Over fifty years, I’ve been playing the piano. I stopped for a while, but I’ve taken it up again, learning some new Bach preludes and fugues as counterbalance to the crazy book editing last spring and the launch this fall. And it is only in this reborn practice that I have learned something my teachers tried to drum into me for decades – if you follow the editor’s suggestions, you have at least a chance to sail right through the tricky parts.
Bach’s a-mazing runs demand finger acrobatics and a steady beat that do not countenance stops and starts. I used to ignore, no, defy the numbered fingering on the page. I figured that the paths my own brain invented were good enough for me. My stubbornness led to endless dead ends hardwired into muscle memory, my fingers stuck in familiar passages, the next sixteenth note impossible to reach no matter how many times I practiced.
There is, of course, a metaphor here about my life or at least my attempts at art. I just do. And sometimes the results are spectacular, sometimes disastrous. Mostly, the work is just made harder. Piano, writing, photography, quilting, drawing - I resist patterns and pre-planning, choosing to wing it, to follow my fallible muse. Sadly, I am impatient and eschew the classes and advice that would make me better at what I love to do.
A few years ago, I made an intricate quilt – my absolute favorite - with hundreds of small pieces of cloth, each selected by eye as I went along. It was a mammoth task, pieces combined until they formed a swath that was then sewn to another swath, and another. I built the quilt from diagonal to diagonal, feeling my way with the fabric, the colors and the shapes until the piece devoured the space on the sewing room floor and I could no longer see it as a whole. When I finally took the quilt downstairs and laid it the length of the living room, I discovered that the diagonals had taken a turn and the finished cover had five sides, don’t ask me how! So attached was I to each and every fabric combination, it was painful for me to cut it back to shape and size, forced to abandon favorite banners of brilliant color on the floor.
Now, I confess that the propensity to dive into the unknown without a plan is a curious trait in one who has made a living making plans. But at this late age, I think I’ve figured out that planning and spontaneity may be the two main, if contradictory, ingredients to a very special creative sauce.
A great leap of faith is required to take on a project, large or small, that dares to be extraordinary. One must have, first and foremost, a willingness to try even when instructions don’t exist and you have to do it anyway. A clear vision and goal is essential. Mapping out the journey’s details, of course, increases the odds of success. Equal in importance is having the wisdom and humility to use to your advantage the tools you’re given - the advice of others, the lessons already learned. With such a foundation, one’s creativity and courage can be focused where it’s most needed - to solve problems that have no precedent and to fix the things that go awry.
As for me, I haven’t perfected the music yet nor reformed my anarchic tendencies entirely (I’m making a more patterned quilt for Christmas that is currently driving me mad), but as I allow the correct fingering to lead me through a fugue on a cozy winter afternoon, I realize the extraordinary pleasure of making music, real music, from the notes and numbers on the page.