Notes on a (web) page

"There's more to music than notes on a page. I can teach you notes on a page. I can't teach you that other stuff."
--Richard Dreyfuss in MR. HOLLAND'S OPUS

I've been playing piano since I was three and composing since I was four. All modesty aside, I'm a pretty fair musician--removed from being a very good one by a lack of discipline. I was largely self-taught, and by the time money came along to enroll me in formal lessons, I had taught myself some terrible habits. For one thing, I had a total disregard for correct fingering. My attitude was 'hey, the right note came out, didn't it? Who cares what finger I used?' This was only a misdemeanor when the pieces were easy, but it became a felony when they got harder, and eventually it defeated my attempts to play anything truly brilliant. And do I have the desire to play brilliantly? You bet. Do I have the discipline to go back and unteach myself all the bad habits I ever learned? Not a chance in hell.
Or my imagination would get the best of me. I'd be playing a little etude by Beethoven--the kind of thing he'd toss off with one finger while he was mulling over the symphony in his head--and I'd have the colossal gall to try and improve on it. I'll never forget the one time I got my piano teacher to accept--very grudgingly--that my version sounded better. "But", she shrilled, "HIS version is what you're to play! Understood?"
Yeah, yeah, whatever. Damn it...straight-jacketed again.

There was a girl in one of my music classes--Yvette, her name was. She was taking her Grade X Royal Conservatory exam the year I knew her...and she could play piano like a hot-rodding angel. Some of the stuff she played seemed, at first glace, to require more than ten fingers, but she somehow made do with the usual human equipment and played it anyway. I'd be stepping on my jaw within three seconds of her taking her place at the keyboard--and she would deflect every shower of praise I or anyone else would throw her way.
The music room was open over lunch to anyone who wanted to use it, and I took every advantage. How else was I ever going to get to play a full-size Steinway grand? A group of us would take turns, showcasing whatever we were working on. Most of the time, I'd just doodle around, playing little snippets of melody and pairing them with whatever chords came to mind. Sometimes, a little epiphany would coruscate out of my brain and down through my fingers and out would come a song, fully formed. To compose flat-out like this requires, for me, a state of near-trance. I get the feeling I'm not creating anything but rather discovering what was buried in my head all along.
Anyway, Yvette would stand and stare at me in awe, which made me feel both supremely uncomfortable and very much flattered.
"Wow, Ken, that's amazing. You're incredible."
(Ah shucks ma'am, 'tweren't nothin' to it.) "No, Yvette...you're incredible. The stuff you play...there's more black than white on those pages, for Chrissake!"
"Maybe...but--how do you do that? I try to compose something and Liszt comes out. I can't change it. I can't write my own stuff. The harder I try, the more easily nothing comes out."
"Really? I don't know how I do it. I just...do it. "
And we'd gaze at each other, both thinking the other was immeasurably more talented. Yvette was further amazed that I had perfect pitch: she claimed to have a tin ear. And then she'd sit down and sight-read a Bach fugue flawlessly.
"Uh...Yvette...it took me three hours to get the first eight bars of that right."
"???"

The piano was my ticket to a social life for many years. It was the one saleable talent that poked itself above a sea of geekery. I'd keep up with popular music in large part so I could play whatever the girls wanted on command. There were certain songs that were mandatory: Van Halen's "Jump", "Alone" by Heart, just about anything by Chicago and Air Supply.
It was a very long time before I realized I was a pet dog--a marvellous animal, to be sure, one that could play all the latest love songs--but a dog all the same.
It says volumes about my self-esteem in those days that it took considerably longer for me to care.
My skill at composition did bear girlfruit on occasion. The girl I'd chased all through grades ten and eleven, no mean composer herself, eventually spent a lunch hour laying on my lap as I played her songs of undying (choke, choke) devotion, thus fulfilling a long-held fantasy. It happened again in grade 13 at another school, but by that time I'd just begun to understand that there was more to me than notes in my head.

It wasn't until my final year of high school that I even started to consider life without the piano as a social crutch. Even then, it was my first resort if I wanted to get the girl--whatever her name was that week. One of them wrote some top-notch lyrics for a song she called 'You Don't Need Me" and I fit them to a tune I'd already composed, all the while musing that, well, maybe I didn't need her, as such, but God how I wanted her. She wouldn't respond to my overtures--she wasn't averse to 'just being friends' and I was far too teenaged to see the value in that--so I moved on, never realizing that once we'd hopped out of the pressure cooker that was high school, we'd end up being very good friends after all.

I thought about taking music in university. I even made steps to sign up for the Laurier band before I was told, quite snottily, that only music majors were welcome in it. In the end, what dissuaded me was the oft-heard maxim that musicians starve. (Whereas English majors, as everyone knows, ask "do you want fries with that?")

I threw off the ebony and ivory shackles for good once I came here. Every friend I've made in the past fifteen years was a friend before he or she ever heard me play a note.
Oddly though, nearly all of them have at least some musical experience...something I wasn't aware of before I'd befriended them. That includes my wife, who has played saxophone and shows real promise as a pianist.

My keyboard, a wedding gift from that good friend who once wrote some lyrics for me, sits next to me as I write this blog entry. I still play, but not nearly as often as I once did. That's mostly because I have always gravitated to the piano when angry or saddened, and there has been very little anger or sorrow in my life since I got married.
But I'll always be a musician, just as I'll always be a writer. The two crafts bear real similarities: they're emotionally cathartic, creative pursuits that leave you both hollowed out and filled up when you've finished with them. The best music leaves you speechless; the best writing sounds like music. And both involve notes on a page...