Girls at the Piano Read online

  If Schroeder’s taste had mirrored Schulz’s, we would associate the child prodigy with a love of Brahms. But for the purposes of the cartoon strip, ‘Beethoven was funnier,’ he admitted.18

  Lying on his back on the piano lid, Snoopy reaches up to plant a big kiss on Schroeder’s nose. ‘You never know how Beethoven is going to affect someone,’ he says.

  Schroeder wasn’t alone in respecting the emotive potential of Beethoven’s music. Lenin listened to the ‘Appassionata’ piano sonata number 23 every day, though he thought it was too much of a distraction. He famously walked out of a performance of the work, saying, ‘If I keep listening to Beethoven’s Appassionata, I won’t be able to finish the revolution.’19

  Leo Tolstoy suspected that Beethoven’s virtuosic ‘Kreutzer’ sonata for piano and violin could arouse a murderous passion. In 1889 Tolstoy wrote out his fear in the novella The Kreutzer Sonata, in which the narrator Pozdnyshev murders his accompanist wife out of jealousy over her musical relationship with the male violinist while they rehearse and perform that work.

  Happily in the world of Peanuts, all Schroeder had to worry about was the unwanted attention of Lucy van Pelt. In the stage play You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, Lucy confesses to Schroeder while he plays Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight’ sonata that it’s always been her dream to marry someone who plays the piano. As soon as he reaches the end, he frowns at Lucy and walks away. I couldn’t blame him—why any little girl would be thinking about getting married was beyond me. When Lucy replaces Schroeder’s portrait of Beethoven with a framed picture of herself, Schroeder goes berserk. He may be able to ‘save…himself from everyday neuroses by sublimating them in a lofty form of artistic madness’, as Umberto Eco has suggested,20 but he could not play Lucy away. Undaunted, she shrugs, remembering the wise words of her aunt Marion, who told her, ‘Never try to discuss marriage with a musician.’

  Watching these child-adults as a child, I was exasperated by Lucy’s refusal to leave Schroeder alone to practise. How could you improve with someone like her around? All she ever wanted to do was go outside and play. Schroeder knew that to be an excellent pianist you had to do it alone, without anyone bothering you, spend lots of time practising, and not worry that you were missing out on anything. Schroeder was my introduction to the physical and social isolation necessary to become an instrumental virtuoso.

  From Monday through Saturday the talkback radio presenters shouted in the background of our family life like angry gods, but for one morning each week my mother allowed the wireless, as she called it, to be switched off. My parents obeyed their day of rest with their own rituals of words and music.

  My mother pored over one of the two home-delivered Sunday papers at the kitchen table, beginning with the personal classifieds, a section she dubbed Hatches, Matches, Catches and Dispatches. She would proceed to read the news of a total stranger’s death, or a summary of the most gruesome murder or severe prison sentence, in crisp syllables at maximum volume, for the benefit of my father in the next room, who read the other newspaper from the sports pages forward. He sat in a chair in easy reach of the record player, wearing a fresh pair of KingGee work shorts and a white singlet. His location reflected a rare period of leisure, but his outfit announced his imminent deployment to outstanding tasks around the house. My father’s crossed legs, with their knobbly knees and tapping feet, were the first things I saw when I emerged from my bedroom. The blue veins protruded from his pale calves like a relief map of Australia’s east coast. The tabloid newspaper in his hands obscured the rest of him, but the angle of its open pages revealed his degree of progress from the back page with the accuracy of a sundial.

  There was no rest for the record player on Sunday mornings, though each week my father’s musical lesson comprised a different text. Sometimes it was the yee-ha banjo business of John Denver’s ‘Grandma’s Feather Bed’; at others, the rambling anecdotes of Tom T. Hall or Willie Nelson. Either way, I woke up to a story in music whether I wanted to or not. Of Dad’s Sunday morning singer-songwriters I unconsciously favoured the British: melancholy Ralph McTell, who mourned the homeless of ‘The Streets of London’, and the wordy Gilbert O’Sullivan’s rhyming nasal twang. In his enthusiasm, my father often attempted to engage me in music appreciation while I still had sleep in my eyes. Decades would pass before he slept later than 7 a.m. ‘You can sleep when you’re dead,’ he’d say. He expected me to be alert from the moment I was vertical. ‘Johnny Cash: listen!’ he’d say, lowering the newspaper, and I would hear immediately that he had left his teeth in the glass jar in the bathroom. Without them Dad’s enunciation was less than perfect, especially when he attempted a mouthful of sibilants: ‘In this song he’s singing about a boy named Sue.’ Out of a fear of disappointing my father, I expressed more enthusiasm for Johnny Cash’s throat-lozenge growl than I sometimes felt.

