PLEASE DON’T SHOOT THE PIANO PLAYER;  HE’S DOING THE BEST HE CAN.  THE GUITARIST ON THE OTHER HAND…

Jerry Harkins

            For more years than is sane, I have been trying to learn to play the guitar.  This quest has not been notably successful.  Still, week after week, for many years, my life was pretty much defined by The Lesson.  Tension mounted as the hour approached, released after it was over and then began the cycle all over again.  The lesson itself was almost irrelevant.  Sometimes it was sublime, other times it felt like something that should be banned by the Geneva Convention.  But what really matters is what happened before and after.  Between lessons I always had to choose between the agony of practice and the joy of playing albeit poorly.  When I practiced, I heard every mistake in bold relief.  When I played poorly, I never heard a mistake.  When I practiced, my dominant emotion was boredom.  When I played poorly, it was serenity.  Talk about poor Hobson and his famous choice!  Practice never had a chance.

            The problem is twofold.  On the one hand, I am not a person who is big on mortification of the flesh never mind of the psyche.  I do have a stubborn streak but my life mantra is that of Charlie Brown.  There is no problem so big that I can’t run away from it.  But first it is necessary to tempt fate.  So, like Charlie, every week I returned to the field of battle.  Heisenberg notwithstanding, there was nothing more inevitable in the universe than the absolute certainty that Lucy would snatch the football away at the last moment and I would wind up on my ass.  Once again.  But honor would have been served.  Run, Jerry.  See Jerry run.

            I was the only kid in my class that actually wanted to take piano lessons.  By the time I was knocking on the door of middle age and could afford one, I bought a piano and did, so I thought, reasonably well with it.  But then one day I was playing the Brahms’ Haydn Variations for one piano four hands with my friend Helen, an attorney who had been playing seriously since the age of six.  I suddenly realized that I would never play as well as she and that, if the object was to enjoy myself, I should switch to something easier, like the guitar.  Six strings.  How hard could it be?

            Every musical instrument is a compromise with its own physics.  Six strings plus nineteen frets and, of course, one “open” position which means that each string is capable of sounding twenty notes.  Well, not strings 3 and 4 where the last fret is missing to make room for the sound hole.  So, a total of 118 notes.  But many notes can be played in multiple combinations of string and fret.  You see the problem, don’t you?  The music says F-sharp of which there are seven on the fretboard, two or three in each octave.  Your choice depends on what other notes you’ll be playing at the same time and where your poor fingers are coming from and where they have to go next.  Altogether, the typical guitar can play 33 different notes compared to 88 notes on a piano.

            It’s a bit like Fermat’s Last Theorem which bedeviled mathematicians for 358 years.  There are no whole numbers a, b and c that can satisfy the equation aⁿ + bⁿ = cⁿ for any value of n greater than two.  Similarly, there is no way to arrange ten fingers, six strings and fourteen frets as to be able to play more than a handful of chords in a handful of keys.  Fortunately most contemporary guitarists can actually play only a few chords.  Bob Dylan, for example, knows four, three of them fairly well.  Michael Jackson actually mastered none but it didn’t make any difference because he used his guitar as though it were a drum.  (There is a reason the instrument is known as an “ax” among rockers.)  Unlike guitarists, guitar teachers have six fingers on each hand and thus have no trouble with sounds like the mystic chord invented by Alexander Scriabin.  It consists of C, F#, Bb, E, A and D.  “Its preternatural stillness was a gnostic imitation of a hidden otherness,” said Alex.  Perhaps it makes more sense in Russian.

            It is a little known fact that the great Spanish novel El ingenioso hidalgo don Quixote de la Mancha by Miguel Cervantes is an extended metaphor for following the quest of becoming a guitarist.  In fact, in the first draft of the manuscript now in the Biblioteca Nacional de España, the title of the book is El loco guitarrista de la Mancha.  It ends with a variation of Charlie Brown’s lament, “To try when your fingers are too stiff to reach the impossible chord.”

            My lessons came to an end when my teacher went off on an impossible quest of her own but she bequeathed to me her precious copy of Méthode complete pour Guitare, Opus 59 by Matteo Carcassi.  As I diligently worked my way through it, I assumed that Matty had had at least two extra fingers, that is fourteen instead of the standard guitar teacher issue of twelve.  But when they exhumed the body prior to his canonization in 2012, they discovered he indeed had only twelve fingers but he also had twelve toes.  God is good to guitar teachers, possibly because they introduce a note of levity into an otherwise somber universe. 

            If it weren’t for the teachers, there would be no guitar player jokes.  As it is, they (I refer to the jokes but it could just as easily mean the teachers) are a dying art as more and more jurisdictions pass laws against hate crimes.  Maybe you remember some of these from a less politically correct time.  What's the difference between a dead skunk and a dead guitar player in the middle of the road?
 There are skid marks in front of the skunk. "Mommy! Mommy! When I grow up I want to be a guitar player!" 
"Now Johnny, you can't do both!" 

            All jokes are rooted in an element of truth.  Any otherwise normal person who imagines eliciting music from six strings and an empty box shaped like a misshapen woman is, at a minimum, slightly eccentric.  There have been some miracle workers who could pull it off but even they spend half their lives tuning the damn thing which sulks when you ask it to stay on pitch.  Still, every year millions of people listen to the likes of Jimmy Hendrix named the world’s greatest guitarist by Rolling Stone magazine.  And they think to themselves, how hard could it be?  Fortunately, there is hope for such fools (and for Jimmy Hendrix).  Like all the hope left in the world, it comes from China via Silicon Valley.  It’s called Guitar Hero and is a digital game with a controller shaped like an electric guitar.  You play it by pushing buttons that light up in a sequence programmed for various heavy metal songs.  If that sounds too difficult, you can always try Air Guitar.