Guest blog by Ajlr
Learning to play the piano when one is over 50 (2 of 2)
As the weeks and months of our music lessons went on and Ben took us patiently through the early stages of learning to read music, translating the notes from the brain to the hands, remembering what keys were what on the piano, understanding just how to use the keys and move the fingers around on the keyboard, I began to wonder if this would ever be something I could do to my own satisfaction. I’ve always found learning comes reasonably easily, usually through books/text and observation, but I found it particularly hard to make the three-way connection between notes on the page, understanding them in the head, then moving the fingers appropriately. I was – and am – so slow in getting anywhere with it. After 25 years with computers I’m a fluent keyboard user so I knew that I could make that eyes/brain/fingers connection with other types of information but this wasn’t just a simple case of ‘hit-the-right-key-and-then-the-next-one’ – there was timing, touch, understanding the dynamics of even the mini-exercises Ben was using with us, heaven knows how many different elements. I felt – still do feel – like a total idiot much of the time. But I hate giving up on things. I had decided I would learn this to a level where I could avoid wincing at the sounds I made, so that was the way it was going to be. And I liked the sounds I could make when my brain and hands decided to co-operate for a few bars. Ray, meanwhile, was having great fun making up and playing tunes, or following by ear a tune that Ben would hum, and not so much fun with the theory side of it. (Our shared hour, at that time, was divided into two periods of 30 minutes, with Ben ably dividing his attention between the one practising and the one working on theory exercises, with us changing places at the half hour.) We both enjoyed most of our lessons, although sometimes for different reasons. Both of us like learning for its own sake, and for both of us this was also something very different to the rest of our respective daily activities.
When it came to learning and playing scales, I began slowly to understand a little more and could begin to work out the answers to our homework exercises by using the piano keyboard. Being told to play scales double-handed (both of my own hands, not one from each of us…) suddenly made playing them with one hand seem easy, whereas before I kept going wrong with the fingering. I like patterns – my brain recognises them and I find many things easier to comprehend once I’ve understood how they fit together in a discernable pattern, even if it’s a difficult one in itself. Playing scales and understanding them is a satisfying pattern.. Mind you, listening to me learning and playing scales must be fairly excruciating. Tabbs, our cat, tends to sit with her back to me, ears almost folded flat, after the first few minutes when I’m practising. And my hands aren’t as supple these days as they should be – all those years of using a computer mouse and keyboard for too long at a stretch have taken their toll in terms of tightened tendons across the backs of my hands. I have to do loosening-up exercises before I can get a good free movement some evenings and if Ben and I compare hands (and he’s 20 years older than I am) it’s obvious how our different working lives have affected our respective limbs. Having had carpal tunnel syndrome in both wrists back in my 20s probably just added to the stiffness. The music teacher at school was also right in that I wouldn’t be able to stretch far – I can just about span an octave but that’s all. But so what? I can still do it and that’s what matters.
Ben has recently been introducing the different sorts of timing that are possible, from simple to compound time (and for all I know, three- and four-dimensional timing will be in next term’s lessons…). The practise itself, for one who has a very full-time job, gets done in the evening and at weekends and after first trying the type of time allocation model that works for me with other types of learning and doing it in solid chunks of a couple of hours or more, I’ve now gone over to the ‘little and often’ model for much of it. Something that Blondviolinist said in one of her guest posts a couple of months ago, about learning to play an instrument being more of the athletics model than the academic as one needed to physically train the body, really clicked with me. I’d automatically been using the processes that have always worked for me before in other spheres – despite Ben saying gently to me that when he was learning a new piece he often went through a stage of doing bits of it for 10 minutes at a time, and repeating that regularly throughout the day to get his fingers used to particular sections. I’d obviously not properly taken that on board but when Blondviolinist said something so similar – two professional musicians with the same idea to put over – my middle-aged brain picked up on it at long last. Not that it’s always easy to make myself practise anyway (I gather I’m not alone in this…). When one is tired after a series of long days the tendency to whinge and make excuses, or find temptingly attractive tasks that need doing (ironing, for example, or cleaning the oven…) can easily overcome the move towards the piano. But then I think ‘do you really want to do this? Yes? Then bloody well get on with it, woman’. And when I do sit down at the piano and get started, things get happier even while they also get frustrating. At least it’s constructively frustrating, if that makes sense.
My brick-like tendencies become more obvious as I go on, in many ways. And I find questions continually pop up as I go on; Ben deals with the continuing questions by sometimes saying ‘do you want to cover this now or do you want continue with what we’re doing?’ and will go with whatever I say…and to my shame, sometimes I distract him if I don’t like the bit I’m trying to learn… :) Other times, I can see him trying to condense decades of knowledge into an answer I will understand. I know that in the near (3 – 4 years) future I am unlikely, short of suddenly being able to leave work and spend hours on this every day, to ever be at the stage of being skilled or confident enough to play much music as it should be played. I get annoyed with myself when a short (very short) piece that I’m learning sounds like a series of plinks and plunks rather than a musical whole, such is my stumbling lack of proper timing and expression. But I want to learn more. I enjoy it – the music, the knowledge of how it works, and using different areas of the brain to those that get marshalled into use most days. My husband has taken time out from the lessons this last term but he still encourages me to go on and is able to listen constructively. He enjoys doing his own thing on the piano and I’m regularly amazed by how much he can pick up and reproduce by ear.
I know that I will get somewhere soon where I can at least see the far wall of the first cavern, even though I haven’t a clue if I’ll ever reach it. I want to be able to play Debussy’s ‘Clair de Lune’ in a way that doesn’t totally insult the composer – I’m not sure if I’m going to reach that, either, but I’m going to enjoy the journey towards it. And if I’m unlikely ever to be able to cope with Rachmaninov, well, there are plenty who can and I’ll enjoy listening to them.
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