Young Enthusiasms and Old Memories

February 2nd, 2021

It arrived this Saturday afternoon and I got for starters almost 5 full minutes alone with it - apparently that's ample time for everyone to figure out where the most interesting action of the moment is going on and come running from all and any corners of the house. They came though and so I simply made space for them, then set the child at it, showed him how to hold his hand and how to play the keys and then set him up with a simple scale exercise too, for I could easily wait, while he couldn't, not really, for all his honest and good-natured attempt at it. His enthusiasm is strong and fiery and young - too young to know how to burn brightly weeks, months and years whole. All it knows for now are barely todays and at a stretch tomorrows. Those are all that can be known by inexperienced enthusiasms on their meager diet of minutes and hours that fail to sustain - how could they sustain anyway, when they are mostly filled with wait, when there are still so many of them in the future to wait for and so few of them in the past to know from?

I don't deplore though the short life of youthful enthusiasms of all sorts. Instead, I tend to sustain them when I can and to let them fill thus perhaps with experience rather than empty wait, those minutes and hours - few or many, as they may be - that they burn through. In this case, the sustenance was well received, the burning is still ongoing and the enthusiasm is apparently only growing stronger, at least for now. Long story short though, the child got to explore this new piano before I did and I got to take pictures of him in the act:

piano_1_640.jpg

On that same Saturday, only later on, I sent the youth to sleep and took advantage of the sudden peace and quiet to try and see if I can still play anything at all. After more than 10 years of not even touching a piano, let alone practicing or learning or playing or anything of the sort, I was quite surprised at how easily a lot of it (I doubt it's all!) came back to my mind - and at least a good chunk of it to my fingers, too! Still, there is also enough tripping over my own fingers to make it clear just how much was lost as well.

The above is, of course, just how it all seems to me now, since I don't actually have *any* recording of any time I played the piano all those years ago and so there isn't even anything more reliable than my memory to directly compare and measure the change the years made. There is, of course, nothing I can do to fix that but there is nevertheless something I can do to avoid a repeat of this very same trouble for my future self, namely record and document the way I play now, on an unknown (if very pleasant actually) piano1 and freshly back at it after such a long and total break. While I kept it at least to the easy classics for now to avoid too much harm to anyone's hearing, be warned if you do click on it, that I still trip over my fingers (or rather they go ahead of myself!) at times: recording (mp3) of my playing fresh after a 10+ year nearly total break.


  1. Until this year, I had only ever played acoustic pianos, although both upright and concert/grand pianos. However, the technology in digital pianos nowadays - in the best ones at least - has advanced a lot, to the point where I can say that my digital piano is certainly better than some old acoustic pianos I played long time ago. At any rate, the keys are made to simulate extremely well those of an acoustic piano so that indeed, they feel exactly like my fingers remember those of the concert/grand piano, not only as touch and release but also as to change in sound obtained by different pressure - and I was very skeptical in the beginning of such a claim being anything more than just a claim. There's a lot more to the digital piano technology than keys though and the way the "voices" of a digital piano are obtained from start to end make for fascinating reading actually.