‘I BELIEVE YOU LIKE TO PLAY Buyeer, young lady,’ said Mrs Wilcox. A few weeks earlier, on my seventh birthday, my parents had asked if I would like to learn to play a real piano. From my obsessive devotion to the toy version, they had concluded that mine was a love that would not burn fast and die.
Apart from my grandmother, my piano teacher was the oldest woman I had ever seen close up. Mrs Wilcox was tall and thin and walked with a slight stoop. She had a big round face that reminded me of an orange. She spoke with an English accent and looked me straight in the eye. I felt afraid of her, especially after she had suggested at my first lesson that Mum wait outside in the car.
‘Buyeer?’ I said, bewildered. I had never heard of him.
Mrs Wilcox grabbed one of her earlobes and rang it like a bell. ‘By. Ear. Your mother told me you can play on your toy piano what you hear on records and the radio. Not everyone can do that, you know.’
At home, hunched over my instrument while nestled in the golden shag pile, sitting cross-legged in front of the turntable as if it were some high-fidelity altar, I played, paused and replayed individual tracks, picking my way across a few of the melodies Frank sang, such as ‘Night and Day’, ‘I’ve Got You Under My Skin’ and ‘All of Me’. Away from the record player, I found that I had not only memorised the melodies but the lyrics too. But just because I could remember the words and copy the melody on my toy piano didn’t mean I understood what Frank or Ella was singing about. What was a ‘lush life’? And how could love be ‘for sale’? It didn’t disturb my parents that I listened to lyrics about adult relationships, no matter how coy the phrasing. In a general sense I knew that Frank sang about how men fall in love with women, but my concept of adult love, like my understanding of how his voice was contained in the grooves of the black vinyl disc I repeatedly spun, remained as remote and vague as the future.
No one quite knew for sure where Mr Wilcox was, or indeed if he had ever existed, but for decades Mrs Wilcox had taught piano and flute to Hunters Hill’s schoolchildren from her home about halfway along the suburb’s long, narrow peninsula. Her living room contained a sofa and two upholstered chairs, a cabinet full of books and knick-knacks, and her black upright piano. Through a large window one branch of a pale eucalyptus tree creaked in time to the invisible music of the breeze.
As Mrs Wilcox talked about the importance of listening carefully and sitting up straight and practising every day, I grew impatient. I didn’t know what she was talking about, but I understood instinctively that if I remained still and was very polite, I might get to touch the piano in the corner. I couldn’t take my eyes off it: the white keys looked as smooth and delicious as vanilla ice cream. And then there were the shiny surfaces of the black keys, and the piles of books and papers along its top. I had never been so close to a real piano before. The afternoon light skipped across the polished side closest to the window, reflecting the clouds and shadows.
‘Would you like to come and sit at the piano?’ Mrs Wilcox said at last, though it could only have been five or ten minutes.
Despite my eagerness to touch the keys, I approached the instrument with my hands by my sides, as if it were a horse that might flinch and run away. When I hopped up on the black leather piano stool, Mrs Wilcox helped me into what she called the correct playing position. My feet, encased in white socks with frilled edges and black patent Mary Janes, were still a year or so away from touching the floor. I saw my fingers hovering over the white notes as if it were the most natural thing in the world for them to do. The position felt slightly uncomfortable—my arms held aloft as they had been in my few dance classes—but somehow I already understood that in time the awkwardness would pass. Mrs Wilcox had the key to all the secrets the notes had to tell me, and one day soon I would know them.
To practise on a piano between lessons, I had to walk from home around the corner and a short way up the steep incline of De Milhau Road to Mrs Weir’s house. Mrs Weir and my mother were friends. I called her Mrs Weird, but not to her face. The journey, which took all of one minute, would today be considered too dangerous for a seven-year-old, with paedophiles allegedly lurking behind every tree.
My own fears were neatly internalised even if they were as obvious as daylight to the outside world. I clutched my beginner’s book in front of my sausage-shaped torso and worried that Mrs Weir’s son Andrew, who went to my school, would be home—I didn’t want him to hear me fumbling around, trying to remember which note was which. He was a year older than me but did not play the piano. I couldn’t understand how it was possible to have a piano in your living room and not at least try to play it. If I had a piano at home I knew I would play it every day.
When I arrived, Mrs Weird would have a biscuit and a glass of milk set on the kitchen table for me as if I were Santa. The more she smiled the more embarrassing it was to make my first attempts to string notes together in front of her. I could hardly hear myself playing for worrying about what she thought. There was so much to take in, and I wanted to understand it all at once. While perfectionists understand that mistakes are inevitable, they prefer to make them in private.
