Piano epiphanies, my key out of the lockdown
Music has the power to connect our hearts across space and time. I closed my eyes one evening and plugged in my headphones to enjoy my favourite songs. It was one of those simple but heart touching experiences. I felt the soft, relaxing melodies envelop around my head like a cottony cloud. When I experience music like this, the lyrics wash over my heart, the sounds spread a cooling balm on my brain. Emotions well up inside.
Don’t we all love music in our own way? Since I’ve been 9 years old, I’ve been learning the piano in one way or the other. Doing anything creative makes you feel incredible.
I devoted one hour everyday to the piano. Anymore for me and my fingers start buzzing worryingly, trying to keep up with the newly learnt clouds. The practise became something I looked forward to everyday. I would come away from it with my brain feeling alive and swirly.
There’s so much to learn in even a two-minute full-fledged piano tutorial that often, it feels like that’ll never finish. We need to take a song piece by piece, chord by chord, almost like slowly knitting a yellow sweater.
The key is to first observe the right hand’s leading vocal notes. Once you’ve got that down and memorised fluidly on your own keyboard, you learn the left hand part separately. Then you put the two together and try to play them at the same time. The curious part about this is that it almost feels as if the keys are talking to each other.
Each set of musical notes adopts a persona as you hear it over and over. As if the chords are telling each other a story. The natural emotive sound of music makes you dream up a reason or a character talking behind it. The melancholy, spaced out melody is a lonely misfit. He dreams to romance the bright girl, a sunny chord that comes right after. There are brothers gambling or a dress twirling señorita hidden in a show-offy chord.
Art talks to us in a quiet way. When we recreate or deeply work upon an artist’s art, it’s inherent personality and the nuanced intention materialise before us. Like stars twinkling through parted clouds.
My guide, DooPiano, wasn’t the masked, expert personality behind the synthesia tutorial that I imagined. The way she composed showed how she thought. There were always flourishes in even simple parts of the chord.
At one point I did a keyboard head smash, whispering feebly, ‘Gosh, Doo Doo! Why you always gotta go all guns blazing, honey?’ Ah, something about being continuously interrupted by fancy chords in the last 15 seconds of the song to learn does make you want to tear your hair out.
She proved right in the end though, when I finished the song and could match it sound by sound with the original one. I felt delighted, like a runner cutting across the finishing ribbon.
Music expresses the soul in a way nothing else can. Whether you exercise with your earbuds booming, play an instrument or sing, we all know this truth. It fulfils us.
EACH SET OF MUSICAL
NOTES ADOPTS A PERSONA AS YOU HEAR IT OVER AND OVER