Piano Blues
My mother recently bought a piano.
I’ve taken it upon myself to teach her how to play it, and it’s proving to be a challenge.
I wanted to start with the basics, teaching her how to read music and what the different types of notes were. You know those old sayings “Every good boy does fine,” “FACE,” “All cows eat grass,” and “good boys do funny acts”…she gets all those fine.
It’s the concept of the different types of notes that confuse her…like the difference between quarter, half, and whole notes.
I now know I was not meant to be a teacher…I’m ready to strangle her.
I think learning how to read and play music will be good for her though. I’ve noticed lately that she’s getting a bit…more loose with how she thinks. For example, you know how you notice something and respond to it in your mind? Like the phone rings and you think, “the phone’s ringing, I should probably answer it.” Well she’s starting to respond to stimuli like that OUT LOUD instead of in her mind. With most people, there’s usually some kind of “filter” that stops you from saying everything you think…but with hers, it seems like it’s broken.
I thought it was annoying at first, but now I’m getting a little worried, like maybe her mind is loosing it’s sharpness. She’s only 54, but it’s gotten worse since I’ve been in college…
This way of responding to things definitely makes itself apparent when I’m teaching her how to play. Instead of looking at a staff and logically figuring out what a particular note is, she just blurts out the first thing that comes in her mind…like if there’s a b on the staff, she automatically assumes the next note is a c no matter where it is…just because b comes after c…
…and even though we just spend an hour on the concept of “every good boy does fine” and “FACE” and she correctly picked out every note on a practice staff 10 minutes earlier.
I’m sure in time she’ll begin to understand as learning how to read music is like learning another language. I just hope that the logic she learns helps to keep her mind as sharp as it can be.
