7 July 2021

I have spent the last four years learning piano.

I started late, just after I turned 61. I was starting pretty much from scratch – I knew the treble cleff 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. I know – both from experience and from research in psychology – that practice swamps talent. Studies of students at piano conservatories find that the best predictor of how well students do – do they turn out to be piano teachers or concert pianists? – 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 of 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 any talent for music, I have discovered that I have an equally useful talent: stubbornness.

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 piter 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 contrail of juice.

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 mind 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 of the hand is different, to be sure. It is quiet. Not one for using words. It is an introvert, focused inward. At least for a beginner, that is one of the challenges of learning piano. While 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 reunion. Except sometimes. There are some things that hands are fine about doing differently. Mirror image playing, for example, is remarkably easy. How curious! So is playing the same sequence of notes with both hands, even though that involves using different fingers for the same notes. And the hands are pretty comfortable playing at different speeds, as long as one speed is an even multiple or fraction of the other. All these things gives hints about the nature of the hand’s mind.

The mind in the hand is a quiet alien. It moves in a dance with a partner, sometimes in synchrony, sometimes in counterpoint. It lives in a world of simultaneity with its mate, choreographing trajectories along which it falls. It may sometimes deign to take notice of the brain for a bit, only to ignore it in a liquid flow of notes that leaves the brain stumbling behind in its wake, feeling awkward and useless. Though the mind in the hand is quiet, it does have a bit of an attitude.

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