The first time I came across an acciaccatura in piano, I played the note as though whole. My piano teacher, a twenty-something-year-old man named Peter who would arrive at my childhood home on Thursdays at 4 p.m. in a haze of cigarette smoke, chewing a mint in tepid apology, tapped the eraser end of his Ticonderoga pencil on the page:
“That’s a grace note,” he explained. His eyes took on new light, as they always did when he found the opportunity to talk real music. I understood, because of this shift, that listening to me plunk around on the piano every week must have been a kind of hell, or penance, for him. I imagined him in the outside world, playing gigs and listening to jazz on an old record player, and begrudging the fact that his circumstances demanded he teach mediocre, dispassionate tweens the basics of piano forte. I could see the faint outline of his creative spirit through this one window: his passion about things like acciaccatura. It was like a candle in the midnight sill.
And so he taught me how to perform the ornamentation. How to lift my finger quickly to resolve the melodic irresolution and permit the principal note to shine. How to hear the difference between playing the grace note with a short time value, as intended, versus with a longer one, as I’d assumed. On the surface, I was studying piano, but these were lessons in nuance. In the finer-grained ways we communicate. In the straining attentiveness we must exercise to really read people, and their private devotions and devastations, through the unexpected throw of candlelight, or the quick maneuver between a sharp and a natural.
Post-Scripts.
+I was not a good piano student, but a some of its lessons have stuck with me.
+Life takes root around the perimeter.
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Shopping Break.
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