Music has always been an important part of my life. During my elementary school years I played both the cello and the French horn. I've also always been surrounded by guitars my entire life. In fact, the guitar is the one instrument I've stuck with for the majority of my 35 years. I gave up the others long ago mainly due to my immaturity and my parents' decision not to force me to stick with something at which I wasn't willing to work particularly hard. Being older and wiser now, I both thank them and resent them somewhat for that decision, and I wonder how I will handle the same issue with my three children.
The one instrument I've always wanted to learn to play is the piano. While I'm fairly proficient at the guitar, I'm aware of its shortcomings. The guitar lacks the bass necessary to play anything with any brooding, emotional depth. The guitar has relatively few great classical pieces written especially for it compared to most orchestral instruments. It also lacks volume unless strummed with a plectrum. While the guitar is one of the few instruments on which a person can play more than two notes simultaneously, it has its limits compared with the piano. On the plus side, it's difficult to lug a piano to the campground to play around the campfire.
A few weeks ago, I decided to finally do something about it and teach myself to play the piano. Since I can already read music, I've been able to bypass much of the elementary music theory necessary to read a piano score (although the bass clef is still a work in progress). After a couple of weeks working on scales and some easy songs, I decided to jump right into my first Beethoven piano sonata, the No. 14 in C# minor, more commonly known as the Moonlight Sonata.
While I don't necessarily recommend that someone learning the piano for the first time start with Beethoven, it has worked well for me. Given my personality, I knew I would quickly become bored playing simple tunes I had no interest in playing later on. Better for me, I thought, to invest that time learning a piece I would never get tired of playing. My instincts have proven correct. After about two weeks of practice, I can actually play about half of the first movement adequately. Another two weeks should allow me to actually be able to play the entire first movement well enough that I won't embarrass myself.
The past weeks’ learning the piano have also taught me something about economics. I know what you're probably thinking; economics and Beethoven couldn't be farther removed from one another. If you're thinking in terms of GDP and the unemployment rate, you're correct, but as readers of this site know, economics is much, much more than line graphs and numbers on a chart. At its essence, economics is the study of how humans act to satisfy their unlimited wants in a world of limited resources.
The most valuable resource anyone has is time. If you doubt this, consider the following: if a man loses all his worldly possessions in a disaster, he can eventually gain them back given enough time. What he can never get back is the time he has already spent gaining all those possessions. Not only is time a one way road on which we cannot turn around, we don't even know how far that road goes. At any moment, our lives can end in the blink of an eye. Our time on this planet is the most precious commodity we have. This is the primary reason why, all things being equal, people seek to satisfy their desires sooner rather than later; you may not be around later.
While the tendency is for wealth to increase over time, time itself never increases. We only have 24 hours a day to allocate in the way which best satisfies our wants and needs. Those wants and needs vary from person to person. The poorest of the poor in our world who live on a dollar a day use all their available time and energy merely trying to stay alive. Those who are fortunate enough to live a more affluent lifestyle have more options than simply meeting the most basic human needs. Regardless, all of us have a finite amount of time to allocate in whatever way we choose.
Playing the piano well requires a lot of practice. Practice takes time. There's simply no shortcut to playing an instrument well. Something has to give. In addition to music, I enjoy reading. I've had to give up reading completely for the present in order to set aside enough time for practice. On my scale of wants and needs, playing the piano has more value to me than reading books. That may change at some point in the future; we humans tend to be a fickle lot. Variety is what makes life interesting. But for now, playing the piano well is near the top of things I choose to do with my leisure time. Reading is way down the list.
The old saying is wrong. Time is not money. Time is far more valuable than money. Given enough time, all of us could eventually satisfy all our desires. If we lived for a hundred thousand years, every one of us would speak ten or more languages fluently and play the piano well enough to play all 32 of Beethoven's piano sonatas. But none of us has that long. If we're lucky, we'll have a mere eighty years to fulfill our most important wants and needs. By my calculations, the best-case scenario is that I've already used up almost half my time. Time to get back to the Moonlight Sonata. That third movement is going to take a while.
June 5, 2006
