On Playing the Piano Too Fast

I walk up the cement steps of Mrs. McGrath’s brick bungalow in Berwyn, Illinois.  She always has hundreds of tiny figurines on display on several shelves all over the living room: lots of things from England, especially red buses, which always make me curious.  On one end of the living room, her waiting students and their parents sit and do homework or read magazines.  Deeper into the living room stands an old piano up against the wall, covered with picture frames, and surrounded by books and books of music.  I am 7 or 8 years old.  I like to play piano.  I love to impress my teacher with how fast I can play.  I also try to play her music that she has sitting around.  She suggests to play slower and with more feeling – I cannot resist the temptation to not respond to her suggestion, implying that she doesn’t know how the music is supposed to sound.

I made it through 6 piano books called Step by Step, and somewhere on book 4 or 5 I got extremely bored of piano.  After I finally dragged through the last book, I started playing songs in a book called the Sonatina Album, and then the piano became interesting again.  I also got some rags.  12th Street Rag and another one about a certain kind of leaf.  There are a lot of rags about leaves I later learned.  I liked to play the Rags too fast.  Piano Rags sound like circus music, but even more if you play them too fast.  Today rags do not seem to be surviving, unless you are interested in creating the atmosphere of a circus or an old-timey bar.  I think I missed the point of rags when I started playing them, but they gave me the idea that piano music could be more than simple classical sonatinas or exercise pieces with names like “Hopping Frogs Like to Hop.”  I think that a well-written rag is supposed to have sharp harmonic turns and tenderness and elegance.  It is inevitably a bouncy rhythm, but if they can be written with minimal bounce, that is better.  The more melodic the bass line the better, and soften up the touch on the left hand stride bounce, please.  Sure, you can swing the rhythm if you want, but if you do, you should know it’s not a rag anymore, then it’s jazz.  I remember reading on the front cover of one of my rags words written in an old-timey font that lended them the authority of the composer himself: “Not too fast!”  So I tried it out in the music.  I don’t think I realized til then that Mrs. McGrath had a good point about playing slower.

Accordion Story No. 1

I walk into the banquet hall and there is Uncle Tom in the corner with a gigantic accordion. Everyone groans a little because he is amplified and grinning through his handle-bar mustache. The Polish flavor is in the air now as he pumps out the raucous polkas. Every cousin who got married had this to look forward to. We danced to Golden Oldies at family weddings – the chicken dance and shout! and good-time rock n’ roll – but when the polkas came out of the accordion then everyone knew that dancing became serious, crucial – a matter of joy. Bring out the accordion and it will have no patience for irony in your dance – it will only accept joy, the kind that flows directly from your soul! The accordion has high standards, perhaps accounting for all the groans. Sometimes you would see the oldest couples out there polkaing with more elegance and energy than the children. Uncle Tom’s youngest daughter Jenny married a Mexican man named Benny, and we saw at their wedding that Polka is the glue between the Polish and the Mexican. I grew up in Cicero, Illinois, where I would dance both kinds of polkas with Al Capone, the Polish and the Mexican, and we knew that they were the same dance. Yeah, I knew Al Capone, he lived next door, and we would polka in his back alley parties. We never quite knew who lived next door. I grew up in a circus where innocent children carried guns in the allies. One day Tillie, our pure white shepherd, got out through the alley gate, and a car ran into her hips. My father cried at Dr. Janda’s Veterinarian Hospital on Cermak Avenue when she died, the only time I ever saw him cry.

p.s. The thing about Al Capone is a myth.  Readers, since all the other facts are true, are you satisfied with how the myth coheres with the rest of the story?

Music Blog? Yes.

I want to begin an account of the music I am interested in making. I am interested in 3 very different styles of music: piano music of the classical type, the craft and tradition of song-writing, and the possibilities of the accordion (all the possibilities in the world!). I want to tell the story behind each style (how I got into the style) so that the direction I go with each becomes clearer. If there is anyone reading at this point, I welcome any responses.