When you're learning to play a piece--on the piano, in this case--it's helpful to learn the melody by humming or whistling or la-la-la-ing. This piece of advice from my father, a piano teacher, has turned out to be very useful recently. Makes me wish Dad had told me years earlier. Or at all.
As it happens, I got this pointer from my sister, to whom Dad told it decades ago. Dad tried twice to teach me and we apparently came up with a mutual unspoken deal where I'd struggle by myself for years and he'd occasionally offer me a suggestion that would usually prove useful, though not as useful as learning to finger, or acquiring basic harmony knowledge. After I finally started spending my own money for lessons, Mr. Diebel (I expect his proper title was Dr., but I never heard it used or requested) patiently addressed the worst of my deficiencies, ignoring my utter helplessness from his friendship with Dad. Dad once asked him what the main thing was he'd taught me, and Diebel answered by putting five fingers on his arm and saying "One, two, three, four, five." When I came to him, I acquired most notes by moving my hand. When we moved out of state a year or so later, I was about where a second or third-year student might be, provided nobody asked any theory questions, including "what key is this in?"
Fortune and decision brought me to theory. First, I noticed the existence of the Irish jam on Cathy's campus and started going. I tried playing my tiny backpack keyboard, but it was nigh inaudible in the room full of fiddlers and accordionists. I brought my accordion in (never learned the bass notes) and sight-read on that for a while before buying a five-octave keyboard with full-sized keys I could play. That led to a feeling of obligation toward those chord names over the tune sheets we used, and I started filling in, first with just the roots of the chords, then block chords, and finally comping. That's when a light bulb in my head said "You should take theory now, before you graduate." So I took four semesters off my art major and just took the sequence, not even for credit. I had some questions early on which my teacher answered by having me sit in on the aural training class concurrent with the theory cycle.
I figured I knew enough theory from osmosis that I could start the class without a semester of "this is your finger and this is a note," and I was almost wrong but got through it with a simple trick I've mastered of clenching my entire head and keeping it that way until a problem seems to solve itself. The theory homework had the side effect of teaching me legible musical writing, which worked out because I also started writing some pieces of music in the same format we used in the jam. The class and sessions are the best musical education I've received, and I wish I'd done it decades earlier.
I was talking to a couple of friends in the group (dang! I have friends here.) about playing outside the sessions to do other kinds of music. Suddenly, people started getting Covid and parts of society shut down, including all campus activities like ours (mostly peopled by non-college folks). My friend and I exchanged mp3s for a while, then started meeting under extremely careful conditions. After two years and change, we pick up new pieces pretty quickly (the tough ones take longer), often making our own non-virtuoso arrangements for the purpose. That's when Martha mentioned the bit about humming.
Who knows if I could have taken music theory earlier? I had one theoretical sort of class in Georgia but was trying to do math and computers and art. Would I have shrugged it off like my first (and second) lessons? Would Dad's pointer have taken root if he'd told it to me himself? Who sawed Courtney's boat?
I'm taking away from this exactly what I'm getting: a tip that makes it even easier at a time when it's continually getting easier. With any luck, I'll get up to Michigan in the Fall and have a chance to show Dad how my playing is going, and mention that I'm using his tip. There's some baggage lying around that I don't feel like picking up. It'd just slow me down anyway, and nothing in it's of any real value.
Left foot. Right foot. Am I there yet?
Repeat.
.
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