As I’ve written about before, I’ve been trying to learn piano. It’s been a slow-going process, even after I got a keyboard, mainly because I refuse to learn the old fashioned way.
By that I mean I am not asking for help, but I guess it could also mean I’m not trying to learn in what would constitute the old fashioned way for me — wherein I vigorously research how other people do it, try to steal their techniques, force myself to do something above twenty times, then twenty more times, then twenty more, until I am satisfied. Instead I have gone about it completely sideways, trying to figure out what I already know about music.
I have long believe that music was just something I was naturally not good at. Even though I was in chorus in middle school, love to listen to several composers (and recognize their work so much that I got to eventually interview my favorite one), and just plain love listening to music, I just didn’t think of myself as a musical person. I came to the piano burdened by all I lacked, rather than what I liked about it. But this also means I don’t feel that I need to be good at it — and to be honest I’m still stuck on playing with two hands at once.
But I’ve discovered that there is more to music, and more to my own understanding of music, than I could’ve thought possible. This inkling first came to me when I read this article, about someone trying to learn piano in every new fangled way they could think of. The writer is charmingly aware of their limitations:
“Now, I am no musician. I don’t know how to read music, distinguish between major and minor scales, or pronounce “arpeggio.” I don’t clap along during concerts because I always wind up being out of sync.”
Pause. What? Being out of sync when you’re clapping at a concert? What?!
I kept thinking about this line, about the revelation I felt behind it. (As a friend of mine once told me, I am always having revelations.) This reminds me of a common refrain on TikTok: that you can tell when people don’t have rhythm. You can see it in their uncoordinated dance steps, the way their smile stays on their face even as they fail to match the beat. But it took me seeing such comments to realize that not everyone has rhythm.
I do. I know that because everyone would tell me this whenever they saw me dance. When I was younger I sometimes daydreamed about being a backup dancer, I so enjoyed being absorbed in musical flow. I would play the radio (the radio!) at home in the late evening in high school, and in my old apartment I would play music as I swept the floors, like something out of Newsies.
Playing piano has felt like reversing the process of this in my brain: like I’m creating rhythm. But no, that’s not exactly it….it’s like I have several rhythms in my head — or perhaps they’re in the air — or maybe they’re just remembrances of random snippets of music and conversation and sounds that I’m playing. I’ll often play a few notes and an image will pop into my head — a snowy landscape, like that found in Force Majeure. A foreboding horror soundtrack that tickles the back of my neck. One time I played three notes, and the first song from Mulan started playing in my head, specifically the part where Mulan anxiously sings, “An-ces-tors, hear my plea.” It was so strong that I went and bought the Mulan songbook, and found the exact notes on the page — all to find that those were the exact notes I was playing.
Maybe this sounds like a roundabout way to talk about something obvious, musically — that you can pick up sounds and play them. But what I find surprising is not just that I can do it, but I can tie three random notes to a memory of a song, even if the song isn’t in my head at that moment, even if I’m not trying to look for it. Then again, Mulan’s songs are also the first songs — outside of choir — I learned the lyrics of, rather than just trying to guess what people were saying.
Tiktok is actually a masterclass at presenting and representing snippets of music in a memorable format. My favorite is when bits of dialogue, orphaned from their original video, are used to present faux conversations. I could write a whole treatise on that (and I will), but I want to to do a close read of one which I’ve referenced before:
this very good TikTok of a woman playing over the disco-drenched sounds of Dua Lipa.
The Dua Lipa song is already remixed to highlight the “You want me” lyric as a self-aggrandizing stance, but what I love is that the creator responds with her own self-inserted dialogue. And while she’s riffing beautifully, I also love that I can tell exactly what she’s saying, without lyrics — though her face helps set the tone (pun intended). Her riff is both about angrily flipping off the nameless conversational partner and showcasing her own unquestionable talent. The flourish at the end, which a friend and the comments informed me, is called “The Lick,” a flourish that appears constantly in jazz music.1
When I first heard this (approximately a year ago, when I was still getting used to my new medication), I listened to this TikTok constantly. I simply could not hear this “lick,” could not hold on to what part it started and ended. To return to what I said in the beginning of this piece, perhaps this is when I tried to learn things my old way. By listening to something over and over again.
The Tiktok is a good lodestar for me — the music reminds me of the person I sent it to, about that time when everything felt new again, when the world suddenly felt kinder and easier than it had felt in a long, long time. And of course, the “conversation” is one of showing off with spiteful confidence, one of my favorite forms of interacting with humans.
I can use it to measure my success as a would-be pianist. I’ve learned to listen, to partition off notes from the whole and see how they are part of the whole. Now I must gather the courage to play them.
When asked about the origin, one redditor replied, “probably hell.”