First Music (Piano)

November 04, 2003 6:48 p.m.

Piano

It had been in the house for years.

My father had bought it ages ago and built its little twin, the harpsichord, in the far corner of the living room. The harpsichord was an old friend: together, in cahoots, we would make old grandparents wince and say, �That�s very nice, dear.� It was always beloved for its tinny, strident powers of annoyance. But the piano had gone untouched by me in my four years of life. I knew neither its name nor its purpose. I remembered only my mother saying something about its use. The vague music of my father tinkling out Liszt on the piano, cursing at the missed notes.

I slid my body, dark and plumped with baby substance, across the slickness of the piano bench. I was dwarfed by the black behemoth, somehow misshapen, the senseless sweep of the propped-up lid. A trembling string brought me to fear. The piano was watching me with a statue-like gaze, rolling out a white-and-black carpet for me, waiting for my next move. I slid my finger over black-white-black, and chess began. First moves.

Gingerly I pressed a key, felt the mild zings as hammer connected with strings and a middling tone, bland and inoffensive, materialized. No demons leapt from the woodwork, and the painted images beneath the lid did not writhe into life. Disappointed, I prodded it again. Clearly the magic of the instrument was not only in pressing a few notes. More ambition was required of me.

I spread my grubby fingers over the piano and brought them down with a dramatic clash. Still no wild spirits. But it was satisfying. A few more dissonant chords. The sounds of the piano were fascinating because they resembled nothing. A trumpet heralds the beginnings of a race up in heaven. A violin is the wailing of a dead child. A cello holds the moans of old souls. But the piano, the musical orphan, does not chirp like a bird or belt like a trombone or soar like the human voice. Nothing sounds like a piano. A piano is a canvas, a surface on which shadows might dance.

I was caught in a scarce few minutes, my clashing war cries silenced and defeated, and I was sent off to piano school to learn the proper way to spin sonatas. It became clear to me early there that I would never be a really good pianist. The instrument did not take to me nor I to it, though we tried to reach across a morass of incomprehension towards each other. It was not my greatest music nor my most beloved. When I was eleven I sang halfway through La Boheme with Mimi, effortless, joyous, maturing fingers progressing along in the libretto, and my musical fate was decided. Today I want to sing opera, but I am still a distorted reflection of the dark girl-child banging madly on the piano, fumbling towards melodies. A flawed music, the first music, the first love.

Anna

Note: I am new here and I don't know how the pseudonym thing works, so I am just using one of my usual online names.