My Piano and I

My mother and all my aunts and all their friends used to play the piano. Nobody was brilliant at it; but they all did it. Many (but not all) girls of my generation learned to play too. I was so possessive of our piano that I carved my name into the back of it. Teaching girls to play the piano is less common now, not such a matter of routine. Times have changed.


But then, with your hands and feet you gradually got control of this big apparatus, and when it did your will, you could make it sing. Then it would express your feelings. Playing my piano gave me not only some power, but some voice. Power and voice were hard for girls to come by, and so the piano was a most treasured thing. If you had a piano to play and a horse to ride, you were almost complete.


Pianos have always attracted and fascinated me, and I have come to associate them with women and diaries and emotion, with power and sexuality. The diary was the safe private place in which women of last century could express their feelings and thoughts in words; the piano was private and subversive, yet at the same time it was safely public. Your audience pays attention as you tease the tunes from the strings. The strings are struck by hammers which get their signal from the keys which are struck by you. The glorious power in the fingers! (And imagine that clever aunt who could do it without fingers, too.)


The piano is made from beautiful wood, carved, with brass or silver candlesticks; it might have red silk behind fretwork; it might have images of flowers or birds inlaid in the surface of the case. It is a sweet, romantic, beloved thing. Like a big smile, the keys lie before you, silent, waiting for you to strike. The picture of a girl at her piano is a charming picture -- the girl is safe behind closed doors, attached to the furniture, making pretty sounds. She feels good because she has the power to make music; her guardians feel good because she seems, while charming them, to be still within their control. A girl who practices the piano is like a fairy with her powerful, mighty and yet magically charming wand, waiting to entice the audience with her powers and charm.