Girls at the Piano

by Virginia Lloyd

  It was through my schedule as an accompanist that I became aware of my preference for improvising. Whenever I set a piece in front of me that wasn’t for the purpose of examination, I regarded the accompaniment as a set of guidelines rather than a prescription. And even when the piece was a set work for study, I found myself straying from the music as notated, my fingers seeking out dissonance and delicious sounds made from notes that weren’t written down. I spent hours by myself at the piano, tinkering with notes, playing with combinations of sounds that my ears heard as pretty, or ugly, or somewhere in between. Often an ugly sound made from a cluster of notes transformed into a gorgeous chord with the simplest of changes; one half-note’s movement, a semitone up or down, was all it took. Perhaps ugly and beautiful were closer than I thought. Maybe any of us, whether we were beautiful or a nondescript and metal-mouthed maiden, were just a few notes away from thorough transformation.

  Practising the second movement of a Mozart sonata, I would lose concentration and after ten minutes find my fingers tracing the patterns of my unconscious on the keyboard. Bored by repetition and rote learning, I thrilled to the variations I discovered by leaving everything to fingers and to chance—or probability, really, based on combinations made possible through the musician’s working knowledge of harmony. Pianist Keith Jarrett, who built his reputation on solo performances of pure improvisation, said in a documentary that he learned he was an improviser by playing classical music. But I refused to embrace the same impulse. Each time I detoured from the notated music I felt guilty about it, as if I were a teenage boy who, having learned to play his own flute, can’t help putting his hand down his pants.

  On my way home from high school I often foraged at Allen’s Music Store in Pitt Street, a vast emporium full of the nutrients essential to my piano diet. It was there that I had discovered the so-called Fake Books, a genre of cheap ring-bound editions that encourage the musician’s departure from through-composed music. In fact, they assume the musician will use a Fake Book to learn a song’s melody and harmonic structure, then depart from them to some degree in performance. Many of the titles in the Fake Books were drawn from the popular canon known as the American Songbook. These songs—which originated on Broadway or in the dance-hall music of the early decades of the twentieth century—became what are known as jazz standards. These days the publications are known as Real Books, the difference being that the songs are now published with the copyright owners’ permission.

  When I brought home my first Fake Book, I was intimidated by the lack of visible notes, but soon realised how liberating it was to use a music chart instead of a notated score. The chord symbols were like a map that worked in reverse, wherever you found yourself: they revealed secrets of familiar territory hidden in plain sight, and made unfamiliar landscapes instantly recognisable. The freedom of finding my own notes to accompany a melody, to cast off from the notated shores, was exhilarating. By contrast with the fully notated music I’d studied so seriously for years, which made me feel like an automaton repeating an existing pattern of notes, these chord charts made me feel as though I was creating a new work from an existing shell—actively participating in a creative collaboration with the composer, rather than executing more or less accurately a replica of someone else’s work. When performing classical music I was as necessarily disciplined and obedient to my soloist as a seeing-eye dog. But using the chord charts, I could vary the notes and as long as I stayed within the same key it made sense, musically speaking.

  After three years of eisteddfod competition, I was yet to win. It hadn’t occurred to me that I didn’t excel because of my reservations about the rote learning of fully notated works. And yet everyone around me took my musicianship very seriously indeed. Mr McFarlane spoke to me as if I were a real musician who had a professional future. At school my teachers and classmates applauded my solo performances. My proud parents sang my praises to anyone who would listen. I wasn’t complaining, but for some reason I couldn’t trust their judgement. A born sceptic, I assumed my piano teacher was paid to take me seriously, that my school lacked other precocious pianists to compare me to, and that my parents neither wanted nor sought third-party validation for their loving compliments. I felt like a toddler praised for sliding down a slippery dip when all I believed I’d done was obey the laws of gravity. Playing the piano came easily to me, I reasoned, in the same way that other girls swam fast or attracted boys. It felt like a natural affinity that had emerged with the good fortune of domestic encouragement and expert teaching, more than something I was actively pursuing on my own behalf. My career in classical piano music had come to feel, in short, like a performance in and of itself. In getting close to but never reaching the pinnacle of eisteddfod success, I confirmed my suspicion that while I might be highly competent, I was far from exceptional.

