The Beginning of Everything

by Andrea J. Buchanan

  In the book Soft-Wired: How the New Science of Brain Plasticity Can Change Your Life, Dr. Michael Merzenich discusses the circumstances under which the brain’s natural neuroplasticity can be harnessed to create focused neurological change. One important factor he notes is that change is more likely to take place in a brain that is prepared to take advantage of it. Being engaged and motivated helps prep the brain, neurochemically, for learning and change. Being distracted and merely going through the motions of something without making much effort doesn’t require a high level of engagement, and thus the brain doesn’t “pay attention” to the opportunity for change. In addition, the more focused and alert a person is on the task at hand, the greater the possibility of change. And since part of what is changing when you are focused on mastering a task and engaged in the process is the strengthening of connections between neurons working together, the more you practice and work at whatever task you’re focusing on, the more those strengthened connections become lasting change. This cooperation between neurons also helps the brain become able to rely on those newly established connections, and be able to better understand and predict patterns, anticipating what comes next.

  Change, of course, in the beginning, in almost any context, is temporary: Doing something once doesn’t ensure that you’ve learned it forever, no matter how alert or engaged you are. Change becomes permanent through repetition, and also, somewhat contradictorily, through novelty. So part of making change happen is doing a thing over and over while finding ways to focus and concentrate and renew your engagement each time, so that your brain finds the experience novel enough to make it a part of your permanent record, rather than just a temporary file. Remarkably, this repetition doesn’t always have to be physical: The brain can be changed by imagining and rehearsing something mentally, without moving the body at all. Memory helps reinforce learning, and mental rehearsal of something new helps reinforce that change, making it become more permanent. And interestingly, for the damaged brain, every moment of new learning is a moment that helps the brain stabilize itself. As new neuronal connections are made stronger through mastery of new skills, other neuronal connections are weakened—including those neurons whose indiscriminate firing contributes to the issues brain-injured people can have with information overload, sensory strain, and executive function. Learning new skills in a focused way can help create new neuronal connections, strengthen neuronal pathways, and calm neuronal overactivity.

  When stroke patients consistently performed and practiced concentrated, focused activities, such as using an arm weakened or impaired by stroke to stack blocks or wipe a table or pick up small objects, researchers noted not only physical improvements in terms of fine motor skill control or greater stamina or strength. They also noted improvements in speech and memory and other cognitive deficits. Somehow, their brains were able to make new connections, find new ways around the places damaged by stroke, find new ways to adapt and to heal, just from this intense, challenging, task-based work.

  I read all of this—slowly, resting when necessary—with great interest. Because, just as in the stories of explorers, I recognize myself in some of the descriptions I read about patients struggling with brain injury. I didn’t suffer a stroke or a trauma due to concussion or whiplash or brain lesion or other neurological issue; but I recognize myself in the symptoms many of these patients describe in the aftermath of their illnesses or accidents as they recover. The way their brains are overwhelmed by sounds and visual patterns. The way that they only have so much brain energy per day, and the way that means their brain function declines as the day goes on. The way their short-term memory fails. The way words sometimes elude them, or become confused with one another, homophones interchanging themselves, or become entangled, rhyming and repeating, mesmerized by sound instead of meaning. The way social interactions fatigue them. The way narrative is a challenge.

  But the other reason I find this all so interesting, reading through it with my healing brain as I wait through the purgatory of physically healing without knowing for sure if I’ll start leaking again, is that it reminds me of something. The physicality of small, focused movements; the repetition of these movements, with the brain at full concentration; the mental rehearsal of these movements; making these movements seem new and exciting, all in the service of learning a new skill, forging new neural pathways: All of this reminds me of work I did with my children when they were toddlers, building things and stacking things and playing repetitive games to nourish their growing brains. But even more than that, it reminds me of the work I have done ever since I was eight years old; work I did sometimes for upward of six hours a day, every day; work that likely helped wire my growing brain in the first place.

  It reminds me of practicing piano.

  35

  The room was grand: dark wood paneling, enriched with details from floor to ceiling, carved patterns that repeated themselves throughout the room; tall windows flanked by thick, heavy curtains, with sills big enough for a person to sit and peer into the courtyard below, mournfully, after a bad lesson; high ceilings; rug-carpeted floors. Two Steinways, side by side, one for the student, one for the teacher.

  Mrs. Kim introduced herself, holding out her hand. It was fierce—the handshake, the hand itself, with its veins and knuckles and muscles; and her surety, her firmness, her sense of gravity. My hand felt especially pale and formless and small in hers. I was seventeen. She was probably younger than I am now, but to me then she seemed ageless, beyond age, beyond any concept of aging.

  “I remember your audition.” Her voice was heavily accented, hard to understand. She was barely taller than I was, but she was imposing, her movements fluid but controlled as she released my hand and walked to the set of pianos in the middle of the room, her steps light but centered, like a ballet dancer’s. Everything she did seemed to have a sense of purpose.

