Practicing for the full catastrophe
Practicing for the full catastrophe
Dear readers, happy solstice, happy holidays! Sorry for the sales pitch right off the bat, but somehow it IS December 22! So, in case there are any sincere & curious musicians on your last-minute gift list (including yourself, if you haven’t subscribed yet!): all Pride & Practicing annual subscriptions are 50% off for 72 hours at this link:
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Happy holidays….. But is it a happy time, and are we happy? Should we be? Or should we not be happy, in the face of omicron, tornadoes, insurrection? Deep divisions of every kind, seemingly insurmountable inequities; ignorance, injustice, dysfunction, breakdown, existential dread…. Merry Christmas! Are we tempted, perhaps especially at this time of year, to hunker down and pull the covers up over our heads? And yet we cannot, because of Ho ho ho and fa-la-la-la-la….
Uh-oh! What kind of post is this? I hadn’t taken Rachel for such a Grinch…. Oh, dear readers, apologies once again. I suppose it is an all-of-the-above post, a let’s-call-it-like-it-is post. Perhaps above all it is a taking refuge post. Because I can certainly tell you that I take refuge in my piano, and I hope you do too. I know we all need refuge, and I think a lot of us need it at the holidays! If we don’t need it now, we have needed it, or we will.
If we are happy, full of holiday cheer—that’s great, and let’s play the piano! What could be better? Maybe our family & friends can gather round and sing, gasping for breath through their sticky, smelly KN95s, but joyful all the same. All you enthusiastic sight-readers out there (and here, just this once, I say you, not we): sure, go through the whole book if you like! And reluctant sight-readers, take heart: it’s not really sight-reading if we’ve been hearing the tune since we were in the womb, and playing by ear is a great skill too. Maybe we’ll get to practice our transposing while we’re at it, because Silent Night is a range-y song, if you know what I mean.
If we are not happy and full of holiday cheer—then that’s the way it is, and let’s play the piano. Certainly a lot of things could be worse, and what could be better? Maybe our family & friends, instead of gathering round, can give us some time and space to do this, while they attend to the perfect gifts, the perfectly decorated home, the perfect meals perfectly presented, the perfect hospitality. Let us take refuge from it all at our piano (and make sure we grant our loved ones their forms of refuge too). Today’s “practice tool” is to play the piano AT ALL. Play something, anything, and let it be enough. Let it be sloppy, let it be imperfect in every way. Let it be slow. Just play. Exhale, feel the weight of your arms, sink into the harmony. Indulge in some extra pedal. Maybe we are asking ourselves, how can I afford to just sit down and play Schubert (or whatever it is for you) when the world is falling apart? What I am suggesting is embedded in the rejoinder that comes: how can I afford not to sit down and play Schubert, when the world is falling apart?
If things are falling apart, internally or externally or both: sometimes there is not much we can do. Sometimes we just must let it happen, let things fall apart, and sit down and play some Schubert. Sometimes it is the longest night of the year; sometimes Christmas is at our throats. But also, the piano is there, waiting for us. It feels good sometimes to light a candle and play very late at night. Never mind what it even sounds like—just play.
Other times, maybe there are things we can do! Maybe if we throw ourselves into action—internally or externally or both—then putting our shoulder to the wheel may be just the thing that is needed. We take some action, and something shifts, and we know that as long as we don’t give up, that shift can lead to more small shifts, and that small shifts can become enormous ones. But still—it is the longest night of the year, and we need to fortify ourselves for the task, to shore up our resolve, to prepare for battle. Dear readers, I am sorry to use this last image, but surely there are battles that must be fought (internally or externally or both), and perhaps we will fight them! And as we steel ourselves, the piano is there waiting for us. It feels good to make a cup of coffee and play first thing in the morning, too!
And we realize: it is good to play any time we can, any chance we get. Not with pressure or expectation, just seizing the opportunity to take refuge in our playing whenever we can, whenever that is available. For today, since we have arrived at the longest night of the year, let’s don’t even call it practicing. And I think we’ll find, even in the longest night of the year, that gratitude comes in. Did anyone see this in the Washington Post, about organizations placing discarded pianos into loving homes that need them? Yes, I mean need them. The thrill of having these large & miraculous objects appear in these children’s lives is palpable, the pianos’ contributions to their new owners’ lives beyond question. I take to heart this reminder of how lucky we are, simply to have the opportunity to play, no matter what else swirls around us in our minds, our homes, our lives or our broader world. How lucky & how blessed we are, to have our pianos to turn to.
Of course, in this newsletter, I am in the business of making “improvements” to our practicing lives…. Slow down, block those chords, count out loud! I hope I am offering tools to make it possible for us to listen more carefully, play with more ease, understand (music and our own playing) more deeply. But there could be, in this way of thinking (practice better! play better!), a sense that things are never good enough. In fact I think that sense is one quite systematically engrained through conservatory training…. But let us set that aside, and put ourselves in the shoes of a child or a teenager whose family has just received the gift of someone else’s thrown-away piano. Our parent unveils the battered old upright, and though we may have no training, no skills or knowledge, still we shriek with joy! We understand that we stand at the gates of a new world, even as we may have no idea where this adventure will lead. In this moment, we are full of delight and gratitude and wonder. Does it matter at all, in that moment, what our playing sounds like?
And though the path of working to constantly improve our playing is a noble one, still, does it matter so much, for any of us, what our playing sounds like? Does it matter so much, in the bigger picture, how refined our voicing is or how accurate our rhythm? Do those things matter on the longest night of the year, as the planet groans under the weight of its human inhabitants, so many seemingly bent on destruction? As everything is falling apart? Of course not! What matters, what lights up the world in spite of it all, is our acceptance of the gifts we have been given and our wholehearted, joyful embrace of them. What matters is our diving into those gifts, from wherever we are right now. We know what a gift it is that we have the opportunity to play the piano at all, and we play from that knowlege. And however that sounds, whether it comes out of our decrepit upright barely rescued from the dump or out of our glorious Steinway B (or even, I must add—against many but not all of the fibers of my being—out of our our electric keyboard): it is perfectly beautiful. We take refuge in that middle-of-the-night playing, however rough and “wrong” it may be by some measures. Through it, much is healed, and much more is softened, loosened, quietly redeemed. At some point we blow out the candle and go to bed. Maybe we’ll wake up tomorrow in the holiday spirit after all, or with new courage and resolve to put our shoulder to the wheel—but either way, we can practice. And what a blessing that is.
Thank you for reading Pride & Practicing, and if you enjoy it, please do subscribe (50% off for the next 3 days!) and share it with your friends. I wish each of you well through the holidays and at every other time!