That thing in the corner

In our living room is a black, upright Wurlitzer piano. It was given to my mother years ago by a dear friend who had it in her family for generations. Now that it is in my house and is banged on by my children, it has been in my family for generations too.

It doesn't sound very good, I'm afraid. Part of that is user error. I was not a committed piano student when I took lessons in school, despite excellent instruction by Sister Vicki Slickers, Holy Trinity Elementary School's vivacious music teacher, who would patiently work with me on scales and chords while I, per usual, rushed ahead to do the fun stuff—Lady Madonna, ragtime, Elton John—without understanding that the fun stuff took hard work. Worse, I treated my lessons the same way I treated my dentist appointments at the time: "What we do here is perfectly fine, but don't go thinking I'm going to work on any of this at home." I'm grateful for those lessons because I can read music and can play chords on sight, which is a good party trick (back when there were parties). This makes me more accomplished than Irving Berlin, who composed God Bless America and White Christmas despite not knowing how to read or write music or play the piano.

Part of our piano's malaise is that the old girl is just old. We've hosted concerts in our house where a real musician has coaxed pleasing sounds out of her (a triumph considering one E♭key is quite broken off) but the truth is, she'll never again create glorious music. Wurlitzers were always supposed to be starter pianos for amateurs, not concert instruments. When mom got the piano, she maintained it, for which I should be grateful as I was the only one in the house with any interest in it, and it was that interest that led her to give it to me when I went out on my own. The problem with going out on your own is that it usually means living in a very small space—in our case a 550-square foot Los Angeles apartment—and we barely had room for a toilet, let alone a piano. So the Wurlitzer lived at my in-laws, where it made a handsome addition to their decorating but was only played whenever I would visit. I love my wife's family but they are far too WASPy to be melodic, descended from the England that the Germans referred to as 'Das Land ohne Musik,' the land without music. When we moved into a house big enough to take the piano back, the thing hadn't been tuned or used regularly and after tuning it three times, the tuner told me sternly, as if I were a deadbeat father, that it would always be a little off. Despite it's broken key, it's irregular tuning and one G that sounds a bit like a cat being stepped on, I can't imagine abandoning it, there's something about my middle-class sensibility that a home needs a piano, even as a piece of furniture or a thing that makes noise for a toddler. Chopin used his piano as a urinary aid, playing chords whenever he felt blocked up. I haven't needed it for that purpose but it's nice to know it's there if I do.

Even if we didn't have a piano, it's not as if our house would be bereft of instruments. The First Vienna Vegetable Orchestra is made up of a dozen or so musicians who all play carrots, zucchinis, celery and so forth. The instruments are made into a soup after every performance. I'd like to think the Viennese are just musically confused (this happens, Austrians love to claim that Hitler was German and Mozart is Austrian but they've got that backwards) but John Cage, that inspired anarchist of music, wrote 0'0", a composition entirely for vegetables and a blender. His 4'33" is the only piece that I play on the piano perfectly.

The word "piano" means quiet or soft. The instrument is a marvel because it is both part of the string family (when you press a key, a hammer strikes a string of the correct length to produce the note) and the percussion family (striking those keys is an act of force). It's predecessors, the harpsichord and the clavichord, had no way of modulating their volume, a debilitating condition in humans and a considerable drawback in 16th century Western music which was emerging from the monotony (though still lovely) of early music dominated by sacred chants and ars nova. When Bartolomeo Cristofori invented the piano around 1700, he did so specifically to give the instrument a range of volume. In fact, he called his invention "clavicembalo col piano e forte" which means "a harpsichord that can play soft and loud noises," which is a clumsy mouthful. The Italians should take some lessons in marketing from the French, which call a grand piano "piano à queue," which means a "piano with a tail."

I love music, which should be a fairly obvious statement but everyone loves music in their own way so that they feel that love is profound and unique, which it is. I love how a saxophone feels thick and rough like a cat's tongue when it's enlivening a dance song and how it feels silky and thin, like a ribbon, when it is supporting a ballad. I love how a piano can sound like ice with a Schubert trio and like fire with a Joplin rag and I love how it can sound like whatever Aretha Franklin wants it to sound like. I love how music is both of a moment and of a million moments before it, tied to memories and contexts that are universal and deeply personal. I love how music effects people, I love how it shades an emotion, I love how it informs a scene in a movie, I love how it can be used earnestly and ironically without being diminished. I love that if you turn up the music in a bar, people drink faster. I love that if you put on Bach, spiders will make their webs closer to the speakers (and will be repulsed by rap or techno). I love that the Earth moves to music. You can't hear it but the planet's rotation creates a C# at about 29 octaves below middle C. And I love our Wurlitzer. Perhaps its in tune with the movement of the Earth. It certainly isn't in tune with anything else.