One Hand, Two Melodies

Every Tuesday afternoon at three, I enter a music studio for my piano lesson. The place has become very familiar to me. Every week, I see the cleaning lady vacuuming the floor between students. I wash my hands at the sparkling basin she has just cleaned. It is part of my Tuesday routine.

The room has become familiar. What I hear inside it has not.

I learned to play the piano when I was still a young girl and stopped taking piano lessons when I was thirteen or fourteen because I did not intend to major in music. But I never really fell out of love with the piano after I stopped taking lessons.

I continued to play whatever melody caught my ear. I booked a piano room to practise whenever one was available, and I continued adding to my collection of piano scores.

My sight-reading has improved over the past few years, and I became able to play more of the pieces I loved.

Some pieces, such as the second movement of Beethoven’s Pathétique Sonata and Schubert’s Impromptu D935 №2, had become very familiar to me. I could already play them without reading the score.

I thought I understood those pieces quite well.

But when I resumed piano lessons and reviewed my playing with my piano teacher, Annie, I realised that I was actually very, very far from good.

My fingering, interpretation, expression and pedalling were all off the mark. I had even been playing some notes incorrectly without knowing it.

For instance, in the second movement of Beethoven’s Pathétique, the right hand is not supposed to play all the notes with the same weight. The fourth or fifth finger carries the main melody, while the thumb and third finger play the lower notes quietly as supporting company.

One hand, two melodies.

I had listened to recordings by Yundi Li and Daniel Barenboim many times, yet I never noticed this detail until Annie pointed it out to me.

Listening to a performance does not mean that I know how to play the piece in the same way. From the ear to the fingers is a very long journey.

Another example is the Trio section of Schubert’s Impromptu D935 №2. I thought that being able to play the triplets smoothly was enough. I even thought the piece was simple and easy.

I did not know how badly I had been playing it until Annie pointed out the details of its interpretation.

Similar to the Beethoven piece, each group of triplets needs to have a leading note. But that note cannot be played as a hard accent. The triplets still need to sound singing and smooth.

I had not been aware of any of these problems before resuming piano lessons.

Music theory gave me a similar surprise.

Before I started learning music theory, I had thought it was mainly about notes and rests, and major and minor keys. Of course, it was not. There are specific rules about how notes should be beamed, how chords are constructed, and how major and minor chords are differentiated.

Music theory is an entirely different language, like French or Japanese. I did not know that language, yet I imagined it was easy. One needs to learn its rules to be able to play music properly. I simply had no idea.

I thought that playing the correct notes was enough. I thought that playing the triplets smoothly was enough. I thought that listening to many recordings meant that I understood how the music should be played.

I was wrong, terribly wrong.

The more I learn, the more problems I can hear in my own playing. My playing may have improved, but I have also become less easily satisfied because I now notice mistakes and weaknesses that I could not hear before.

Still, it is absolutely delightful to notice even a small improvement.

Sometimes the improvement is only that the melody played by my fourth or fifth finger becomes slightly clearer, while the lower notes remain quieter in the background. Sometimes the melody passes between my right and left hands a little more naturally than it did before.

The improvement may be very small, but I can hear it.

Looking back, the biggest lesson from resuming piano lessons has very little to do with the piano itself.

It is about how ignorance distorts our own judgment.

This explains why I had been satisfied with my playing before.

When we don’t know what we don’t know, our standards are often far off the mark, yet we remain completely unaware of the gap. The most difficult stage is not when we perform poorly. It is when we perform poorly without realizing it.

I suspect this is true far beyond music.

There are probably many things in life that I believe I understand but have not yet truly comprehended.

Perhaps real learning does not simply make us better.

It first teaches us how much we have been unable to hear, unable to see, or unable to recognize.

Every piano lesson seems to make me less satisfied with my own playing — not because I have become worse, but because my ears have become more discerning and my touch become more refined.

Today I hear mistakes that I could not hear a year ago.

Maybe that is what progress really looks like:

Not playing perfectly. But gradually learning what “better” actually sounds like.

The eighty-eight keys have become eighty-eight quiet teachers.