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.
Sight-reading is an addictive business, because by definition a musician requires vast amounts of fresh notation to develop the skill in the first place, and subsequently to satisfy the need for more music. French philosopher Roland Barthes, a highly proficient sight-reader, has been described as ‘insatiable’ for new music.30 I know this particular lust. I understood musical promiscuity long before any other, always looking for the next piece to play, whether alone or with others. In my case the talent for sight-reading led me to accompanying, which in turn made me a stronger sight-reader, but this isn’t an inevitable path. Barthes sought only new pieces for solo piano, which he would perform every morning for an audience of one—his mother.
Looking back, I can see there was little coincidence that I practised every day before dinner, when invariably my mother would be preparing the meal in the kitchen—right beside the Sitting Quietly room. It was crucial to me that my mother heard me as I played. Sitting at my piano and not being able to see her through the dividing wall, I associated the tones of her voice with the pitch and rhythm of musical notes. Though her words didn’t correspond precisely to any single note, their patterns translated easily enough: in the case of ve-ry good, into two quavers and a crotchet, with an emphasis on the rising pitch of the second word; in the case of that’s nice, darling, four quavers in a symmetrical u-shape that fell from and ascended to the same pitch. In this way my mother’s rising and falling intonation became the essential accompaniment to my domestic piano performances.
Because I was as sensitive to the nuances of my mother’s voice as a seismograph to an earthquake, the worst possible sound was her silence.
One day I helped her fold invitations to the local Rotary Club art show, an enormous act of unpaid labour that my father undertook each year like a volunteer Sisyphus. Usually Mum and I chatted or sat in a companionable quiet, but as the afternoon wore on a cloud came over the silence. I don’t know how I knew my mother’s mood had changed; I could just sense that she was upset about something despite showing no outward sign of it.
I pointed to the pile of sealed invitations in the centre of the kitchen table where we worked. By now there were hundreds of them. ‘Look, Mummy,’ I ventured to puncture the quiet, ‘there’s a wall between us.’
‘There certainly is, my girl,’ she said sharply, as the temperature around the table plummeted. ‘There certainly is.’ She continued to fold invitations while her face froze into the stony silence that could last for days. Talk about a lesson in metaphor.
Her tone sliced me to my stomach, but already I knew better than to ask if anything was the matter. Nothing ever was.
Years later, I wondered if she felt excluded by my relationship with my father, which was bound up in our love of music. It makes me sad to think that she might have longed for the two of us to share something of our own, and perhaps felt—despite the hours we spent together reading and talking—that we did not. So calling out to her from my piano stool wasn’t for coaching or technical improvement: it was for reassurance that she remained pleased. It was she for whom I played, her approval that I sought. The need to hear my mother’s brief encouragements was insatiable. Our ritual of call and response provided regular confirmation that everything was still all right.
I am grateful to my mother for teaching me to keep my ears open at all times for nuance and imminent catastrophe. I developed a finely honed sixth sense for when a musician needs reassurance about when precisely to come in again after several measures of rest, or a subtle advance sounding of the note she is due to sing. Which phrases need extra punctuation, or where in the score the soloist is likely to start running ahead of the tempo. My capacity for attentive listening, when paired with the sight-reading, made me a popular accompanist.
Away from the piano, I was less charismatic. At Hunters Hill Public School, Greta Mitchell wielded social power over me like my mother did in every other aspect of my life. Recently Greta had excommunicated me from her circle without warning. Somehow she had the authority to decide who was in and who was out, as if by being in the same group of friends we formed a scale whose notes only she knew. I was devastated: I looked up to Greta, who had olive skin and played the cello. But she no longer wanted to make even the slightest eye contact with me. When my mother sometimes stopped talking to me or pointedly refused eye contact, I knew, deep down, that her silent withdrawal—those hours and days that felt as if they lasted for weeks—would end eventually. She never explained her silences, though I understood that I had done something wrong. Greta didn’t explain herself, either, but her decision was final. At home I cried at the piano and sobbed into Gail’s matted hair.
‘What a lot of rot!’ my mother exploded when I explained through tears what had happened. ‘Why do you want Greta to be your friend, for god’s sake? Get yourself some new friends.’ The concision and force of her blast stunned me as if I had been wounded. She turned back to the kitchen sink, where potatoes awaited peeling.
What more was there to say, even if I could have found my voice? Empathy was in short supply around our house, whether you were a permanent resident or, like the piano tuner, just visiting. Clearly, the things I felt or had trouble explaining weren’t for telling other people but for keeping to myself. I’d learned my lesson, and I’d never share anything important with my mother again. ‘To feel anything strongly was to create an abyss between oneself and others who feel strongly perhaps but differently,’ Virginia Woolf’s heroine Rachel Vinrace concludes in The Voyage Out. ‘It was far better to play the piano and forget all the rest.’ Like Rachel, I stayed quiet except at the piano, where my fingers spoke with increasing confidence and fluency.
Behind most talented girls at the piano is a highly influential mother. Maria, the mother of Marina Tsvetaeva, was a gifted amateur pianist. But Maria’s father refused her ambition to pursue a professional music career, objecting to the idea of women performing in public. In this attitude Mr Tsvetaeva agreed with most people of the Victorian era, who regarded the stage as next door but one to the brothel. In Miles Franklin’s 1901 novel My Brilliant Career, on learning that Sybylla Melvyn entertains notions of taking singing instruction and ‘going on the stage’, her grandmother says insistently: ‘promise me you will never be a bold, bad actress’.
