At eight o’clock one Saturday morning, six giants appeared in entrance of the constructing the place I reside, propped open the entrance door, and began heaving a thickly swaddled 1930 Steinway Mannequin L grand piano up the slender switchbacks to the fourth ground.
If these stairs give out, I assumed—not a distant risk—I’ll have blood on my fingers. Some 90 minutes in, as I glanced out from my kitchen entryway onto the touchdown one ground beneath, one of many giants caught sight of me: “Oh. You’re the man.”
I’m the man—the man who noticed match to spirit a 600-pound piano onto the vinyl-tile living-room ground of his railroad residence subsequent to a cement manufacturing facility. After I sat down and performed, even earlier than the tuner had come to settle these jostled strings, I understood directly that it was the correct selection: A grand piano—candy sounding, delicate keyed, display free, and completely detached to the standard of your Wi-Fi—has made my life a hotter, lovelier, better-ballasted factor.
I grew up in Salt Lake Metropolis, a spot with a whole lot of pianos: the flinty hand-me-down upright in my mom’s eating room, on which she taught my first six years of classes; the five- or six-foot grands within the dwelling rooms of a few of our neighbors, whose youngsters I’d babysit for spending cash and so I may tinker away after they went to mattress. These had been households I knew from our Mormon church, the place I’d go on school-day afternoons to follow when my mother was educating at residence—as ward organist, she had the keys. Then there was the 6-foot-11-inch Steinway Mannequin B in my piano trainer’s front room, the place a good-looking hearth purred all winter and he or she sat incurably glamorous, welded to her espresso mug, an murderer on the keyboard.
I cherished studying the piano. I cherished the puzzle of a brand new piece, noticing how some composers’ concepts (principally the Russian romantics—Scriabin, Rachmaninoff) felt nearly preprogrammed in my mind, so intuitive had been each the sounds and the bodily actions that made them—whereas others posed a baffling and charmless blockade. Being a semiserious pupil meant I needed to play some Bach and Beethoven too—earlier, sparer, extra bare music than the romantics, and because of this, much less forgiving of weak factors in approach. Exterior a couple of episodes of actual stage fright, I cherished performing, and by the second half of highschool, I used to be giving satisfactory solo performances to a recital corridor filled with smiling family and friends.
What I didn’t love was working towards—the true tedium by which one perfects fingering and contact and voicing and rhythm, the duty of discovering the music within the music. However within the unsupervised solitude of the church, at a well-kept instrument in an enormous room the place it sounded good, I discovered one thing extra enjoyable: improvisation—enjoying chords that flowed out of me just like the testimony I’d hear in that very room on Sundays.
After faculty in California—a spot the place, at the price of a few years of peace, I revealed myself to be homosexual and reduce ties with Mormonism—I moved to Los Angeles to start maturity. Abruptly, the abundance of pianos I’d identified as much as that time was changed by none. (The exception was the Bösendorfer in my first employer’s Brentwood front room.) Digital keyboards got here and went, however utilizing them—lifeless, rickety, bereft of voice or vibration—was like cooking with earplugs in your nostril.
And thus it went for a lot of pianoless years, by a transfer throughout the nation to Brooklyn. The uncommon encounter with a piano was each pleasing and painful, given the deterioration of my repertory reminiscence and dexterity—till I made one thing up one night for my pal Courtney on her Yamaha upright, and he or she stated, in the best way that the correct individual on the proper time can glide in and unlock the door to a complete different wing of your life, “It’s best to actually have a piano.” She instructed me concerning the public sale home Doyle, on the Higher East Aspect, the place an undervalued grand would possibly often present up alongside the vases and the rugs. I trekked there within the January chilly and, taking pictures squarely from the hip, positioned a bid—a couple of thousand {dollars}—for a honey-colored Steinway from the Nineteen Twenties. (James Barron’s magnificent New York Instances collection on the making of a Steinway describes “a keenness if not a reverence” amongst musicians for devices from this “golden age”—a phrase at which the corporate, which remains to be making and promoting pianos, chafes.)
I acquired outbid, nevertheless it didn’t matter. I used to be hooked on a imaginative and prescient of my life infused with the romance of my very own Steinway. I discovered the same instrument at a suburban vendor and picked what turned out to be the coldest day of 2016 for a visit there on the Lengthy Island Railroad. After I arrived, the home windows of the shop had been fogged over from the humidifiers on full blast to protect towards the growth and contraction that promise each piano its eventual doom.
As I sat there muddling by Brahms, making an attempt to repatriate to a rustic whose language I may solely faintly recall, I dreamed of getting a piano like this in a spot the place nothing may ever preserve me from it—no keys to the church, no cords or MIDI cables to extract from a closet. At any hour of any day, beneath any situation, I may simply stroll proper as much as the keys and press down on one among them, after which one other, after which sit down and be up, up, and away.
Considering such a factor was marvelous. It was, on the similar time, absurd. On the vendor value, I’d must take out a mortgage—even for this mannequin that, having not lately undergone the most important renovations a piano wants over its life, was 1 / 4 the price of new; plus, I actually did worry that the haul to my decrepit walk-up would finish in catastrophe. What would occur if I needed to transfer?
However the dream made a greater case, and I suppose it was by no means actually as much as me anyway: My piano is haunted, you understand. Its arrival, per week or so after that Lengthy Island check run, coincided with an remoted however terrifying occasion of sleep paralysis and hallucination. I hadn’t bargained for the way a lot and with what fervency this object would exert its pull, or how instantly.
The Bach corpus I as soon as rejected is now my favourite, and I’m making my means by his toccatas; grownup me has a modicum of self-discipline and persistence, it seems, and has skilled many brain-remodeling recordings of Glenn Gould. My final Zoom lesson with my piano trainer (the identical one, as glamorous and caffeinated as ever) was largely of the “no notes” selection—an interplay with out precedent in our relationship. However principally, I really like to take a seat down and play no matter comes—for my associates, for a person, for the digicam on the telephone with which I generally put up my infinite music to Instagram.
I’ve sat at that piano enjoying karaoke tracks for occasion visitors. I’ve sat there singing the hymns of my childhood, a fragile reclaiming of a confiscated historical past. I’ve sat there as my ex-boyfriend cloistered himself on the reverse finish of the residence with a set of noise-canceling headphones: “It’s simply so loud.” It generally occurred to me that my piano would nonetheless work within the apocalypse, which appeared melodramatic. However then I sat there, alone, with a shattered coronary heart within the early days of COVID, and from my bench, I may see the spire of the Empire State Constructing pulsing purple and white, up and down: emergency.
A bit later, I sat there after I wasn’t positive decide up steam writing a novel concerning the origins of my childhood religion. I performed a couple of notes and sang alongside from the thirty eighth chapter of Job, making up music to go together with the phrases—a legend of creation—which have chased after me because the second I first learn them: “When the morning stars sang collectively, and all of the sons of God shouted for pleasure.”
You would possibly, I suppose, simply get a guitar. Or a harmonica. Each are moveable, good for dabbling, and invite as a lot joyous creativity as any musical instrument. However some issues in life are supposed to be heavy and indebting and antiquated; they’re meant to demand common and extremely specialised upkeep; they’re meant to carry ahead the burden of the previous, to induce it upon us, to maintain us unreasonably awake. I take into consideration all of the years after I didn’t have a piano, when to some extent I believed it not possible, one other piece of the previous I’d needed to go away behind. However the factor a couple of piano is that it’s too large to vanish; it’s sufficiently big to struggle, sufficiently big to search out its solution to you. “Oh,” my piano stated in that outlying showroom all these years in the past. “You’re the man.”