Girls at the Piano Read online

  Dad nudged me onto a stool. ‘Go on, play something,’ he said.

  Neither of us had any idea what to look for in buying a piano. I was sitting before a small reddish-brown Yamaha, transfixed by the sheen of the wood and the polished white notes, smooth as the collars on the shirts Mum ironed for Dad. Did brand-new pianos arrive by plane, or by sea? How would you get one out of the store and into your house? And where would your mother allow you to put it? At seven I had no sense of what a piano cost, or what other purchases my parents had deferred so that I could have one.

  Our generation-spanning ignorance must have been obvious to the salesman, who drew nearer as I attempted to reproduce by memory a simple melody from one of my beginner’s books. In my nervousness, the fingers of my right hand tripped over each other.

  ‘Oops! That’s the wrong note,’ I said, before playing the melody correctly.

  ‘The important thing is she knew she’d made a mistake,’ said the salesman, now standing at my father’s elbow and confident of a sale.

  Dad interpreted his ego-stroking comment as proof of my precocious talent, and the chestnut upright arrived at our house ten days later.

  A shining Japanese-manufactured piano now stood in one corner of what in our house was known as the Sitting Quietly room. Before now I had only ever gone in there to read, curled up on a high-backed olive-green sofa chair. It was a great place to be by myself. Covered in pale golden wallpaper and straw-coloured shag pile, the room featured a square glass coffee table that only ever had one empty ceramic bowl sitting perfectly in its centre. A still-life painting, minus the life.

  When I lifted the lid of the keyboard for the first time, I was surprised to see a sash of purple felt draped across it, as if the Yamaha had just won a beauty contest for its perfect but modest proportions. I didn’t know which note to touch first. The black keys looked like the mane of a wild horse. I pressed a white key near the middle with the tip of my right index finger, as if I feared it would bite me. The instrument settled in the tufted carpet, its brass pedals hovering above it like three tiny feet. You could raise the top of the piano and prop it open with an in-built stick that stood up in a special cavity in the underside of the lid. When you played the piano with its lid open, it echoed and rumbled more loudly than when the lid was closed.

  After a few days my mother placed one of her porcelain figurines along the piano’s closed top. Her Lladró collection—polished tableaux of labour and romance that included a pair of courting Mexican peasants (complete with sombreros) and a captain of the British Navy consulting his map of territories yet to be colonised—abhorred a vacuum. She had often mentioned that she would have loved to learn the piano when she was a girl, but that her family was too poor to afford lessons. Now, with the upright making itself comfortable in the Sitting Quietly room of her own home, my mother chose to dust it as if it were the largest figurine in her collection, rather than touch the keys directly with her fingers. In later years I would remove the figurines so I could practise with the lid open, but back then I had to ask her to remove them. There was a connection between my mother’s insistence that my hair be tied back at all times and her preference for keeping the lid of the piano closed, but I failed to see it then.

  The piano tuner, who arrived two weeks after the instrument, wasn’t happy about its location. Its back was exposed to the large window that looked east to the Tarban Creek bridge, where the sun rose on the cars and trucks that drove across it all day and night.

  ‘He said, “You’ve got two walls of glass meeting in this corner. The sun will stream in and cause it to go out of tune,”’ my mother reported when I got home from school. ‘He said it’s the worst place for the piano.’ She shook her head, her eyes flashing at the memory. ‘The hide of him, telling me where to put the piano!’

  I felt sorry for the tuner. He probably knew what he was talking about, but not that it was no use offering a contrary opinion. The only alternative would have been to move the piano against the shortest wall and put the cream sofa in the sunny corner. Even I could see that this wouldn’t work: the sofa was too big. Anyway, my mother was right—the sunlight would have faded the fabric.

  ‘I told him that’s too bad and that’s where it’s staying,’ she said with the sharp edge in her voice that acted on me as a bridle did a horse. I was certain the piano tuner wouldn’t have mistaken her tone either, before remembering he was self-employed and tuning the instrument where it stood.

