26.7.10

left behind


i can remember this piano recital that i performed in, as a kid. i was probably eleven years old. we had just moved to a new city and i was studying under a teacher whose approach was way more intense than any i'd encountered before. he wore black horn-rimmed glasses, and always a white oxford shirt and pants that appeared as if he'd slept in them. his hair was black and unruly, and his body was lank and sort of unwashed-looking. i can remember seeing the cavity of his pale chest through the nearly transparent shirt, and thinking, "what kind of man is that?" he had two kids, little wisps of black hair and olive skin that better resembled their Taiwanese mother, with whom he invariably bickered if she made a rare appearance. the kids, too, he would maniacally hustle out of the practice room whenever they ventured down to spy on his students.

i can't remember his last name, which i'm sure is what i called him by. i know his first name was david because i would hear my mom discussing him with my dad, as in "bird doesn't like david very much" or "david's students do competitions and get scholarships." she was right in both instances. david's students were mostly little prodigies, the kind that TV movies get made about later, cipher-faced urchins whose fingers ran like those wind-up Matchbox cars, and stopped as abruptly when they were through with their concertos as if they'd run into a wall. and i did not like him.

he always seemed occupied by something outside of my piano lesson. i can remember that he never looked me in the eyes. his arms would windmill broadly as he shouted "more! more!", in direction that i was supposed to play louder, and then he would hunker over like Quasimodo and murmur "less! less!" it seems to me now that he was more occupied with the technique than with the song itself, though i couldn't have said so at the time. i would only have said that piano lessons were a drag and that mozart's fantasia in d minor was not, and was unlikely ever to be, a personal favorite.

fantasia in d minor was the song he elected for me to play at the recital, which meant that not only did i have to be good at it, but i also had to memorize it.

i'd been through dozens of recitals by age eleven. i didn't get stage fright, and if i messed up the performance it was because i got distracted or bored. i liked the applause, and the cookies at the end of the event, and i always brought a book to read during the ages and ages it took to give the rest of the students their moment in front of the camcorders. nonetheless, i dreaded this recital because i really hated playing fantasia in d minor, probably for no other reason than that it was in a minor key and had some tricky runs that david's ungentle persuasion had set me against ever playing correctly. if i got the fingering right, the rhythm was off, and if i fell into the right rhythm, my fingers buckled like a foal's knees. and the pall over the whole affair was that i didn't care, and felt the guilt that i ought to.

the recital was in the small auditorium of a high school or community college. there were dark blue velvet curtains, and the piano was not as grand as the one in david's studio. i sat beside my mom in the back rows, and propped my feet up on the seat in front of me; as the first pocket-sized soloist took the bench, i opened my book. i don't remember anything else--what i had been made to wear, what book i was reading, how i knew when it was my turn, or even setting my fingers to the piano--until i was about sixteen bars into the performance.

i can recall the slow revelation, as i was playing, that this was not only a piece, but a song. i saw that it was a very lyrical and emotional song. without knowing what in it was moving me, or why it never had moved me before, i suddenly felt myself caring about the space between the phrases, about the pressure with which my fingers fell from one note to the next, and wanting urgently to express a "more" and a "less" that had nothing to do with windmilling arms and the inscrutable lenses that shied from a direct gaze. suddenly, i wanted to know what the music was trying to say, and convey its voice faithfully. i wanted to agree with it, to cooperate in making the beautiful thing hidden in the notation i had memorized.

but then came the long, cascading runs; my heart sank. i hadn't cared, and i wasn't worthy to play them right, and they were going to let me down now--justly, because i had let them down. i limped down the network of intervals, shuffled through to the end of the piece, took my perfunctory bow with the browbeaten attitude of the prodigal son, and went back to my seat.

i found out later that the recital had, in fact, been a competition, and that david had told my mom i should have won it if i'd practiced more. as it was, some eight-year-old Taiwanese kid took the scholarship money home. my mom asked why i hadn't practiced more.

i told her, "i did practice. i just don't like him."

also, i wanted to say, i hadn't known there was money riding on my performance. and i hadn't known anything of what mozart or d minor meant, until it was too late.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

You know how Matthew Barney made a whole—whatever it is—about, among other things, that moment when an embryo crosses over from pure potentiality to being constrained by gender, and uses the name of the muscle involved to invoke a range of concepts and emotions?

I wonder if there's a word/concept/bit of anatomy to encompass the moment when one's musical eyes (sorry) are opened? I had one such experience: I had been bludgeoning a snare drum and one cymbal for a month straight when I suddenly realized it didn't sound right. I had been so focussed on rhythm that I had neglected timbre. After that, I stopped caring just about drums/rhythm and began to notice music/tone. That was when I began to be a musician.

OK; it's not quite the same. I know my drumming!=Fantasia in D Minor, but you have very skillfully evoked that moment. Not just skillfully, but beautifully.

Bird said...

thanks for reading.
maybe the word is epiphany? appearing forth? i don't think it's anatomical. i think it's supernatural. science is just detailed explanation of the process...it can't account for the cause. i don't think.