As I’ve begun learning to replay the piano, I’ve been amazed to realize what a complicated endeavor it is. It seems your mind has to be actively engaged full-tilt in at least nine different directions at once.
Learning to sight-read again is difficult enough in itself, memorizing all the keys and flats and sharps in the treble as well as bass clefts, then adding in the kinds of notes and how long to hold each, when to rest, when to repeat, when to go to an octave higher.
But all that’s child play compare to actually playing the notes as you scan the score, each hand going off in a different direction at the same time, while remembering the complex fingering of keys, as your fingers scamper up and down the keyboard, sometimes crossing over each other.
Then try adding the pedal to that, remembering when to press down to sustain the notes, when to let up. Never mind remembering where to speed up, slow down, play louder or softer. And all that with feeling, to express the emotional content of the score.
The thing we’re after, of course, is to learn to play the piece so well that our muscle memory takes over and the fingers themselves know what to do, where to go and how to play. Then you become the instrument through which the piece plays itself, so to speak. How peaceful that is. No wonder we go into ecstatic rapture when that happens.
But to get to that point is extremely difficult and complex, and time-consuming, requiring tons of discipline and dedication as well as pure love for the instrument and the music you are attempting to master.
Which is why performances like that of Martha Argerich, considered the finest living pianists today, is so mesmerizing. Watch how her hands fly over the keyboard, how her body leans into the score, how her face expresses the depth of her feelings as she plays.
Watching this, I wasn’t surprised to find in an article on Brain Pickings last week how “playing music is the brain’s equivalent of a full-body workout.”
Playing an instrument engages practically every area of the brain at once — especially the visual, auditory, and motor cortices. And, as in any other workout, disciplined, structured practice in playing music strengthens those brain functions, allowing us to apply that strength to other activities.
Robert Jordain in his book Music, The Brain, and Ecstasy agrees:
No human undertaking is so formidable as playing a musical instrument. Athletes and dancers may drive their bodies to greater exertions; scholars ma juggle more elaborate conceptual hierarchies; painters and writers may project greater imagination and personality. But it is musicians who must draw together every aspect of mind and body, melding athleticism with intellect, memory, creativity, and emotion, all in gracious concert.
A properly trained pianist plays all at once from fingers, wrists, elbows, shoulders, and spine, every joint in exquisite coordination as legs support and pedal. When the torso sways upon the bench, every joint continuously adjusts its relationship to every other in an enormously complex running calculus . . . Accurate movement requires that the brain monitor every result of its efforts in a perpetual loop of feedback and adjustment.
So every sensory system except those for taste and smell is put to work reporting what has happened after a movement is made. . . . . Meanwhile, the visual system runs helter-skelter, one moment decoding dozens of dots on a printed page, the next aligning hands to keyboard, then darting off to gather timing cues from fellow musicians.
None of this commotion would be worth much were it not for emotions welling up through the mind’s floorboards. It is the joy of so pure an expression of emotion that draws musicians to the profession.
The musician at once commands the notes and is ravished by them.
Certainly all of this can be seen in Argerich’s playing. I am in awe when I watch her. And I wonder why I never heard of her until I was doing research for this post. Rubenstein, Horowitz, Glen Gould, Van Caliburn, all great classical pianists, all household names, all male. But the greatest of them all, according to so many lists I’ve seen, is this beautiful, Argentine woman who I had never heard of before. How can that be?
Apparently she is a legend in the classical world, “but she doesn’t act like one,” according to an article in the Washington Post last year.
She’s private, moody and unpredictable. She’s wildly beautiful, with a long, thick mass of hair — once dark, now gray — and a radiant, quick smile, and at 75, she still wears the peasant blouses and cotton pants of a teenager circa 1968. And she plays the piano brilliantly, ferociously and, perhaps, better than anyone else on Earth.
Some say that her performances on U-Tube are responsible for a new resurgence of interest in and accolades for her work among the general public. I’m happy that I found her there. She demonstrates so beautifully what that full-body workout of the brain looks and sounds like.
I played piano as a girl and always regretted giving it up. Lately the thought that I may never play again, never again experience the pure pleasure of music playing out through my finger tips onto the keys–to lose that forever– seemed too sad to bear. So I bought myself an electronic piano, something I could set out on my dining room table to play.
Nothing so romantic as a baby grand–but it has the touch and feel of the real thing. I can close my eyes and listen and imagine that heavy-breathing instrument bowing beneath my body as I play it.
The music I want to play is the kind that sweeps you away–Chopin, Mozart, Brahms, Beethoven . . . . What I yearn for, and seem to remember, is the kind of playing where body and music meld, where the notes sway through my body and spill out on the keyboard, like some lover I’m caressing. A musical love-making.
Of course, it’s a fantasy. I never played so well as a child, and I can’t imagine that the clumsy relearning I’m now experiencing will ever evolve into that. And yet I seem to “remember” something like this happening as a child when I played, perhaps at some rare moment when it all came together immensely well.
How my fingers, my whole body, knew where to go without thinking, without reading the notes. How it was almost as if the music was playing me, and I’m as much its instrument as is the piano. Or even more, as if we were playing each other–the score, my body, the piano–all playing together in unison, to create this “thing” we’ve become.
I don’t know if concert pianists feel this way about their music-making, if this is a memory of how it can be, or just some intense pleasure-making I’ve imagined when listening to some music that moves me, when I feel it flowing through me as if I were part of it, or it part of me.
And so I’m learning to play again, in this very painful, clumsy, halting way that all beginners experience, even those who once played before. Yet it’s still a thrill, touching fingers to keys, hearing the sound it makes vibrate through me. I know I may never play so well in reality as I play in my mind/memory/imagination, but then I don’t have to. I already have it. That experience. I’m already “it.”
This patient, clumsy practice is just the homage I pay to what could be, and to the tremendous hard work needed to reach that point of perfection. Playing well is a rigorous undertaking. And the outcome of all that practice is not guaranteed.
But this thing I’ve heard and experienced when listening to the music of those who have reached this pinnacle, makes me want to at least attempt to master some measure of that kind of music-making. I want to practice enough to feel at some point the table turn, and my fingers become the mute instrument of the music at play.
Do you play a musical instrument? Does it play you?
