I burst into a rage of tears at last when my piano teacher asked me to play CDEFG again and again. I still didn’t know how to place my fingers properly on the keyboard. I still didn’t know how to grab the keyboard with an individual finger to produce a single proper sound. What happened to me?
I had brought a piano at home. I had practiced at least one hour a day. But my fingers didn’t follow orders and my brain didn’t know how to give orders. I brought along the music notes of G Major and F Major, but I couldn’t work on them. It was a moment of frustration, the last piano lesson of year 2009.
Who wouldn’t feel a little sentimental on the last day of the year? I began my last day of 2009 crying when I saw a big group of people singing Ode to Joy on Japanese satellite TV this morning. Maestro Kurt Masur at the age of 82 was full of passion conducting NHK Symphony Orchestra to perform Ludwig van Beethoven’s 9th Symphony. When I saw the joy of Maestro Kurt Masur, I seemed to see Beethoven singing along.
I was a little reluctant to go to the last piano lesson in the rain this afternoon. I didn’t make any improvement in the past week. My fingers were paralytic when they were on the keyboards. What would I say to my daughter if I had one? So I went to the class as planned.
Yi-hwa gave me a good pep talk when she saw tears in my eyes. She understood how difficult it was for a middle-aged woman to learn piano from scratch. She advised me to take one step at a time and gave me a children book of piano lessons as the new year gift to cheer me up. I burst into laughters at the end of the class.
Index fingers were not obedient, because of the nerves between index fingers and middle fingers. It is important to play piano with only DIP( the distal inter-phalangeal joint between the distal phalanx and middle phalanx), not PIP (the proximal inter-phalangeal joint between the middle phalanx and proximal phalanx). It was the first time I realized how little I know of my fingers. It was the first time I realized how valuable my ten fingers were. Now I can tell if a person plays a piano by the way she or he holds the coffee cup.