The music

On the way to the writing of this piece, a young girl was playing piano in her bedroom upstairs. She has skipped school because of a tummy ache. In between bed and frequent trips to the bathroom she stops to sit in front of her piano and practice.

Her piano teacher lives nearby. Thanks to her she spends more time on her piano now. It has been years since she learned to read notes. She is now training her fingers so they will fall into the right places as soon as she reads the music. It is a hard hill to climb. But she knows exactly the meaning of “learning curve”. Her parents talked to her about it.

The learning curve is bell-shaped like a hill sitting on cross axes. The horizontal axis describes learning, skill and competence. Superimpose over these pleasure and the sense of fulfillment one enjoys from playing. The vertical axis describes difficulty. This translates into pain and suffering. To make the music more fun, the player must crank up the pain and climb higher up the curve. Once over the top, playing becomes easier and more pleasurable. But even so, the top of the curve is arbitrary. To play really well, the player must raise the target higher and higher still, and constantly over time. The most difficult lesson to learn is how to drive one’s self. In the end everything is decided by gana or desire. Talent is a fine idea to think about but it is only a presumption having no actual measure.

Learning begins with pain and lots of hard work. The body and mind are only coming to grips with what the music requires. To play guitar one must start by bearing the pain of guitar strings cutting into soft little fingers. Callous takes time to form even as the required muscles slowly become stronger. Music is the conquering of pain. It is also the measure of human persistence, personal will and faith in one’s self. Great things can only be achieved little by little, one painful little note at a time. And since this is all a simile to the personal journey, then one must presume that this will be a story of many stumbles and bringing one’s self up after every big fall. Her teacher has advised her to master at least one single piece instead of trying to learn too many all at once. She has chosen “River Flows in You” by Yiruma.

She plays it over and over again. After a while, it becomes to those who listen a single continuing piece having no beginning or end. The music is marked by jarring inflections, sometimes a scream from her, sometimes a frustrated grunt every time her fingers miss. The music stops. And when it returns it must strive once again to become music. Yet the music forms almost immediately in the ears of those who listen. It draws the mind in and captures it. It mesmerizes, drawing us into its peace, its sudden unexpected twists and turns. It is telling a story more immediate perhaps than words can ever hope to be unless the words were poetry.

The music is a river. It is there all the time. You can see it as one particular river if you look at it from its banks and yet is not really the very same river at any time. Its waters flow continuously traveling downstream. It never returns the way it came. It never stops. Is this perhaps the meaning of this particular piece of music? Is this the object that formed in Yiruma’s mind when he made this music? Is this the very same object, the very same story that poetically forms in our minds when we hear this young girl’s music?

All art whether sight or sound forms in the mind through a process called Gestalt after the school of psychology which studied perception and how meaning forms in the human mind. Meaning involves many disparate elements coming together magically in the mind into a single unit of thought. “The end result is always greater than the sum of its parts.

“The young girl is thinking of individual notes that translate into the tapping of little fingers on piano keys. At a certain point in her learning she must make the music transcend inside her from being notes on a piece of paper. They must become the river itself flowing inside her. They must become music.

The man writing this piece downstairs is enjoying himself. His young girl’s music is still playing in his head. Is it the right time to talk to her about art and the problem of the mistake? She sometimes still stops playing after a mistake. How may he explain that the watercolorist does not have absolute control over his paper and paint. All are subject to gravity, the viscosity of water, its salt and Ph balance. And then there is the painter’s mind itself and what goes on inside the heart.

Will she ever learn by herself to see the beauty of the “mistake” and how essential it is in every person’s art? How does he explain how we must all play on after every “wrong” note? As with life itself, every misstep only makes the end result more interesting and beautiful. The mastery of music is not at all the absence of all mistakes. Soon, she must learn how to romance it and the accident, to love it as if it were the most personal part of her art. How close they both come to being there.