Two Minds, One Body
My fingers have
a mind of their own. They tend to drift off and do things on their own, while
the rest of my body is left behind—a completely separate entity. I don’t mind;
it’s like having two brains instead of one.
At 5’ ½”, I am not tall. I don’t have long, lanky legs to show off
beneath miniskirts, or the privilege of reaching the top shelf of the cupboard
without a stool. As a child, I always worried about height requirements for
rollercoasters, and I’m still waiting for that growth spurt my mother promised
me would someday arrive. Though my body lacks in stature, and it’s often
frustrating to strain my neck just to get a glimpse of things beyond my field
of vision, there is one aspect of my physical appearance that I wouldn’t change
for the world: my hands.
My hands follow my petite body’s lead, measuring just slightly over
six inches from my wrist to the tip of my middle finger. Though small in size,
my hands and fingers are the most emotionally charged and active parts of my
body. They act as outlets of emotion on a daily basis, gripping various tools.
“Dear Mickey,” I type into a blank Word document, and all of my thoughts and
feelings pour out of my head and into my laptop—lovingly named Mickey Mac—as my
fingers speedily form pages upon pages of words. Or perhaps I’m feeling
old-fashioned, sitting on a park bench on a beautiful summer afternoon. My
fingers grip a blue Paper Mate pen, and poetry spills out of the ink and into a
notebook. But my most defining moments,
and some of my proudest moments, have been at the piano. There, my fingers
allow me to express musically what I could never begin to verbalize.
I was eight
years old when I discovered the power of my fingers. I had spent the summer at
Schoolcraft College, taking intense private piano lessons with a professor. I
also studied music theory, technique, and music history with other young
pianists from the area. Our summer days were spent isolated in practice rooms
or creating music together in classrooms, instead of splashing in the pool or
playing sports at summer camp.
For the closing
ceremonies of the summer music program, my classmates and I filed into a
concert hall to play in a recital. For many of us, it was our first real public performance; living rooms of
neighborhood teachers and playing at family gatherings didn’t really
count. Heads rotated in circles as we
walked toward our seats, wide eyes scanning the area from the high ceilings to
the carpeted floor. The performance space looked as incredible as ever; there were
over a hundred seats in the college hall, and a sound booth in the back
controlled the vast array of lighting and sound options. In the center of the
stage, a magnificent Steinway piano shimmered in brilliant black beauty,
silently waiting for one of us to bring it to life.
All of the
students had been instructed to sit in the first two rows, in the order that we
were to play. My moment to shine would come about halfway through the recital,
and I gazed admiringly at my name, printed so elegantly on the special program
paper. I felt like a star already. The lights dimmed, and the director of the
program gave a short welcome speech. Cell phones were turned off, and everyone
settled down in their seats, waiting.
The recital
began, and I listened patiently. The auditorium was not quite half full, and
the only people in the audience I knew was family. For me, playing the piano
was fun and easy. I wasn’t nervous, and I wondered why people got stage freight
at all. My hands sat calmly in my lap, idle and bored.
As students
before me played their pieces and took their bows, the empty seat of the
performer crept closer and closer to where I was sitting. Finally, the girl to
my left stood.
For a moment I
felt deserted; I was in the last seat of the first row, and there was no one to
my right. But as she played her simple Minuet, a song I could have played a
year ago, I grew more and more excited for my turn to come. I suddenly wanted
more than anything to show everyone in the audience what I could do with that piano.
Listening to the Minuet and thinking about the sonata I was about to play, I
realized that I was different from many of the students in my class. The Minuet
was stoic, dry, and unemotional. I had no idea what the girl was feeling. But I
knew that the moment I sat down at that piano, people would know what I wanted
the piece to convey. Musical expression had always come naturally to me, and it
had never occurred to me that for others, it did not. I loved building tension with short, quiet
staccato notes, keeping my listeners on the edges of their seats. I loved
swelling upwards in a surging crescendo, louder and louder, faster and faster,
until my music reached a majestic climax and my entire body leaned and swayed
with the force of expression. I suddenly wished that this girl would play her
song faster, so that she could take her bow and sit down already. My fingers
twiddled in my lap, anxious and raring to go.
Finally, she
unceremoniously played her last chord. I sat perched at the end of my seat,
waiting anxiously for her to sit back down next to me. My time had come, and I
walked confidently across the stage.
Though each of
us had played our pieces on this particular piano during dress rehearsal, the
enormous Steinway still loomed before me, bigger than ever. The stage lighting
was now in use, and the spotlight shone fiercely. I turned the knob of the
piano bench backwards, adjusting it upward to accommodate my short legs. A man
cleared his throat impatiently, and my confidence began to sway. The audience
was completely dark, and I couldn’t see anything beyond the edge of the stage.
I was alone with the Steinway.
But as soon as I
was seated, and I had placed my hands on the piano, it was no longer just the
piano and I. For my fingers had made their presence known, introducing
themselves to the ivory keys beneath them in the moments of silence before I
began. In those moments, the silence of the auditorium screamed, and the
intensity of the spotlight was blinding; suddenly I was very nervous. My heart and thoughts began to race, and I panicked,
unable to think of a coherent stream of notes, rhythms, or dynamics. I tried to
visualize the first few measures of music, but my mind refused to provide me
with any musical images. All I could think about was the silence, the people,
and the possibility of not remembering any of my piece at all. I felt my heart
rate increasing, and the bright spotlights began to feel like ultraviolent
rays, radiating an uncomfortable heat onto my entire body. My fingers, however,
remained steady and fixed atop the keys of the opening chord. My fingers had a
mind of their own.
Before I could
work myself up any further, my fingers took control, taking off in a glorious
series of opening chords. With that first reverberation of music, my body and
mind acquiesced all power to my fingers, sitting back to enjoy the ride. I
relaxed, and soon I was floating above the stage, above the audience, and above
reality. Soaring through clouds with f-sharp minor, dramatic dynamics, and W.A.
Mozart, I was finally free.
A few years
later, in a seminar at Interlochen Arts Camp, I would learn that muscle memory
is the ability of muscles to record patterns of tension and release. These
patterns of movement become familiar with repetition, and eventually the
muscles are able to work together without specific thoughts controlling them;
movement becomes more or less instinctive.[1]
In the months leading up to my first big recital, I had practiced my piece
thoroughly and frequently. I practiced it slowly, quickly, with the metronome,
without the metronome, and in different rhythms and dynamics. I had practiced
it so thoroughly, in fact, that once onstage, my fingers truly moved on their
own accord.
At the time,
playing the piano simply felt natural. It was as if I was running a long
marathon: thinking about my body’s every action would interrupt the rhythm and
flow of my jog, and I didn’t want to stumble and fall. I watched my fingers
move. They seemed to barely touch the keys, skiing across their ocean of black and
white. Listless, weightless, my fingers were finally able to show off their
tricks. Performing fancy flips and trills, they sped back and forth across the
water. They glided in the wake, avoiding waves of awkward fingerings and
unintentional accents. My body and mind merely watched from a distance, the
motor pulling the music along.
As the final
notes of the sonata resonated in the auditorium, my fingers stopped moving. I
suddenly became aware that I had finished with almost no mistakes, and my heart
began to race again as my physical surroundings brought me back to reality. The
lights, the solitude of the performance space, and the audience’s applause
triggered me to my feet, and I took my bow. I walked back to my seat, glowing,
and knew that my fingers’ first big performance had been a success. My fingers
have a mind of their own.
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