Flapjacks Again

In the music room of Saint Bernard’s, just above the piano, lettered in gold leaf on the wall, is something old Clara always said, Music is to the arts what love is to the virtues, the greatest. From the time a Saint Bernard girl is in the second grade she is formally exposed to the strains of the Old World, music appreciation class twice a week, and by the time of her graduation will be expected to identify every name brand in the classical music book, to know a fugue by Geisenheimer Muenster Huff from one by Corvo Pecarini, to tell a concerto by Kreuszer from one by Lieberstrom.

The Monday morning after her Friday outing to the Cootie Club, Gloria still has music coming out of her ears and, as fate would have it, music class first period. She comes into the room, more intense than usual, charged with the echoes of her birthday party, All Hollers Eve, and the swinging Apollo Cotton Band. The music teacher, Mrs Melanzano, the wife of the late cello maestro Erno Melanzano, normally demonstrates to the music class just what class music is about by playing phonograph records, directing the girls’ attention to the speaker with her baton.

The lesson for today is on the grand Kirschelmeister, Kleinz Kreuszer. “Of all composers, there are none like Kreuszer,” says Irene Melanzano with a sigh of devotion. “He is our best-loved, and most prolific. Even though he was only in his mid-thirties when he died, he penned more great music than an ordinary great composer could hope for in ten lifetimes …” It doesn’t take Mrs Melanzano long to stack the platters that offer Emmet Franks’ rendering of the adagio movement of Kreuszer’s Piano Concerto in G Major on the spindle.

As she promised Laudette, to try to fit in with the crowd, Gloria pretends to be like the average Saint Bernard girl: terribly smart, terribly rich, and terribly bored, even when the subject happens to be something she’s interested in. Ho-hum, her classmates yawn, flapjacks again. But today Gloria’s feigned boredom in music class is suspended. Her ears have an increased depth perception. Wide awake to the power and delight the listener has in adding dimension to sound, she hears full musical spheres in the thin sound coming from those flat spinning disks. Listening is the key, the listener being the essential part of every instrument. Her body-mind is a sensitive sound board, reverberating with the tones of strings, wind, and percussion in the opening orchestral flourish.

Another thing gives her listening an edge over her classmates’: she is familiar with the piece. She’s heard a different recording of it many times in her house coming from her mother’s phonograph, and knows it as a call for her Daddy-o to come to bed. When the orchestra rests for a measure, the rest of the class hears the rush of crackle and surface noise which all the fanfare was drowning out, but the amplifier in Gloria’s ears also filters out the static, nicks, dust, and scratches, and cleans the clatter clear to silence. The melody slowly unfolds and the piano between her ears trills like a mating songbird, but with different accents, slightly altered cadences from the version she is used to. She finds herself starting to merge the two static, recorded performances into a living one, an original form that exists nowhere but in her mind, that has the identity of the two renditions, but is itself beyond reproduction. The abstraction augments, rather than diminishes, her enjoyment of the particular interpretation she’s hearing.

The teacher never plays the whole piece. After the first cadenza, Melanzano picks the tone arm off the record, scratching it slightly as she does, and goes rattling on about Kreuszer and tonic, dominant, sub-dominant.

Gloria is surprised to find herself considering a serious study of music. Perhaps not a career, but at least she has a burning itch to put herself to the test of learning more of the mechanics of the art. She knows what theory her mother does and that is too little. Sarah plays almost entirely by ear and her renderings of any piece are highly erratic, subject to change without notice at any point. On occasion Gloria has heard Melanzano play the piano for the class and her playing, in contrast to her mother’s, is halted, studied, as if the piano were a horse on stilts and she were trying to ride it to a perfectly bland, accentless drumbeat. Still perhaps there is something to be learned from her. Gloria startles even herself when, after class, shy and rose-flushed in her tan, she stays to talk to her teacher. “Excuse me, Mrs Melanzano, …”

“Yes, Miss Black.”

“I would be grateful if you would teach me a little more about this Kreuszer music.”

The teacher looks at her with surprise. The girl has barely said “boo” in the whole time, going on six years now, that the two have known one another. “Why, Miss Black, I’d be delighted. Nowadays not many young girls love the great music of the past because they pollute themselves with this modern day filth called ‘jazz’.”

