Gathering Goat Eggs

Hobbit

To which race of Middle Earth do you belong?
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And the quiz didn't even know that I live in Brandywine. I'll bet I couldn't make it come out Elf even if I had a cheat sheet.

I have been taking harp lessons for about a year. Just recently, I have progressed to the point where making my fingers play what is written on the page no longer requires all my concentration. So my teacher is pressing me to bone up on music theory, and begin to study the structure of what I am playing, with a view to eventually writing my own arrangements and compositions.

My teacher has a rosy view of the kind of music education the typical young student received in the 1960s and 70s. I'm not "boning up" on music theory, I'm learning it de novo. I began studying piano at the age of four, and took private lessons for twelve years. I also played woodwinds in high school, and competed in state level competitions on three different instruments. Never once did anyone attempt to teach me anything about music theory, chord structure, or harmonic analysis. We were trained to play what was written on the page, and no more.

So when, preparatory to a Mozart recital in December, I was assigned the task of writing out a chord analysis of a reduction of an innocuous little piano trio, I might as well have been tasked with a dozen pages of Feynmann diagrams or a translation of ancient Sumerian. I didn't have a clue. (OK, that's not quite true. I memorized the major and minor scales way back when, and still remember half of them. I can stagger through the circle of fifths if someone gives me a push.) I did what any befuddled 21st century dilettante does: I Googled up a bunch of music pedagogy sites and started slogging through the chord progressions, and then I hauled out an old Casio keyboard and picked out the chords, and I paged back and forth, and scribbled some notes down, and after a couple of hours I had a set of chords that more or less fit the rules of early classical music, and didn't sound too out of whack.

And then I looked over the whole thing, and it struck me. I have just found a key that unlocks a secret code in the music. There is a structure there. There's a predictable and logical sequence. There is a correspondence between the mathematics of the wavelengths of the notes, and the emotional impact on the listener. It's been there all the time. Thousands of other people knew all about it (and if they're reading now, they're laughing their fannies off that I think this is such a revelation, no doubt).

And now I remembered why I wanted to play the piano in the first place. Most kids who start as young as I did have some innate musicality, some ability to play by ear, to reproduce songs they hear or compose reasonably coherent pieces on the fly. I didn't. I still don't. I was sucked in when I discovered the code of the musical notes. I was out visiting with my parents, and the children of the house had a neglected toy piano. There was a music book on the bench that had the notes written on staves mapped to a picture of the keyboard. I always loved that sort of thing — I'd already been inventing substitution codes and hieroglyphs, writing secret message to my grandmother, fiddling with the cryptograms in the newspaper. So I studied the code for a few minutes and then I started playing the little piano. I played through the whole book, front to back, before I noticed there were six adults standing in the alcove staring at me. The next week my grandmother took me visiting again. We visited the piano teacher.

These encodings, these mappings of a coherent and self-contained explanatory system to the real world, kept sucking me in as I entered adulthood. The same impulse that led me to tap on piano keys and write cryptograms eventually led me to God, but that's fodder for at least a couple more posts.