Music lessons

Let's be honest. I'm not a musician. I did take piano lessons as a kid, and I'm taking them now. I like to listen to music. But I'm not a musician, any more than I'm an artist just because I played with poster paint in grade school and enjoy visiting art museums as an adult. I can't carry a tune worth a bean, and I don't really enjoy listening to a piece until I've heard it so often that it sounds "familiar."

In other words, as the joke goes, I know what I like and I like what I know.

If you've been reading my blog all along, you know that over a year ago I began teaching myself the second movement to Beethoven's Pathétique, plunking away even before I returned to taking lessons in February. Last week, my teacher suggested that she'd like to review my progress on that movement today, so I spent a large part of my week's practice time focusing on it. It was still rough, I felt, but I also felt that I was getting so I could play it without significant errors.

So I sat at the piano during my lesson this afternoon, and absolutely butchered it. I made mistakes I never make at home. I hit wrong keys, repeatedly. The piano felt weird, the keys seemed sticky, my fingers felt weak and bumbling. Sometimes I couldn't even depress a key firmly enough to sound the note. I had to repeat whole sections where I'd gotten bogged down and had lost the thread of my playing. I felt I was banging away on the keyboard while playing a movement that should be played softly and delicately. I was mortified.

When I finished, I said, "Well, that's the worst I've played it for a long time."

Amazingly, she said I did great. She said I'd given the piece a completely reasonable and successful interpretation. She said she really had no additional suggestions to give. Obviously, it needs more practice, so I don't keep hitting the wrong keys, but -- as a matter of musicality, from her viewpoint as a teacher -- she said I've mastered the movement. This from a woman who performed the same sonata as a degree requirement at the Leningrad Conservatory.

To me, mastering a piece has always meant learning to hit the right keys, and playing with the proper rhythm. To be told that I have accomplished something beyond that -- before I've even accomplished that -- is an amazing and wonderful thing. A bit unnerving, really. As though I'd churned out a dimestore novel, and then read a favorable review stating that the book had depths of meaning that I'd never intended or dreamed of suggesting.

So I'll keep plugging away at it. Get those notes correct. Hit the right keys. Check the grammar of my Great American Novel, and run a spellcheck on it, so to speak. My teacher says, let's check back in a few weeks -- let me hear you play it again at that time, and see how it's coming along. Cool! Meanwhile, during the rest of the lesson, she held my hand (figuratively), while I tiptoed my way through the first section (Grave) of the sonata's first movement, a difficult movement whose initial playing I plan to make the major project of my summer.