scales and arpeggios

I had my first piano lesson last Sunday. And I never thought it would be that stressful. It was not because of the teacher. No, she wasn't Helga the Barbarian with thick-rimmed glasses, stiffly coiffed hair, ill-fitting dentures, and a long-sleeved blouse with ruffles on the cuffs. And she didn't have a stick to whack my fingers with. She was just wearing a tight-fitting shirt and an extremely short pair of shorts. Appropriately so. It was a blazing late afternoon. Dust particles lay suspended in the rays of the sun dilating through her apartment windows. None of these rays reached the bench upon which I was sitting. The upright grand was tucked in a tiny air-conditioned cubicle below the stairs. Inside that box, I labored hard to get those damn arpeggios right. And that was the source of all my stress.

My main problem was incorrect fingering, which she identified right away. She told me to work on legato passages and be sensitive to the emotion in a musical phrase. Every phrase, like in spoken language, starts with an uphill surge which climaxes into a passionate summit and then goes downhill again, which she called the “decay.” Now that's something I could really use.

Years ago, there was a piano teacher who came to our house to teach my nephews. I asked her if she could give me lessons, too. She willingly agreed but she wanted to hear me play first. So I sat and played Beethoven for her. After nervously listening to me, she said she couldn't possibly teach me because I played “too well” for her. She recommended another piano teacher, “the maestro”she called him, who could handle advanced students. Of course I never got to meet this maestro and my nephews never got to learn how to play.

Last Sunday was the first time I actually sat up for a lesson. It was comforting to know that my teacher knows what she's talking about. I had watched her play with an orchestra during her graduation recital. Her execution is clean, her notes distinct. I said to myself that if ever I would formally study the instrument, it would have to be under her. Her eyes lit up as she spoke about the pieces she would give me. She tossed some names: Bach, Mozart, Espino, Mendelssohn, and perhaps Chopin. She was already contemplating on making me play a full Haydn sonata. Just thinking about it overwhelms me. That afternoon, she made me play something from Hanon's Exercises for the Virtouso Pianist. She skipped the first 49 pieces and asked me to go straight to Exercise Number 50. This book only has sixty progressively difficult technical exercises. My poor fingers got confused with the alternating thirds, but I think I managed to pull it off. And then came the annoying scales. It was so confusing I felt like I was playing the piano for the first time. I can't believe I had studied complicated pieces on my own before and I can't even finger the scales right. She was patient enough to guide me through it, sometimes touching my hand, her rough palm grazing against the back of my hand; sometimes humming the melody which I needed to distinctly pluck out of the clutter of the arpeggio lines. If the room weren't heavily air conditioned, my armpits would've sweated a river. She asked me to study Daquin's Le Coucou as my homework. You have to follow the correct fingering, she said, otherwise you won't be able to play it well. We would also have some advanced Czerny exercises and more scales next time.

I excitedly went home that night and practiced until midnight, the prospect of playing a Haydn sonata titillating my ego.