qt with dad

Dad has been teaching himself piano very, very slowly for three years without any particular method. He finds free sheet music on the Internet that is horribly transcribed or is arranged for a thirty-piece string section and a French horn, and he can't understand why the sheet music asks him to play 12-note chords. Despite these obstacles, he is very enthusiastic about practicing. On any given night I will hear a gavotte or a waltz played extremely slowly for half an hour to an hour. He plays through the sheet music the way a dental hygienist polishes teeth, sweeping through a region over and over, in any given four-measure phrase playing measures 1, then 1 again, then 1-2, then 1-3, then 2-3, then 3 four times, then 2-4, etc. It is the kind of slow, repetitive, dissonant ivory tickling that directors of horror films choose for the telekinetic-flesh-peeling-by-pupilless-child sequences of their movies.

Yesterday I sat down with him and suggested that he learn to play the left-hand and right-hand parts separately, and to stick to the rhythm. He'd never tried the latter. He understood mathematically that a quarter note comprises two eighth notes, but could not divide the duration of a beat into even halves. Each time he played two notes in sequence, they fell into heartbeat rhythm, or a sixteenth note followed by a dotted eighth:



I got him away from the piano and had him tap a steady beat on the kitchen counter with his left hand and instructed him to tap the counter with his right hand when his left hand was up and when it was down. He found this exceedingly difficult. I told him to think about the steady rhythm of his pace when he walked. I said, Music is like C++. It's just another language. I'm not sure this advice was helpful in any way.

Tonight he burst into my room and started pounding on the door. "Look!" he said. He pounded quarter notes with his left hand and eighth notes with his right hand. He was hitting the hollow door about twice as hard as it is advisible to hit hollow doors. But the rhythm was right on. Then he went to the piano and played quarter notes of middle C with his left hand and C5-D5 with his right. Over and over. And then again. Then he switched over to triplets on the right hand. C-D-E. C-D-E. C-D-E. So on. Again and again.

I also watched TV with him tonight. First it was the Chinese news reporting on the Shanghai World Expo. I asked if he was planning to go, and he said, "No, the ground there is covered in phlegm." Then he reprimanded Boo for chewing rawhide and drooling on the carpet, and reprimanded me for giving Boo rawhide because he might mistake his tongue for hide and just chew it right off. "Do you want to pay that hospital bill?" Then we watched the last half hour of a pretty boring PBS documentary about the huts and vistas along the Appalachian trail. "This must have been filmed in the 1970s," said Dad. "People now don't have beards like this." I noted that thru-hikers often grew beards because it was inconvenient to shave. One bald young man with a wild goatee gave an interview to the camera. "Terrorist," said Dad. "Just kidding. If he were upside down, he'd look just fine." A woman in pigtails gave an interview. "This person's beard is underdeveloped." He overenunciated words he heard in the documentary in an effort to learn them. "Ka TAH din. Mooselookmeguntic." Regarding windspeeds on Mt. Washington, he said, "I stood in a 100 mph wind once." After the documentary finished, he said, "Do you want to watch my favorite show? With music performance?" He was talking about a local weather report channel that simply displays the three-day forecasts for the counties of the Bay Area while muzak plays in the background. He says this is the most relaxing show on TV. He says this show is the best laxative he's found.

Just now, as I was hurriedly typing the above paragraphs, he stopped in my doorway and said, "Dadadadadada! Flying keyboard!"