AT NINETEEN, THE EXAMINATION FOR AN Associate of Music Diploma in Piano Performance loomed on the horizon as prominently as my virginity. A handsome 24-year-old tennis coach had recently offered to seduce me. His tone was that of a man bestowing a great favour, as if my innocence were as easily unzipped as the cover of my wooden Chris Evert racquet. Reader, I wish I could say that I let him, but I was too uptight to return his volley. Madame Bovary used her piano lessons as a ruse to meet her lover; but I used mine as a sublimation of lessons of an altogether different kind.
I channelled my sexual curiosity into piano study, interrogating the pieces my teacher had selected from the works considered suitably challenging by faceless music bureaucrats for the award of diploma. Mr McFarlane was best placed to identify those that suited my temperament and my technique. The A-Mus., as we abbreviated it, was of a different order of magnitude from the annual grade exams: to be eligible for the diploma, the candidate must have completed satisfactorily all grade exams in performance as well as a certified level of music theory. As I approached the summit of amateur musicianship, the sudden rise in the expected level of technical skill induced in me a kind of musical vertigo. A chiselled jaw or a pair of well-developed shoulders would only have caused my concentration to slip.
Frédéric Chopin’s twelfth étude, known as the Revolutionary Study, opens with a declamatory five-note chord in the right hand and a run of semiquavers descending rapidly in the left. Like all études, this is a composition specifically designed to strengthen a pianist’s technique. The demanding work isn’t known as the Revolutionary for nothing. The Polish composer wrote it in despair on learning that the November 1830 Warsaw uprising, led by a group of young military officers against the occupying Russian Army, had failed. Chopin directs the pianist to play allegro con fuoco, or cheerfully with fire, which I interpreted as a highly ambivalent instruction along the lines of grin and bear it.
To open the Revolutionary Study was to encounter the sobering truth that despite more than ten years spent learning the language of music, some works required a native speaker’s fluency that was still beyond my reach. There were too many notes to get under my fingers for me to imagine ever being able to play the piece with feeling and musicianship—let alone cheerfully, or with fire. Which was a bit of a problem considering I was set to perform it in competition at the Sydney Opera House in six months.
My emotional connection to the work was another challenge. I had got a long way on the combination of attention to detail, an obsession with technical improvement, and self-discipline. Despite my ability, the gap between technique and feeling had widened. I was struggling to fake a passionate attachment to the works I studied intensively. Performing Brahms, Bartók and Mozart for my annual exams was an exercise in displaying myself for third-party judgement on a functional, specialised level. Every year my examiners praised my ability to memorise long works and included marks for ‘expression’, but to my ears the production of a feeling—melancholy, passionate or militaristic—smacked always of artifice and cultivation. I knew how to produce the sound of such a feeling, irrespective of whether I felt it. This to me seemed a detached and cynical approach to music that I felt I should have loved intensely; it was little wonder that I considered myself a fraud at the piano. When playing the works of composers for whom I had the greatest affinity—Bach and Beethoven—it seemed on the contrary that my innate love of their structures and harmonies led me to express myself too much, so that I was always having to rein myself in.
Most interpreters of the Revolutionary Study focus on the technical demands made of the performer’s left hand. These demands require the seamless legato playing of semiquaver passages that distinguishes a real pianist from a hack. My instinctual response to the challenge of there being too many notes and not enough time was still to rush through learning the piece as though I were frantically completing some last-minute Christmas shopping. It didn’t matter whether I was eating, reading a novel or walking, I was always in a hurry. At the piano I couldn’t understand anything in part unless I had first awkwardly embraced the whole. Beyond the piano stool, in the real world, I barely said boo without first carefully pondering the implications of a syllable. But at the piano I was cavalier and careless, riding roughshod over the delicate intricacies of melody, harmony and rhythm just to play the complete work poorly with both hands. Too often during practice my lazy fourth and fifth fingers would ride in the slipstream of their stronger siblings. Missed notes and wrong notes were the inevitable result.
‘This is too difficult,’ I finally complained to Mr McFarlane. It was one of the few times in our seven years together that I admitted what I felt about any of the pieces I studied with him. Intimacy was a kind of music I had yet to practise in public—or anywhere, really.
‘No, it’s not,’ he said.
Clearly not every teacher remembers his first time with the Revolutionary Study. He sat behind me in a chrome chair upholstered in fuzzy grey carpet, a benevolent dictator fallen on hard times. And like Mr McFarlane himself, the new chair was wider than the rickety wooden one it had replaced. A few months back he’d stopped tucking in his white short-sleeved polyester shirts.
