Black and White Keys

I started playing the piano when I was eleven. I used to stand in awe, during Sunday service, looking at the pianist as he pressed the black and white keys on the electronic keyboard. His instrument had me spellbound whenever I heard the sound rising from it. It felt magical. It felt spiritual. Very quickly I started memorizing the exact sounds the keyboard gave, and, even more tantalizingly, tried to foretell what would come next. Being able to predict sound patterns at such a young age made me feel like a small god. But there were times when my anticipation was wrong, and it hurt me deeply. 

If I needed motivation to wake up early on Sunday to prepare for church service, it was the expectation of hearing the keys come alive, the pianist at work over the instrument as he pressed its mysterious black and white keys. It fascinated my young eyes to see someone mindlessly, or so it seemed, press random keys on the keyboard and somehow be able to produce organized sound. The sensation sparked the beginning of my curiosity towards the piano and, more generally, the creation of music. 

My church had only one musical instrument: the electronic keyboard. There was no bass guitar, no acoustic guitar, no drums, no sax. Could it be that I became biased from the beginning, drawn to the only instrument I could get my hands on? Could the lack of options have evolved into my singular devotion to the piano? I always ask myself what would have happened if it had been the sax, say, and not the keyboard, that had been present in my childhood church all those years ago. Perhaps the sax would have it, but I can’t know for sure. 

Despite developing a knack for memorizing piano sounds and anticipating the pianist’s movements during praise and worship sessions, I could not, when given the opportunity to play, do what the man was able to do so effortlessly. For me, it felt unfortunate and frustrating. But I was lucky to have a father who took notice of my magnetic pull towards the keyboard. He decided to buy a small electronic keyboard for me and my brother, for our use at home, and even proceeded to hire a teacher, a guest at our church in those days, to teach me how to play. His hope was that my brother and I would eventually learn how to play the piano excellently. But things did not go as our father had wished; my brother was more interested in the guitar while my interest in the piano remained. 

As I worked hard at playing well, the excellence of others pushed me on. The keys seemed like non-living things, and I remained intrigued by how someone – especially if that someone was not me – could gather sound in his head and actually be able to transmit it to others by pressing dead keys, dead black and white keys. At the same time, I was mesmerized by the effect piano music had on others – others more than me, others as well as me – complex primates who, of course had invented the piano, as if they had not invented the piano. 

Sadly, when I joined secondary school, the hectic classroom schedule meant I could hardly find time to play the piano. My routine was packed with classes, and music was not taught as an examinable subject at the high school I attended. In hindsight, I think it was a really bad thing for me. Still, during church sessions at school, I liked to monitor the student pianist as he played, sitting in a place where I could easily watch him as he pressed the lifeless black and white keys. I still couldn’t play well and had limited opportunities to access the keyboard, but the instrument and those who played it always appeared in my wildest fantasies. All the time. 

I had better chances during school holidays, at home and with the small electronic keyboard that my father had bought. Months later, due to financial hardship, my father could no longer afford the services of our piano teacher, who stopped coming home. This marked the beginning of my journey to teach myself. I felt so bad at the time, but today I think that perhaps it was the best outcome for me. When you are left to your own devices, so to speak, you invent ways of learning. This process is even faster if what you are learning is something you are highly passionate about and no one is forcing you to learn and you are under no pressure to pass exams.

Those early years of teaching myself how to play the electronic keyboard were the most difficult, but I guess it was all worth the effort. What I learnt in my self-education has proved to be applicable to many areas of my personal life. 

In my second year of high school, much to my suffering, I realized that some students who didn’t know anything about the piano had started learning from the student pianist and were picking up fast. I didn’t follow their example. Why? I realized that the students who had shown spectacular improvement in playing the piano had also chosen to invest all their free time in learning how to play. I didn’t see this as a wise choice. I thought it was more sensible and practical to invest any free time outside the classroom in revising my notes and then, hopefully, passing my exams. My parents were struggling to pay school fees, and once I almost dropped out. My eyes were intensely set on performing so well that I might even be able to win the bursary I desperately needed.

Maybe I was wrong, or perhaps I wasn’t. If I could go back in time, I would want to see how my life would have turned out had I decided to be like the other students who wanted to use all their free time to learn the piano. Was the fear of dropping out due to my parents’ inability to pay tuition on time a justifiable reason for me not to be a devoted student of the piano, an instrument I loved deeply? To this day, I sometimes wonder if I was a coward for not pursuing my interest as determinedly as the other students did, even if at the expense of my grades. 