  On Wednesdays I could hardly wait for school to end so I could sit on my teacher’s smooth black leather piano stool and explore her books of music manuscript. Like many beginners, I had started with John Thompson’s series, including the classic Teaching Little Fingers to Play, before moving on to Robert Schumann’s Album for the Young, along with The Children’s Bach by Johann Sebastian himself. I can still picture those creamy quarto-sized pages crammed with squiggles and lines and dots and white-faced notes and black blobs—and running through them all, like a comb through the knots in my hair, the five lines for each clef, treble and bass, right hand and left (more or less). ‘I didn’t understand anything until once I saw a musical staff at the top of a greeting card,’ wrote Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva of her struggle to learn notated music, ‘where, instead of notes sitting on the staff, there were—sparrows! Then I understood that notes live on branches, each one on its own branch, and from there they jump onto the keys, each one onto its own. And then it makes a sound.’26 In her 1934 essay ‘Mother and Music’, Tsvetaeva—who became one of the twentieth century’s finest poets—confesses she disliked simultaneously reading and playing music, feeling that the notes hindered her. My experience was the opposite: to me the written notation was a puzzle or a secret that I could understand, if I paid attention to Mrs Wilcox and practised every day.

  My mother had taught me to read letters and words, but learning to read music was my independent discovery. The very idea that a circle with a straight tail corresponded to a particular note, that a symbol written on paper indicated not only the precise pitch of a sound but its duration too, was so intoxicating I kept coming back to the piano stool for more. But reading music was exhausting—you needed to be able to read up and down, to the right and to the left, using your full concentration. And even when you did that, the music never meant anything more than the pretty sounds it made. The combination of dots and lines weren’t like letters forming words; they weren’t about anything. Still, I was learning to speak a new language, and I didn’t want to stop talking. ‘I know every thought in your head,’ my mother sometimes said to me as a warning against discord; but she didn’t know this. My anxiety to please her was countered by the pleasure I felt at the piano, my little fiefdom of discipline and delight. As the only one in my family who understood what the black notes and straight lines meant, I associated notated music with privacy and power, and the piano became a secret place I could go where no one else could follow.

  As I progressed, getting the notes under my short impatient fingers was only one aspect of learning a new piece. Another was learning the vocabulary of music’s written language, which was primarily Italian. The pages of my Bach Two-Part Inventions, a classic teaching text for beginners, were filled with Italian words and phrases. Allegro tranquillo at the top left of the two pages of ‘Invention 13 in A minor’, for example, instructs the pianist as to the speed (allegro means fast) and tone (tranquillo, no prizes for guessing) at which she should embark—and though I’d never had a problem with playing fast, the tranquil part was more elusive. Presto was my preferred tempo to play, though andante, for a walking speed, was my favourite adjective. I loathed largo; its slow pace required patience, restraint, and what Mrs Wilcox described as an emotional connection with each note, whatever that meant.

  There was the fancy f that I knew meant forte, loudly, and the mf that added mezzo to the forte and indicated a volume about halfway between f and the p for playing softly, piano. There were the signs that looked like the bobby p
ins my mother used to keep my hair in place, which, depending on the way they opened, indicated I should gradually get either louder or softer. Beneath one bobby pin the instruction grew quite specific: decresc. poco a poco. How I loved that poco a poco: to get softer, little by little. The abbreviation dimin. told the pianist to become quieter—in English, to diminish it—while cresc. suggested it was time to play louder.

  In 1723, Johann Sebastian Bach described his fifteen two-part Inventions as exercises composed for ‘amateurs of the keyboard, and especially the eager ones’.27 He wrote them for his then nine-year-old son Wilhelm Friedemann. By ‘keyboard’ Bach referred to the harpsichord and clavichord (clavier), which the pianoforte would not dislodge for several decades. About 250 years later, when I was two years into my lessons—near Wilhelm Friedemann’s age and learning Bach’s ‘Two-Part Invention number 13’—my twentieth-century edition marked gradations of piano and forte. The terms sum up the transformative difference of the instrument from those two earlier keyboards: it can play from soft to loud. Because of that development, in the late eighteenth century the pianoforte not only became the dominant keyboard instrument but also quickly made its predecessors redundant.