‘You’ll get there,’ he’d say, ‘just take it one day at a time.’ But I was tiring of his clichéd encouragements. I might as well have complained to my parents: their uniform response to any expression of frustration or difficulty was the highly irritating ‘You’ll figure it out.’ Even though they were mostly right, I had concluded long ago that asking anyone for help was futile.
I continued practising daily, coaxing the reluctant fingers of my left hand to gain fluidity and evenness in playing the Revolutionary Study’s long semiquaver passages. Oscar Wilde quipped that ‘the typewriting machine, when played with expression, is not more annoying than the piano when played by a sister or near relation’, and on reflection my repetitive keyboard exercises must have been one of the banes of my brother’s adolescence. But no sooner had I surmounted the difficulty of the left-hand part than I realised the semiquavers’ dense trees obscured the forest of an even greater challenge: the chord clusters in my right hand that announced the stirring main melody.
With typically dramatic flair, Chopin enunciated the melody in chords for the right hand of between three and five notes played at once, spread over the reach of an octave. That means my right thumb and little finger played the melody using two notes—actually the same note, eight notes apart—while my second, third or fourth fingers played the remaining notes of any complex chords. When the piece is performed properly, the effect is of a bell-like clarity from the obedient multi-voiced choir of the pianist’s right hand. But achieving this effect isn’t nearly as easy as it may sound. The melodic chord passages demand a dual function of the one hand. While my ‘outside’ fingers were occupied in hitting the melody notes with precision, my second, third and fourth fingers had either to step high above the keyboard, like a woman lifting the hem of her dress above the muck, or to stretch up and out over the notes as written, like a can-can dancer wearing the same dress. All of it at precisely the right tempo and at a volume that ranged from the softest piano to the loudest forte, or in the case of this work, sforzando.
There was no getting around the main problem: my right hand was too small for the job. My battered copy of J.S. Bach’s Two-Part Inventions is dotted with my first teacher’s amended notation for seven-year-old hands that could not yet stretch to a single octave. I often suspected that Johann Sebastian—whose pudgy face beneath a ridiculous wig stared out at me from the cover—was not impressed by his exercises being rewritten so that I could splay my undisciplined fingers across the modern keyboard. Now, although my fingers were extremely disciplined, the Revolutionary Study demanded that my right hand play four and five notes simultaneously across an octave. This required the dexterity of a crab’s claws and a handspan of ten notes. In every sense of the word, it was a stretch.
About three months before the competition, a fleeting sensation of tightness in my right forearm began to come and go during my daily practice sessions. It usually appeared when I played a lot of fast notes, and sometimes during the running octaves in the Revolutionary Study. The feeling was most like muscle soreness, as if I had hit too many practice serves on the tennis court. Yet I thought little of it because the strain always receded. To interpret the Chopin with authority, or to hang an Associate of Music Diploma above my desk, meant many hours of training each week. The countless repetitions of the muscles of my hands, strenuously exerting themselves on the most unnatural of movements, was what being a serious piano student was all about.
The idea that some physical discomfort was the inevitable by-product of intensive practice felt natural to me. If the tightness disappeared as soon as I stopped playing, that meant I was working hard. Surely this was a good thing. In the house I grew up in, industriousness ran a close second to cleanliness. After so many years of discipline, it never occurred to me that my technique could be faulty. Assuming that such an error could be observed, I trusted that Mr McFarlane would have seen and corrected it. I deduced that my right forearm was fatigued from practising the consecutive octaves, and that I needed to accept and endure it. There was no point in mentioning it. What could my teacher do except express sympathy?
I also suspected that I was exaggerating the pain I had begun to feel. I had recently played the Revolutionary Study for my father’s Rotary Club to give the work a public trial run one month out from the eisteddfod. Artistically, my performance had as much revolutionary spirit as a can of Coke, but it went off without a technical hitch. Maybe the stiffness in my arm was all in my head.
The Chopin competition was scheduled to begin in a half-hour or so. I had hopped on the 506 bus to Circular Quay as if I travelled there every day, and arrived with plenty of time to turn myself into a nervous wreck. As I slowly made my way along the curving promenade towards the Opera House, my empty bladder insisted it was full. Perhaps I could register for the competition then hide in a toilet stall until show time. On my left, the green and gold ferries nodded encouragement from their watery berths. My black pants felt tight, and I fretted that the lines of my underpants would be visible beneath the stage lights.