  Dad’s favourite sound of all was a big band in full swing. Nelson Riddle and the Dorsey Brothers often performed for us on Sunday mornings. Operatic singing might have been likened to the strains of a drowning cat, but the scat singing of Ella Fitzgerald was considered genius. And Sinatra was only ever referred to as Frank. Those musicians known outside our house for breaching the wall between classical and jazz music only performed one style inside it. I heard Benny Goodman play Duke Ellington but not the Mozart clarinet concerto. Instead of Rachmaninov, George Gershwin performed ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ for us. For years Leonard Bernstein was beloved to me not as a conductor but as the composer of West Side Story. My knowledge of ‘classical music’ was limited to the orchestral soundtrack of Walt Disney’s Fantasia. There were no ‘classical music’ records in my house. I didn’t know that Beethoven was a composer of ‘classical music’, and I wasn’t familiar with the term ‘classical music’ or any of the myriad ways in which grown-ups discourage curiosity by naming things and placing them in clearly marked boxes.

  The first time I heard Beethoven at home was when Schroeder played the ‘Pathétique’ and ‘Moonlight’ sonatas in the Peanuts television specials broadcast in Australia during the early 1970s. To sit at those black and white keys helped Schroeder escape real life while keeping completely still; to disappear without leaving the house; to explore pretty sounds that were pure and abstract and free from the world of baseball and Christmas and neighbours like Lucy who didn’t understand his passion and dedication. He played in an attitude of joyful self-improvement, looking up to Beethoven who watched over him from the lid of his piano. But Schroeder didn’t play simply to get better at playing: his virtuosity was tied to a deep emotional need, and this magical connection to the instrument fascinated me. For as long as his fingers touched the keys in exquisite isolation, Schroeder found relief from frustration, anxiety and distress—emotions I was yet to name.

  In the early 1970s the ‘Moonlight’ sonata was just as popular as it had been after its composition in 1801, and it was one of the first melodies I played by ear on my toy piano. But Beethoven wasn’t too happy about its runaway success. ‘Surely I’ve written better things,’ he later told Czerny.21

  Over time I came to realise that of the music I heard during the Peanuts specials, Schroeder’s Beethoven recitals weren’t my favourite. What I enjoyed best were the jaunty soundtracks. Free of any music terminology to name what I heard, my young ears felt an intense affinity for the syncopated swing, the pretty melodies and the minor-sevenths. I thrilled to the walking bass, and the tap and swoosh of the brushes over the drums. Most of all, the miracle of the piano—by turns happy, wistful, ecstatic, morose, hopeful, lonely, impatient—somehow encompassed a whole world of feeling: not just how Charlie Brown or Snoopy or Lucy or Schroeder felt, but how I felt while watching them. It was the piano music that helped me to know how I felt about what I saw—and somehow made me feel it more intensely. How did the music do that? And would it be possible for me to learn how to play such music?

  Despite admiring Schroeder’s virtuosity and dedication to practice, even then I could tell th
at his passionate attachment to Beethoven was at the expense of other kinds of music. In that attitude, too, he reflected the ambivalence of his creator towards the music that came to define the sound of the Peanuts specials. ‘I think jazz is awful,’ Schulz told a journalist only months after agreeing to mix traditional hymns with jazz music for the first special, A Charlie Brown Christmas, which aired in December 1965. More than ten years earlier, in the strip for 9 December 1952, Charlie Brown interrupts Schroeder while he’s playing the ‘Moonlight’ sonata to ask, ‘How about a little jazz?’ Schroeder pokes out his tongue and looks physically ill. When Lucy arrives in the final panel, Charlie explains, ‘Just the mention of the word is enough to make him shudder.’22 We can’t help how we respond to certain types of music, and on the subject of jazz, Schroeder and I had to agree to disagree. Between my father’s record collection and the Peanuts soundtrack, I was hooked for life.

