Thomas Erickson
June 2023
I have spent the last six years learning piano.
I started late, just after I turned 61. I was starting almost from scratch – I knew the treble clef, and quarter and half and whole notes, but that’s about it. They say that one learns things – especially things like language and music and dancing – better before puberty. That may be so.
But what I lack in timing, I make up in other ways. Studies in the psychology of expertise tell us that practice swamps talent. Studies of students at piano conservatories find that the best predictor of how well students do – whether they go one to become piano teachers, concert pianists, or world-renowned performers – is simply how much they practice. The idea of someone with talent to whom music comes naturally… well, that may be true for a few months during childhood, but in the long run it is practice, practice, practice. Perhaps it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy: tell someone they’re talented, and they feel motivated to practice more. But although I lack talent for music, I have an equally useful talent: persistence.
And, in fact, I have another advantage, one that leverages my lack of talent: I’m fascinated by mistakes. Why do we do things – seemingly simple things – wrong? What is it that makes something easy? What is it that makes something difficult? Can we devise some sort of alchemy that transmutes difficulty into ease?
One thing I find interesting about learning piano – or in fact doing anything with my hands – is that I can feel when I’ve made an error. Whether it’s playing the wrong note, pressing the wrong key on a keyboard, or shooting a pit from the cherry pitter in the wrong direction, I know when I’ve erred. In fact, I know before I’ve erred. It’s almost psychic: the hand has set off down the wrong path, and I can feel it even before the cherry pit goes skittering across the floor leaving a bloody contrail of juice.
But unlike typing or pitting cherries, I find making mistakes on the piano very unpleasant. Not only do I feel the mistake before it is made, I hear the mistake as it is made. As does anyone else who is present. And mistakes – at least those made by beginning students like myself – are not subtle. They loudly proclaim their wrongness. They feel bad. Almost painful.
As loud and obvious and painful as pianistic mistakes are, they are often frustratingly difficult to correct. I make a mistake. That flusters me, and so I try again and repeat the mistake. And again. It is not so bad if I am practicing. I have an electronic piano, which comes with the blessed privacy of headphones. But at least once a week I doff the headphones, drive to the MacPhail Center for Music, and play for my teacher. The first six months of lessons were horrible. I find it hard to fathom why I didn’t just quit. I came away from practice drenched in sweat, every muscle taunt, an ache in my upper back. I am not used to being inept. The only bit of comfort I clung to was that my teacher must be accustomed to the halting, error-ridden, cacophonous progress of students.
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There appears to be only a slight linkage between the conscious brain and the active hand. My brain, looking at the music, knows the notes it wants to play. It can see the notes and their rhythm right there in the score, but the hand, like an impatient and petulant child, pays little attention. The conscious brain believes it is directing, but to its dismay and frustration, its directions are unheeded. And occasionally the opposite happens: the brain is befuddled and doesn’t know what to do, but the hand, continuing to ignore the brain, dances merrily along, producing a melodic series of notes to the brain’s astonished dismay. Is the brain really necessary? The hand seems to have a mind of its own.
The mind in the hand is different, to be sure. It is quiet. Not one for using words. It is an introvert. It doesn’t care for others. That is one of the challenges of learning piano. While blithely ignoring the directions of the brain, the hand is all too attentive to what its mate is doing. If the right hand is doing legato, the left hand wants to do it too. If the left hand is playing a repeating motif, the right hand very much wants to join in. And as with the hand, so with the fingers. Only long, slow, focused repetition of short sequences can convince the two hands to part ways. A moment of inattention, and the hands resume their synchrony, thwarted lovers sneaking a moment of rhythmic reunion. Except sometimes.
