When I ventured into the world of the beginner adult piano student, the only member of our household who didn't vacate the premises upon hearing the first strangled twang announcing the start of yet another practice session was my African grey parrot, Max.
It was humbling to have my first unbiased critic be a parrot, and for him to tell me, through actions that screeched louder than words, that I sucked.
In those early days I was a purist, doing things by the book as beginners invariably do. Accordingly, Max was placed on the edge of the piano and admonished to sit quietly. This he would do for all of five minutes before venturing into the bowels of the grand piano to watch the hammers and dampers bounce around.
As the weeks progressed and I painfully crashed through my first piece, it became apparent that Max was up to something back there. Sure enough, his careful observation had led him to discover that if he grabbed the hammer with his beak just as I struck the note, there would be no sound, clearly the preferred state in his view.
I soon learned to play through that piece quickly, because otherwise all I would hear was the soft thunking of the felt of the damper. My piano teacher was surprised at my rapid improvement, but at the risk of censure for my less than orthodox methods, I kept quiet.
As I progressed, Max was banished to sitting on my knee because the piano tuner kept making puzzled comments about the chunks missing out of my hammers. This brought new pedagogical benefits. The key one was the uber-effective peer (or parrot?) pressure.
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Grinding through a particularly challenging Beethoven rondo for hours on end, there was a passage that I just couldn't seem to get right unless I was playing very slowly. (For the record, Beethoven, it's a good thing you're already dead because if you weren't, I would have cheerfully finished you off.)
As I tried repeatedly, hour after hour, night after night, to bring it up to speed, Max shifted restlessly on my knee, shooting me a long-suffering "look" as the evening waned.
One day, I had butchered it just one too many times. As I stopped mid-passage in complete frustration, Max looked up at me, fluffed out his feathers, stretched his neck for emphasis and whistled the entire section in perfect pitch, with a nonchalant air that seemed to say, "Look, you stupid human, it really isn't that hard."
I almost cried. Okay, I did cry. My bird could perform the rondo better than me, and he wasn't even taking lessons.
From that day on, he whistled me through that passage, and the sheer humiliation of being outwitted by something with a brain the size of a gumball made me get it together.
The months turned into a year and I knew things were getting better when Max stopped climbing onto the keys and lying flat across them with all the deadweight that one pound of feathers could muster in order to make me stop. (Try moving an ornery parrot who insists on parking himself across your middle C octave - trust me, it cannot be done, at least not while keeping all fingers intact.)
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Instead, I had the immense satisfaction of him falling asleep on my knee, particularly when I played a Chopin étude. Until I invariably messed up, that is, when he would dramatically open one eye and shoot me the "look" until I got it right.
It took me quite some time to realize that his parrot snoozing was teaching me the most important piano technique of all. One of the things that piano teachers go on about ad nauseam is keeping those wrists high. Personally, I think it looks contrived and it isn't comfortable, but for $1 a minute of lesson time, I am not about to argue.
One evening, hands flying up the keyboard with much gusto, I made the mistake of dropping a wrist, thereby clipping sleeping Max, who catapulted across the living room in a good imitation of a parrot home run. As a responsible pet owner I of course take no pleasure in treating my bird like a baseball, and luckily no damage was done (other than to his pride, which I figure just about made us even). But it did occur to me afterward that having him on my knee was fostering my excellent high wrist position.
I dare not tell my secrets to my piano teacher, but upon reflection I must conclude that most things I have accomplished on this confounded instrument of torture have been thanks to Max. I need his services for a few more months until I stumble through my exam, but after that I am willing to hire him out to the next poor unsuspecting sod newly embarking down the path of piano lessons and in need of a little pedagogical help on the sly.
Susanne Taylor lives in Toronto.
Illustration by Valero Doval.