The piano had won my heart without my trying hard enough. It haunts me now as it haunted me then. As I grew, my interest in the piano grew deeper even without considerable development in my playing. I vividly remember how, during my Senior Six vacation, I studied a voluminous book titled “Fundamentals of Piano Practice,” by Chuan C. Chang. I studied it with academic intensity. Around the same time, I started saving my earnings from my first job so that I could buy a good keyboard. But I still didn’t have enough cash to purchase the keyboard I wanted. I then requested my uncle to provide, as a loan, the balance of what I needed, and fortunately he accepted. I will always be grateful to him for never asking me to pay back his money. 

It turns out that the things that win your heart to the extent that no resistance can estrange you from them speak to a higher calling. They are calls to be heard and answered. Everyone of us has that thing that won their heart without effort. You might not be aware of it, but it is there. It could be a sport, an academic subject, or even a habit like reading. It is just that there are so many things that hinder or distract us from sharpening this awareness. In my case I have considered the possibility that I was attracted to the piano because the brain – my brain – craves the order that it represents. Music theory applies to all music instruments. Only that when you look at how it is applied to the piano, you can’t help but see a lot of order, extraordinary order. For example, you do not need a lot of technique to bring out certain sounds on the piano, in comparison to, say, the guitar or the sax. Though I can be a little messy from time to time in real life, I’ve always known that my brain seriously craves order since, after all, everything that’s not in order vexes me. 

Playing the piano is one of the few activities requiring high-level coordination of both hemispheres of the brain simultaneously. Research shows that long-time pianists have a more developed corpus callosum, the bridge of white matter that connects the left and right cerebral hemispheres. After reading Chang’s book, I liked to think that I was naturally attracted to the piano perhaps because I possessed a brain that instinctively craved “symmetrical stimulation.” If that’s the case, could this be why, since childhood, I have always had a drive to analyze or construct systems. I see everything in systems. Naturally, I find a lot of comfort in 100 percent predictability because it requires zero guesswork. Sometimes it can be so annoying to those around me, so much so that they are compelled to call me rigid. They want to see more elasticity in me. To attenuate this, I try a lot to be around people who are so different from me.

Science tells us that craving visual symmetry is a way for the brain to compensate for poor internal balance. Which raises other questions for me: Could it mean that poor internal balance is a characteristic of all pianists? And what does that poor internal balance look like? Anyway, recently I found out that my talent for mathematics might be associated with this. Craving symmetry is often linked to high activity in the areas of the brain that handle mathematical reasoning and geometric regularity. And so I believe that most pianists, virtuosos especially, could have great mathematical talent. Perhaps they should seriously be encouraged to fervently study mathematics as much as they study music – if for no other reason then to help them maximize their God-given potential. Why would a pianist die with unused mathematical talent if it really exists within him or her? Forgive me if it sounds excessive, but the piano feels like home for me because it matches my cognitive architecture.

The first time they told me that the pianist is the mother of the band and the bass guitarist is its father, I couldn’t understand what it all meant. However, as I progressed in my piano skills and started playing for bands here and there, it became clear to me why this was so. Socially, a mother’s responsibility is to manage a home, and that comes with a need for control and the unerring ability to be reliable. Fathers, on the other hand, are providers, and that comes with a need for direction. Speaking of the mother, the piano dominates by controlling the “internal climate” of the song since it handles melody, harmony and rhythm simultaneously. Recollecting all this even now makes me understand, as if I didn’t already know, why I have always been attracted to the piano. I also love control and value stability. Sitting by the piano feels like sitting before a control panel, or perhaps at a throne. Additionally, there is a sense of becoming the creator when you have eighty-eight keys at your disposal. I love doing things differently and I like originality too. I am the mother of the band. I am in charge of the home. 

Then there is the matter of visuospatial intelligence, an important point for me as a man.  If I could play well, it followed naturally that I had a bit of that. The piano is the only instrument where higher always means “to the right” and lower always means “to the left” in a perfect, unbreaking line. For people with strong visuospatial intelligence, the piano undoubtedly feels like the correct instrument. And the perfect one, too. This is because the brain doesn’t have to translate a finger position into a sound, as with the guitar or the sax; it simply sees the map and moves across it. 

Knowing this gives me confidence that I can ably succeed in fields that require visuospatial intelligence: advanced analytics, surgery and specialized medicine, architecture, engineering and technical design, music, writing, geospatial analysis, molecular biology and bioinformatics, name it. The point, the key takeaway, as it were, is that our proclivities are also key compasses in telling us that we are capable of being good at so much more in life. ▪