother attended a music conservatory in Ontario after high school, but although she loved music and studied hard, she never managed to make it her career. Her instrument of choice was the piano, and thanks to sharing our home with a pre-school there was always a piano available to use as I was growing up. She got me started when I was three but my stubborn independent nature wouldn't let her give me formal lessons. I would ask her for advice on what to attempt from her wide collection of sheet music, and she bought me a few "teach yourself" books to help out too.

Over the years, I learned to sight-read and play most melodies. I could muddle my way through the English Hymnal and a large number of Christmas Carols. I even made a stab at the simpler tunes in my mother's book of Scottish Dances. The more complex classical works tested me, however and only a handful appealed to me enough to put in the hours of painstaking analysis and practice required to master the full score. Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata" and "Für Elise" made that list.

For many years, as long as we lived in that house, I played the Moonlight Sonata several times a day. By the time I was ten, I could play it with my eyes closed. Once I no longer had daily access to a piano, I gradually fell out of practice and now I need to have the sheet music in front of me in order to make it past the first few bars without stumbling. In the video that heads this post, I adapted the first first bars for the guitar (the only instrument I have to hand right now) by downloading the sheet music, and transposing it from C# minor to E minor. My guitar-playing is nowhere near as proficient as my piano-playing used to be and I could only manage a few coherent triplets at a time as I recorded it. Thank goodness for GarageBand! With more time, I might have got through the entire first movement, but that would have required hours of effort.

When I was sixteen, my mother gave me the option of piano lessons at school again, and I took her up on that. However, all those years of bad habits had built up, and I found myself unable to make the progress my teacher hoped for. Apart from Mozart's "Twelve Variations on 'Ah vous dirai-je, Maman'" (otherwise known as "how to spice up Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star"), I did not add substantially to my repertoire.

I have a rusty knowledge of music theory, and memories of recorder and clarinet lessons. I've owned a guitar off and on since I was fourteen and dabbled with the accordion and bagpipes during summer vacations. I've made excruciating noises on a harmonica. But keyboards remain the only instruments where I stand a chance of producing something that sounds good to my own ears. I know, however, that it would take a lot of practice to get back to the level I was at in my pre-teen years.

Maybe I'll do that.