More Technique: Piano Stuff.

Photo by Baron Dave, 2005. I had hands then, too! Taken at Minicon.

So much of the time I spend learning a piece now appears, in the cold light of decades of days, to be time spent figuring out how it should sound. Even as I built a pretty good facility for sightreading whatever didn't scare me off at second glance, I still had to deal with the ingrained presence of Mister Fuckup.

Mister Fuckup lives in my head, with some other entities we don't need to discuss now, and his sole joy in life is making me play the next wrong note. (He moonlights as a typing coach, by the way.) Even as I improved my playing and gained some welcome certainty over the easier notes, Mister F still reigned unchecked. My own personal Muse of Failure, living on the road between Intention and Execution, his specialty was finding the moment of confidence after playing three things right in a row and starting to believe I'd make it to the end unscathed. Implacable, non-negotiable.

The first partial victory against Fuckup was when I noticed one day that I was talking to my hands, as if they were individuals with wills of their own. And maybe they are. Anyway, I was embarking on a tough passage, and I beamed a thought like "And if Righty fluffs the melody up there, Lefty, you're doubling it anyway, so lean on it and we'll get through this," and then I caught myself doing it and realized that as long as I was making up entities, I should concoct an invisible henchman whose only job is to keep my place in the score (I had just done the crushing job of deducing that losing my place was a drawback. Offstage.) and threaten it with dire things if it didn't keep a running spot tally for my eyes to return to. 

And what do you know? It worked. My playing improved more quickly than usual for a while. I'd injured Mister F.

In many ways, it's good to have a brain you can take out and play with sometimes. With a number of little hacks and kludges, I began to get fairly reliable within my level. I even began to notice some things about my playing that went back to the very fundamentals of playing.

Remembering about Dad's advice, via Martha, to know what the passage is supposed to sound like before trying to play it makes me think of the long times I would spend trying to make a piece of music match what I heard in my head when that aural image was overly vague or otherwise just plain wrong to start with. 

I not only increased how much I'd work on each hand by itself (oh yeah, we're talking piano here), but made it a point when needed to dissect one hand's part for a measure, even playing it with both hands until I had the sequence of notes and rests down in my head. Has this made a difference? No, I've cunningly spent all these paragraphs saying it didn't, ell oh ell, aitch aitch oh kay, ess aay ess. Of course it made a difference!

It turns out that subjecting myself to continuous cognitive dissonance by looking at the right notes while thinking the wrong ones can wear you out, and stopping it is a relief, even if you don't replace it with anything. If you replace it with something, though, may I recommend mentally shouting out the name of the note when you see it in notation instead of trying to cultivate the Blind Zen Archer bit. It turns out that successful blind Zen archers were remarkable because most of them failed and found something better to shoot for and are now faintly embarrassed by the whole archery phase, to be honest, and they have a ukulele right here.

Getting back to me, however, I'm passing along my advice to myself: Figure out the real melody as soon as possible. It's never too late, luckily, to start working toward it and away from the broken version of a tune I'd substituted. When temptation strikes to keep the wrong one, I can refer to a mental image of something my best piano teacher, Mr. Diebel, said about a very similar topic. 

"Write your own damn music."

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