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Midnight Musings: A dulcimer’s tale

JO ANN KIRKLAND

I am rediscovering my inner musician and realizing that music stays in your body, much like riding a bike. Muscle memory, an awakening: Hey, I remember how to do this.

I’ve always played piano, though these days it’s mostly around the holidays when I pull out the old Christmas book and play carols. I learned to play when I was 10 and music was a release and a hideaway; the old piano lived in the sunroom of our house and provided the perfect escape from the chaos of a large family.

I may not have been the most talented but I had a good ear and I’d stick with a difficult piece of music until I’d perfected it.

I even had a short career as a piano tuner and while I loved tuning and had a tuner’s ear, I was lost when it came to fixing sticky hammers and replacing broken strings.

When I moved away from my hometown, I didn’t have a piano for a long time. A friend of mine played the hammered dulcimer in a band and after hearing it, I decided I wanted to learn.

A dulcimer is a trapezoid-shaped instrument, with two and a half octaves of strings, played with two wooden hammers, and has a delicate sound somewhere between a harp and a harpsichord. It’s the precursor for both the piano and the harpsichord and is often heard in bluegrass or Celtic music.

Twenty years ago, I decided to buy a dulcimer on a gray February day, when anything new seems like a good idea. The beautiful black wooden instrument, edged in walnut, arrived from Dusty Strings in Seattle, a place well-known for its dulcimers. Inside the sound hole, it had over 15 signatures of the craftspeople who built it.

I played it a little, never mastering it, but that dulcimer came with me every time I moved, from apartment to apartment and to the house I moved in when I got married.

When we moved to Florida, we packed it in the car. I stashed it under a futon in an upstairs room, the top of the case growing mildewy with humidity. Every once in awhile, I’d pull it out and play; it was so badly out of tune that I’d spend most of my time tuning it. The sea of strings intimidated me and I’d shove it back underneath. My son was a toddler then, and it seemed so hard to find time to do anything creative.

When we moved to Shelter Island, the dulcimer came too, sitting in its case, waiting.

My sister always wanted to learn to play it, so a couple of years ago, figuring someone should make music with this thing, I shipped it to her in Buffalo. She tried but couldn’t get it and in frustration, consigned it to a music store.

My son, now a teenager and a lover of all musical instruments, wanted to play “psychedelic” Rolling Stones music on it. When we visited my family, he asked my sister if he could borrow the dulcimer and she told us where it had ended up. We retrieved it from the music store, packed it into our car and brought it home. If the dulcimer was a steamer trunk, its case would be covered with travel stickers.

The dulcimer sits next to our piano, the gift of music given back.

My son learned “Lady Jane” and then moved on to other Rolling Stones and Beatles songs. He has more of a natural affinity for music than I do and his enthusiasm inspired me to finally learn the instrument.

So far, all I can play is the Shaker melody, “Simple Gifts.”

We’re learning together. I practice while he’s at school, he plays when he gets home and we share techniques.

I prefer to learn from books, as I did when I first started playing piano over 40 years ago. I played from the same books as my older sisters. Every page had our initials, proof that we had learned the song. You played a song, as written, and then you moved on to the next song until the end of the book: a linear progression.

My son starts with sheet music and if he doesn’t understand a passage, he goes to YouTube and watches a musician play, studies his hands and plays the same passage over and over again until he’s got it. Then he embellishes, adding riffs and harmonies until you can hear his own musical voice.

Now that I’m flexing my muscle memory, I think I’ll learn cello next.