Last month I saw a post that mentioned a fun book of piano music: Vince Guaraldi's arrangements of Christmas music for the Peanuts TV special. (I feel like Amazon raised the price for December. I think I paid $9 or $10 for it?) I've been enjoying it a lot. It makes me SO nostalgic -- it takes me right back to those 1970s Decembers, when I was counting down the days until Christmas.
It's also pretty brain-bendy. I have zero experience with playing jazz piano, or really jazz anything, and the chords are just not in my vocabulary. The book kicks off with O Tannenbaum, and the first page is fairly easy -- all of it except the first beat. The first chord requires you to play a B-flat and a C with your left hand, and a C with a D-flat in your right hand. I keep doing the same thing: I play those notes together -- B-flat, C, D-flat -- and I think to myself, "That cannot be right." I look at the music, I play them again, I think, "No, something is wrong here." But no: that is exactly what's written. I have probably tried 50 times to go directly from the first chord to the second chord, and I still have to pause and say to myself, "Whoa, that is very dissonant." I'll get there eventually.
A lot of the music is difficult for me. Some of it is the unfamiliar chords and jazz rhythms (I refer you to Nicole's post, which advises the musician to pretend she has just smoked a big doobie, man), and some of it is that Vince Guaraldi must have had bigger hands than mine. (Wait a minute, though, Google tells me he was exactly my height. It wouldn't surprise me if a man my height (5'6") had bigger feet than mine (women's size 7), so I suppose his hands could very well be bigger.) I cannot span a tenth on the piano -- my max is a ninth. But there are a lot of tenths in this music, and tenths are impossible for me to play without rolling the chord.
This is an occasional problem in the classical music I have played, but only an occasional problem. Today I decided to look up how different hand sizes are for men and for women, and I came across this interesting chart on Reddit. Did you know that specialty keyboards exist, which are more comfortable for women with smaller hands, and less comfortable for men with larger hands? Did you know that 76% of men can play a tenth on a standard keyboard, and 87% of women cannot? That link takes you to a website dedicated to alternate keyboard sizing, a rabbit hole I knew nothing about before today.
I said to Elwood, "This is more evidence of patriarchy in action: the standard keyboard fits men's bodies better than women's, even though millions of women play piano. It should not be significantly more expensive to get a suitably sized keyboard if it doesn't affect the instrument's sound production." He was skeptical. He said, "There are always standards."
But it seems to me that one way to recognize privilege is to observe the places where your group defines the standards. The "flesh-toned" bandaids are the color of your flesh; the default pronoun refers to your gender. And pianos -- who knew? -- are constructed with your hands in mind.
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