It started out as an unofficial goal. When faced with a month between internships with only a few networking meetings and a job interview scheduled, I decided to play the piano in some of my spare time.

Since deciding this the other day, I have spent hours trying to master a song not all that tricky—it only takes a little more than two minutes to play. Plus, the song is written in D minor, so it only has one flat.

Admittedly, I wouldn’t have known that last bit of information without a Google search. Though I took five years of piano, I didn’t learn all that much.

My piano teacher was light on theory and heavy on “Good Job!” stickers, but I can’t blame her for all of my shortcomings as a piano player. I have long fingers that easily hit octave intervals, but my brain never got into it. I hated practicing and resented my mother’s “five years of piano lessons” rule (and then resented it more when my brother got away with taking only three).

In the near-decade since my bout of lessons, I have dabbled in piano, even learning two songs by memory just to have a few to play in case I’m zapped back to the nineteenth century and have to play piano in the equivalent of a Jane Austen novel.

So now, at age twenty-two, I decided to learn a new song, and something more challenging than the others. Something out of the level-four book, not the level-3b book. My choice? “Greensleeves”—a melancholy number with shots of bright majority. Just how I like my music.

My brother, home from break through most of my practicing time, doesn’t cease to point out that I am actually playing “What Child Is This.” In January. After Christmas. Over and over again.

“Stop. Just stop it. This doesn’t matter,” he tells me one morning.

Out of the mouths of nineteen-year-olds comes such joy.

“Yes it does.”

“Why?” I can hear the disdain in his voice.

“Because,” I shoot back, using the American Dialect Society’s word of 2013. “It matters to me. I’m proving I can do something, that I can still play the piano.”

“So?”

I sigh and go back to a tricky place in “What Child”—I mean, “Greensleeves.” My brother puts in his earphones.

I don’t try to explain to him how piano represents something I’ve missed. Though I loved and continue to love studying novels, I occasionally want the order of high school calculus, when there was one right answer and usually one right way to get it. Analyzing literature occasionally feels imprecise and messy, like attempting to run on dry sand, but playing piano has order. Keys must be hit at certain times in conjunction with other keys to make the music.

Playing also involves acrobatics. While reaching back to play arpeggios, I sometimes feel like my hand is a trapeze artist stretching out toward a bar and hoping to get a firm grasp. Bringing the right hand up the keyboard to hit the high note without looking is a similar leap of faith.

But, if a pianist doesn’t play with emotion and proper pedal, the song might as well be played by a player piano. Strategic crescendos, decrescendos, and subtle tempo changes are overlaid on technical mastery.

Perhaps playing the piano well is similar to high-quality writing, but with technical prowess and emotive qualities inverted. Though intriguing stories can be told without technical mastery, the greatest prose I’ve read is often produced by writers who understand how to use rhetorical and literary tools to tell the story. And I’m not just talking about the classics written by old greats. I recently read A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010) and re-read White Teeth (2000), and admired the synchronicity of the technical and the story in each of them.

I will never be to piano as Jennifer Egan and Zadie Smith are to novels, but it’s nearly noon. The brother has not yet stumbled out of bed, so I think an alarm clock in the form of “Greensleeves” might be in order.

Libby Stille

Libby Stille (’13) lives in St. Paul and works in the marketing department of a children’s publishing company in downtown Minneapolis. She recommends that everyone visit the Twin Cities, but only between June and October, unless you enjoy subzero windchills and slipping on ice.