  My mother stood behind me plaiting my hair while I sat on one of the kitchen table chairs turned sideways, trying hard to stay still. I was about to attend my first live jazz concert with my father, who had bought us tickets to see the Jacques Loussier Trio perform on its 1976 Australasian tour. Mum preferred crooners—like Andy Williams singing ‘Moon River’—to the jazz instrumentalists we were going to see, and was staying home to look after my brother.

  As usual, there wasn’t a single strand of hair on my six-year-old head in doubt of its place. Everyone had to be able to see my face. I never understood how my face was obscured by my hair hanging loose to my shoulders—I could see the faces of other girls with long hair very clearly. But the display of abundant hair, without any attempt made to control it, was deeply troubling to my mother. Tucking my hair behind my ears was insufficient.

  ‘Pull your hair back,’ she’d say to the parade of glamorous strangers who graced our television screen. At night, topping and tailing green beans into her giant silver colander while she watched, she would yell at actresses and newsreaders. ‘Look at that hair. It’s a mess. Why doesn’t she chop it off?’ Hair had to be secured with elastic bands, with braiding, with patience. Even on the rare occasions when I wore my hair down it was still partially up, its front locks restrained by a barrette that, as far as Mum was concerned, represented the only thing standing between her daughter and chaos. I was relieved these women couldn’t hear her; I was used to it but suspected others might find her opinions a bit extreme.

  My mother wore her straight hair short but permed, in a style that required a maintenance visit to the hairdresser every Wednesday morning. But it never occurred to me to question why I had long hair, nor why cutting it was out of the question.

  My father and I walked up the broad and shallow steps from George Street to the main entrance of the Sydney Town Hall. Inside, hundreds of women’s shoes clicked as they walked across the white marble floor, though my polished round-tipped Clarks made no sound. After ascending a staircase that led to the balcony, we sat about a third of the way down one of the long sides of the rectangular auditorium. I stood up to peer over the edge—our row was close to it—and stared at all the grown bodies filling the seats below us. I was short for my age and understood, as my father must have when reserving the tickets, that I wouldn’t see anything of the concert if I were trying to look over the heads of several hundred adults. On the stage I saw an enormous grand piano, a double bass lying on its side, and a drum kit shaped like a cresting wave. I thought of Schroeder and Snoopy’s combo.

  The central dilemma of the Peanuts TV special Play It Again, Charlie Brown is whether or not Lucy and Charlie can convince Schroeder that ‘it’s all right to play some modern music’. Having secured Schroeder his first gig, Lucy is distraught when Peppermint Patty forbids him from playing Beethoven. Instead he’s to play with the ‘combo’, which consists of scruffy Pig-Pen at the drums, Charlie on the acoustic guitar, and Snoopy playing ‘walking bass’ by climbing all over the gigantic instrument. When Schroeder discovers the combo jamming on a bluesy syncopated number, he is so disgusted he mimes a gag reflex to the flummoxed Lucy, pretending to throw up. ‘I’ve sold out,’ he cries.

  I had first heard The Jacques Loussier Trio Plays Bach during one of those musical Sunday mornings at home. On that album and many others, the French pianist used Johann Sebastian Bach’s compositions as the basis for jazz improvisations. I don’t think I had ever really listened to the music of Bach before I heard these improvisations. But I was far from alone in my enchantment with Loussier: by the time of the Town Hall concert, his trio had sold millions of albums and been touring the world since before I was born.

  Depending on your point of view, Loussier either practised the worst kind of musical miscegenation—playing a white man’s jazz that bypassed the African roots of the genre via a long European detour—or he was a musical evangelist, spreading the love of improvisation and syncopated rhythm to millions of listeners who enjoyed it without knowing that improvising had been part of the music of ancient Greece, of Gregorian chant and medieval secular music, and a common and prized skill among European musicians for hundreds of years.

