NPR'S ADAMS DISCOVERS 88 KEYS TO HAPPINESS.

Byline: Tom Walsh Knight-Ridder Tribune News Wire

Title: ``Piano Lessons: Music, Love and True Adventures''

Author: Noah Adams 

Data: 250 pages, Delacorte; $20.95

Our rating: Three Stars.

Noah Adams' dedication page in his new book, ``Piano Lessons,'' reads: ``For those who would play.''

It is an apt and accurate dedication. For those millions of adults who have said, once or twice or hundreds of times, ``I'd really like to learn how to play the piano,'' Adams offers a lighthearted, anecdotal mix of sentiment and interviews from his introductory year on the instrument.

Since Adams is the co-host of National Public Radio's ``All Things Considered,'' the interviews were not difficult for him to arrange. The trick is to read this book as if listening to Noah Adams the broadcaster, with his soft, resonant voice, earnest and sincere, never sickeningly inflective.

The book is broken into 12 chapters, one for each month of 1995, when Adams, having decided to learn how to play the piano, bought a Steinway, purchased a self-teaching computer program, attended piano camp, and spoke to dozens of piano teachers, tuners, students, builders and fixers in an effort to capture the collective psyche of those who love the ivories.

Adams makes one believe that a reasonably intelligent person can, with a modicum of effort, grasp the basics of chords, bass and treble clefs, notes and scales. His goal throughout is to learn ``Traumerei,'' a rather difficult piece by Robert Schumann. In the meantime, he expresses his agony over tunes like ``Misty'' without self-pity or overdramatization.

Not surprisingly, the strength of the volume comes from the people Adams interviews, from Ned Phoenix, an earthy guy in Vermont who fixes old pianos.

Ideally, this book should be read on the beach this summer, when there's time to enjoy a meandering narrative.

Adams writes that he and his wife, Neenah, ``have been talking about what it means to be a piano player. When can one say, `I can play the piano'? She believes that moment comes when emotion can be expressed and heard in one's playing, when human contact can be made. I think it's when you have the ability to work through the sheet music for a song you'd like to play, or especially to understand key signatures and chord progressions and to be able to sit down and improvise. If I can come to the piano late at night and `think' there, drifting through slow blues chords and wandering melodies, or play the old Methodist hymns as they come to mind, then I'd be a piano player. Not a `pianist,' though; Leon Fleischer is a pianist.''

The only real weakness in the book is Adams' minor tendency to idealize his own dreamy, wonderful baby-boomer life.

``I bought arugula and red oak lettuce seedlings at a greenhouse, and the first asparagus should be up soon,'' he oozes in the opening paragraph for April.

Adams would do well to spare us the touchy-feely content. Worse though, he even slips into embarrassing snobbery, describing a trip to the mall as a perilous rendezvous with people who ``look overfed and a touch evil; everyone's wearing stonewashed jeans and big white basketball shoes ...''

Even if you're thinking it, Noah, don't say it.

Yet it's nice that just as the intricacies of learning music get a tad tedious to a nonmusician, Adams moves on to another colorful character's personal story about the piano, as he does with Julie Gold, who wrote the Bette Midler hit ``From a Distance.'' Through Adams, Gold tells a warm story of the love of a particular piano and a song written on it. The balance of storytelling - about pianos specifically, and then into music in general and back again - rings nicely, with plenty of pushed pedals to sustain it.

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Photo

Photo: ``All Things Considered'' co-host Noah Adams chronic les his year at the keyboard in ``Piano Lessons: Music, Love and True Adventures.''