Brahms & Tomorrowland (2015) by Sara N. '28
Recently, I’ve been spending a lot of time in the Lewis Music Library, which I’m glad about, because Lewis Music was the first study space on MIT campus that I felt I had truly clicked with. It’s a relatively small library, with large yellow-orange wooden tables and dark green carpeting. It is almost always warm and quiet. I wanted to share pictures of the space, but I found something even better: this photoblog about Lewis Music that blogger Mitra L. ’07 made in 2004. More than twenty years later, and the place is still more or less the same.
Early in the spring semester, the Lewis Music Library started giving away free sheet music. Dozen of books in large cardboard boxes right at the entrance of the library. They seemed to run out quick, and week after week, another large box would appear with collections from another composer. Each time I’d exit the library for the day, I’d kneel beside the box, a little hunched over from the weight of my backpack and the bulk of my coat, and leaf through the books. They were all beautiful, with yellowing pages and notes that looked like calligraphy. I wanted one desperately, though I had a vague sense that I wasn’t really deserving of owning such a thing. After all, I would remind myself, I really wasn’t a good pianist.
I began learning to play the piano when I was five years old. Whenever this comes up, I think people tend to assume that I must be very good, and when I try to explain to them that I am not, they think I am trying to be modest or self-deprecating. I am not. I am, objectively, just not very good. I know the notes on the staff, but for some reason, that never translated into fluid sightreading. I am slow to learn and fast to forget. In my fourteen years of piano, I’ve learned countless pieces, and I’ve loved them while I’ve had them, and then I’ve watched them all slip out of my fingers with time. Sometimes, when I go home, I try to finger my way through old pieces. During last year’s spring break, I had tried to recover Bach’s Solfeggietto, because I love the way its notes cascade like a creek tumbling downhill, and the way the mind must become cool and empty for the fingers to run. Muscle memory is a strange and beautiful thing, and in those seven days under the dim light of my room, I felt parts of it coming back to me. But there was too little time, and too much friction between me and the parts I could not remember and had to re-learn. At the time of my writing this, there is not a single song — not classical, not pop, or Disney, or anything — that I could play all the way through.
Despite all of this, I do truly love the piano. A great deal of credit for this goes to my piano teacher, who has taught me since I was eight. I’ve never met anyone else that can make the instrument come alive the way she does. The first time I ever heard her play, she played the sound of rain for me. First, thunder and large, rolling clouds. Then a sliver of sunlight. Then, the sheets of rain thinning into a drizzle, then a sprinkle, the kind where the droplets dance and children play. I remember being transfixed. I had not known one could do this with music.
In the years following, whenever I would begin a new piece or get stuck on an ongoing one, she would remind me of what’s at stake. For a waltz: Imagine the girls and their beautiful dresses, the glinting jewels they’re wearing and the shine of their hair, and imagine the ballroom and the chandelier that fills the hall with light. Or for a nocturne: imagine a dark, starless night, with just the faintest hint of moon. A jasmine flower blooming, a poet walking alongside the quiet of a river. The solution to every musical block was to remember what it was meant to evoke, to behold its beauty and to let it linger. To let it move you.
There is much my piano teacher has taught me — technical things: hand position and scales and the circle of fifths and other things I can’t remember well anymore — but above all, she taught me to love beautiful things. To appreciate beauty, to seek beauty, and to remember that, when needed, I could fashion it out of my own two hands.
It is all of these things that make me want to be a better pianist, and it was what finally convinced me to take one book when the next box inside Lewis Music appeared. I chose a book of Brahms’ waltzes. You can see it here:
It’s from 1956, both the oldest and one of the coolest things I’ve ever owned. Over Spring Break, I took it home and began practicing out of Waltz No. 9. It was lovely and invigorating to get started on a new piece again.
In between the practicing and all the usual eating and sleeping and walking around I do whenever I come home, I also forced my little brother to watch Tomorrowland (2015) with me, a movie that I remember loving when I first watched it (on a DVD from Redbox!) more than ten years ago. It has shockingly low reviews, and having recently rewatched, I still cannot figure out why. It’s a beautifully earnest ode to the power of human resilience and optimism, and critically, a warning against cynicism.
There is a beautiful monologue towards the climax of the movie that I’ve been thinking a lot about recently. I don’t know how much sense it makes outside the context of the movie, but I wanted to try to share, because I think it’s really relevant — to my piano story, but also to my MIT experience, and more generally, I think, to anyone attempting anything that seems challenging and hopeless but also worth trying for.
These lines especially stick out to me:
In every moment, there is the possibility of a better future, but you people won’t believe it. And because you don’t believe it, you won’t do what’s necessary to make it a reality. So, you dwell on this “Oh, terrible future.” You resign yourselves to it. For one reason: because that future doesn’t ask anything of you today.
I don’t know. I needed to hear this, and maybe you did too. The pessimistic future — the one where the things going wrong today continue to go wrong tomorrow — requires absolutely nothing from us. It’s the path of least resistance. Stay still and it simply follows. But it is remarkable that we live in a universe where the future and the present are not independent of each other. In the midst of classes and exams and art and other things that aren’t always going well, I am trying to remember this. The better future I want just requires something more from me now.
The second floor of the Lewis Music Library has two digital pianos. You can request a headset from the front desk and hook it up to the piano so that you can practice without anyone else hearing. Since I’ve gotten my Brahms waltz book, I’ve done this a couple of times. I haven’t gone as often as I would like. But more often than I would have, had I given up.