As I stood to collect my things, the Maestro appeared beside me with my Jazz Masters: Dave Brubeck book. At the sight of Brubeck beaming from the cover, my hopes lifted. In my defeat I had forgotten to retrieve it. Perhaps the judge would utter some terse words of encouragement.
‘I must tell you that you had the rhythm of that piece all wrong,’ he said, lips pursed, as he handed me the book. ‘I just thought I should let you know.’
Laura Rambotham herself could not have been more surprised. Had the Maestro not once heard Time Out? It was quite possible I hadn’t played ‘Blue Rondo’ as well as I thought I had, but rhythmically I had played it like Brubeck does on his own recording. I could accept an adjudicator not caring for my playing—that had largely been the story of my eisteddfod career. But it was on Brubeck’s behalf that I was outraged. For once I didn’t blame myself for my failure: I diagnosed the Maestro with a severe case of arrhythmia.
12
ALICE PLAYED ONE NOTE AT A time on the church piano, the first of each broken chord the choir sang arpeggio. Their voices, ascending in unison then falling as they returned to the home note, had the comforting roll of water lapping the shore. For three years now she had led the choir’s midweek rehearsals and warm-ups on Sundays before the service.
From her first solo soprano part at a Sunday service, Alice’s clear articulation and honeyed tone had lifted the whole choir out of what a few newer members might have characterised as complacency. Despite his frail appearance, old Mr Somerville’s ears were still as sharp as those of the youngest tenor in his charge. He made a point of complimenting Alice in front of the choir after that service, and his brief encouragement lit a fire beneath her vocal ambitions. She had been surprised by her confidence in singing in front of an audience, the way that she felt uninhibited and utterly herself. More so than she did almost anywhere except whispering with Nance in their room before they fell asleep each night. On a stage she was Alice May Morrison Taylor, the pious young woman with the bell-like soprano voice, who loved her family and God and the music of worship, though not necessarily in that order.
Like the rest of the congregation at Dowanhill United Free Church, Alice had been nervous at the news of Frederick Hervey’s taking up the position of choirmaster on Mr Somerville’s retirement. Hervey’s reputation as a severe taskmaster preceded him. According to an article about him in the Musical Herald, Mr Hervey was a teaching member of the Tonic Sol-fa College, Singing Master of Renfrew School Board, a lecturer and music master at the Bible Training Institute of Glasgow, Music Master of Girls’ Orphan Homes at Whiteinch, Conductor of the Scotstoun Male Voice Choir, and Musical Director of Windsor Halls Church in Glasgow. Alice marvelled at how one man could hold down so many jobs, but her mother was dismissive. ‘He’s in everything but a bath,’ she said.
Now that Alice had left school and was working full-time in Mrs Rankin’s haberdashery, she could afford both piano and voice lessons. Under Mr Somerville’s choir leadership, she had flourished into a key member of the soprano section and an occasional soloist. Mr Hervey offered her a discounted rate for private singing lessons with him in return for her help in leading the rehearsals. It became her responsibility to plan them, to ensure the choristers had the music they needed when they needed it, and to liaise with Gardner Street and Windsor Halls, the other major Glaswegian churches at which the Dowanhill choir performed in the major concerts of each year. Alice considered the responsibility a pleasure, reflecting the esteem in which she hoped she was held.
Even so, she chafed at the constraints her teacher placed on her vocal technique. During her first lesson, Alice—quietly proud of her God-given tone and her lung capacity—sang her warm-up arpeggios as if she were performing them. After she finished, Mr Hervey looked at her for a long moment. In the silence Alice heard her hubris. ‘You have great natural talent,’ he said, finally. ‘A good ear, a good range, and a lovely rich tone,’ he added. ‘But you’re in a hurry, and musicianship is not a race.’
While she enjoyed playing the piano at church, Alice had come to find practising the instrument repetitive and, though she would never have admitted it to dear old Mrs Ramsay, horribly dull. Alice wondered now whether her feelings for the piano were like the love a mother might have for a child who was adopted rather than born of her own flesh, which is how she now thought of her voice. And yet here was Mr Hervey, taking her back to the beginning, to the most rudimentary aspects of singing. He drilled her with exercises in basic voice production and building lung capacity. He paid inordinate attention to her posture, and his approach to phrasing was nothing short of painstaking.
