Piano Lessons: Music, Love & True Adventures by Noah Adams, A–
Switching gears from that long fantasy novel, I moved on to this relatively short (248-page) memoir by Noah Adams, former host of NPR’s All Things Considered. In this book Adams chronicles a year of trying to learn to play piano as a 51-year-old adult. I stumbled across it while I was in the music section of the library, and since I was also 51 years old and attempting to learn something new, I thought it might make an interesting read.
As someone who already plays piano, I felt that Adams made several questionable calls, such as buying a brand-new Steinway upright that he couldn’t be sure he’d ever really use, as well as trying to learn to play the piano from a computer program rather than a teacher, not to mention insisting on learning Schumann’s Traumerai right away. (I had reason to revisit Traumerai myself recently, and though I wouldn’t say it’s a hard piece, I also wouldn’t classify it as beginner material. A teacher in the book calls it a third-year piece, which sounds about right.)
His mule-headedness is sometimes a bit hard to take. But, he’s a smart guy and a good narrator, and he sprinkles the book with interesting piano trivia. As a whole, I think the memoir works, and that’s why I gave it a good grade.
One thing that particularly struck a chord with me (ha-ha) was this part:
Many years ago an accomplished pianist and veteran teacher decided you could tell which youngsters were going to be able to play by just looking at them. Helen Hopekirk wrote: “You will find that all musicians have noses that are broad at the base. Always look at a new pupil’s nose, and never expect anything of a pupil who has a thin, pinched nose. If a pupil has a nose that is broad at the base, you can feel quite happy.” In recounting this story in The Great Pianists, Harold Schonberg adds; “Hopekirk had a nose that was very broad at the base.”
And I’ve been told to look for an extra-long little finger. That pianists will often have a little finger that extends well past the knuckle of the finger next to it. This is interesting but probably not important: Josef Hoffmann, one of the great pianists, had rather small hands. Steinway even made special instruments for Hoffmann, with the keys scaled down just a bit.
The bit about noses is, of course, total nonsense, but funny as an anecdote. The bit about pinkies has a lot of truth to it. The right-hand pinky takes point on the melody, and the left-hand pinky takes point on the bass line, so the pinkies are crucial. Having long ones is certainly an advantage.
The video below is of a lovely piece by Schubert in which the melody is almost exclusively played by the right pinkie while other fingers of the right hand play all the harmonic filler. At times the camera focuses in on Horowitz’s hands, and there are several good shots of his left pinkie. Assuming his right pinkie matched (and why wouldn’t it?), he was blessed with long pinkies, making this piece a total cakewalk for him. (But of course, that’s only half the story. His musicality is simply stunning and has nothing to do with his physicality. In this video he’s hardly moving, seemingly half-asleep, and yet somehow all this music is coming from the piano. Amazing!)
I myself have ridiculous little pinkies. They’re not even average length, let alone extra-long. As a consequence, I struggle in ways that Horowitz could never have understood. But, I can play that Schubert piece, too. I just have to use the pedal to hold some of the melody notes, in order to keep my hands in comfortable positions, whereas Horowitz wouldn’t have needed to do that.
So I wouldn’t say that you need long pinkies to play well, but they are unfortunately needed for playing certain pieces comfortably. I wish I’d given more thought to such things when I was younger. I might have spared myself some difficulties. But, it’s those difficulties that are pushing me now to learn how to compose pieces that suit my particular skills. Sometimes we don’t realize until we’re in our 50s what it is we really ought to be working on.