Playlist Piano

ISSUE #30

It's getting to be study season, and we're gonna need something to drown out all the ugly fucking noise so we can please just focus, just please for once can someone let me think! clearly!? I'd like to give you a portion of my writing playlist, and an ode to my favorite instrument, the first one I ever learned: the piano. Here, let me set my bag down, I've got to fish out my Poetic Wax... it's in here somewhere... past the loose Gushers... okay, here it is:

The piano is, of course, our hand-drawn map to the musical scale, at least here in the West. It's our graphic representation of the aural world, and it's the size of a small sedan. All the notes that float around our ears, the different frequencies of our thrumming atmosphere, it lassos them each and lays them flat. Splayed out before you, you've got all the tools you need. It is our dictionary and thesaurus, and with it there is nothing hidden, but nothing fully known.

Music, whatever that word encompasses, isn't actually stretched out as neatly as the piano, just as physical space itself isn't necessarily Euclidean, but it feels like our most coherent representation of the sounds we hear. Other instruments weave down weary paths to form their scales, with endless steampunk buttons and valves, but the piano hides all that machinery away inside the cabinet and leaves us with only the essentials. It was designed the way the mind organizes information, which forms a lens through which we can perceive the music. It is the key-and-kite we hold to harness the beauty of the ether.

It's also enormous, a symbol of mass so pervasive that cartoons drop them on each other's heads. It takes up space like a monolith. You must come to it, an altar at which we bow. It's a piece of furniture, and because of its size, it has a force of its own. It cannot be easily moved, and therefore cannot be tamed unless you sit down and meet it at its level. I guess it's like the horse of instruments in that sense. Wherever it rests, it lives—it practically pays rent. It reminds me of what John Darnielle said of the farmhouse: it is "timeless and impermanent without ever committing to either side."

At first we had the harpsichord, but that couldn't get any louder or softer, and our yearning for the nuance we wield with our voices drove us to create the piano. It can fill a concert hall, and at the same time sound like it's sitting right next to you, like Nils Frahm in his excellent "Ode". The piano feels intimate, interior, functioning like memory, and the way it bathes you can make you see things you aren't really seeing. It is the water sign of instruments: strings can sound like the winds of heaven, but with a piano, you can see the every molecule in the mist, and maybe bend them, too. It's our closest thing to hearing the music of raindrops.

The fundamental problem with a piano is that you cannot sustain a note. A violin can measure eternity with just a rocking of the wrist, back and forth like a parent with a child. The piano teaches us that all things fade. Even if you try to grasp a chord with the pedal, it will go away. No amount of work will keep those notes there. In that, it requires either change or repetition, but always action. We touch it like we touch each other, with tips of fingers and recurring attention.

It's also the easiest on the ears, which is why it's so great for sleeping and for studying. It's a gentle reminder that there's beauty in the world— and that beauty's name is Jeff Lehman. Nah, just kidding. Poetic Wax is going back in the bag. It's just me now, farts and all.