  “I remember your Mozart. And some Liszt? Fiery,” she said, allowing an eyebrow to raise, a small hint of a smile. I wasn’t sure I understood what she was saying, and it must have been clear on my face, because she clarified for me. “You like the quick. The dazzle.”

  I did? But I nodded my head.

  “Refresh my memory,” she said, languidly gesturing to the piano. “The Liszt.”

  I nodded my head again and sat on the padded bench. I hadn’t practiced the Liszt in months; the summer before leaving for music school I had mostly spent my time waitressing, saving money. There hadn’t been much time for practice—at least not at the level I’d been practicing before, while preparing for competitions and music school auditions.

  I began the piece, trying to get a feel for the piano, the pedal, the ease of the keyboard as I went along. I realized too late I had started too softly, and now my pianissimo had nowhere to go. I tripped on some of the faster figurations and I could feel my cheeks flushing, the cycle beginning of my own awareness of my mistakes informing my performance, making me even more likely to make mistakes, making me hyperaware of how many mistakes I was making, leading to more mistakes, and on and on and on.

  Suddenly she stopped me, a strong hand on my right forearm.

  “That’s fine,” she said, but this time there was no eyebrow raised, no hint of a smile. “We have a lot of work to do.”

  Two days later I was in a third-floor practice room, crying. I could hear the sounds of everyone else practicing around me—Mozart from down the hall, Bach, Beethoven; the room next door to me thundered with sounds I’d never heard from a piano before. I paused to listen, feeling the vibrations of an octave bass passage reverberate through the floor.

  I turned back to my music. A Chopin étude. After listening to me play barely a minute or so of Liszt, Mrs. Kim had already made up her mind: I was to learn this étude—but not the whole étude. I was to return next week having practiced just one note.

  The first note.

  Of only the right-hand part.

  For a whole week, that was all I was supposed to play.

&
nbsp; She told me I should “strike from knuckle, not wrist.” I should “feel belly button here,” in that one finger, as it rested on the note, so that that one finger was the center of my body. And I should do that, over and over, until it sounded right. What did that even mean? I couldn’t tell. It all sounded the same to me. It sounded embarrassing. Like punishment. Like failure. One week at music school and I was relegated to playing only one note, like some kind of beginner.

  I wiped my eyes and then wiped my hands on my jeans. Screw it: I had played this one stupid G-flat for twenty minutes, trying to strike from my knuckle, trying to make my third finger my belly button, whatever that meant, and all that had done was prove that it was possible to play one damn note for twenty minutes. I launched into the Lizst that she hadn’t liked, playing too loudly, using too much pedal.

  This piano felt easy, the action quick, the keys responsive, the room bright with sound. It was easy to be loud, to sound full and powerful and accomplished. One note. Was she kidding me? I reached the first cadenza and trilled a decrescendo of alternating chords into the quietest pianississimo I could manage in the small, echoey practice room and felt chills as my hands hovered above the keys, a muddle of pedaled harmonies fading away as I waited through the fermata. Then I dove back in, playing the theme again, this time an even more elaborate incarnation. My tempo was skittish, the pace quicker than the way I usually played it, and I went with it, chasing it through the cadenzas and the flourishes and the triumphant, final iteration of the theme, through the crashing, flashy coda, finally, to the end, with a majestic last chord, the kind of ending you imagine when you imagine a concert pianist ending a piece, flushed with sweat, almost standing up from the bench to make that final chord sound the way it needs to sound, one hand up in the air after the last note, waiting for the audience to stand and cheer and fill the moment with the sound of raucous applause.

  My moment was filled with the ambient silence of the practice room, plus the sounds from the other practice rooms: opera singers, pianists, clarinetists, violinists, all rehearsing at once. Reality.

  I sat there in the muted cacophony of the practice room noise, letting everyone else’s practice sounds wash over me, and returned to the score. Chopin. G-flat. One note.

  “Think like squirrel,” she told me, the next week. “You know squirrel? They run, they move so fast, quick—and then they stop. Very still. So still, nothing moves. They conserve energy.”

  I played the G-flat with my third finger, trying to strike from the knuckle, have my belly button there, think like a squirrel.

  “No,” she said, batting my hand away. She demonstrated, her powerful hand striking the key in a way that sounded different from the sound that I’d made. “Be totally still. Then play. Then still.”

  I tried again.

  “Like squirrel,” she reminded me. “They don’t fall asleep.”

  Of course squirrels fall asleep, I wanted to argue, but I thought I knew what she meant. The way they freeze and yet aren’t frozen with tension, the way they are able to be still without ever seeming sloppy, relaxed. Was that what I was supposed to do? Play a note and then freeze in time, my hand stuck in a position but without stress or tension? Had I been playing the note and then letting my hand relax too much, when what she wanted me to do was basically play a one-note, one-person game of freeze-tag?

