Piano

164325_10150126297260590_41298_n — Pianist at Sunset. Venice Beach, CA. Photo by Sara Aranda

History

My mother tried to teach me piano when I was five but I cried too much when she’d say I did something wrong—it was too personal, I suppose—so she sent me across the street. I took one formal year of lessons, but the elderly woman got sick (I think that’s how the story goes) and it was just me and the Everett upright at home. I’d hear my mother play, or my Grandmother, and I knew that it was a special thing. So I started teaching myself how to play; and when I pursued the clarinet for eight years throughout school, I took what I learned to the piano keys. All I basically did was create. I thought up songs, thought of rhythms and sequences I couldn’t physically perform yet, and I practiced until I could. It only felt right to do so. I knew where I wanted the sounds to go, and I would make it happen, whatever it took. I had a whole library of songs I had composed in my head, kept them there, never wrote them down. I am the third generation of piano players in my family, all on the same keys and foot pedals, the degrading finish, the scuffs and refurbished innards. By now, the piano has to be at least 70 years old.

But pursuing athletics and my nomadic life, my inherited piano sat in a storage unit in Southern California for five years. The euphoria of performing a song you wrote, with all the sensitivity of an adolescent teenager and blossoming woman, was something I will never forget. The piano is definitely my soul instrument, if such a thing were to exist. Yet, like a ghost lost to memory, all those songs have faded, that girl long forgotten.

Finally reunited, I’m ecstatic.

23749_108793292465504_528813_n — High School Sara

The Goal

The dream with this page is to share the music I have created with others, to offer another part of myself that coincides with writing itself. I don’t know if this is normal or kosher, but it is me.

Currently, I am working on compositions for a film project. Stay tuned!

Old Songs/Terrible Recordings by Sara

2009 – “Untitled”