Piano Joy

A composition in twelve movements.

I.

I set up my Casio Keyboard for the first time in this apartment just a few weeks ago.

I've had it since May 2010, where it lived in my last NYC apartment in the East Village. It came with me to Seattle where it mostly sat untouched for the year I lived in that tall scalloped tower near the downtown convention center. At my first SF apartment, the keyboard sat covered in a rarely-used common room, in the Upper Haight three-bedroom I shared with friends for five years.

The movers disassembled the wooden keyboard stand for its next journey into a sunny but small studio apartment in Nob Hill. The keyboard itself and the stand components remained stacked in the closet for the entirety of my four-year stay there. The bundle eventually arrived at my current apartment and inertia kept it stored away for almost two years even though my new place is at least double the size of the last one.

I'd considered selling it in the past, usually during stints of unemployment or when a resurgence of "what sparks joy?" decluttering energy strikes.

It’s heavy owing to weighted keys, but weighted keys make such a difference.

II.

I took piano lessons for thirteen years, and flute lessons for ten. My best friend in elementary school played the flute, and I wanted to be like her, but my parents insisted that I start with piano lessons first. When you're young, the smallest things seed such important paths.

Every Friday afternoon, mom drove me (and eventually my younger sister, who also took up piano lessons) to our teacher's house. It was routine and normal, like brushing teeth, going to school, passing time. There is not much drudgery or dread I associate with those years, not in the way that I've heard many other peers recall their music lessons. There was not an abundance of joy or excitement either.

Each spring there was a recital with all of the teacher's students. We used to be scheduled earlier in the program, a little asterisk by our name to denote our debut in the annual performance. Towards our last appearances in the recital, we were some of the final performers to take the stage.

III.

I have hazy memories of a group piano class with a different teacher from earlier – there was a room with some dozen digital keyboards set up, and each student wore headphones so we could practice on our own. The color red is coming up here for some reason too, maybe from the cover of the instructional book we used.

IV.

The fall after I moved into this apartment, I spent a weekend at Flower Piano, an annual event at the SF Botanical Gardens. Twelve pianos are brought into the gardens, some the center of attention in a magnificent field, others tucked away into oft-overlooked coves.

I wandered around for hours, letting piano notes guide me from one performance to another. They schedule specific performers for sets, but in between those, the public is invited to line up and take turns playing.

I found the latter group much more compelling - a wide range of pianists coming out from wherever they had been practicing, rehearsing, repeating the same phrases over and over again until they were ready. Small children clutching brightly-covered books, climbing onto too-tall stools and remembering their finger placement before haltingly starting the first notes. A parent nearby recording and encouraging them. Experienced players strolling up, eager to show off what they'd memorized. Pairs of pianists and singers, bringing familiar showtunes and pop songs to the space. And everything in between.

I recalled the keyboard sitting in my closet, and committed myself to getting something ready to perform the following year.

V.

I bought this keyboard because of a long-distance situationship that I desperately hoped would become more. He had mentioned offhand, once, that it was cool that I knew how to play the piano, how he'd always wanted to learn but hadn't gotten around to doing so.

I didn't buy it thinking I would impress him with my skills, necessarily. We lived on opposite coasts after all. I bought it thinking that if I could simply become a person he would want to be with, then he would want to be with me.

He visited me in NYC once, and I fumbled my way through the chords of Elton John's "Sorry Seems to be the Hardest Word", too nervous to sing the opening lyrics.

Let's be honest, there's on the nose, and then there's on the nose.

I made $50k in 2010, this was not a responsible purchase for many reasons.

VI.

Of the joys I really remember from the piano lessons, one was unlocking the ability to play songs that I could sing to. I never took singing lessons, but I wanted to sing all the time. We wore out Disney sing-along VHS tapes, I loved musicals, and the biggest thrill upon visiting someone's home was to discover they had a karaoke machine.

When we first got internet, I learned how to search for sheet music to my favorite songs. There were some dozen sheet music sharing sites where users maintained lists of their collections, and we would email each other in order to request individual file trades. This is how I acquired "My Skin" by Natalie Merchant.

I practiced and performed this at one of my high school's coffeehouse events. As a teen, I knew generally what this song alluded to, but as someone who at that point had never been kissed, I'm not sure where I came up with the emotional truth to sing it.

One of the more popular girls at school came up to me afterwards, complimented my performance and asked if I'd written the song. I admitted I hadn't, but the implication that I had – that I was perceived as someone who could write something this sensual and evocative – was intoxicating.

What a strange artifact of the currency and cordiality of early aughts emails.

VII.

During the final day of Flower Piano that first year, I came across a small gathering of people in the California Natives area of the garden. A walnut-finished baby grand, shaded by a large canvas umbrella, sat waiting. A teenager had just inherited the spotlight, and they set their phone against the music rack to begin.