Over the days leading up to the competition, the tension in my forearm had become increasingly severe. I’d hoped the sensation would go away of its own accord, but the tightness began seizing the muscles of my right forearm within minutes of practising the Chopin. Sometimes when I cleaned my teeth I would watch my right hand as it gripped the handle of the brush, making the same movements it made every morning; why was it that I could make these repetitive actions and incur no muscular penalty? At the piano, my right wrist began to feel sore and stiff too. From elbow to wrist my arm felt as if it was freezing over in a pianistic permafrost—as if it were the tip of a slow-moving, threatening force beneath the surface of my lightning fingers.
I had mentioned this problem to no one. Shame at my physical limitations as a pianist was a large part of my decision to remain silent, but I had no vocabulary to describe my vague and transitory symptoms. As far as I knew they had no name, and Mr McFarlane had noticed no change in my playing. Nor did it occur to me to withdraw from the competition—finishing things I had started, whether it was a novel or the food on my dinner plate, was a long-ingrained habit. I had agreed to compete with the best of my contemporaries, and I would show up as planned.
‘Athletes of the small muscles.’ That’s what American pianist Leon Fleisher calls professional musicians, who ask extraordinary feats of their fingers and hands. Fleisher was a child prodigy who first performed on the concert stage at the age of eight. After almost twenty years of public performance, the fourth and fifth fingers of Fleisher’s right hand started to curl in on each other as he practised passages of octaves in the Tchaikovsky First Concerto for a forthcoming tour. ‘A hand can take only so much brutalisation before it starts to fight back,’ he writes in his autobiography My Nine Lives. In 1963, with no one to advise him, Fleisher decided to address the problem by practising harder. But his right hand began to feel numb, and his fingers began to cramp. Within a year his career as a concert pianist was over.
Inside the Opera Theatre, which seats 1500, perhaps forty friends and family of my competitors were scattered among the first dozen or so tiered rows behind the orchestra pit. Just twelve of us were playing the Revolutionary Study in competition, and eleven of them were wearing stony faces and Sydney Conservatorium of Music High School uniforms. I realised my solitude was no accident but a strategy to protect me from seeing disappointment in the eyes of those who thought me talented. Despite my regular accompanying, and without being conscious of it, over the course of my high school years I’d grown to associate playing the piano with being alone. It was a safe, controlled, isolated environment. Like a bell-jar.
The first competitor walked on to the stage. He was so petite that a strong gust of wind could have knocked him sideways, but he approached the piano with a confident stride. I wondered if the Conservatorium high school taught him to do that or if it came naturally. When he sat down he spent what felt like a great deal of time adjusting the stool, just as every concert pianist I’d seen had done. Before he’d touched a single note I was completely intimidated.
He executed the Revolutionary Study not only with fire, but also the precision of a machine gun. I hadn’t even played yet and it was all over. As I listened to his faultless interpretation, I diagnosed myself as a fraud. My competitors had chosen to study classical music with such dedication that they had competed successfully for a place at the Conservatorium high school, the main talent pipeline for the Conservatorium of Music. At some critical moment each of these teenagers had decided to pursue classical piano performance exclusively, and had taken what felt to me an almost religious vow by joining the Order of the Conservatorium. The idea of forsaking all other creative possibilities, which was how I regarded their commitment to the classical repertoire, felt like a death. I must have shared a high level of technical skill with my competitors to have propelled me into the ranks of advanced amateurs. But as I heard a succession of good to excellent Chopin interpreters, I understood that their superior ability wasn’t simply a matter of greater dexterity than mine, or more hours devoted to practice: they were passionately attached to their repertoire, whereas Chopin was what I practised in between teaching myself songs by the composers I preferred listening to, such as George Gershwin and Duke Ellington. To perform the Revolutionary Study in public was for me an intellectual challenge rather than an expression of monogamous love. Simply willing myself across the line would never work.
Finally my turn came. I stepped onto the stage of the Opera Theatre and sat at the prow of the gleaming Steinway. I felt the sharp heat of the stage lights on the back of my neck and a cold weight in my abdomen. In the piano’s polished black surface I saw my own reflection. An uncanny sense of familiarity and novelty dazzled me. That long moment before I started playing was the culmination of all the hours and months and years of practice that had brought me here. I had done the work—sometimes joyful, often grinding—that enabled me to compete today. Perhaps I wasn’t at my competitors’ level, but I knew the Revolutionary Study inside out, and in a sense that was enough. My goal was to play the piece through with no mistakes, as if the pain that I had come to associate with this composition had been a hallucination. In The Piano Teacher, Erika Kohut tries to ‘talk a blue streak about interpretation’ to her students, but ‘the only thing the students wish to do is play the piece correctly to the end’. Like me, they ‘are afraid that when they play at the examination, their sweaty, fear-filled fingers…will slip to the wrong keys’. In my focus on technique rather than emotional expression, I had become the worst kind of piano student.
