Piano!
Piano
Originally uploaded by dadadreamer. I have a piano! A Yamaha P90 digital piano, to be precise. OK, so it isn't made of wood and it doesn't have strings or those brass candlesticks attached to it like the one that my parents have, but it is a proper full length keyboard with weighted keys which sounds and feels like a piano to play. I've now moved it from the lounge where you can see it in the picture, and with a bit of jiggery pockery, have found that it fits snuggly into the corner in my bedroom (although I do have to be careful when I hit a low note because my elbow is liable to bang into my chest of drawers).
This feels like a significant thing, to have proper access to a piano again. You see, I started playing piano when I was eight years old and eventually got as far as Grade 7. I wouldn't say that I was amazing, but I was good, competent, showed promise, and I worked at it quite hard. I went on as far as doing Music A level, and might have taken it further, but due to all the problems I was having at the time with depression, and because I lost patience with the snooty, competitive, insular world of classical music, I eventually gave up. I went off to university, became interested in other things, and forgot all about it.
But I found that the feeling never left my fingers that once upon a time I had been able to scoot up and down the piano keyboard playing scales and chords, and translating dots and squiggles on a page into a tuneful noise. I wanted to go back to it, and decided last year that a piano had to be bought one way or another.
So here it is. The plan now is to practise, practise, prictise to ease myself back into it and start to work towards the standard that I was when I left it. Meanwhile I need to find some jazz/blues piano lessons that are affordable, as that's the direction that I want to go in now. I can read music, which is a very valuable skill to have, but I'm absolutely crap at improvising or playing chord based stuff, as this is not what classical musicians do, so this is where I need to focus. But I wouldn't rule out going for my Grade 8 exam, it would be nice to have the full set as it were (Grade 8 is the highest grade that you can do). It would be interesting to see what the Grade 8 syllabus is like this year, but I expect that it would completely terrify me, so I'll work myself up to that one.
I slightly embarressed myself late on Saturday night, when I first sat down to have a proper play, having finally got it installed in the bedroom. I plugged in the headphones and started to play the Moonlight Sonata. After a quarter of an hour of happy tinkling, Laura came upstairs saying that it sounded lovely, but what an earth was I doing it was nearly two o'clock in the morning. I looked at her rather bemused for a moment, and then realised that I'd left the amp on, and that the whole household (and possibly half the street) had been hearing my private Beethoven rendition. It was kind of like being caught talking to yourself, and at that time in the morning as well, but at least it was the Moonlight I was playing, not Bring Me Sunshine.