When I was in fourth grade my mother started piano lessons for me on the cherry oak upright she inherited from her mother. I loved to fool around on the piano so I was excited to start my lessons.
My teacher was Mr. Heinz, a bald, clinically overweight man who took up three quarters of the piano bench we shared in the sweltering heat of our non air conditioned Florida home. Mr. Heinz never smiled or engaged me in conversation to put me at ease, rather launched straight into music theory. Time signatures, half notes, whole notes, notes that flew above and below the lines - I didn’t understand any of it! The incessant ticking of the metronome spiked my anxiety. When I actually attempted to play “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star”, Mr. Heinz moaned and groaned, mopping his face and the crown of his head with a big white handkerchief. This agony continued for a month before he told my mother that I was incorrigible and he quit. I was elated…so much so that I felt my mother storming through the house, banging pots and pans, and icing me out for days was well worth it.
I still played on my own sans sheet music, just for fun. I figured out the fingering for scales and drilled my fingers until it became automatic. Never knew what key I was in and didn’t care. I played by heart.
Eventually I grew up and went away to college, then moved out to Seattle after I graduated. There I began to yearn to play the piano again. I was perennially working crumby jobs so it’s not like I could buy a piano. Then, to my heart’s delight I discovered a piano in the basement of the public library and the librarian said I was welcome to use it. I began to figure out the scales for big chords and worked and worked until I achieved mastery. A single musical phrase popped into my head so I played it again and again until other phrases occurred to me and I was able to build a musical storyline. Dynamics were of utmost importance to me. I wanted the piece to build and build, then be distilled back down to its essence.
The Pacific Science Center in Seattle has a piano you can play that instantly translates your music into sheet music. Excitedly, I sat down to try it. I had to laugh because I couldn’t begin to play my own piece by looking at what the computer had generated!
Blue by Susan Moffitt (2024) acrylic on canvass
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