Adjusting the puckered leather stool to a comfortable distance, I began.
Almost as soon as I sounded the declarative octaves of the powerful melody, the familiar painful stiffness arrived. It came earlier than I had ever experienced it during private practice. My forearm felt as if I was trying to lift a dead weight, while my fingers tried to ignore what held them back. I played on, willing my arm to continue despite the slow icing-over that for the first time began to freeze the fourth and fifth fingers of my right hand.
To any rational pianist this creeping immobilisation would have signalled imminent disaster. In my mind’s eye I was only on the third page of seven, but it was obvious to everyone present that something was terribly wrong. The severity of the stiffness was making me botch notes I’d never missed before. Chopin’s étude, intended to help develop a pianist’s technique, had hastened the deterioration of mine.
In the sequence leading up to the second articulation of the melody, during which the hands race down the keyboard in parallel motion, my right hand stopped functioning. The fingers, now fused and curled in on themselves from the stiffness in my wrist, could no longer move independently of each other. My forearm was locked in paralysis too. But my useless claw didn’t stop moving: it skidded, taking my forearm with it, thundering across the treble keyboard in a hail of discordant notes.
Somehow I limped through the final bars. One still had to finish even if one were, in another sense, already finished. The silence in the Opera Theatre was cold and complete. I did not expect comfort from these strangers, but I wished the spotlights would go dark. The humiliation radiated from me so powerfully that it felt as if my freckles were burning. Glancing briefly through the dusty haze of the stage lights, I saw the shadowy outlines of the Conservatorium students hunched together, nudging each other with their elbows like the undulations of a piano accordion. At least they had the decency not to laugh out loud. I had to get out of there before their silence burst.
I closed my eyes as I dipped my head in mortified farewell. A few sympathetic members of the audience clapped to congratulate me for finishing. The rest were too appalled to respond.
It wasn’t until twenty years later, reading the story of Leon Fleisher for the first time in the neurologist Oliver Sacks’s Musicophilia, that I recognised my experience and learned its name: focal dystonia, commonly known as musician’s or writer’s cramp. Some neurologists believe that the localised paralysis is the result of over-practice, during which the brain distorts the mental representation of the fingers such that they overlap and can’t be controlled independently. Focal dystonia disproportionately affects musicians, most frequently pianists, violinists and guitarists, although it also strikes horn players’ embouchure. Instead of maintaining a reciprocal balance between agonist and antagonist muscles, relaxing and contracting in tandem, the muscles contract together. It’s as though the brain reaches a point, after countless repetitions of the fingers making the same movement, beyond which it can no longer differentiate the working of one finger from that of another on the same hand. If you think of a trill, in which two fingers manipulate two neighbouring keys at high speed; or the precise levering of the right hand required to play consecutive octaves, you can marvel at the brain’s capacity to engineer these dexterous feats while empathising with its occasional failure to distinguish one performing finger from another. Research has shown that when parts of the somatosensory cortex, the section of the brain responsible for the sense of touch, repeatedly receive signals extremely close together, they can blur, perceiving the signals as simultaneous.55 Fleisher believes that inappropriate practice techniques, rather than too much practice, are to blame for the task-specific paralysis. In any event, the debilitating cramp is a neurological more than a muscular affliction. The real problem wasn’t in the muscles of my right arm: it was in my brain.
In 1831, the year that Chopin composed the Revolutionary Study, Robert Schumann began to experience cramping in the middle finger of his right hand. At twenty-one he was considered one of Europe’s most promising virtuoso pianists. Terrified of what this inexplicable development meant for his performing career, Schumann turned in desperation to a finger-stretching device. Unfortunately his loss of motor control in the ‘bird’ finger became worse, and within two years he abandoned performing. Today Schumann is best known as one of the finest composers of the Romantic period. His Toccata is the only work of the virtuoso piano repertoire that has no use for the third finger of the right hand. Clara Schumann became the first, and foremost, interpreter of her husband’s works for piano.
Schumann’s is the first known case of focal dystonia—in his case, the loss of task-specific motor control in the middle finger of his right hand while playing. According to contemporary neurologists, dystonia affects approximately one per cent of professional musicians, and Schumann displayed several of the disorder’s primary risk factors: namely that he was a perfectionist, a man, and someone who was prone to anxiety and who practised for extended periods music that placed an extreme burden on the motor skills of the brain.56 The only risk factor I was missing was a penis.
