What Piano Teachers and Editors Have in Common
April 12th, 2007
When I was a little girl, I begged my parents to buy me a piano. I asked for a piano for years and years, and my parents promised that one day they’d get me one.
One night, my parents returned from a swanky, black-tie auction absolutely beaming with pleasure. “You’ll never believe what we got you,” my mother said. “It’s something you’ve wanted for years.”
“You got me a piano?”
My mother and step-father exchanged glances. “Well…almost. We got you an organ!”
My face fell. An organ is simply not a piano.
The fact that my parents bought me a church organ in lieu of a piano is utterly irrelevant to the story I’m about to tell, but I wanted to note it anyway.
I started taking piano lessons when I was about thirteen years old. My first piece was Minuet in G Minor, by JS Bach. My music teacher played it for me once through and sent me home to learn it on my own.
Now, I knew how to read music. Which is to say, I knew that Every Good Boy Does Fine, and that there’s a FACE in the spaces. But things like key and meter were still a bit of a mystery to me.
I sat down to play the Bach piece on my brand new-to-me organ, but what I was playing was distinctly different, somehow, from what my teacher had played only hours before. The notes were right, I was sure of that much. But something was definitely amiss: though the notes were right the meter was dreadfully wrong. What I was playing was something like Minuet in G Minor on crack.
But I couldn’t figure out how to play the piece correctly, so I just kept practicing it the wrong way. And the funny part is, I distinctly remember thinking, “Well, maybe she won’t notice.”
Well, of course she noticed. I was playing Bach like some kind of Big Band outfit. In retrospect, I’m surprised she didn’t laugh out loud at my butchering of the music. But she didn’t ridicule me, she merely walked me through the rhythm, introduced me to meter, and that was that. I played Bach beautifully afterward.
Recently, I submitted an article to a journal I frequent. I should note that I started writing this article in November, and here it is April and I just got around to submitting it. I rewrote the damn thing five times, but I was never quite pleased with it. Something was wrong, I just couldn’t put my finger on what.
But true to form, I gave up and submitted the article anyway, thinking optimistically, “Well, maybe she won’t notice.”
The editor replied the next day (which, in editor time, is utterly miraculous. Editors are like black folks; they live in their own time zone.) with a note that basically said, “Nice try, psycho! You got the notes right, but your meter is totally fucked up!”
She said it much more diplomatically, of course.
What amazes me about good editors, though, is the way they can point out what is wrong without belittling the writer, and in fact can educate the writer in the process. Each request for improvement isn’t merely a one-shot diddle: it’s a foray into writing as a discipline. Advice that I receive from good editors is advice that I can apply to all my future writing; it isn’t germane only to this particular piece. Just as my piano teacher helped me fix my Bach problem by teaching me about fractions, my editor guides me by reminding me about focus (which is always my problem. I have a tendency to bite off more than I can chew.)
I’m a philosopher at heart, and I believe the solution to most problems is a better understanding of the problem. Being told how to fix something is one thing: understanding how or why it was broken in the first place is a whole different story.
“Teach a man to fish…” as it were. :)
Hi,
I’m an editor My sister sent me to your site because she liked this piece. I did, too. But I have a few suggestions, if it’s OK with you.
Some readers find the reference to black folks living in their own time zones offensive. It may be true of some black people, but not all of them. That’s the trouble with generalizations, and why good writers avoid them.
I’m curious how at your first piano lesson you could be playing Bach already! If you had prior musical training, surely you would have known about meter. So it’s a puzzlement.
Hi Fran. Thanks for stopping by.
You might not have read enough of my writing to have figured it out, but I’m a black woman. I enjoy talking about my experiences as a black person, and that includes making fun of us–the stereotypes and the truths. And as a black woman, I”m allowed to–and I’m gonna–talk about black people. Even if it “offends someone”.
But the truth is, even if I weren’t black, I might still make inappropriate comments here and there, and I tell you what: being *fearless* is what makes me a good writer.
“Good writers avoid generalizations”? Good writers use generalizations when it suits their purpose: if it creates the right mood, if it tells the right story, if it pushes the right buttons. Good writers know what will work for their audiences and what won’t, and we’ll use every weapon in our arsenal–even black jokes–to spin a good tale and make a salient point.
As far as Bach: Minuet in G Minor is pretty simple. Extremely simple. It might be Bach but it’s no Mozart ;) I grew up in a musical family, so while I could read music and I understood the *concept* of meter, actually executing it reliably wasn’t something I had mastered–at all. (Hell, as a classically trained singer, I know the theory of minor key inside and out, but if you asked me to sing “Mary Had a Little Lamb” in minor key, I don’t know that I could do it without much hair pulling and gnashing of teeth.) I was, and remain to this day, a terrible musician. And so while in theory I understood what a song in 4/4 meter should mean, that didn’t mean I could stop my fingers, with their own mind, from playing in the wrong meter. And, even more unbelievably, I was able to convince myself that it was good enough, and no one would notice.