An Amazing Discovery: Steinway Hall

Today (which, as I write this post, turns into yesterday) I discovered what I now think is one of the most beautiful places in New York City: Steinway Hall, the flagship store of the legendary Steinway & Sons.  

I walked the showrooms in awe. Sheet music lined the overstuffed shelves. Music escaped from the practice rooms. The place is all marble and gold, grand and impossible.  So much black and white gleam, your own image reflects in the propped-up lid and a set of four hands runs across the keys. 

It reminded me how beautiful and regal the instrument can be. The kind of epic stories it can tell.  I will walk this place when I want to feel joy. 

I miss playing the piano.

Also...I apologize if this blog is turning into a strange photography romp through New York City.   I'm going through a bit of a rough patch in this space and I hope to find some kind of focus soon.  Until then.  Well.  I don't know.

Belonging Still

For a long time, I had been looking for my beautiful piano teacher, Mrs. Lance. I went on exhaustive internet searches that came up empty. Her blue shingled house had been sold.  Her phone number no longer in service.  I had tracked people down on Facebook, students I had known but not really, kids at end-of-year recitals whose parents my mother would run into at the market while I stood bored and annoyed as they chatted.  I sent these strangers messages, do you know where she is?  The reply, always the same: No.  But I am wondering too.

A few weeks ago, I was in my parents home and I mentioned my search.  My father, in a that-reminds-me-moment, went into the other room and handed me a book.  He had found it while cleaning out the garage.  Weep No More My Lady by Mary Higgins Clark.  A tattered, yellowed cover, and on the inside, scrawled in pencil, J. Lance.  

I have no recollection of her loaning it to me.  I can not imagine that she meant for me to keep it, with the way her name had been so deliberately and proudly written, there was no doubt that the pages belonged to her.  When I find her, I'll give it back to her, I thought.

So the news, from my mother, that she had run into E. did I remember her?  And of course, I could not forget E. nearly six feet tall at thirteen years old with her wild hair and crooked glasses who played piano and sang songs she had composed herself, one strange song in particular, I Can Fly, which we always remembered because she sang it at the top of her lungs, soaring boldly and confidently to non-existent, off-key notes.  The news that my mother had run into her and learned that Mrs. Lance had died three years ago comes at me with such a strange and terrible pow.  The permanence of her disappearance just doesn't seem possible.

Her children took the piano, my mother told me.  And truly, this seemed like the most important information, the biggest reassurance, that the piano had not been snatched at some estate sale, had not been left on the street to be taken away.  That it belonged to them, to her, still.

I can think of no greater gift than music. Not the talent for it.  Not even the sound of it.  I mean, the love of it. To be shown that, given that, I am forever grateful.  

(Almost) Wordless Wednesday: Coney Island / Playing From Memory

He sat at the old upright, drenched in sun, on a too-warm January day, just below the Coney Island Museum.  The fractured story of a place hummed above him.  He played from memory, just as we did, running our fingers along the slide of banister, drumming the floorboards, peering into the coin-operated telescope of time.

Maybe I have an urge to play an instrument I can not fit in my apartment.  Maybe I wish I was not at work but on Coney Island's beaches or riding the rickety Cyclone.  I don't know. But I think of him today.

At The Piano

I sit with the memory of her gold and green living room with its mangled smell of cat litter and sweet honey lozenges. She sat against the wall, tucked beside the piano bench, in a wooden chair with its own worn cushion. She always leaned over the keys, wrote the date, with her long, shaking but careful fingers, in the corner of the page.  The date became a beginning, a pull-switch, and it would send my own hands, too small, too slender, the reach between pinky and thumb too short, to the smooth ivory in anticipation of learning a new song.

She wore glasses that magnified the ocean of her eyes.  Her hair was a soft, rolling hill of red.  I'm a little witchy, she'd tease, titter at the edge of a giggle, the quiet, mischievous glow of a small child about to do wrong.  She said this, each and every year, of her Halloween birthday, and I would follow with the same story I always did, that I was supposed to have been born that day but came early.  So, there was no connection, not really, only that we could have shared that but didn't.

Her husband came and went in shadow through their small home, shuffled past the open door, tinkered in the pantry. I'd hear the clank of porcelain against the metal sink basin, the quick, flinch of television static, then the kind of purposeful, certain quiet that comes with having to be quiet. Because the living room was hers.  And my fingers perched over the sturdy upright piano for those forty-five minutes each week meant that it was ours. The crumpled green grass of rug beneath the pedal.  The tink of silver chain that lit up the sheet music.  Heavy, thick, drapes hurdling to the floor.

Once a year, there would be a recital in summer. We'd fill that one room entirely, folding chairs tangled up in one another. Children in crumpled pants and dresses with lopsided hems. Our parents pressed up against the front door or the coat rack or the wall-papered seams of the space.  And we'd play in order. From youngest to oldest.  My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean to Debussy and Chopin. The same songs, each year that we progressed, until I was seventeen and college bound, playing a song I'd heard played ten years earlier by a teenager I never knew when I still wore patent leather shoes and my green-stained knees were covered in itchy tights.

It was only at the recital that we saw the rest of her home.  That we'd spill from that familiar room into the sun-soaked kitchen with its checkered curtains and round Formica table.  The screen door to the backyard would swing open and we'd scatter.  The oldest students with arms crossed, leaning against the shingles of the house.  The youngest hiding behind their parents chatter or running in the open grass.

She'd serve us lemonade and store-bought cookies, then present us with plastic statues, miniature busts of the great composers.  Some years I'd receive a statue I already owned and I'd line it up anyway, twin Bachs, on top of my piano at home, until that last year, when I did not receive a bust at all but, instead, a gold pin I've since lost. One gold note meant to hold all the notes I had ever learned.

Playing with Two Hands, Medleys, and Shards by Ismet Prcic

I have a few things on my mind today but, mostly, a weird thought about playing piano with two hands because I'm reading this fascinating book Shards by Ismet Prcic.

When I was a little girl first learning to play piano I was really impatient about wanting to be able to play with two hands. And even when I did, finally, learn to do it my teacher always made me plunk out the notes of a song separately, let each hand settle into its role before allowing them to play together.

You think I would have learned something from that experience but no...to this day (though it has, admittedly, been a while since I sat down to play) I will look at a new song and automatically attempt to play it all at once. It's always a stupid mess. And I always have to step back, play each hand seperately, and put it back together again.

Last weekend I listened to the Sunday Show with Jonathan Schwartz. I'm totally obsessed with this show. It's crazy. If we have plans on a Sunday I become the most irritable person on the planet if I can not get my Jonathan Schwartz fix.

Anyway, he played this Irving Berlin medley (below) and I just thought how hard it must be to sing a song while the person, standing right next to you, is belting out an entirely different song. How you have to be all tucked inside your song and, at the same time, know the rhythm and feel of the other person's song.

So, this is what I'm thinking about. Having to know, I mean, really know, two pieces of something before you can put it together and have it make any kind of sense. I think Ismet Prcic, so far, as I am not yet through the book, is doing something experimental and wonderful with that idea in terms of the actual structure of the book and the theme of diaspora. Stepping back to understand all the pieces of a person before you understand the whole.

And here are Marin Mazzie and Jason Danieley singing that Irving Berlin medley. I apologize that it has the cheesy cabaret feel. It's the only rendition I could find on You Tube. I think it's worth sticking it out to listen to them sing together. IT'S CRAZY. It just blows my mind whenever I hear two different voices and two entirely different songs come together like that.