Some of my earliest memories are faulty, or at least unreliable, thanks to my dad’s penchant for filming family activities with a wind-up Bell & Howell 8mm camera, a whirring device which required tons of light to achieve a decent picture. So Dad had bought a light bar, consisting of three floodlight-level lamps on a metal rod, which attached to the camera. Therefore I associate emotionally wrenching moments of my childhood such as Christmas morning with interrogation-level floodlights. The camera’s running time was mercifully short, however, and so the paparazzi thing never lasted very long.
Because of Dad’s Bell & Howell, I’m not altogether sure if I actually remember the arrival of the cherrywood Gulbransen spinet in our house on Chatterton Drive in the Spring Branch subdivision of Houston, or if my memories are of Dad’s movie. Whatever the source of the memory, I’m sure that the piano was wrapped in transparent red plastic with a big bow, to make it seem more like a proper Christmas present.
The irony of the situation was that the piano was a Christmas present for my older sister, not for me. It was 1958 and I was all of four years old. Nor was the piano new; the folks had bought it secondhand. It hadn’t been much of an instrument to begin with, just your basic mass-produced box from Aeolian Corporation, manufacturer of el-cheapo pianos under a wide variety of brand names, some of which carried once-noble lineages (Chickering, Knabe, Mason & Hamlin) and others that were strictly trailer-trash trade (Story & Clark and Gulbransen, among others.) The piano’s one abiding virtue was an attractive cherrywood case in French Provincial style, making it a reasonable match for the brocaded living room furniture—a gift from my grandmother, as I recall, to help the folks furnish a brand-new tract house that they could barely afford.
But my sister Kathy (in those days with the ‘y’; later in life she changed it to Kathee) had no discernible musical talent. That’s not a put-down; she would be the first person to agree. Music just didn’t do anything for her, then or now. So that sleazy cherrywood box wasn’t going to get much love from her. Nor did her piano teacher help matters much—a grayish-looking chap who came to our house, always carrying his clutch of piano method books, including an ominous tome called “Technic is Fun”.
I note that even as a little shaver I was disturbed by the spelling on the book: it should be “Technique”, I thought. My penchant for morphological nitpicking just might be inborn.
I seriously doubt that Mr. Misspelled Technic is Fun was much of a piano teacher; he drove to a suburban tract house to teach an ungifted 8-year-old girl on a dinky Gulbransen spinet. Did Rosina Lhevinne ever do that? Maybe he was young and just starting out. To me he looked old, but when you’re four anybody over the age of 10 has one foot in the grave.
Kathee’s pursuit of the Muses was to be mercifully short. I, on the other hand, took one look at a keyboard and knew how it worked. I could figure out stuff on the piano from hearing it on a record or on TV, and I wasn’t just being a copycat either. I was talented, but I was four years old, and so I tended to stay on the white keys. I suppose most of my reconstructions were strangely modal, but that wouldn’t have bugged me much. I just loved to sit there and make sound happen.
Getting me to practice was another matter entirely. The discovery of my freak talent led to a real piano teacher before long—i.e., we went to her place instead of her traipsing over to ours, and she had a much better piano. I understand that our folks made a deal with the piano teacher: you can have the little boy, but you have to take his big sister as well. So Mrs. Smith (that’s really her name, not a protective pseudonym) agreed to slug it out with Kathee in order to experience the infinite joy of teaching me.
Except that I was probably a lot more trouble. With Kathee, Mrs. Smith knew exactly how things stood: be pleasant, don’t lose your cool, try to help her learn a few more notes if possible, but don’t sweat it. With me, the ground never stopped shifting. My talent was never in question. But I didn’t like working out piano pieces from printed music. In fact, I hated it. Mrs. Smith made the colossal blunder of playing my pieces for me. I’m not sure if she ever quite figured out that I wasn’t actually ever reading the music; I just watched and heard her do it, and then proceeded accordingly. So she misinterpreted my (many) mistakes as mis-readings or rhythm problems, when actually the underlying cause was an underdeveloped memory. Oh, I picked up the piece on one hearing, but I didn’t pick it up all that accurately. It went through my pint-sized musical filter and came out transformed. Poor Mrs. Smith: she could circle all the notes she wanted, write in accidentals, carve COUNT!! in red pencil and capital letters over an offending passage. For all the good it was doing, she might as well have tried sacrificing a goat on a horned altar by the light of the full moon. It wasn’t the paper that needed the circling, accidentals, and red pencil all-caps. She needed to get inside my neural pathways and red-pencil my synaptic connections.
Eventually I got my act together and became a responsible musician. It didn’t happen until college, by the way. I find that funny at a lot of levels, given my overall reputation nowadays as an exemplar of high-end technical musicianship. I suppose I’ve earned that reputation—heaven knows I worked hard enough at it.
But somewhere deep inside this oh-so-trained professional musician there still abides a barbaric little munchkin, just brimming over with imagination, cheek, and a blissful disregard of propriety. I wonder if I could ever bring him back to light again, or if all these years of polish, education, experience, and punctilio have suppressed him forever. For now, I’ll just keep him safe, that imp in my bottle who bangs away on his cherrywood spinet, making an earsplitting racket and having himself a fine old time.