The Duet

One two three, one two three… left hand and right…low bass..high trill… One two three one two three…. The hands that play me move clumsily and unprofessionally. I am a voice for her and her singing rings inside of my body, ricocheting off my fifth octave of copper and steel strings. When her voice hits the tone correctly it joins with mine, two waves meet and they don’t crash. Instead they evaporate into a finely tuned mist that hums harmonic overtones. To your ear that note sounds pleasing, rather than wobbly and dissonant. To me it feels like a mood and a colour; it reverberates through me immersed in mystical frequency. It becomes an extension of my being when I wash over your ears. A tear falls from your eye and you wipe it away. 

She is singing about the birds and the trees. One two three…chickadee… One two three…tall spruce tree… one two three … in mourning. I don’t just feel her voice, her fingers and her feet, I feel her heart beating in the steady rhythms and it joins with me into the floorboards and above into the ceiling and out the window onto the neighbours lawn. The sadness she is expressing is merged with my own loneliness in this place. She makes be feel less lonely and it makes me realize that I was less lonely when I was a tree. 

At moments, her sadness has a frequency that is blue, shrill and inharmonious. As the piece moves her sadness turns to touches of frenzy and even a joke or two…or…three…bumble bee…humming bird…cheek to cheek. Many have sat at my table and many were much better piano players but I am in a supporting role. I hold the notes just a little bit longer when I think that is what she meant to say. I think that shrill note would sound better if it bounced off of the sound board in a gentler way and so I lean in to absorb a bit of it. You, the listener, started to worry about her when she told the jokes but I took the edge off of that last note and now you are absorbed in its affect. It chimed in a way that met with your bodies memory of humility and I intended it that way. A smile. 

She doesn’t treat me like a task and although she lacks discipline, she hasn’t always. I can tell that about her when she attacks some notes too soon but manages to carry through the middle of the song by charting heartbreak and candour alone. She knows that her current limitations are only a moment and that I am here to help her shine. I will not let her pitch too far forward only to fall flatly into the wall and slide ungracefully to the floor. I am her willing accomplice and I will help her to breath in the breaks between the notes. Her breath is almost weightless but it is holding the burden of unreleased sorrows. 

And I know pain. I used to be an elephant and they hunted me down. Now, I am a key that unlocks. I hold her phrases so briefly before I send them back out until they disappear from me. I feel grief too because although I am a container, and a partner of beauty, my past lives still haunt me. I held birds nests in my arms and on my back. I miss reaching for the sunlight with my branches. I miss so many things. I grieve the things I can’t forget and so I can empathically lift her melody. 

I feel the applause as acutely as she does. I feel proud of her and I will miss her until she comes back. I love accompanying her, I wish she knew that.

I am also accompanying you, listener, on this journey of song. How long was it since you sat and listened to music, played by a musician, in a theatre? Those tiny computer speakers you are using are missing two bottom octaves. They have no motor. I’m not trying to moralize, but I do get fussy about acoustics and materials. At the end of the show they play songs through wires and speakers while people mingle. The songs are perfectly in tune, that much is true but I prefer the laughter to those songs. Laughter from many different voices has the most pleasing of cacophonies. It is fingerprinted birdsong to me. No one persons laugh sounds the same! I wish I could laugh back at you so that you could hear my laugh. Things are probably too sad to do that right now though. The world is suffering and what is the sound of one piano laughing? Someone has to laugh through me don’t they? I don’t want to scare them. I stay silent. What if I just play one note. A little laugh of a note while they walk out of the theatre? A little twinkle, a wink, a poke! No, no, they are not birds in my arms. I can’t laugh unless they laugh. Listener can you hear me thinking this? No, of course you can’t. You are getting your jacket and talking to your girlfriend about where you should go for dinner. If I laughed at you, would you think I was a wind up piano? Well I’m not. I’m not like a watch. I don’t click and clack and keep things neat and nice. That’s it! Just one little note. No one will even hear.

Middle C is not too high. No one will notice. Ha! Ha! Okay, I played it twice but no-one heard. That damn treble computer music is blocking my joyful expressions. G g gee Eeeeee… F F F Deeeeee. Hahahahaha. Beethoven anyone? Everyone knows that phrase. That laugh is in your phase. Get it??? Hahaha little meta physics joke there. No one?

They are all leaving. They are shutting the hall doors. I wonder if they’ll take me back to the music shop and trade me in at some point. I saw the last piano on it’s way out, I think someone had bought it. Oh wait someone is coming back in. It’s her, the performer from earlier.

She just sighed. She is sitting down on my bench. She is playing a different song. I think she is making it up.