Leon Fleisher tried everything from homeopathy to hypnosis to fix his disobedient right hand. Some doctors thought he had a pinched nerve and wanted to operate on his spine. Many suspected that the problem was psychological. Despite his dystonia, Fleisher’s devotion to the piano led him to become the world’s leading performer of the repertoire that exists for the left hand.
Paul Wittgenstein, brother of philosopher Ludwig, was a promising pianist from a wealthy family who lost his right arm during World War I. After the war he commissioned concertos for the left hand from composers including Ravel, Hindemith and Prokofiev. The Ravel became Fleisher’s signature solo work in one-handed recitals. But he never lost hope of performing again with two hands.
In the late 1980s researchers discovered that small injections of botox can block the nerve signals causing muscles to contract, and in the case of some musicians can help their muscles relax to a level that allows some to resume playing. The effect is temporary, just as it is for those who receive botox injections to relax the facial muscles that cause crow’s-feet. Fleisher was one of the lucky ones: following injections into his right forearm, he played with both hands in a concert with the Cleveland Orchestra in 1996. It was thirty years since his last two-handed performance. Botox didn’t prevent Leon Fleisher from ageing, but it did help him turn back the clock.
When I left the Sydney Opera House after the Chopin competition, an undeniable relief punctured my humiliation. The experience had forced me to admit to myself that I didn’t love the works I was studying so intensively for my A. Mus. A. diploma; that I strongly preferred playing jazz standards and trying, however poorly, to improvise; and that there was therefore little point in continuing my pursuit of a level of technical perfection that I couldn’t achieve, and which, more importantly, I knew I did not want.
I would not be a classical pianist when I grew up. Not only did I lack the passionate dedication for such a life, but there was a physical limit to my ability to achieve it. And in terms of classical piano prodigies, I was already well over the hill.
My right hand had staged an uprising against the excessive demands I had made of it. Unlike Leon Fleisher, I wasn’t prepared to fight this. It took me twenty years to learn that focal dystonia is a kind of rebellion of the body, but the discovery made perfect sense. As a teenager I had agreed, deep down, with what my body was telling me, but had tried very hard to ignore it. It was the only powerful force in my life that I had refused immediately to obey.
Perhaps at this point other students would have tossed in the piano altogether, but the goal of obtaining my performance diploma remained. It was only a month or three away, I reasoned with myself, constitutionally unable to abandon a goal once set. And so I turned up to my weekly lessons with Mr McFarlane, kept practising at home—where the dystonia disappeared now that we had substituted a Brahms prelude for the Chopin—and dutifully passed my A. Mus. A. exam on 25 November 1989.
‘Memory work is commended. There was a sense of performance but do be careful not to allow the audience to be aware by your “grimaces” of everything you are not pleased with in your playing,’ noted one of the two examiners in her handwritten report.
Recently, my friend Kelsey and I discussed our musical adventures in high school. She is the only person from school I keep in touch with, but not only because we were expat Australians in the USA. As teenagers we’d spent a lot of time together rehearsing pieces for her to sing at school concerts with my accompaniment, from Schubert arias through to Lennon and McCartney.
‘I remember listening to you perform when you first arrived at Wenona,’ she recalled. ‘The headmistress asked you to play for the school, and it sounded amazing. I thought, Who on earth is that?’
It’s funny what you choose to remember. I had no recollection of the performance.
‘But I have to tell you,’ Kelsey said, ‘you never looked happy when you played.’
In This Real Night, Rose Aubrey despairs of a new piano teacher who insists she go back to the fundamentals of study. In her despair, Rose considers the tantalising prospect of abandoning the instrument altogether.
For as I sobbed I was only partly anguished. I also saw a vision of myself walking by the river near the Dog and Duck, as happy as the blessed dead, my mind flowing bright and unconfined and leisured as the Thames I looked on, because I had cast away the burden, so infinitely greater than myself who had to bear it, of my vocation. I would earn a living somehow.
Though I was never going to be a concert pianist, and though I’d never felt convinced beyond doubt that the piano was my vocation, I felt the liberation of having cast away the burden West describes. But it wasn’t until I discontinued lessons with Mr McFarlane and stopped practising my scales and arpeggios, my Mozart K280, my Bach ‘Prelude and Fugue in F minor’, my Brahms ‘Rhapsody’ and my Prokofiev ‘Gavotte’, that I felt how heavy and unreasonable my self-imposed burden of solo piano performance had been. After almost thirteen years, my highwire act riding the tension monocycle was over. Now, like Rose Aubrey, I’d have to think about ways to earn a living. I was studying for an Arts degree. I was still living at home. And, on the cusp of twenty, I was still a virgin.