Be Seen, Be Heard

I’ve been teaching myself piano for three years, and I’ve noticed something about the way I play. My fingers tend to approach the keys from an oblique angle, almost coming at them from the side rather than from above. They do not land with confidence; they approach timidly, feeling their way across neighboring keys to make sure they’re in the right spot before playing the intended note. Because I play on an electronic keyboard, this means I sometimes accidentally strike the neighboring note before the one I want, or hit them both at once without meaning to. It makes for a little sloppiness in my playing, along with other messy habits I have, like speeding up my tempo when I get excited about how well a song is going (which then leads to more missed notes).

Yes, it’s happening mainly because I’m a newbie at piano, but I think it’s a habit that could become a crutch. My fingers probably know their way across the keyboard well enough by now. I wish they could simply glide through the air, feeling their way through the music without bumping clumsily into the keys. They should be approaching every note and chord with purpose, not timidity. Did your parents ever tell you to get into a chilly swimming pool by jumping in rather than dipping a toe first and letting yourself be submerged incrementally? I never got the hang of that when I was growing up; I had to test the water first, no matter how many pools I had swum in before. I knew in my head that it would be fine, but still I had to stick a sacrificial toe into the pool to make sure. The notion of going all in was too scary. That’s how I find myself playing piano, especially when a song requires big movement from one octave to another—my fingers can’t take that leap without feeling their way along the surface first.

The shy approach to getting in the pool is not, ultimately, satisfying. It gives us a little bit of comfort, making us think we have gained a better understanding of what we’re getting into, but makes no difference to the overall experience. In the end, we still need to jump. The musician needs to rise above her uncertainty to bring clarity to the notes being played, so the listener can enjoy the melody.

I’m noticing this about the way I play music because I’ve spent a lot of my adult life overcoming timidity. Early on, I was very shy about expressing myself or speaking up in school. I was always self-sufficient in the sense of whiling away my hours alone, entertaining myself with reading and writing, but not so much in the sense of navigating the external world. As a teenager, I was still nervous about approaching fast-food cashiers to place an order. I’m not sure why; maybe I just didn’t like interacting with people, or worried about phrasing my order the wrong way or being judged (by another likely teenager behind the counter) for how I presented myself. Maybe I merely suffered the low self-esteem of all girls who grow up tall, skinny, sensitive, and not conventionally beautiful or stylish.

I tried a little to push through the shyness. Around age ten, I joined a children’s theater program, then quit after being uncomfortable with the group vocal warmup. Bad enough that other people, especially other kids my age, had to hear my voice blended with others; I wanted to leave before they had a chance to hear it projected on its own. Later, as a freshman, I improbably joined my high school’s color guard. I had never done any form of dance, marching band, or pseudo-military exercise. All the other girls seemed graceful as they twirled our blue-and-gold flags and performed dancelike routines. I was uncoordinated, and couldn’t figure out how to follow their movements. I walked off the field the first day. The next year, I similarly walked away from a journalism extracurricular when the instructor tried to push me harder to develop my writing style. I left before I could get more assignments that would challenge me to either interview people (i.e., talk to them) or express my own viewpoints more fully.

These all represented things I wanted but was too timid to pursue. I longed for ways to express myself aside from the poems I wrote secretly. Even though I was shy and quiet, part of me wanted to have a stage on which to be seen, whether it was part of a theater or the metaphorical stage of a writing forum like the student newspaper. I was just too scared to be seen flailing, or to reveal my quirks to anyone except a circle of close friends.

A few decades later, I've been seen and heard on various stages. None very large, but all occasions that felt momentous and challenging and fulfilling to this gal who usually keeps to herself: professional presentations, storytelling shows, karaoke bars. I have an urge to try acting, improv, and standup comedy too. Although I've become braver in my forties, I still have plenty of timidity to strip away. I’ve noticed the same quality in my singing as in my piano playing, that is, a tendency for my voice to creep up to a note rather than hitting it straight on at the beginning of a phrase. It’s very subtle, but I feel a difference since I started defying that habit. While I’m not impressing many people at the karaoke bar, my voice feels stronger and richer these days. I’m trying to go the same route with piano. Like any practicing musician, I find that I’m getting better at knowing where to place my hands while my eyes stay on the music sheet.

It is okay to live with confidence. Our bodies want to make music, sing, laugh, dance, and move; our souls want to be seen, heard, felt, and loved. We should step fully into that potential when opportunity arises.