in which I get philosophical, long-winded, and opinionated--and it all started so innocently!

[truepenny]

katallen tells it like it is: writers is nutz.

---

Still working on the Maple Leaf Rag. Also teaching myself to play "In the Mood," "Boogie-Woogie Bugle Boy," "La Bamba," "Mack the Knife," and various other songs of that ilk. Keeping in mind that Scott Joplin is the uppermost limit of my technical proficiency, any suggestions for sheet music collections, especially of blues and folk-music, would be very much appreciated. (I recognize the irony, believe me, but since I have no ability to play by ear, nor to improvise, nor to compose, if I want to play something, I have to have sheet music. Them's the breaks.)

I love having a piano again. I love being able to wander out, play for five or ten minutes, and wander away again. I love being able to sit down and play for an hour, if that's what I want to do. I love the fact that I have no one to please but myself. I love the fact that I can please myself.


I took piano lessons for ten years, from the time I was seven to the time I was seventeen. A lot of the time, especially in the first five years, I hated it. I willfully forgot to practice; I sulked; I was, I am retrospectively sure, unforgivably snotty to my piano teacher.

And now I'm grateful. I know this is something that gets kicked around a lot--should children be forced to take piano lessons (or violin lessons or ballet lessons or what have you), even though they complain and sulk, and even though it's quite clear to everyone concerned that they do NOT have the next Glenn Gould or Anna Pavlova on their hands? And of course that decision is always situational, always depends on the child and the teacher and the parents involved. But I do want to give my testimony, as someone who was an unremarkable and unenthusiastic pianist as a child: it was worth it.

As I said, the first five years were incredibly frustrating. I wasn't any good, and I knew it, and I resented the effort it took even to be mediocre. (I was not helped by the unspeakably loathsome horror that was the twice-yearly ritual sacrifice piano recital, but that's a different story.) But then, when I was twelve or thirteen, things started to fall into place. I started being able to play, instead of just plodding drearily through my practice sessions. I started looking for sheet music for things I wanted to play, started enjoying myself. It was no dramatic Saul-on-the-road-to-Damascus event (I still didn't practice as often as I ought to have, and I did not suddenly develop musical talent, or anything like that), but it was a qualitative difference in my relationship with the piano, and it's that relationship--allies instead of enemies--that has persisted into adulthood. But I would never have gotten there without those five ugly years of war and hostility.

(And there go my violent, morbid metaphors again.)

There are a lot of problems with America's cultural ethos these days. The pervasive sense of entitlement; the unwillingness to take responsibility; the glorification of athletic ability and concomitant denigration of intellectual, artistic, and other kinds of ability (I think there's a parallel to be drawn between the nation's defense budget and its major universities' athletics budgets); and then the idea that self-esteem (and, yeah, I do think it's okay for people to like themselves and be proud of themselves) should be nurtured Harrison Bergeron style, by not exposing children to things they can't do well, and not teaching them how to deal with the fact that other people may be more talented than they are.

Except, of course, in athletics.

It will not come as any great surprise to my Gentle Readers when I say that I was a nerd in high school. There were a lot of nerds at my high school (a natural consequence of Oak Ridge's rather peculiar demographic), and there was an extensive selection of AP courses and a variety of ways in which we were challenged and encouraged by our teachers.

But we were never praised. Not publicly. We'd all learned early and well to consider our intelligence and academic ability slightly suspect; we'd learned, to greater or lesser extents to "pass" for normal, understanding that we were weird and threatening and therefore targets. And no adult ever said we weren't targets, or shouldn't be targets, or tried to do anything about the fact we were targets (except my high school Calculus teacher, who told us vehemently to be proud of being geeks--but her Cloud Cuckooland only extended as far as her classroom door), in much the same way that no adult ever said that perhaps sexual harrassment wasn't a healthy way for teenage boys to relate to teenage girls. Intellectual achievement was something to be proud of, but also something vaguely shameful and never to be talked about in public.