  An invention is a short work for keyboard defined by its counterpoint. In the case of a two-part invention, two independent and different voices operate in harmony with each other. It was a model for any relationship, really, all those variations of rhythm and melody, all those patterns of the left-hand imitating or varying what the right hand had just played, squeezed into twenty-four bars (in the case of Invention 13) of independent development and harmonious empathy. Just as in Bach’s more structurally complex Preludes and Fugues, the Two-Part Inventions feature the playful sharing of melody between the hands. As in a game of tennis, the right hand throws a fragment of melody after two bars to the left hand, which keeps it for two bars before lobbing the task of melodic development back into the right hand’s court. Again the left hand answers a melodic scrap in the right, only for the conditions to be reversed later in the composition. And on it goes, back and forth across the net of staves and bar lines. A game between two hands, two voices, in which there is harmony and agreement; and if discord should arise, the musical clash soon resolves itself. More Björn Borg than John McEnroe.

  During our lessons Mrs Wilcox hovered over my right shoulder holding her yellow pencil, worn down to a stub. In the Invention, in addition to helpfully inserting a numeral above an especially tricky note to indicate the best finger for me to use, she took her pencilled annotations one step further: she altered the left-hand notation in one bar so my nine-year-old hand could manage it. Even then I wondered what Johann Sebastian would have made of her editorial intervention.

  The future novelist George Eliot was an eager amateur pianist from girlhood, when the world knew her as Mary Anne Evans. As an adult, she described in her letters how playing the piano gave her a ‘fresh kind of muscular exercise as well as a nervous stimulus’.28 As a writer, she endowed several of her female characters with musical talent. In The Mill on the Floss, Eliot channelled her passion for the instrument in the musical preferences of her heroine Maggie Tulliver: ‘The mere concord of octaves was a delight to Maggie, and she would often take up a book of studies rather than any melody, that she might taste more keenly by abstraction the more primitive sensation of intervals.’ If Maggie was managing octaves single-handedly, her handspan was broader than mine. It wasn’t the remote musicianship of the virtuoso that captured Eliot’s imagination; she understood the physical and intellectual challenges the instrument presented to its students, and empathised with her heroine’s faults in playing. ‘Hurrying the tempo…was certainly Maggie’s weak point,’ Eliot noted.

  The beginner’s temptation to hurry was hard to curb. In his instructional Letters to a Young Lady, Czerny warns against the common ‘error of accelerating the time’.29 The off-white pages of my first music books are covered in notes from two distinct hands. Mrs Wilcox’s handwriting is long and slim like she was, neat from years of writing in the margins of music manuscripts at odd angles over the shoulders of her students. All her annotations remind me about tempo. In my own hand, rounder and thicker like my prepubescent torso, are my colloquial translations: Slow down! Do NOT rush!!

  And then there were the punctuation marks, such as the dot beneath a note that told me to play it staccato—to jump off it—as opposed to the smooth evenness of the ideal legato. I had a lazy tendency when first learning a piece to ignore phrase marks, which comprise the internal punctuation of any composition: a musical phrase shapes a series of notes or measures of a piece with its own beginning, middle and end. And just as disrespect for punctuation, now epidemic in the age of instant-messaging, leads to misunderstandings and garbled communication, so my rushed delivery of melodies minus precise phrasing resulted in interpretations that for Mrs Wilcox were semiliterate at best.

  Raising my eyes from Mrs Wilcox’s keyboard, I was often shocked to see myself in the shining black surface of the piano. It wasn’t the same as seeing my reflection in the mirror over my bedside table, where the ribbons my mother tied around my pigtails hung above a tiny vase of fresh flowers she sometimes placed there. Staring into the piano’s black mirror was more like seeing into the future, recognising for the first time the possibility of another version of myself, glimpsing the girl I would become, the girl who could play the piano and understand the world around her through her fingertips, and let her hands speak for her when she could not.

