I once dated a pianist. We got along very well, but I still found him very mysterious. He seemed like the most unpredictable person I’d ever met. While others zigged or zagged, he zoomed and zooted. I always believed the main reason was because he was a musician, and I could not understand music.
I don’t mean that I couldn’t read it, although that was and is true. I mean I felt like that particular creative endeavor was totally alien to me. I’ve never considered myself a creative person, or an artist, but I have to admit the evidence is clear that I am, because apparently my attraction to art is not the same as everyone else’s. I started painting with acrylics during the pandemic, and have now begun using gouache and oils. I taught myself to hand-sew last year and am learning to sew with a machine this year. I have made comics and illustrations in Procreate, I’ve several notebooks and Notes app full of ideas for books, movies, short stories, poems, comics, and so on. I’m a pretty prolific writer, and recently finished a novel that I’ve begun querying, and have made several notes for several more novels.
But music has always felt well beyond my reach. Piano was actually one of several things I tried out as a kid and quit. I quit choir, I quit violin, I quit soccer, I quit ballet, I quit gymnastics. I found playing music almost impossible to comprehend, I felt I had no rhythm to share with the world, and when my voice went from soprano to alto, I gave up on singing, not willing to sing the lesser known parts of the songs we were meant to perform. This was also the time when I became quieter and quieter, unsure how to measure the new tones and ideas of my peers as we grew older.
Connie Wang did not quit piano. Her personal essay about how Asians and Asian Americans have integrated piano playing into their culture has stuck with me. In the essay, Wang describes winning prizes, practicing regularly, working hard at it. My experience was a bit more like another Asian American story about piano lessons: this scene from the movie adaptations of one of my favorite books as a kid, The Joy Luck Club.
Wang contemplates how Asian American culture has latched onto piano culture in a very particular way:
“Being piano-rich was not about acquiring financial wealth. We were striving for cultural wealth — something more valuable. A piano in a home isn’t just a sign that you can afford a piano, but that someone in your family is fluent in musical notation and, more impressive, Western culture.”
This makes me think of this recent article in the Washington Post about piano life cycles, which links to a much longer article about how the piano became part of middle class life, a kind of hearth like a fireplace or radio or TV. I’d never figured that to be so. Instead, I thought the presence of a piano in a house demanded being played. A piano in the house that went unplayed seemed strange, like something left unspoken.
In her article about relishing being “an amateur,” Xenia Hanusiak talks about the piano in yet another way I’ve never heard before. But first she is familiar: “My musical upbringing involved constant striving across hours of laborious practice….I don’t recall happiness, fulfillment or engagement.”
The essay, like the other essays I’ve linked, should be read itself. But what I found surprising is how, when she decides to be the amateur, she finds a new relationship with her piano: one where instead of achieving a goal, she finds herself playing in a way that connects her with herself:
“Practicing heightens my awareness of being alone with myself, and the sense that I’m controlling the experience. I can then be engaged and enlivened by the encounter, relinquishing a sense of passivity for one of self-engagement. Suddenly, I find that I’m not alone at all. The piano becomes my significant other.”
A friend of mine began playing piano during the pandemic. He told me that his mother had suggested he might forget how to read it. He was dumbfounded: that’s like not being able to read words, he said. My inability to read music felt exceedingly tragic when I tried to find a way to listen to the Pulitzer Prize winning score “Stride,” by Tania León, and only came across the score. Like a twice foreign language, the markings meant nothing to me. It’s like how I’ve tried and struggled to learn Hindi more than a few times — I become agitated quickly because I feel like I’m being asked for too much: to learn the alphabet, and the language.
At one point, Hanusiak mentions psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s theory of flow. I first heard about the theory of flow from “Trying Not to Try,” Edward Slingerland’s book on (perhaps to Connie Wang’s surprise) Eastern philosophy, specifically wu-wei, trying not to try. Slingerland draws on neuroscience throughout the book to illustrate his points on the philosophy of wu-wei. One study involves putting jazz pianists in an fMRI machine with specially designed keyboards. They’re told to do scales at first, then to improvise based on a composition they’d previously memorized. Slingerland describes the neurological processes going on as “involv[ing] shutting down active conscious awareness and control while maintaining background situational alertness. When your conscious mind lets go, the body can take over.”
Flow is something I’ve been constantly trying to integrate into my body by letting go of my conscious mind. Ever since I read the book, I’ve given myself permission to let go. Let go, let be, let live. Sometimes this caused chaos in my life, or so it seemed to me — but instead of becoming frustrated with myself, I’d think: perhaps there is order here. A constellation of which I can only see one star. A song where I can only hear one bar.
In this video on the neuroscience behind playing an instrument, I learn that the pianist’s brain was indeed different from mine: musicians are apparently particularly good at executive function and memory (both things that ADHD brains are famously bad at). And this benefit is specific only to brains that play an instrument, not other art forms, to the point that people of similar cognitive function found their minds improving function after practicing music.
Part of the reason I became drawn to new art skills during the pandemic wasn’t just a lack of things to do. I finally began to let go of my perfectionism. I had always been an art kid (one subject I stubbornly stuck to from youth), but I’d lost my way. I’d buy art supplies and feel too shy to use them; I’d only post art or comics during wild moments of inspiration, and be shocked at people’s positive reactions. I’ve only recently begun to believe that my art was worthy to be looked at and appreciated.
But that’s another newsletter. I return, of course, to the question, yet again: did the meds help? Yes, the meds have helped. Specifically, I feel less afraid of the piano, of music in general. Let’s return to that language metaphor: I’ve also been able to pick up more words and verify letters of Hindi when they come across my screen. And one thing I’ve always been able to do, whether or not I know a language, is understand what people are saying anyway.
While hanging out with a visiting friend, and her friend, I interrupted their conversation in Mandarin to say in English, “He can certainly come with us if he wants!” They looked at me in surprise; how had I known that they’d been discussing whether her friend should join us for dinner? Another time, I turned to my friend’s mother, who was speaking to her cousin in Farsi, and said, in English, “Are you guys talking about me?” My friend’s mother looked at me in shock; she had indeed been explaining who I was to her niece.
While I have been incredibly intimidated by the piano and playing it, I still enjoy the many ways it can be used in music. I’m a good listener of music, you could say: the lilting, magical whimsy of the “Beyond the Visible” soundtrack; in my discussion with the Game of Thrones composer; in the wry witticisms of Tom Lehrer, my teenage crush; in this very good TikTok of a woman playing over the disco-drenched sounds of Dua Lipa.
I think there’s yet another reason I’ve begun to feel drawn to music. I’ll turn to Connie Wang yet again:
“I often think about immigrants and silence, how part of the movement for Asian American justice has focused on “speaking out” and “speaking up,” actions that feel utterly elementary and empty when compared to the issues at hand. And yet, our reticence has defined many of us. Part of that is fear of being noticed and judged. But I believe that there’s something else that holds our voices hostage, and it’s this: You talk when you believe that your words have consequences, that someone is listening, and that change is possible. You don’t share stories when no one is listening. You don’t negotiate when you believe there’s no chance you’ll win.”
While they might not have been as mind blowing as playing an instrument, turning to painting, drawing, sewing, cooking, and illustrating, remembering what it was like to be an amateur, and, most importantly, sharing it with my friends and peers, has changed how I think of art, and how I think of myself, and how I share myself and my art.
I texted a friend to see if I could visit her, and her piano. After all that, I’m no longer afraid of the instrument, straightjacketed by my lack of abilities. I’m sure anything I plink and plunk out will be chaotic and nervous and awkward. But at least in my brain there’ll be fireworks.