Making music

More and more each day, the piano belongs to her.

We've had an electric keyboard ever since I bought one for my wife, to honor the lessons she took in college when we were dating. But with our time consumed by children, by jobs, and by a thousand other things that steal our lives in bite-size pieces, the keyboard sat in the bedroom, and eventually in the living room, a silent member of the family whom we always meant to know better.

We are, after all, a musical family; heck, we're a musical species. Music is so essential to being human that studies have shown a mental link not only between music and speech, but also between music and mathematics, so that becoming "fluent" in an instrument can have other benefits.

At the start of the year, I sat down with Oldest Daughter and outlined a course of music study that would involve practicing piano for at least 30 minutes a day. After all, she had been puttering about with the keyboard for years. It was time to get serious.

The initial lesson was simply to pick a song she knew, start with C-natural, and figure out the tune from there. In the five months since, she also has learned how to begin the song at a different key, and (lately) to play with both hands at the same time, her left hand two octaves lower than her right. Once she is more comfortable with these skills, it'll be time to take it to the final lesson, and learn which chords go with which notes.

Today I heard her play "When Somebody Loved Me," from "Toy Story 2." A couple months ago, it was "Castle on a Cloud" from "Les Misérables." These are songs with fairly straightforward melodies, I suppose, but she's at a place now where she can work out increasingly complex base melodies in increasingly short times. It took her days of practice to work out the notes for "Holy, Holy, Holy." Today she had  Jessie's song worked out in about five minutes.

The progress she has made is obvious even when she goofs off. Five months ago, she gave herself breaks by running her fingers up and down the keyboard in an irritated glissando or by hammering away at the keys in a raging flood of frustration. I would patiently try to wait it out, but invariably either she would walk away on her own, or I would need to remind her to focus and try again.

Now when she takes her leave of the song that's frustrating her, I hear a more delicate ripple of music as her fingers explore the keys on their own and weave the foundations of what one day could become actual songs. She's discovering the distance from one note to the next, and in finding that, she's closing the distance from her soul to the keys.

Some day, if she wants, Oldest Daughter will take formal lessons from an instructor, and she will learn to play piano the formal way, with scales, with metronomes, and with sheets all covered with quavers and breves, with cleffs and staves, with sharps and flats, and with a score of Italian phrases. When she picks up that key, she'll find that it unlocks the discipline and the knowledge that lead to vast new storehouses of musical knowledge that she'll be able to tap whenever she wants. That'll be good.

Until then, though, I think she's discovering the more powerful, more enduring thing. She's learning how to make music, all on her own.