When I approach a piano, I don’t see black and white keys allayed in a row anymore — I see shapes.

More than that, I see a series of ghostly paths unfurling in front of me, shifting constellations that overlay on the keyboard like through a VR headset, or like the strings on a cork board in a conspiracy theorist’s basement.

These are the chords and scales and other patterns I’ve been playing for thirty years, and my fingers know them well, like a warm, familiar body next to mine. I nestle down into them with such soft comfort. I can let my fingers slip lightly across their smooth surface, primed for a deeper touch. It’s grounding and exhilarating, as is the expertise of knowing what to do with them. I honestly can’t believe I’m here, that I can do this.

The first thing I see is usually a series of pentatonic patterns — five notes in two groupings, each separated by a minor third. The pentatonic scale is the musical equivalent of a puppy rolling on its back asking for belly rubs. Playing it is like skipping stones across one of those ponds from Monet’s Water Lilies — light, textural, pastoral. There’s no friction, no messy half-steps or tense tritones, no demanding major sevenths screaming for your attention and resolution.

Today, the first one I see is an A♭ major pentatonic (that’s A♭ B♭ C E♭ and F), but played over a D♭ in the bass. It’s a dreamy texture, playful and wistful. It’s fun to play, like my fingers are running down little knolls with the giddiness of a toddler, three two one, three one, black black white, black white, etc.

I first learned the pentatonic on the guitar, the first thing many guitarists are taught (especially the blues scale version). Pianists aren’t really taught it in the same way for some reason, and I accidentally picked up the snobbery of my instrument. We pianists, to whom is granted the full 88 key range of complexity, we must not concern ourselves with such a well-worn trope as a pentatonic. Only 5 notes? How quaint.

But then I grew up. I heard Art Tatum pulverize the piano with pentatonic runs that left you breathless. I heard McCoy Tyner pairing pentatonics with big percussive chords voicings. I learned to play Claude Débussy’s “La fille aux cheveux de lin,” which paints a pastoral pentatonic landscape in bulging clouds of expression. The pentatonic is so textural.

And yet, the other reason I love a pentatonic is because of the notes not included. In a major pentatonic scale, you play the one, two, three, five, and six (C, D, E, G, and A in the key of C). Four and seven are left out.

Sometimes the notes in the pentatonic feel of a kind to me, a little clique of replaceable sounds. They seep together, a gaggle of little conformists, not here to rock the boat too much. Four and seven refuse to play along, and that’s why I love them.

Four demands a lot. Think of an F note over a C major triad (or even a C major seventh). It’s an anxious party guest. It can’t just hang and be chill — it always feels the need to ask what’s next or to take up space. I’m always tempted to sharp it, raise it a semitone, like giving adderall to an ADHD kid.

But that neediness is also what gives it a unique emotional power. The four lifts up the melody. It can feel like a pitch bend, a pull, a plaintiff whine. It’s got millennia of amens behind it.

And then there’s the seven. I remember someone telling me that a major seventh is the most dissonant interval in music. Play a C and B natural together, and you’ll hear what they’re talking about. And yet, a major seventh chord isn’t particularly dissonant. It’s wistful, it’s longing, it’s dreamy. How are both those things true at once?

(Here’s a recording of the C and B together, followed by Cmaj7. Such a different vibe!)

The seven is an enigma like that. Just a semitone below the octave, it sounds like it could be a mistake. Are you sure you didn’t mean to just resolve instead? Did you really want to put us, the listeners, on that doorstep and leave us there wondering if we’re allowed in? That small frequency difference is a chasm, and within that chasm there’s a world of beauty to discover. Because of that, the seven works best up on top, above the fray. The lower registers don’t have time for its diva-ish demands.

These scale degrees were the gateway drugs for me, leading me onwards toward the joys of the raised sixth in a Dorian scale or the lift of a sharp eleven in a Lydian melody. You learn that there are certain notes who, by the force of their aural undulations, can bend the entire color of what you’re playing. You thought you were looking wistfully out the window but you’re actually at the disco. That’s a flat seven on a major scale, by the way (also called Mixolydian).

In case you can’t tell, I think about these scale degrees and my relationship to them a lot. They are my childhood buddies who all grew up and took a different path in life. Freddo opened a hip little coffee shop upstate that has live music on the weekends (that’s a flat third). He’s still edge-y and cool, but also a little dramatic sometimes. Alexis is now living on a goat farm in Armenia (that’s the flat nine). She’s a real wild card. Charlie married a nice girl we all like and started a big family (that’s the two). They’re always around, very supportive and reliable.

I think I only recently realized how important each of these musical relationships is, the character and personality they can each take on, the eccentricities and opportunities they each offer. It’s opened up powerful new doors in my music, new ways of seeing and hearing the sounds I’m creating. Getting to know them deeply has become and will continue to be one of the most joyful aspects of my life as a musician, especially one who improvises a lot.

There’s a very popular TED talk by Robert Waldinger from 2016 about one of the longest studies ever done. Basically, they tracked a group of about 800 men from the 1930s/40s until today, with regular check ins and evaluations, and then tried to draw conclusions from how their lives turned out. The thing this study is famous for is the conclusion that our relationships are the key to our health and happiness — that the people with deep, close relationships lived healthier, happier lives.

How could it not be? Our partners, friends, children, siblings, parents — these people we surround ourselves with and our relationships with them come to define so much of our lives. They give us so much. They’re the source of so much of what makes life interesting and meaningful and joyful.

As I sit here playing my little shapes on the piano, my fingers casually loping up and down the keyboard, I can hear all these different colors available to me from the myriad of relationships possible on the keyboard. I can emphasize drama with a flat six or search for transcendence with a nine. I can smile at the little foibles and irreplaceable details of each sound.

And I can be reminded of what truly matters in my life: the relationships with the people I love.

What a gift,
Ian

Ian Temple
Founder, Soundfly
ian@soundfly.com

Five Interesting Things

1. It’s Bandcamp Friday! That means that artists get 100% of every dollar you spend on Bandcamp today. It’s a great day to support artists you love. I’ll point you to my own band Sontag Shogun’s EP in cloudy states from last year.

2. Or… my bandmate Jeremy Young’s stunning new release, which ambitiously includes an Aphex Twin cover.

3. Shout out to my buddy Dustin for this one. This grocery store’s freezers were all coincidentally tuned to a C# major so a bunch of folk musicians came in and jammed with them. Hilarious.

4. I had the honor to host a listening part yesterday for OPIA’s 7th Composer Challenge. Everyone was challenged to use some pianette samples to write a new song. Here’s the winning track by Frederic Poirier. If this sounds like something you’d be into, join the OPIA Discord community.

5. Man, this story about Hank Mobley from Bret Primack got to me. Mobley was a jazz great — he played with Art Blakey, Horace Silver, Herbie Hancock, Wynton Kelly, and so many more throughout the hard bop era of the ‘50s and ‘60s. But the label that signed him sat on his records, and he ended his career early, at just 48 years old. As Primack says:

   “What makes his suffering particularly poignant is the contrast with his artistic personality. Mobley’s playing was unfailingly warm, generous, and optimistic in spirit. His solos unfolded with patient logic, building tension through harmonic sophistication rather than pyrotechnics. That same gentle approach may have contributed to his being overlooked, as critics mistook subtlety for simplicity.”