The songs you can't get away from

There is a reasonable buffer zone - including trees and a pasture or two - between our house and any neighbors.

The sound-muffling landscaping is probably a good thing for the neighbors; there have been times they may have been driven mad by the opening strains of "The Entertainer."

"The Entertainer" by Scott Joplin is the quintessential piano-student song. Both boys learned the easy version; my oldest is now working his way through the original composition. Though my piano-lesson history is less consistent than theirs, it was a part of my very limited piano repertoire.

It's the song that average piano students play, as fast as they can get away with, anytime they get near a keyboard. It's the song you memorize when you're young and somehow can still plunk out years after your last day of formal instruction.

I forced my boys to begin piano lessons as soon as they were of reasonable age. One is still taking piano; the other replaced piano with fiddle; they have both taken up guitar.

With guitar, you're guaranteed to hear the opening chords of "Smoke on the Water" soon after the instrument is brought home. There may be progress to the opening chords of "Freebird." A little more skill, and they'll be playing the opening chords of "Sweet Home Alabama" - early and often.

Soon all are part of an informal medley stringing together the riffs from every song staple on classic rock stations.

Once you get past the opening riff, though, the guitar is for most musicians a vocal accompaniment instrument; there is little motivation to slog through a song's verses and chorus unless one is going to sing along. (And one does not often sing along if one is a teenage boy.)

If once in a while, you want to hear a piece of music in its entirety, there is always the piano.

I remember purchasing the sheet music to certain pop songs purely for their memorable piano intros. I usually went ahead and learned the rest of the song, though "I'm Sailing Away" by Styx, which has a catchy opening piano solo, was never quite so satisfying beyond that, without the big-haired guys playing the full heavy-metal guitar accompaniment.

There's always a tendency anyway to hit the opening of any piano music hard, from the ditties about marching bands and puppies in Alfred's Basic Piano Course, Level 1B, to a Chopin prelude. While piano teachers may sometimes instruct otherwise, the average student generally ignores that advice and practices from the beginning.

While the first few measures may go swimmingly when you listen to your kids practice, the artistry tends to deteriorate - more stops and starts, more wrong notes, more pounding on the keyboard in frustration - as the song nears its end.

Wrong notes on the piano are nothing, however, compared to the discordant sounds made by the fiddle.

I have no experience with the fiddle, or the violin as we are never allowed to call it in our house, so I have no idea how my son is progressing in his first four months of lessons.

Sometimes I wonder if the fact that he sometimes hits a note as pure and clean as any you would hear from a professional and that he is playing recognizable melodies means he is progressing well beyond the average kid and is a string-instrument musical genius.

Then he throws in a screecher or two, and you realize the hard truth: There are no shortcuts to violin, sorry fiddle, virtuosity.

To look on the bright side -if there is an "Entertainer" equivalent for the fiddle, it may take a while to recognize that it's being played.

Reporter Heidi Gaiser may be reached at 758-4431 or by e-mail at hgaiser@dailyinterlake.com