On the other hand, attendance at pep rallies for the football team was mandatory.

You do the math.

Comments

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

First: my mother is a devious, horrible woman. She convinced me that she did not want me to take piano lessons. It was too expensive! I was too young! Etc.! When I turned 8 (which was, not at all coincidentally, the age her piano teacher friend had told her was the best age for starting kids on lessons), Grandma stepped in and said she would pay for them as a birthday present, and Mother reluctantly acquiesced. But! (she told me) she would never remind me to practice or tell me I had to. If I didn't, she would tell Grandma to stop writing the checks, but it was all my thing and my choice.

I practiced for hours. I loved it from the start. Devious, horrible woman, as I said.

Second: I still get a lump in my throat when I think of Marylyn screaming, with tears rolling down her face, at her special class that we were not nerds, we were gifted, we were special, and if we didn't take care of each other no one else was ever going to take care of us. That was a lot more effective than if she'd come in chirping about Geek Pride, I think, because it felt real to us. Because she wasn't promising us that being special in her eyes was going to make a damn bit of difference to the rest of the school or to the world at large -- just that it ought to make a difference to us.

I should call her. It's been too long.

When I was a sophomore and Math Club treasurer, AcaDec pres., Queen Geek around that school, my gym teacher tried to nominate me for Student of the Week. "But I found out the math department had already given it to you." She paused and gave me a really baffled look: "Are you good at math?" (I still don't know how she could have missed that one.)

One of the biggest revelations I handed someone at that school was when one of the stoners realized that I hated the place as much as he did. He had always thought that it was set up for people like me, and that's why it was making people like him miserable. I explained. We were friends after that, but I can't say either of us was any happier with the system.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

That was a lot more effective than if she'd come in chirping about Geek Pride

I've described it wrong, because that's not how it was.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Ah, okay; I think it was the Cloud-Cuckooland line that threw me, then.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

No, that was just me being cynical.

[malinaldarose.livejournal.com]

My parents gave me my childhood piano for my birthday a few years back. I love having it around, but honestly, I don't play, partly because it makes my wrists hurt. I think to be really good, you need a combination of talent and manual dexterity that practicepracticepractice just isn't going to give you. So while I can play some pieces passably well, there are others that I simply can't wrap my fingers around (and the same is true of the flute, which I also played in school).

[cija.livejournal.com]

Having a piano is one of the best things ever.

I bought an ugly, badly-taken-care-of Everett console a year ago with the bonus money that was supposed to carry me through the unemployed summer months, and I have not regretted it for a single second. My mother shipped me five shelf-feet of sheet music when she heard - the only thing I could ask for is to live in a house, not an apartment, so I could play in the evening or the middle of the night, but hey.

I don't know what was worse about piano recitals: the adrenaline to the point of nausea, or the Laura Ashley dresses they made me wear. I think I could have been pretty good if I'd been able to make myself practice, but I couldn't, and I quit when I was thirteen or fourteen. But now I can (practice.) It's a miracle.

[larryhammer]

You musical education and talent sounds a lot like mine, except I also was made to learn recorder in there as well, and play that more now than piano. Of course, it helps I have recorders here, what with my paino a state away.

I was more fortunate in high school experience, I think. Pep rallies were rare, and routinely ditched by the uninterested, myself included. And while I was one of the awkward nerds, I got out of most of the teasing by also playing soccer. Also, tallest white boy in school. (I'm always startled when I see how height intimidates. My reaction to someone taller than me is along the lines of "cool -- someone with an even larger second conscience than I.")

---L.

[ckd]

My high school had a fairly strong athletic focus as well, but at least while I was there, that didn't translate to active thwarting of the intelligent. (Benign neglect, perhaps.) Sure, the math team never got a pep rally...but the co-valedictorians my senior year were also the co-captains of the football team, and were taking all of the available AP classes. This meant that the folks who'd be the stereotypical nemeses of the Most Nerdy were usually studying with them instead. I don't expect that to have continued, though I do hope that some of the social effects lingered.

