Me and my
piano
I WAS Grade 6 when father bought our
piano. Though old looking and secondhand, it nevertheless gave us joy as
children. It was about the only ‘antique’ thing in the house, and though the
case had dried up with scratches, yet its curved legs were elegant and
sometimes you notice the leaf carvings on the sides. I was very happy seeing it
‘arrive’ at our home. Years before, I remember trying hard to open the lid of another
piano in a family friend’s house but could not do so because it was locked. I
was scolded.
When my grandmother’s church bought
a pedal powered organ (this was before electricity reached the village) the
instrument was temporarily placed in our house until carpenters finished making
its plywood casing complete with lock. I would spend hours banging, rolling and
frolicking my fingers on the keys, sometimes put the side of my head on the
naphthalene smelling keys like they’re pillows and then kick the pedals to
grandmother’s dismay. The organ was promptly transferred to the church.
Our first teacher was Ma’am Rosie,
the piano owner’s daughter. Story has it that her father, a Boy Scout master,
died on a ship that sank between our village and a nearby island. I remember
she wrote a letter to my parents offering to sell her piano. Father must have
asked us what our thoughts were, since I recalled reading Ma’am Rosie’s letter
and can still picture her slanting handwriting strokes and color of the pad she
used.
On hindsight, how difficult it must
be for Ma’am Rosie to give up the only piano she had, her true friend and
companion, a real possession bought especially for her by her father. Whatever
her needs were that time, she must have also hoped my parents would be able to
take care the way she took care of her piano. Maybe she also prayed the new
owner’s children would find delight in it the way she, in her time, filled her
own house with abundant laughter, music, love, and life entertaining her
parents with skillfully executed servings of melodious and ‘sonorous’ (her
term) Visayan piano songs.
In the beginning she would to come
to our house on weekends and taught me and my sister waltzes and duets. At
times it was difficult absorbing everything she said. So she would play her
favorite pieces, and demonstrate the simple, to complex executions of Visayan
folk tunes on the piano saying, all these keys are really ‘one and the same.’ That was the point of my difficulty. Since the
keys looked alike how would the fingers know which key to land on? Yet we plodded
on.
A few weeks passed and Ma’am Rosie
stopped coming to our house. Maybe the rigors of travel from her town to our
village with really bad un-cemented roads proved too much on her. To continue
our lessons mother enrolled us in a formal piano school in the city. I can
still hear on my mind the thunder deep metallic sound of the tall upright with
yellowed keys where my sister and I took turns striving to hit the correct
keys, as our legs dangled from the seats hardly reaching the pedals. Our new
teacher was a competent woman, piano wise, who loved wearing matching up and
down ‘terno,’ bags and umbrella. She can attack and scale with ease the difficult
notes of Malagueña, Glow Worm and, Charles Williams’ ‘Jealous Lover’ -the theme
from the movie The Apartment. Jealous lover, to her, represents one woman’s
quixotic love for a priest - hers.
My sister never went farther beyond
the first piece ‘Off I go to Musicland’ (‘training ear and eye and hand’).
Probably she found formal training tedious and not to her ‘free spirit’
temperament. She abandoned the lessons altogether. But she has evolved in other
areas of music such as karaoke singing, shaping and ‘perfecting’ her voice
craft along the style of Sharon Cuneta
a favorite singer of Tagalog compositions.
Whenever she comes for a visit our sibling ritual is to do pop numbers with
piano accompaniment. Reveling on the piano had been my and my sister’s bonding.
Rabindranath Tagore once said that
the faith waiting in the heart of a seed promises a miracle of life which it
cannot prove at once. I am thankful of the unflinching trust of our first music
teacher, giving up her piano for us. It was faith that says hey, these bumbling
musical ignoramuses whose only input is raw interest can still evolve (a saving
grace worth looking into) not necessarily as big-time musicians but, at least,
can be counted on among those who continue to keep faith in music’s mysterious
power to bring souls to higher levels of life and love.
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