I took a seat under the afternoon sun, curious about where their opening chords were leading. And then it dawned on me. I pulled up the lyrics to Adele's "All I Ask" on my own phone, looking around to see if anyone else had recognized the song. Encouraging but blank faces.

I began mouthing the words, trying to catch the pianist's eye to let them know someone knew the song. They smiled and called me over, and then I was up at the piano with them, singing along. Bold, given no preparation, given no warm-up, given Adele, but it was glorious to feel the energy shift in that little alcove.

When the song ended, our spectators were shocked to learn we hadn't planned this, hadn't even known each other until three minutes prior. We played an encore, Sam Smith's "Stay With Me", after I browsed through their phone for other songs I knew. We never exchanged names or contact information, but our smiling selfie together remains favorited on my phone, evidence of a serendipitous moment in time.

VIII.

When I started to see flyers announcing the return of Flower Piano this fall, I found myself struck with guilt. A whole year had passed and I had missed my chance to prepare anything.

I wandered the gardens again, searching for serendipity.

The piano in the California Natives area of the botanical garden.

The day Flower Piano ended this year, I asked a friend to hold me accountable for at least the first step.

"I need to find the power cable for my keyboard. Can you text me later to show you proof I did?"

If I could just find the cable, the rest of it would be easy.

It was, of course, in the last possible storage box, the one at the back of the closet, the one that held cables and cords for everything lost and misplaced. I fished it out, along with the sustain pedal attachment.

IX.

Once you're a cardholder at the SF Public Library, you're entitled to $2.00 worth of printing every day. This is equivalent to 20 black and white pages.

Most pop songs end up being in the four to six page range, made efficient by choruses and verses that share the same measures.

Two more things I learned about the library: 1) they have dozens of piano music books available to borrow, 2) you can scan unlimited pages and convert them into PDFs.

When I want to treat myself these days, I choose one or two of my scanned PDFs, upload it into the library's digital printing hub, and take a brisk walk to my local branch, bringing a folder along to make sure the pages don't get folded or bent during the journey home.

X.

A week ago, I hosted some friends at my apartment. The three of them sat on the couch; I sat adjacent on the storage ottoman that now doubles as my piano bench.

We had foraged snacks and planned to cozy up to watch a movie. I was angling for Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron, though Anastasia was under consideration as well.

Instead, we spent the entire evening singing together. I had a handful of Olivia Rodrigo and Taylor Swift songs practiced and ready to perform ("Happier" and "logical" from the former, "Exile" from the latter), and they dug through reams of my sheet music collection and retrieved long-forgotten favorites. "Boston" by Augustana. "Kissing You" from the Romeo+Juliet soundtrack. "The Scientist" by Coldplay. "Superman" by Five For Fighting.

I stumbled through rusty keys and chords, laughter breaking out as important melodic sections were marred by jarringly wrong notes. I paused, apologized, squinted, corrected my finger positioning, and we kept going.

This isn't the joy I thought this keyboard would bring me.

XI.

Two small chores have become essential to my current practice. They are tedious and I get impatient, but they facilitate transitions between things and as such, they have been worth the time spent figuring them out.

One is piano fingering, making marks to indicate which finger should play which note. Some music comes with complex passages already pre-fingered (it's very hard to talk about this without smirking!) but most of it doesn't. Before, these marks were always made by my teacher, and I absolutely did not recognize the value of this labor until I had to do it for myself. It's not an exact science – it's about where your fingers need to be after the notes you're currently playing to set up for the next ones, it's about how your specific hand can accommodate the notes it needs to, and it's about what will flow the best. I keep a pencil with an eraser nearby when I'm unpacking a new song.

The other is page management. Stopping the flow of a song because of a page turn, or worse, a missing page entirely, is decidedly un-joyful. Page management starts with carefully taping each sheet of paper to the next one so that the entire song becomes one long scroll but can still be folded up accordion-style for storage. It's important that the top, bottom and the middle of the pages are taped, and that there's neither gap nor overlap between each page.

This also leads into the second part of page management, page turns. I can balance a four-page wide song on the music rack, but any longer and there will need to be a critical decision made about where I can spare a hand to execute a page turn. Sometimes there's no good spot and the only way to avoid pausing is to anticipate a measure or two before a page ends and flip it over early.

XII.

I don’t practice every day, but when I do, I end up playing until early in the morning. I plug headphones in so I don’t bother my upstairs neighbors, but I also can’t help but sing out loud sometimes.

There’s a lot of joy here.

Despite a decade-plus pause, muscle memory around certain songs remains. Sometimes I nail a passage that has eluded me for days, finally getting the fingering correct and feeling the music moving itself along. There’s unfurling a new song and delighting in how pretty its chord arrangements are. There’s questioning why I made this impulse purchase, why I dragged it from home to home, and realizing I have an answer.

I think forward to next fall, wondering which songs I’ll bring with me to the botanical garden, and who might sing along.