Be The Oven: My Attempt at Learning the Piano during Lockdown
It was as much a surprise to me as to anyone else when I started playing the keyboard, for I am not one inclined to do unnecessary work. Some may call it being lazy, but I firmly maintain that I just preserve my energy for more important tasks. The lockdown had, however, left my mind in such a state of disarray – it arrived in the middle of exam season – that even I felt that I had to do something to keep my last few remaining brain cells alive. After writing a carefully-worded email to the Prime Minister (which I never got a reply on!), I reasoned that the piano would be the least energy-consuming activity as it involved only pressing keys; and thus began this ill-fated saga.
Even before I could start, I was faced with a problem: where would I ever learn from? My brother had an eccentric guitar instructor who did personal lessons at home, so we asked him for advice. In response, he started a long, impassioned speech in Tamil, which none of us understood. He seemed to really care about whatever he was talking about, though, so we kept quiet and listened to him until he was done. It was rather impressive, to be honest. He then told us his price and left. I still sort of miss his oratory.
Apparently the speech was about how difficult it was to be a freelance teacher of music, as our neighbor translated for us. Even though this fellow had enterprisingly collected all his fees upfront, they were not enough to live on; and he depended a lot on exam registration costs. Since there were to be none held that year, he lost a big chunk of his income. The society we lived in soon blocked people from coming and going except for absolutely dire circumstances, which stopped the classes too. At least if the very worst did happen, our teacher lived close to a government-run food bank; however that just highlighted the cases of all those who didn’t.
I was still in a fix about what to do when I discovered exactly why I hadn’t received any reply to my prime-ministerial email: I had never sent it. There it was, the culmination of many hours of writing, rewriting and rerewriting, lying innocently in my Drafts folder, looking as fresh as if it had been written just a day before. I raged about a bit in my room, deleted the offending draft, raged a bit more, knocked over a pile of books, saw the pile collapse and destabilize a box I kept on my shelf, watched hopelessly as the box fell, and heard the sickening crack which meant that the tiny glass trinket I had kept in it and which I dearly loved had been broken. After cleaning up, I decided that sending the email would make this entire ordeal not completely pointless, and went to retrieve it. I then accidentally pressed the ‘delete forever’ button, losing both my work and my remaining sanity at the same time. I spent the rest of the day in bed, listening to sad songs. Or I would have, if my headphones didn’t run out of charge within ten minutes of my beginning to use them. By then I didn’t even have the emotional energy left to care anymore, so I stayed there, headphones on, shrouded in silence, and only got out the following day.
None of this tomfoolery had helped me solve my problem, so I gave up on it and started learning the guitar instead. I was using the same spiral-bound book the instructor had given to my brother, and I couldn’t understand most of it since it was meant to be supplementary material, not a guide. I couldn’t even recognize most songs; the only one I did know was ‘Amazing Grace’, and the book gave an extremely complicated (to my untrained eye) version which even my brother couldn’t play.
One day, after strumming the only three chords I knew over and over again, which I had been doing seemingly since the dinosaurs roamed the Earth, I decided enough was enough: this simply wouldn’t do (also the neighbors had taken to blasting music whenever I practiced so they wouldn’t have to hear anything I played). I searched for a simple song that I could actually perform. As luck would have it, I didn’t find one; but somewhere in my untiring clicking of links, I came upon an ad: one for an app to learn piano from. I’ll be honest, I would probably have missed it entirely if it hadn’t been for a mosquito buzzing near my ear that precise moment; the ensuing chase caused me to drop my iPad onto my face, and the ad got pressed.
With my dignity as crushed as my nose, I picked the iPad again, and saw the App Store open on the page of a piano-learning app. I figured that this must’ve been Siri’s attempt at an apology. At any rate, it was far better than the corporate ‘We apologize for the inconvenience’, so I wasn’t questioning it. It seemed interesting enough, so I downloaded it to try it out, and enjoyed it enough to take out a subscription for six months.
This brief period of happiness didn’t last long, though: the app quickly got tiring. One would think the makers of a music app would have a refined sound palette, but that was unfortunately not the case; it had this annoying ‘ting’ which it played whenever it got the chance: finished a song? Ting! Completed an exercise? Ting! Did the daily work-out? Ting Ting Ting!!! Did nothing at all? TING TING TING!
Even so, the ‘tings’ alone I could have handled; but what really took the cake was the insane difficulty curve the app had: one moment I was sailing, getting 3/3 stars, and the next unable to play even half of all the notes racing across the screen. What was worse is that if you failed to play a certain number of notes in any exercise, the screen would do this weird shaky-thing while simultaneously making a sound akin to the scratching of a blackboard, and then start the exercise all over again. It was a daily fight for the preservation of my sanity, and the very fact that I am even writing this crackpot article tells you who won.
Unable to make progress, I decided to just play songs to stay in touch while trying to find a different way to move on. I went around on the internet, looking in forums and chatrooms for advice, which was mostly fruitless. Things continued as they always had when I remembered I had a friend who played the piano, whom I could approach for advice. Unfortunately, this friend rarely came online, so I would have to make the most of it when he did. I sent him a message and waited for a reply, which shockingly came right away:
“Ur learning piano,, Gud” (He was a big fan of textspeak.)
I replied that I would appreciate any advice he could give.
“ok,, do hand exercises and scales and keep playing, id say Be the oven”
I didn’t understand what he meant by ‘Be the oven’, and I asked him, but this fellow was actually quite rude and just left me on read.
Having nothing better to do, I decided it couldn’t hurt to try and went to the kitchen to look at the oven (in my defense, my brain cells had been eroded by the lockdown, and even simple deductions took me forever to do). It behaved as ovens do: it did nothing. I’m not sure what I expected, but it certainly was more than what I got.
By now my exam dates had been declared, so I once again spent most of the time studying. Things were going as usual (i.e. me panicking about not understanding how to integrate) when my friend decided to contact me again. After chatting and catching up for a bit, I asked him what he meant by ‘Be the oven.’
His reply? “It was a typo; I meant Beethoven.”
When I finally heard it, it suddenly made much more sense. However, I still had a question for him, “You suggested Beethoven to a beginner?”
He answered, “I guess? His songs are pretty basic.”
It was at this point I realized that asking him was a mistake. I thought about all the hours I had wasted looking and listening to the oven, hoping it would give up its musicological secrets to me, and saw how completely hopeless I was. I was literally lost for words and promptly cut the call.
Thankfully the exam went well, and now that I’m in college, I have picked up the piano again. I’m relearning it properly this time; I’m certainly not going to ask left-on-read clowns for advice ever again.
I have no clue what the moral of this unnecessarily-prolonged tale is, other than that ovens have no musical virtue whatsoever.
Proofreaders: Ashani P., Durga C., Mokshit N., Smit W.