In ‘Mother and Music’, Marina Tsvetaeva writes about how her mother transferred her professional goal to her daughters. Marina wasn’t the boy whom her mother expected to deliver in 1892. From the moment of her birth, she became her mother’s plan B: ‘When, instead of the longed-for, predetermined, almost preordained son Alexander, all that was born was just me, mother, proudly choking back a sigh said: “At least she’ll be a musician.”’
Poor Marina. At least my mother’s psychic had been able to confirm my gender and musical tendencies prior to my birth. Great expectations are best managed in advance. Marina’s thwarted mother told her: ‘My daughters will be the “free artists” I wanted so much to be.’ And then she forced Marina, the one daughter who showed some natural aptitude for music, to practise for hours daily from the age of four.
‘You’ll sit through your two hours—and like it!’ Marina reports Maria saying to her in the tone other mothers might reserve for the eating of vegetables. Nothing is free, least of all freedom.
In 1906 Marina was headed straight for the Moscow Conservatory when her mother died of tuberculosis. The budding poet-pianist was fourteen. ‘I certainly would have finished at the Conservatory and emerged a fine pianist,’ she reflected almost thirty years later, ‘for the essential capacities were there.’ Instead she became a writer and composed ‘Mother and Music’ as a prose tribute to the fierce ambivalence of the love between mother and daughter. ‘After a mother like that I had only one alternative: to become a poet,’ she writes.
Maria’s high ambition for her daughter to become a concert pianist is radically different from the common expectations of women pianists held throughout the nineteenth century, when it was believed they should be competent but not too good. This attitude is prevalent in Jane Austen’s novels, in which remarkable skill at the piano is something not to be remarked. In Emma (1815), Jane Fairfax’s extreme skill as a pianist places her in a morally shady corner of Austen’s world; the characters loved hearing Miss Fairfax play, but their author was dubious about the real value of such ability. Despite Jane’s talent and beauty, she is never a threat to Emma as the heroine of the story because of her secretive relationship with Frank Churchill, the donor of the sumptuous piano whose provenance remains a mystery for most of the novel.
In Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mary is the most musically accomplished Bennet sister, but Austen has little patience with her: ‘Mary had neither genius nor taste; and though vanity had given her application, it had given her likewise a pedantic air and conceited manner, which would have injured a higher degree of excellence than she had reached.’ She prefers the heroine, Elizabeth, who ‘had been listened to with much more pleasure, though not playing half so well.’
The most famous virtuosa of the nineteenth century was Clara Wieck, known as Clara Schumann after her marriage in 1840 to the composer Robert Schumann. Clara’s father, the pedagogue Frederick Wieck, had groomed her from the age of five for a career as a concert pianist. Despite a long and influential career as a performer, she encouraged her daughters Marie and Eugenie to teach rather than become soloists. They worked alongside her as teaching assistants at Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt in the 1880s, helping students not yet at the technical level to study directly with Clara.31 The majority of those wishing to study with the mother had no choice but to study first with one of the daughters—an impressive feminist twist on the Biblical promise of the Son being the only way to the Father.
As an aspiring pianist, Australian author Ethel Florence Lindesay Richardson—better known by her pseudonym, Henry Handel Richardson—sailed with her mother via the Cape of Good Hope to the Leipzig Conservatorium in 1888. In Leipzig, Richardson’s loyalty to the piano was tested by her love of literature. It was Tolstoy whom she propped on her music stand to read while she ‘ploughed through the needful but soul-deadening scales and exercises’. In her 1948 autobiography, Myself When Young, Richardson writes of not wanting to disappoint her mother:
Here was I, who had been brought to Leipzig at what, for Mother, represented a considerable outlay; on whose behalf she put up with living abroad, which she detested, among people she didn’t like and whose language she could not master. Yet all this she was willing to endure, provided she might take me back to Australia a finished pianist, there to make not only money but a name for myself.32
A professional pianist, making her living in the country in which she had been born and raised: that was all her mother asked. But she had fallen in love—in Germany, with a penniless intellectual to boot. ‘For me now to blurt out that I didn’t propose to put my training to any use, but, instead, contemplated marrying an insignificant young man, would be a cruel blow to her dreams and ambitions.’33 Like Marina Tsvetaeva, Henry Handel Richardson didn’t become a professional musician or put her studies directly to use; but the love of music travels along winding pathways, and in her case produced fiction in which the piano figured prominently. In her 1908 debut novel, Maurice Guest, she describes the tragedy of a young pianist who arrived in Leipzig in the 1890s, wanting desperately to be a concert artist, only to embark on a self-destructive and ruinous relationship with another musician.
Tsvetaeva’s understanding that she would be a poet, not a musician, came as a relief. Yet it was her relationship with her mother, forged at the piano, that shaped her poetry. Her writing was inextricably linked with music because her mind had been shaped by her mother’s passion for it. The torrent that flowed from her pen over the next thirty years reflected a sensibility that had been immersed in a ‘pianohood’ which replaced her childhood. Reflecting on the hours she spent at the instrument as a child, Tsvetaeva saw that it gave her, as an aspiring poet, a place that was both part of her and apart from her. A way of seeing one thing through another: a double vision in which she could be inside and outside her experience at the same time. To play the piano was a simultaneous act of self-discovery and self-expression, a powerful act of metaphor.
I can only be eternally grateful that neither my mother nor father played the piano, and that they outsourced my instruction to Mrs Wilcox. When I first started learning to play, I was so eager to improve that I sat at the piano daily. Other parents had to force their children onto the piano stool or bribe them with television or ice cream. My parents, who were thrilled simply to be able to afford lessons for their daughter, never applied any pressure on me to practise. I applied more than enough of my own. There was so much internalised pressure that it felt as if there was no pressure at all, because it was there all the time. I rode the tension like a monocycle and never fell off.