Mrs Melanzano steps on Gloria’s mulatto understanding as well as her sympathy for swing. The teacher says that she believes the musical fashions which are popular today will be forgotten tomorrow and fervently hopes that jazz, which she calls “the product of depraved, uncivilized imaginations”, is the last thing that is here to stay. “It has no place in the life of a young lady. Too much rhythm, if you understand what I mean.”

Of course, I do, you close-minded crank, thinks the hep young kitty, but she knows better than to argue. Gloria recognizes that no music is better or worse than any other, that in the ears of the muse all men and their musics are created equal, and that beauty is in the ear of the listener. If her teacher cannot see the value of something spontaneous she won’t bother to tell her, but Gloria has already figured out how jazz is a metaphor for freedom, a sign of democracy, and is denoted by equal rights for composer, performer, and listener, while classical music is not about freedom at all, but about power, control, and dominion. When she is out for knowledge she is at home with contradiction, and compromise. In young Glory the free and slave states form a more perfect union. She wants to play for the sake of play itself, not necessarily to mistress the most demanding technique, but at least to get better than her mother and Melanzano, and extend her ability to listen intelligently regardless of whether it’s Kreuszer or Cotton in her ears. To her mind the true maestro is the eternal beginner.

She emphasizes Harry Swan’s role in her musical upbringing. “My Daddy-o once told me, ‘Any two can tango, but it takes a special someone to help you enjoy serious music.’”

Mrs Melanzano winces at anything colloquial. The term Gloria coined for the man her mother married sits no better with her than “jazz.” “My dear Miss Black, what an odd way you have of putting things! Whom I think whom you mean is ‘my stepfather’.”

“No, Mrs Melanzano, I didn’t mean your Daddy-o I meant mine.” Gloria tries to get friendly by making a corny Daddy-o-like joke. When Melanzano does not seem amused, she decides to amuse herself by volunteering some unsolicited personal information to really jazz the priggish teacher’s ears. “I didn’t know my real daddy. But my Daddy-o’s a billionaire who got a bug for educated class music up his behind, especially when my Mummy puts on airs of it for him.”

“What?” Mrs Melanzano recoils at what she thinks she has heard. “My dear, I’m sure you didn’t mean what I think you did.” She sees she must be willing to overlook certain things about Miss Black. She reminds herself: Irene, the child’s interest does seem genuine. It’s that that counts. “Do you read music at all, my dear?”

“Some,” says Gloria.

“Do you understand what this says?” says the teacher pointing to the sheet of Kreuszer music, the slow soft moody minor theme of the adagio.

Gloria is no prodigy, but because of the explanations she has had from her mother she can get by the key signature and knows what most of the details on the notes mean. Compared to the rags and rambles her mother has shown her, where the bass follows simple progressions, Kreuszer’s music seems like complexity itself. As she expected, it’s a real challenge. Her eyes hurt and her fingers, long though they be, are stumped.

The teacher goes through it a measure at a time, over and over again, phrase by phrase, until Gloria thinks she understands it well enough to take it home and practice. To supplement it, Melanzano gives her sheets with elementary exercises of scales, chords, and arpeggios.

After a week the student returns to recite for the teacher. She is far from having the Kreuszer down pat. Unable to sustain the tempo with her left hand, she bounces it in a rag time. Her right hand deviates from the wholeness of the melody too. Like corruption, heretical syncopations creep in, a flat note here, a sharp one there, then her mother’s influence shows up whole. What she doesn’t know she fakes by inserting a fistfull of phrases out of the blues, and—

“Enough! Enough! This is not Kreuszer!” The teacher screams, waving her baton. “Stick to what Kreuszer wrote.” She softens her voice to a plea. “My dear, you have talent, but talent is not enough. You must have discipline. The more discipline you have the more you will appreciate the difference between what is art and what is base.”

“You mean improvisation is out entirely?”

“Not entirely, Miss Black. But it’s a cultivated subtlety which marks one player’s inventiveness and uniqueness from another, not his brash depravity.”

Gloria starts to study with Melanzano three times a week and every evening sits at the piano, a serious practitioner. Let the other music in the house play on, the swing in the children’s wing, the amorous strings from her Mummy’s bedroom, she doesn’t let it mix her up, but uses the distractions to help her sharpen her wits on what she’s about: playing note for note, in the proper time, what is written on the sheet in front of her, and only what is on that sheet, as close to the ideal virgin interpretation as she can come. And while her back is straight, her mind is bent on transmitting the nuances to her fingers, the things that sheet music can’t express and what she might be permitted to spell out between the lines.