There are some things that hands are fine about doing differently. Mirror image playing, for example, is remarkably easy. How curious! Or maybe it’s not so curious: playing with the hands mirroring each other means that the thumb, index finger, and so forth, on each hand, are doing the same things, because the hands are mirrors of one another. So perhaps that makes sense. But it also turns out to be easy to play the same sequence of notes with both hands. That means that the right thumb is acting in synchrony with the left little finger, the right index finger with the left ring finger, and so on. Now the hand seems to have a special awareness of the position of each of its fingers: these are the left-most digits – it doesn’t matter that one is a finger and one is a thumb. So the hand seems to be able to address its digits in two ways: by name or by position.
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Today, while I was practicing, my hands figured something out. My right hand had been playing a series of notes: finger 1 pressed C, then finger 2 pressed E, and then finger 5 – stretched out a little bit to span 3 keys rather than 2 – pressed A. At some point, my hand had an epiphany. It recognized that it was in a familiar posture, with the first three fingers relaxed and the latter two stretched out a bit: it was the handshape used to play the first inversion of a chord, in this case A major. I had played many first inversions, many times, and my brain recognized the handshape, but suddenly my hand felt the shape it was in as a familiar and singular whole. It was not just the shape, but the way the shape felt as fingers splayed out with a web of tension varying across the fingers.
I often have the sense that as I learn, I am watching from the outside. And what I saw, from the outside, was that my hand had learnt to recognize the feeling of the chord. It had, perhaps, previously failed to make the connection because it was not playing a chord; that is, it was not depressing all the fingers at once, but playing them one at a time in a sequence. This is called a broken chord. The epiphany of the hand was to realize that its posture or shape was separate from its movement. It shaped itself for a chord, but it played the notes separately. This is a big advance because the hand takes on a single posture, and the fingers need only press in sequence. No need to figure out how to get the next finger to the next note: each finger is already where it needs to be, and a breaking wave of energy flows through the hand pressing each digit into its key.
This applies to more than a short sequence of notes. Playing becomes a matter of moving the hand, still in its first inversion shape, to another part of the keyboard. Or, perhaps, one stays in the same place and shifts to a different handshape, such as the second inversion. So a passage of music that had previously involved repeatedly positioning individual fingers to strike individual keys, again and again and again and again, becomes much simpler: the hand shifts fluidly among a few handshapes while the fingers press keys in synchrony with the rhythm.
The brain watches in amazement. This tumbling flow of handshapes is beyond it.
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If the brain is limited in its ability to play, it is indefatigable in its attempts to analyze. I have come to recognize a common pattern of mistake-making, what is called a failure mode in systems analysis, related to my hand position. I find when I stretch out my hand – that is, spread the fingers apart to play a larger span of keys without moving my hand – that afterwards I automatically return it to a more closed, comfortable resting position. I believe that I am returning to a notion I learned long, long ago when I learned to type on a keyboard. We were taught that there was a home position – with your index fingers on the “f” and “j” keys of the middle row , and that your fingers ought to return to the home position after stretching out to type keys on other rows. The idea was that by doing that you, or rather your fingers, would always know the path to each letter. But on the piano, I am learning that there is no home.
On the piano your fingers are nomads. To master the piano is to understand an entire territory. Different pieces of music cause your fingers to dwell in different areas. A score is like a map, and playing a song is a journey through a particular territory. Key signatures define the topographies of the paths, where some sequences of notes are favored over others. Particular rhythms recur, and repeated motifs may serve as landmarks, recognizable, but transposed or inverted when approached from different directions. Being a nomad means understanding the lay of the land: its patterns – topography, seasons, ecosystems – are meaningful.
Patterns stretch out over time and over space. A line of flotsam marks the extent of a high tide. The concentric layers of hailstones bear witness to its accretive formation high in the troposphere. The alignment of crystals in granite evince the slow flow of the magma. Patterns are the fossils of processes. Today, when I learn a song, I am working backwards. I am learning the patterns of a piece of music, trying to understand their meanings and interrelationships, and working out the tumbling sequence of handshapes and the flow of motion over the keyboard that will produce the song.
One day I hope I will know enough to work forwards. That the mind in the hands will be at home in the keyboard, able to chart its own way along paths of its own devising.