by Angus Verspeeten

You've got $3,000 burning a hole in your pocket. What to buy, what to buy?

Let's see. You can go passive, or you can go active.

Passive: You send the $3,000 to Gateway and pretty soon you've got a three-and-a-half foot plasma television (see photo above), suitable for wall-mounting. Guaranteed to impress your friends.

And what do you get besides snob-appeal? You get lovely visual access to 500 channels of garbage, except for the occasional really good movie, sports event, or world-shaking disaster. The rest of the time you have a lovely chrome-framed minimalist work of art (Look, Marge, an all-black painting!) hanging on your wall.

Or, you can go active:

On eBay you can find a shiny, black-finish Yamaha upright piano. This is a REAL piano (don't let anybody kid you: a digital piano is NOT a real piano***). You buy it, have it shipped to your dwelling. And--uh-oh--it just sits there. It does NOTHING unless YOU do something. You can't turn it on. You can dust it, you can polish it, you can admire it, otherwise... nothing.

Until.

You.

Play.

It.

What? You don't know how to play the piano? No problem. The piano, you see, costs only $2,400. Which means you have $600 left, with which you can either start taking lessons, or you can go to the music store and buy LOTS of self-teaching piano books.

Do that and several things begin to happen. 1) You start to make music. 2) Your hands become limber, then stronger, then as you get better, your arms become stronger, then your whole body is affected (non-pianists don't realize what a muscular, whole-body exercise playing--REALLY playing--the piano is), 3) and probably most important of all, your heart finds quiet ease anytime you sit down at this rather ungainly, unprepossessing large black object that now dominates whatever room you put it in.

Passive or active? Cultural garbage absorber, or maker of music? Fuckee, or fucker? That, in a nutshell, is the 21st-century question.

END

***The excellent newsgroup, rec.music.makers.piano, monthly re-publishes its FAQ's. One of the most frequently asked questions these days is whether to buy a digital or a real piano. The question is answered well in the monthly FAQ. What the opinion of these piano experts boils down to is, there are only two reasons to justify buying a digital piano: convenience (it's easy to move and doesn't need tuning), and silence (you can use headphones with it so you don't disturb the neighbors). Otherwise, they strongly advise that even a cheap, real piano is better than a digital one because of 1) the sound, and 2) the feel of the action. Yes, makers of digital pianos advertise things like "the authentic sound of a digitally sampled Steinway concert grand," but the complex patterns of overtones produced by a real piano are NOT reproduced by these digital samplings.

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