  Having grown tired of my Highly Commended certificates and runner-up trophies, I decided it was time to come out about my preference for syncopation and flattened seventh notes. I asked Mr McFarlane if I could enter the Jazz Instrumental section of this year’s competition. Wanting to win, I hoped I would fare better in this section because there were fewer competitors. And if I had been honest with myself, with my teacher, with my parents, or anyone else for that matter, I would have admitted that I cared more for Brubeck, Ellington, Gershwin and the Australian jazz singer-songwriter Vince Jones than I did for the Mozart sonata I was also performing in competition.

  There was a long pause while Mr McFarlane digested my question. I was usually as inscrutable as the Sphinx, and had never asked him for anything before. ‘What piece would you like to play?’ he said, eventually.

  I didn’t hesitate. ‘“Blue Rondo à la Turk” by Dave Brubeck.’

  ‘From Time Out?’

  Now it was my turn to be surprised. Released in 1959, Time Out was an album of original compositions in unconventional time signatures. The critics disliked it immediately, and it became the first jazz album to sell one million copies. It reached number two on the Billboard 1961 pop album chart, and the album’s famous track ‘Take Five’ made it to twenty-five on the Billboard Top 100 in October that year. Perhaps my teacher did not, as I had assumed, listen only to Brahms and Beethoven.

  I had bought a book of Brubeck compositions from Allen’s Music Store, whose jazz section was like my social life at the time: small and frequently empty. The broader reaches of Allen’s printed music aisles were only slightly more populated, dotted with young men whose faces were in turn dotted with pimples. If only I’d been able to join the dots and smile in their general direction, I’d have had something to do on a Saturday night. But just as the solitary giant panda subsists strictly on the soft shoots of the bamboo tree, I grazed in the piano section, sniffing out musical morsels. With my pocket money I bought the two-volume Edition Peters set of Beethoven piano sonatas, feeling triumphant at finally being able to return my teacher’s copy. But it was acquiring a prized example of the late twentieth-century piano repertoire—the collected works of Billy Joel, in three tasty volumes—that really made my mouth water. And like the pandas, I wasn’t interested in mating: my promiscuity manifested only in an insatiable appetite for new music to sight-read.

  The glossy cover of Jazz Masters: Dave Brubeck featured an extreme close-up of his face washed in a deathly blue that did nothing to make the grey-haired fifty-something pianist seem any younger. Were it not for the fact that the book contained my only access to a notated version of ‘Blue Rondo’, the composer’s looming countenance would have been sufficient reason to avoid going anywhere near it. Instead I took it home, where I was forced to look at him several times daily whenever I opened or shut the book during practice.

  In Mr McFarlane’s studio we listened to ‘Blue Rondo’ on a cassette player to ensure consistency between the music on the page and the recorded version. As an approach to playing jazz music, imitating a great player is the stuff of training wheels, but I had to start somewhere. While I sat beside my teacher,
I wanted to nod my head, move my shoulders and bounce my knees, but my instinct—however mistaken—told me to remain perfectly still. It was excruciating, and not just because of Mr McFarlane’s body odour.

  The piece is composed primarily in 9|8 time, a rhythmic meter I hadn’t encountered in any classical repertoire. Nine fast beats per bar are divided into a rapid-fire one-two one-two one-two one-two-three. Then every fourth bar the feeling changes to a more waltz-like three plus three plus three in 3|4 time. Brubeck had based the piece on a traditional rhythm he’d heard street musicians play when he was touring in Turkey. ‘It’s like the blues to you, 9|8 is to us,’ Turkish musicians in Istanbul told him.39 Like any jazz composition, it’s a structure made for improvising, its purpose to drive variation and playfulness in performance.

  There was one fundamental flaw in the very idea of the Jazz Instrumental competition at the eisteddfod: it depended on the competitors performing notated music. The event involved no improvisation whatsoever.

