Two weeks ago, my Patient Husband said, “I wish we still had a piano.”
In the old house, we rented an electric piano and he was re-teaching himself piano the same way I was re-teaching myself violin. It went back to the piano store when we moved to Angelborough, and I thought he’d never looked back.
Unfortunately, a course on Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas rewakened his love of the piano, and after the fourth time he said that, I saw clearly the fork in the road. The first fork said, “Don’t do anything about it and then ten years from now he’ll still be wistfully longing for a piano.”
I chose the other fork and went to craigslist under “musical instruments.” Sure enough, someone was giving away a free piano.
I’ll omit the stressful parts in the middle, where I requested online quotes from three vendors and received twenty-six phone calls and nineteen emails, all from two forms;the third from an actual piano mover who never called back. Eventually I had to (horrors) place an actual phone call, and shortly we were in business. Well, that and I needed to rearrange the furniture in the living room to accommodate it.
The piano is now here. It needs only to be tuned.
Dear heaven.
For the record, the benefit of an electronic piano is that you can jack in your headphones. And turn down the volume. Still, sometimes they’re cute with it, such as when Kiddo#2 “sings” a children’s book.
The noise level has increased by 3000% since last Thursday. It’s almost enough to make me want to get out my violin again, since there’s no way I could possibly be worse than the sounds emanating from our living room.
(Kiddo#2 said to me, “Mommy, your violin didn’t give me a nosebleed!” And who knows, maybe she’s right!)
But despite the post-apocalyptic soundwaves emanating from my living room, there’s a bright spot. Every so often, when the kids are distracted, I can hear my Patient Husband picking out the notes of Fur Elise. And it’s good.
Kids+piano= Overload of noise. (And Overload of Cute.) Nice way to start the morning.
The price of noise-cancelling headsets have come down….
I’m just saying 🙂
NCHeadphones only blot out ambient noise that falls into a kind of steady-state range. There are technical terms for that, but the short story is, nope. 🙁 They would blot out the background noise so I could listen to the hell even more clearly.
I’m back to considering ear sporks.
Because you also know that you can tune a piano….but you can’t tuna fish!(rimshot)
Kiddo#2 laughed and laughed when P.H. told her that.
The piano tuner comes today. He says he needs it quiet. Maybe we should leave the country.
If you want the noise level to go down, get the kiddos piano lessons. They’ll flee that instrument like it’s on fire. 😉
We are inheriting my mother-in-laws grand piano this week. (She didn’t die, fortunately. She’s moving out of her house and giving it to us.) I am so happy, I don’t even care how much noise it makes. I have a few very fine pianists in my house. Love the videos. It’s so fun to watch kids having fun on the piano.
Yeah, we got one about a month ago, and I’ve been saying we should call it a forte instead.
Piano does mean soft, but the original name of the instrument you now own is a “piano-forte.” Soft-loud. As evidenced. 🙂
Well,they’re playing it like a forte-forte. Or a piano-fortissimo.
The tuner just left — it’s in tune now. 🙂 Thank heaven!
One of Google’s quotes of the day:
If you develop an ear for sounds that are musical it is like developing an ego. You begin to refuse sounds that are not musical and that way cut yourself off from a good deal of experience.
– John Cage