Pianophobia

Pianophobia; probably not the correct word for this experience, but it's annoying. This is a freak-out my brain experiences when confronted with a piano other than my own. I can learn a lesson proficiently on my own piano and then when my hands touch an unfamilair piano the keys look completely alien to me, or feel wrong, and my brain circuitry misfires. I can't remember the piece. It doesn't last forever, it isn't as though dementia is creeping in on me. After several minutes, I become habituated to the keyboard and can play the piece, but not as well as I could at home. It's as if I have to relearn it. About half-way through my lesson, I become used to the piano and my brain relaxes.

I'm convinced this is a psychological quirk, so for the past couple of weeks I've been going to the Music School, (where my lessons are held) and practicing on pianos of various stature and nobility: rickety wooden uprights, wheezy Baldwins, and regal Steinways. Like a baseball batter swinging two bats before stepping up to the plate, this exercise accelerates my home efforts considerably.

Left to my own devices, without my teacher present, I've also been able to analyze the mechanics of this phenomenon. My piano is an electric piano, with semi-weighted keys, which approximates the feel of a real keyboard, but the feel isn't quite the same. The keys on a Steinway Grand Piano are heavier and the coefficient of friction is greater. There is more "drag" between finger and key. So the amount of effort to work the keys is marginally greater, and I think one of the factors leading to my brain's "freak-out" is it didn't receive the result it anticipated from its calculations. Hand, brain and ear fell out of synch. When my brain couldn't make sense from this new set of data it went into melt-down. My timing was thrown completely off.

Once I saw what was going on it seemed like all I had to do was concentrate on the finger-key interaction. I had to keep my eye on what's going on there and try to ignore what my ear was telling me--at least for the time being, until my hands could sort everything out. Otherwise, my brain was trying to accommodate too much new data and compare it to the old, familiar template. And after all, I'm fifty years old and while the gray machinery has its strengths, multi-tasking can overwhelm it. One of the strenghts of the middle-aged mind is tenacity and stubborness. It can sometimes work against you though; once you learn a habit it's danged hard to break, so if you learn something you'd better make sure you learn it correctly the first time.

But the point of this circumlocution is I seem to have gotten a leg up on this problem that's plagued me since my early lessons (not that nine months of lessons makes me an early settler); the problem of the strange piano. For a while I hoped my once-a-week lesson would habituate me to a strange piano, but it wasn't enough. The solution, of course, the obvious one, practicing on lots of different pianos outside of my lessons, was slow in coming because it entailed more effort on my part. Like anything worthwhile, you have to decide if the end result is worth going the extra mile.