  ‘There’s never been a time when improvisation has been given the respect it deserves,’ said jazz pianist Keith Jarrett in 2005. A jazz musician best known for his completely improvised solo concerts could be expected to be a little irritated with a recent lack of respect in the music world, but Jarrett’s view was short-sighted. Improvisation is still ubiquitous throughout the world, just not in most types of music given serious critical attention in the West. Jazz was shunned by the academy until graduate programs were established in the latter decades of the twentieth century; freestyle rap is perhaps musical improvisation’s most popular current form.

  We celebrate musicians of mythology, forgetting they were all improvisers. Name the tune Orpheus performed to rescue Eurydice from the dead. Or the music Pan played to enchant his followers. And which composer helped the Pied Piper lure the children of Hamelin over the nearest cliff? Their music wasn’t notated or available for purchase or download. Their life-changing acts of music-making didn’t differentiate performance from composition. The stories of Orpheus, Pan and the Pied Piper reflect the world of music as it was for most of its history—musicians invented it as they played their instruments, or they experimented with variations of melodies they had picked up along their travels, without regard to precise notation or copyright. Musicians composed while they performed: in other words, they improvised.

  In 1829, a decade prior to his Letters to a Young Lady, Czerny wrote a book entitled The Art of Improvisation. Fifty years after Nannerl Mozart dazzled her father with her spontaneous creativity, it was now expected that virtuosi improvise preludes to the works on their recital programs, to extemporise (an interchangeable term) on given themes or familiar tunes, and to invent cadenzas (codas) to works during performance.

  One early student of The Art of Improvisation was ten-year-old Clara Wieck, whose piano performances during the 1830s regularly featured her improvisations. Touring with his adolescent prodigy, Frederick Wieck wrote to his wife that ‘No one could believe that she could compose, since that has never been true of girls of her age, and when she improvised on a given theme, all were beside themselves.’ On another occasion he boasted: ‘Clara, as a girl, already has an advantage over all the female pianists in the world, in that she can improvise.’40 By the time she became her century’s greatest woman pianist, improvisation had been part of public performance for two centuries, and Clara was considered one of the greatest exponents.41

  Czerny believed that any amateur pianist could learn how to improvise, as long as she had attained a ‘more than moderate skill in playing’. It wasn’t a specialised skill set of the elite virtuoso musician and the concert hall, but rather an approach to music, a way of playing almost any instrument, that many amateurs could share. In Letters to a Young Lady, Czerny described extemporising as playing that ‘which has neither been written down before, nor previously prepared or studied, but which is merely the fruit of a momentary and accidental inspiration’.42 He encouraged his ideal student Cecilia to attempt to ‘connect together easy chords, short melodies, passages, scales, arpeggioed chords, or which is much better, leave it to your fingers to effect this connection, according to their will and pleasure’.

  But, typically of a creative act that gave women a channel for self-expression, the practice of improvisation triggered ambivalent responses. Not even Clara Schumann could count on the support of her husband in the practice. ‘One word of advice,’ he wrote her, ‘don’t improvise too much; too much gets away that could be put to better use. Resolve always to get everything down on paper right away.’43 Thus does the document trump the improvisation, the composer the improviser.

  As a teenager, Clara did compose. ‘Composing gives me great pleasure,’ she declared in 1853. ‘There is nothing that surpasses the joy of creation, if only because through it one wins hours of self-forgetfulness, when one lives in a world of sound.’44 But she didn’t perform her own compositions during concerts as her contemporary Liszt did, or as Bach, Beethoven and Mozart had done before her. She suffered from too much self-doubt. At the ripe old age of twenty, when we are nowhere near wise beyond our years, she decided to abandon it. ‘I once believed that I possessed creative talent, but I have given up this idea,’ she wrote. ‘A woman must not desire to compose—there has never yet been one able to do it. Should I expect to be the one?’

