Crawling through ebay, I can never find it. The music was common as table salt—like book club copies of Gone With the Wind, or electric waffle irons—and the lithographed head of Beethoven is repeated in different lay-outs stretching back to the twenties. There are scores of copies in the 100+ drop-down view of auction listings.
But none are the version from my childhood, my first piece of music—the first musical notes I ever read. The outside was a field of Creamsicle orange. Beethoven's head was dark blue and—I believe—in the upper right hand corner.
Of course, even if I found it no copy would have the penciled letters, in the archaic cursive capitals, carefully written above each note. I had left my grandmother's disintegrating pile of sheet music behind, in that last half-hour walk through the house, picking up pieces of my childhood as if at a blue light special. I chose a mantle clock, a butter dish, a spiral binder of handwritten recipes—stuffed with cut-out panels from boxes of jello and recipes clipped from the local paper—and a bunch of Bibles.
"That looks like it might be valuable," the man said, pointing to a decorative vase. I put it in my box out of politeness. I broke it a few years later and Gary carefully glued the pieces back together, my childhood and my adult life briefly, tenderly intersecting.
Sitting at the piano, now, I wish I had that incredible token—a sort of musical birth certificate—of my first steps in the stentorian world of Beethoven. The composer proved large enough to accommodate a life's study—a life's appreciation—from the insipid, almost leering simplicity of the early Bagatelles to the visceral satisfactions of the sonatas. Like Shakespeare, or Caravaggio, or Jack Nicholson (when he was any good), every mood seemed to be there.
My grandmother had padded and covered the rectangular piano bench with a massive, exhausting needlepoint—a floral bouquet on a purple background—that must have taken her years to complete, and the effect on my 8-year-old mind was to fuse the act of piano performance with the sublime. The inert, mysterious pattern of black and white keys was like a cabala—dominoes for grown-ups—a deck of cards that yielded in the hands of an expert a royal flush, fistfuls of perfect arpeggios.
The mentality was established early in my life, that any modest achievement meant glory, and even a single wrong note meant failure: black or white.
In the beginning a stiff, unfolded length of card was dropped behind the keys that corresponded to each written note on the stave, and when, after a certain time, it was removed the sensation was identical to my first wobbly bicycle ride without training wheels. I never lost my fear of the lowest notes, indistinguishable under their countless ledger lines or—even worse—the top notes, wooden and thin, lost in clouds.
But the emotion of music, like a riptide, carried me back to the purple bench in the long summer afternoons, and my technique slowly accommodated my ambition. My response to the symbols of printed music—the runes of 'bird's eyes,' dots, dashes, and cupped lines that tied notes together—was competent and respectful; but it was the terms for expression—legato, forte, pianissimo, crescendo, rallentando, più mosso—that I seemed not to notice, as if no one could tell me how the piece was to feel. I ignored the mathematics of time signatures.
I can't remember the last summer lesson with Mrs. McClain, my teacher, her knotted distal joints still note perfect, halting in the air before striking a key like an actor marking time before his entrance. But by 15 my lessons had stopped, and my only accomplishment had been a sort of sudden swallowing whole of the Adagio Cantabile of Beethoven's C minor opus 13 sonata. My hands loved those particular notes. In college, I stole time from James Joyce to race through Chopin's D flat major opus 64 waltz or pound out the chords of the B flat major prelude. A resident advisor overhearing me late one night said "Oh yes, the easy one."
I spent two decades away from the piano, chasing boys and changing jobs. Any time left over was spent doing pencil sketches or painting on stretched, primed kraft paper. Then around 40, acting on a suggestion of Gary's, I bought a piano—a good one—that eventually bankrupted me. But I never recanted my choice, and at the present moment a cabinet of sheet music awaits my inexpert, subjective rendering. I am trying to discover whether I could enjoy Bartok despite my initial dips into his cold, atonal water.
Yet I feel the need of those soft, handwritten letters above the notes as I feel the lack—from time to time—of the simplistic, authoritative tones of Bible passages. From the beginning I took away from the pages of music, and from the faces of family and lovers, a memory of symbols—I had a genius for details—but also a peculiar nescience about intentions, about what the composer meant, about what anybody else was saying.
I could not be taught.
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