  Today we know Johann Sebastian Bach as a prodigious composer, but in the first half of the eighteenth century he was regarded as an exceptional improviser. Beethoven, whose improvisations in performance were said to be more astounding than his printed compositions, wrote: ‘Real improvisation comes only when we are unconcerned [with] what we play, so—if we want to improvise in the best, truest manner in public—we should give ourselves over freely to what comes to mind.’23

  Until tonight’s concert, Loussier’s approach to Bach had been a mystery for my ears only, but now I watched it come to life. Even though I knew what trio meant, I could hardly believe that there were only three musicians on that wide stage. Somehow they created an entire world of sound. I can still see the double-bass player plucking the long strings of his instrument, one hand down low and the other up high at the neck, to produce those soft staccato steps that led to the opening of ‘Pastorale in C Minor’.

  Through my father’s binoculars I saw the bassist and pianist communicating with their eyes: each lifting an eyebrow or nodding when it was time for the other to begin or finish their solo. The drummer shared a similar intimacy with the bassist, each smiling when some aspect of one’s playing pleased the other. It surprised me to see how actively they listened, how attentive they were to each other’s every note and gesture. They looked like good friends having the time of their lives. I wondered how they kept track of what they were playing and where they were in the piece. Loussier didn’t refer to printed music although the bassist had some loose sheets of paper scattered near his feet. The drummer kept them all in time, but despite the responsibility he seemed so relaxed. I envied their familiarity with each other, their easy confidence on the stage, how they weren’t embarrassed that everybody was looking at them.

  I had played Dad’s recording so many times that I recognised the Bach compositions, but the music came out differently on stage. How thrilling it was to hear the difference. The possibility that there could be such variation within the boundaries of a single piece thrilled me. I understood that the discrepancy between each performance of the same tune was intentional: the point was to honour the original composition with harmonically appropriate changes that became possible only within the notated boundaries of the melody and chords. My ears heard enormous freedom in music that offered flexibility within the larger context of an agreed form.

  It surprised me to see the musicians sweating, or reaching for nearby glasses of water. These men had seemed like gods to me—that they felt sweaty and thirsty was liberating. It gave me hope that when I grew up I might be able to play like them. I wanted to play all of the instruments. I wanted to know how to sit at a piano with other people and produce the exquisite sensation that made it hard for me to sit still. I thought that to be a grown-up playing music like this on a stage for an audience was the greatest possible thing in the world to do. It didn’t occur to
me that these grown-ups were all men, or that this fact might be in any way significant.

  When I handed back the binoculars, my father smiled at me with the pride of a man who knew his hard-earned money had not been wasted.

  It wouldn’t be easy. I would have to practise all the time, like Schroeder, to become good enough to play Bach. Then, when I could play Bach, maybe I could show him how much I loved his music by dancing with and around his beautiful melodies. How marvellous it would be to talk to a composer across time using my hands and my imagination at the piano, playing new variations on familiar themes. Schroeder might not have understood, but it was time for me to put away the toy piano. I needed to learn how to play Bach, so I could play like Jacques Loussier.

  5

  ALICE MAY MORRISON TAYLOR. IT WAS hard to credit that my scary grandmother owned a maiden name of such glorious abundance. Until I saw her name written down in its entirety—at which time I was seized with the compulsion to read each word out loud, as if it were a poem—she had only ever been Granny, or, much later, the posthumous Alice Lloyd, with its three paltry syllables. But Alice May Morrison Taylor: the syllables, clustered in ones, twos and threes, had the gravitas of a complex chord played with two hands.

  Alice was born on 8 July 1895, the second-oldest of five children born to Charlotte and James Taylor of 370 Dumbarton Road, Partick, in the west end of Glasgow. Home was one level in a three-storey tenement of sooty blonde sandstone, one of many rows of such housing built for the workers who had flooded into the city during the nineteenth century to work in its mills and shipyards. James Taylor worked for Denny’s Shipyard, which sat at the mouth of the River Leven where it met the Clyde, just below Dumbarton Rock. Denny’s was as famous as Charles Dickens.