(The school was also willing to let you take any AP test you wanted to, even if they didn't offer the course; my senior year we had three tests that were each taken by only one student--three different people.)

[necessaryspace.livejournal.com]

**Intellectual achievement was something to be proud of, but also something vaguely shameful and never to be talked about in public** I find this interesting. I took all the AP classes I possibly could in high school (5 in senior year alone). I did very well in them and so was naturally invited to all those mini-award ceramonies. I absolutely hated going to the point of embarrassment. I didn't see why I should be 'rewarded' for receiving good grades, for that's not why I was striving for the grades in the first place.

However, now that I'm older and theoretically more mature, I wonder how much of my 'shame' was a result of the fact that many would've considered me too smart or something along those lines?

Find the Peanuts music!

[shalanna.livejournal.com]

I'm so glad you've come back to the piano! May I suggest some of the most FUN music you will ever play--and it's stuff that everyone will want you to play at parties (unlike your labored-over Chopin and Beethoven), and in fact will start dancing when you play it. . . .

Vince Guaraldi's piano music for "A Charlie Brown Christmas" and other Peanuts specials.

I was recently at a gathering of musicians who were admiring the host's new Petrof piano. They'd all played their virtuoso stuff. My mother had come with me (she needed to get out of the house), and she begged me not to go in and play. I was determined. So when I heard someone else playing Beethoven's sonata Op. 46, No. 1, I ran in there to follow up with No. 2. (The "easy" sonata, the Tempo di Menuetto.) The nerds grinned and followed along in the score. It's not heard often. Then I paused . . . and swung into "Linus and Lucy." (Not the arrangement, which omits the interludes and bridges, but the transcription, augmented by the by-ear fixes.)

Children jumped into the air and started dancing! "That's the Peanuts music!!" Smiles on every face. I tell you what, they WANTED to hear that. It says a lot.

Get one of the Hal Leonard books, or maybe the transcription book if you're interested in the exact sound. ("Linus and Lucy" is all over the place in simplified solos, but they leave out all but the main theme. The main theme is the favorite part, but the "real song" is the whole thing, to me.) There's a yellow cover Hal Leonard that has intermediate arrangements of "Skating" and "Christmas Time Is Here," two of my major hits.

Not that I go around playing people's pianos. (Well, I always have that impulse, but I usually restrain it. I'm an ear player and have been from age three or four, but I also taught myself to read music, laboriously. I had music classes in school, so Mother said no piano and no piano lessons at home--we had a Hammond two-manual organ, and she said anyone who played by ear didn't need lessons. Not true, but anyway I appreciate it more than those who were forced to take 12 years of lessons and can't play a note--my husband is one of them, and he hates pianos. I finally bought a piano when I was 14 with my baby-sitting money; it cost $150, was an old practice piano upright that smelled musty and was painted Chinese red, and Mama didn't want it in the house. My dad made her let me put it on the screened porch--the neighbors who sold it to me delivered it, out of pity. It held a tune amazingly well for something out there in the unheated part of the house, but it was a honky-tonk piano. I bought a baby grand, used, from a piano teacher after I married (she was divorcing and divesting), and I still have that one. I play probably two hours a week, down from two hours a day, because I started spending all my free time writing on the novels.)

I can't play stride or ragtime. Hands too small. Also, Mozart is tough to pick up by ear, so I always use the sheet music for classical works. Have you tried just noodling around with chord progressions? You can come up with some great New Age stuff just doing that. And it's by ear!

[mmarques.livejournal.com]

Thanks for your post. I played piano yesterday afternoon for an hour or so, when I hadn't played for months.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

My senior year, a friend and I started cutting pep rallies. We got caught by teachers as nerdy as ourselves (who were ALSO supposed to be at the pep rally), and they didn't say a word.

Or, rather, they did, but not about the pep rally we were all currently skipping.