One of my earliest tasks was to learn which note on the keyboard corresponded to the black circle with the long stalk on each of the first, second, third or fourth lines of the printed music. Mrs Wilcox had taught me the phrase Every Good Boy Deserves Fruit as a way to remember E-G-B-D-F, the name and order of the notes on the black lines in the right hand from low to high. The phrase stuck in my head but didn’t help. I believed that good boys deserved chocolate or a new toy, but C’s home wasn’t on one of the lines. And there was no T for toy, in any case. The piano’s alphabet was quite limited really, going only from A to G. With so few notes to learn, I suspected I’d have the instrument sorted out pretty quickly. The notes that sat in the white spaces between the black lines were easy to remember: F-A-C-E.
The quite ordinary Mrs Weird who had the piano was related to the Weirds who lived next door to us. But they really were strange, having an ant farm in their kitchen and driving to church every Sunday. The only ant my mother would tolerate in her kitchen was a dead ant; she depressed the bug-spray trigger on hapless insects with the zeal of a mass murderer. On Sundays, Dad was often gardening when the next-door Weirds drove past on their way to church; he’d stand up in his tattered white singlet and khaki work shorts and yell, ‘Say one for me, Stella!’ waving them off with his wood-handled garden shears.
My own experience of Sunday school had been short-lived. The photographic record suggests that I wore some great outfits to those Bible lessons. In remedial-sized handwriting we wrote down key points in the life of Jesus and recreated His most significant moments using coloured pencils in soft-cover booklets. Sunday school was where I’d heard stories about God switching on the lights on the first day, an old man who killed his son, a woman who ate an apple. But one day, when I’d answered the question ‘Who is Jesus Christ?’ with a triumphant ‘A superstar!’, the Sunday school teacher had seen fit to call my mother. At this rate, it would take more than a pair of polished shoes and a purple dress to get me into heaven.
Ironically my debut performance at one of Mrs Wilcox’s regular student concerts, after just three weeks of lessons, occurred in the church hall where I had incorrectly identified Jesus. As I strutted towards the piano, I did not imagine that ‘Indian Dance’ was a racial profile of indigenous Americans set to music or a simple tune requiring almost no dexterity. ‘You should be able to keep a twenty-cent piece on the back of your hand without it falling off,’ Mrs Wilcox had said at one of my first lessons. On stage, my left hand stayed in place for the one-minute duration, hopping up and down on two notes played by two fingers. While this was going on, the right hand pretty much stayed where it was, too, hovering over a five-note span and depressing the keys in a repeated pattern. The other thing that didn’t move was my hair, which my mother had pulled back so tightly from my seven-year-old face that it made me look as though I was still only six.
Like Czerny’s teaching method 137 years earlier, Mrs Wilson’s assumed from her student’s first lesson that the goal of playing the piano was performance. In this respect she also emulated Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, who despaired of practising without the prospect of an audience: ‘Why should she play? Who would hear her? Since she could never sit on a concert stage in a short-sleeved velvet gown, running her light, graceful fingers over the ivory keys of an Erard piano and feeling the ecstatic murmur of the audience flow around her like a warm breeze, there was no point in going through the boredom of practising.’
I wore cotton rather than velvet and sat at a Yamaha upright in a church hall rather than at a grand Erard on a concert stage, but the silent attention of an audience was intoxicating. There was no radio blaring out the news every half-hour, and my brother had no choice but to sit still and listen to me. He and Dad would catch up with the footy in the car on the way home. The piece was so simple that I felt confident performing it, and to play solo made me feel special, no matter how fledgling my talent. I smiled throughout my minute on stage, delighted at the way my hands worked accurately in the public spotlight, relieved to discover that I genuinely enjoyed playing for others, and excited about my next lesson and having new pieces to learn. There was no ‘ecstatic murmur’ among the audience as in Madame Bovary’s fantasy, but the applause was genuine. Afterwards, over tea and biscuits up the back of the hall, I smiled at compliments from familiar faces.
Soon after the concert, Mrs Wilcox suggested to my mother that I would improve more quickly if I had my own instrument. Mum promptly informed my father that the time had come to buy me a real piano.
Her clairvoyant had been right.
With my father I roamed a piano display room, thrilled at the thought of my practice sessions at Mrs Weird’s house coming to an end. Surrounding me were black pianos, brown pianos, and a vast gleaming piano the colour of white chocolate. Until that moment I hadn’t realised that grand pianos came in different sizes, or that anyone other than Liberace had access to a white one. We proceeded past the Steinways and the Bösendorfers, the Kawais and the Beales, to the display of modest uprights that occupied the far corner of the room. A salesman began to pay us attention using his peripheral vision.
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 pins 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.