  7

  AT THE PIANO, ALICE MAY MORRISON Taylor picked out the notes she saw in her mind’s eye, repeating under her breath the new hymn the choir had sung this morning. When she listened to the choir she pictured the shape of what they sang. Didn’t everyone? Sometimes the notes marched in a line as straight as Dumbarton Road. Other times the melody would soar as if to the top of Dumbarton Rock, then float back down to the Clyde. If Alice could keep its shape in her mind’s eye during the service and the walk home, she knew she would be able to remember it when she returned to her piano. She had come to think of the piano as hers, because Nance had given up all pretence of playing it, and, despite the organist at church being a man, their parents and brothers considered playing the piano as something only girls did.

  The Dowanhill United Free Church was ten minutes from home. On the way there, one of her brothers would crack the joke about how it should be downhill, like its name. Nance giggled every time, but it drove Alice to distraction. Her favourite moment was rounding the corner into Hyndland Street and seeing the steeple pointing straight up to God. Soon she would be inside the church and singing, even if she were sandwiched in a pew between her fidgeting brothers instead of up the front with the choir where she just knew she belonged.

  ‘Surely there are quicker ways, Mother,’ James Taylor grumbled as they walked home along Hyndland Street toward Dumbarton Road.

  ‘It’s half a mile whichever way we go,’ his wife replied. ‘When Alice joins the choir she’ll have to get there and back by herself, and you know very well this is the simplest.’

  Every Sunday Alice watched the conductor, old Mr Cunningham, her eyes glued to his narrow shoulders as he moved his arms in front of the choir, trying to imagine exactly what he was doing. As long as she could remember, she had yearned to join the choir. But musically speaking, Dowanhill United was a serious business: membership of the choir was by invitation only.

  ‘Mr Cunningham told me today he’d be happy to have you join the choir when you turn twelve,’ her mother had said the previous Sunday afternoon, unpegging the dry sheets from their section of the common clothesline. Alice had bent to help her fold them, trying to contain her excitement. ‘It’s God’s gift to you, your voice,’ her mother had said, the peg lodged in one corner of her mouth keeping her tone flat. ‘Sure as eggs you didn’t get it from us.’

  Despite the peg, Alice had heard the quiet pride in her mother’s voice. But twelve? She had only just turned eleven. How coul
d she possibly wait that long?

  8

  THE PIANO STOOL QUICKLY BECAME THE most comfortable seat for me in any house. At home I was rolled out at dinner parties to entertain my parents’ friends, and on Christmas Day post-pudding for members of my extended family who preferred Bacharach to Bach but politely clapped anyway.

  Because I was a strong sight-reader—meaning that I could play credibly through a piece that was new to me—by the age of ten I was a regular accompanist to the violinists, singers and flautists of my neighbourhood. Like those of any freelancer, my gigs came through my immediate network and word-of-mouth recommendations. Mrs Wilcox’s strongest flute students—which I also became, for a time—needed accompanying at her regular concerts, where I was now a featured soloist at the end of the program. While I rose to the challenge of solo performances, increasing anxiety over forgetting the notes or making an obvious mistake had begun to cloud my enjoyment. I found myself gravitating toward the variety, novelty and companionship of the accompanist’s job: to help the soloist sound their best. A budding violinist at primary school asked me to perform with her for a church concert; a local singer needed me to help her rehearse for an upcoming audition. I said yes to everyone. Accompanying wasn’t about me—it was about making the other musician feel secure.

  Sight-reading is the process of converting musical information from visual signs and symbols into sound. It’s a feat of short-term memory built on the solid ground of cultural familiarity with the type of music set before the musician: a combination of nature and nurture. Research has shown that proficient sight-readers look further ahead in the music than their less fluent counterparts, managing to process and remember a larger eye–hand span—the gap between reading the notes and actually playing them—than other musicians. Similar to reading language by expectation (the unfortunately named ‘chunking’), the effective sight-reader recognises patterns of notes as a single unit.