  I tried again. G-flat, third finger, strike from knuckle, belly button here, think like squirrel, don’t fall asleep.

  “Yes!” She said. “Again!”

  I tried again, doing everything exactly as I did before.

  “No,” she frowned. “Tension in fingertip only.”

  I tried again, G-flat, third finger, strike from knuckle, belly button, squirrel, don’t fall asleep, tension in fingertip.

  “Better,” she said, but her face was stern.

  The so-called Black-Key Étude, nicknamed for the fact that much of the melody is played solely on the black keys of the piano, begins on a G-flat, third finger, right hand. The third fingertip is the center of your body. All the gravity is there. The third fingertip strikes the G-flat, wrist and palm moving in protectively, and waits. You should be able to lift yourself like a gymnast and balance on that centimeter of flesh. The sound bells, rounds, becomes flat, fades away. You do not move. You breathe. You feel the gravity.

  Your hand should look the way it looks when you drop it loosely to your side: wrist relaxed, the plane to your knuckles a natural forty-five degrees or so, your fingers curved, the blood settling into your fingertips. That is where the gravity is, there, in the blood. The trick is lifting your hand to the keys while your mind imagines the hand is still dangling beside you, your shoulders loose, your neck relaxed, no tension.

  Though the G-flat sound has died, you are still there, hand crouched in position, balancing around that third finger. You are not moving, but you are preparing. Then quick, like one of the squirrels in the park, motionless until it moves: your fifth finger to the B-flat. If you have not prepared properly, your knuckle will collapse. Make it strong. Now the center of gravity is your pinky. Someone watching but not hearing you will not be able to tell the difference between the way your hand looked when you played the G-flat and the way it looks now. Your hand is cupped, fingers huddled around one another, but not gripping, not tight; it should appear as though if you turned your hand palm up, keeping it in the exact same position, you might be cradling a baby chick.

  The point is to strike and then be at rest. That is why the energy, the tension, must be concentrated in the fingertip, why the rest of your hand—the rest of your body—must remain neutral, balanced, supportive. Slow practice is about preparation. In slow practice you learn to conserve energy so that at tempo you have the stamina to support your speed.

  The B-flat has sounded, rounded, and died while you rested, alert, upon the key. Next is D-flat, your thumb. It’s easy to misuse gravity with your thumb, easy to make a harsh tone using the same force that had elicited a rounded one with your pinky. Your thumb has more natural weight, more natural gravity behind it. The trick here is to play decisively but not crassly, and this time you attack with the side of the appendage and not its tip, the black key against your thumb from its tip to the first joint, the rest of your hand returning to its default position, resting, relaxing, preparing.

  Those are the first three notes.

  Eventually, after practicing like this, deliberately, thoughtfully, in slow motion, one note, then two notes, then three, then enough so that the first phrase was executed and the next part was just a repeating of the pattern, I was allowed to think about my other hand, the left hand accompaniment. Eventually, I was allowed to put them together. Eventually, after weeks of painstaking, focused work, I was able to hear the difference between the sound Mrs. Kim wanted me to make and the sound I actually made, was able to feel the difference between the way Mrs. Kim wanted my hand to be and the way my hand actually was. Eventually, I was able to play the piece at speed, in all its fiery, quick dazzle, and while I didn’t understand exactly what it was I was doing all the time, or whether I was doing it the way she wanted me to, I began to understand there was a way to think about playing music that was different from the way I’d thought about it before. At tempo, the étude was hyperspeed, fingers blurring through virtuosic passages, sounding light and effortless, dancing on the keys. But it only got there through the slow, deliberate, intentional work of slow, deliberate, intentional practice.

  In the end, I was thwarted by the showmanship of the last measures, a double-octave black key scale before the final cadence of the piece. My small hands weren’t able to wrap around those octaves, no matter how much slow work I did, no matter how much resting and preparing was built into the practicing of it. There are some physical limitations even smart practice can’t solve. But this exercise in patience, in approach, in practice, laid the groundwork for me for the rest of my time with Mrs. Kim, and the rest of my life as a musician.

  Later I would le
arn how the work doesn’t end once you gain a new understanding of it. How once you’re able to play it through without snagging on difficulty or tugging the thread too tightly, the next stage begins. How you must allow yourself some perspective. How you must recognize the ways in which the piece has changed from your deconstruction of it—that slow, deliberate practice. How you must reimagine it in its new context. How you must attempt even newer ways of understanding it.

  How you must take it apart again.

  Left-hand only, to even out the bass, to comprehend the way it grounds the melody in this particular piece but perhaps not another; to dissolve the rest of it away until only the skeleton of the structure is there, guiding you toward another way of listening.

  Right-hand only, the voicing, the phrasing you thought was one long breath but is actually several groups of thoughts in this particular piece but perhaps not in another; hearing now so clearly how in isolation the information this melody imparts is completely different than what is conveyed when it is integrated, grounded by harmony and structure and form.