  Instead, Clara introduced into concert programming the idea of performing other composers’ works. In her Vienna debut in 1837, for example, the nineteen-year-old presented Beethoven’s piano sonatas to a concert audience in their entirety for the first time—ten years after the composer’s death.45 Clara made this practice her own as she performed all over Europe for decades to come; it was her choice, but her promotion of the works of older male composers exerted enormous influence over the format of concerts that persists today. By the mid-nineteenth century, works by dead composers dominated the concert halls of Europe. The acrobatic hijinks of virtuoso pianists such as Franz Liszt (who studied as a child prodigy with Czerny) presenting their own compositions gave way to the model of performers who focused on interpreting the works of others.46 In this genre of music, the separation of creator and performer was all but complete.

  By century’s end, improvisation had gone out of fashion. This attitude is reflected in Kate Chopin’s 1899 novel The Awakening. Chopin takes a dim view of the elderly Mademoiselle Reisz improvising, describing how she ‘sat low at the instrument, and the lines of her body settled into ungraceful curves and angles that gave it an appearance of deformity’.

  The development of the classical repertoire, and the music publishing industry that burgeoned and profited from it, depended on notation. Improvisation disappeared from performance, replaced by literal adherence to the music as written. My piano transcription of Brubeck’s Time Out recording exemplified the attempt to commodify a type of performance—specifically designed for spontaneous creativity—that was anathema to full notation. The twentieth-century amateur could be forgiven for considering the written music as Scripture, as if from the beginning there had been the Notes.

  Judging the Jazz Instrumental competition was a conductor best known for leading the TV studio orchestra in a daytime variety show. The Maestro was a short man with a bowl-cut carpet of black hair and an impassive expression.

  Having grown out of the habit of wearing pants, I performed ‘Blue Rondo à la Turk’ in a flared forest-green skirt with a wide self-belt, paired with an apricot-coloured short-sleeved fitted cotton top. What can I say? It was the 1980s.

  ‘Her performance…was a startling one; the forte pedal was held down throughout; the big chords were crashed and banged with all the strength a pair of twelve-year-old arms could put into them; and wrong notes were freely scattered. Still, rhythm and melody were well marked, and there was no mistaking the agility of the small fingers.’

  This vivid description is not of me but of Laura Rambotham, Henry Handel Richardson’s schoolgirl heroine from her 1910 novel, The Getting of Wisdom. Lau
ra is giving a spirited rendition of a difficult work by Thalberg, Mozart’s contemporary, for her humourless headmistress—a fictional equivalent of my equally humourless Maestro. But the physical effort Laura puts into the Thalberg reminds me of the energy it took me to perform the Brubeck, with its chord clusters and its rapid switches between time signatures.

  With my bare arms flailing and my heels tapping, I gradually formed the impression, however, that my enjoyment at playing ‘Blue Rondo’ was a lot greater than my audience’s pleasure in listening to it. I’m not sure what specifically gave me that idea; such thoughts run on the intangible currents between performer and audience. And it was difficult to know what precisely the problem could be, let alone how I could do anything to fix it. Was it that the piece was unknown to the audience and therefore faced invisible resistance? Was the composition too strange with its abrupt rhythmic changes? Too Turkish-sounding—whatever that meant? Or was it simply too contemporary by eisteddfod standards, at only twenty-five or so years old at the time?

  Perhaps I should have selected a Gershwin or Duke Ellington number with more whiskers on it, as several other competitors had. After I finished, as I smiled and bowed and left the stage, I wondered why it never occurred to me to do something straightforward.

  Returning to my seat, I noticed the Maestro staring at me with a puzzled look. I hoped he was impressed with my choice of material. No other competitor had selected such a rhythmically complicated work.

  So as the Maestro handed out the awards and I remained empty-handed, I was more than a little disappointed. In fact I was dumbfounded: I may not have been the people’s choice, but I couldn’t imagine how I had failed to persuade him. Laura Rambotham had felt proud of how she’d played the Thalberg, but later found herself accused of a ‘gross impertinence, in profaning the ears’ of the other guests, and learned that she should have played Mozart instead.