Suddenly she wondered how she was supposed to translate the heavily marked score, which looked strangely familiar, into any sound, using the long row of binary keys facing her.
As her teacher has always said, cells that fire together wire together. But what if her hands failed to play back ‘memories’ of her practice including only warm-ups she did earlier? “Muscles do not have a memory of past training,” she had a blinding flash of what she read in a random magazine before her turn. Her palms moistened. Being scared to ask for a Kleenex on the towering examiner’s table, she wiped the palms on her new skirt, then restarted.
Cells managed to ‘wire’ together this time. Her hypothetical thought, “Muscles do not have but at least a ‘one-day’ memory,” was instantly verified in her experience as her body and hands began to move rhythmically with the music she was creating for her audience. Her fingers danced smoothly across the keyboard while skipping a note or two without being noticed---even by herself. Taking note of the following regions, her eyes scanned left to right, and top to bottom, so to decipher the polyphonic script with the intertwining of different melodic lines. Her ears listened attentively to how hard and how soft she pressed the keys keeping the beat inside her head all the time.
The head playing conductor, the eyes sight reading ahead, the fingers performing legato and staccato, the ears giving attention to the music being produced, the muscle orchestra worked in tandem to create a masterpiece of her interpretation towards the exhilarating finale.
The loud words, “Well done!” made her feel less again.
As her teacher has always said, cells that fire together wire together. But what if her hands failed to play back ‘memories’ of her practice including only warm-ups she did earlier? “Muscles do not have a memory of past training,” she had a blinding flash of what she read in a random magazine before her turn. Her palms moistened. Being scared to ask for a Kleenex on the towering examiner’s table, she wiped the palms on her new skirt, then restarted.
Cells managed to ‘wire’ together this time. Her hypothetical thought, “Muscles do not have but at least a ‘one-day’ memory,” was instantly verified in her experience as her body and hands began to move rhythmically with the music she was creating for her audience. Her fingers danced smoothly across the keyboard while skipping a note or two without being noticed---even by herself. Taking note of the following regions, her eyes scanned left to right, and top to bottom, so to decipher the polyphonic script with the intertwining of different melodic lines. Her ears listened attentively to how hard and how soft she pressed the keys keeping the beat inside her head all the time.
The head playing conductor, the eyes sight reading ahead, the fingers performing legato and staccato, the ears giving attention to the music being produced, the muscle orchestra worked in tandem to create a masterpiece of her interpretation towards the exhilarating finale.
The loud words, “Well done!” made her feel less again.