‘A singer is in the unique position of being both the instrument and the performer,’ he would say. ‘We need to get you singing from the inside out, singing with your whole body.’ Alice, intimidated at the very idea of her body’s involvement in the sounds she sang, did not understand what he meant but trusted that in time she would. Despite her impatience, the brief hour that she spent each week with Mr Hervey studying melody and harmony, phrasing and pitch, was what she looked forward to most.
Mr Hervey’s working life, immersed in music, seemed a magical existence to Alice when contrasted with the oil and grime of her father’s lot, and her grim tenement home where there was love but little music. She drank in her teacher’s stories of his time as a student at the Royal Academy in London, of attending several concerts each week, and of the talented women who were now training at the Guildhall School to conduct small choirs.
Sometimes, in her more extravagant daydreams, Alice pictured herself walking the streets of London and attending the Guildhall, but the idea was as far-fetched as some of the novels she had read. Fictional young ladies travelled to Europe to study music as if it were the most normal thing for a girl to do. Having never heard of such impossible extravagance outside the pages of these novels, Alice quickly tired of them. Just once she wanted to read the story of a plain girl from a working-class family who made a life for herself using her musical talent that didn’t involve marrying or being born into the right family. In too many books all roads led to weddings—unions that produced babies and turned the mother from her piano (it was always a piano) into an exhausted slave.
Nance couldn’t understand Alice’s heretical views, but then Alice always had been the practical sister. Just as she could read instantly the shape of the songs she sang, Alice could see the landscape of relationships between men and women, even if her only experience of such relationships was that of the observer. She preferred the routines of piano practice and choir rehearsal to her mundane domestic duties. How she and Nance could have been raised in the same household and drawn such different conclusions about the realities of married life, Alice did not know.
‘You just wait. You’ll feel differently when you meet the right one,’ her sister would say.
Everyone was always telling her to wait. It was too easy to remind Nance that as a pretty girl she could pick and choose among her admirers, and had been doing just that for several years before Richard turned up at church one day like the answer to a redundant prayer. Other girls thought about putting things into a glory box, but Alice couldn’t see the point if she was to dedicate herself to music: glory boxes were for the girls to whom young men paid attention and who looked forward to marriage.
Nance and Richard’s decision to emigrate to Australia came as a disappointing surprise to their parents, who had been looking forward to tripping over a brood of grandchildren. ‘I wish you’d be happy for me,’ Nance sobbed as they farewelled each other at Partick Station.
Alice, despite having been privy to the newlyweds’ decision, failed to muster any joy for her sister’s good fortune. Instead she chided herself for her feelings of loss and worried that she would never replace her only confidante. With Nance embarking on a new life, Alice could not help but wonder whether there would ever be someone special she might sing for in her own future.
13
IT WAS ALWAYS A RELIEF T
O play the school Steinway, to feel the smooth keys beneath my fingertips and the sustain pedal beneath my right foot, and to hear the notes as they sound and know I produced them. Away from the piano, my flat chest and pale freckled skin made me feel invisible, but when I sat down at the instrument I somehow grew taller and more powerful in my seat, as if I were riding a horse sixteen hands high and could see and hear everything.
And did those feet in ancient times…
I didn’t mind playing ‘Jerusalem’ yet again. My job was straightforward: read the music, translate that through my fingertips into black and white keys as it was written, and play at a consistent speed so the whole school could sing along, and at a volume where everyone felt confident about raising their voices and keeping them aloft. I understood the piano—its vocabulary, its technical capabilities and its emotional range—and enjoyed the power at my fingertips. How easy it was to help the singers find the note they needed, so subtly they didn’t even know I was helping them, or to confuse them in an instant if I chose. If I were to stop suddenly, so would everybody else. Even Miss Jackson. I could induce an instant silence in hundreds of girls, though silence was always the last thing I wanted to hear. It was comforting to feel I could control one thing in my life, when so much of the rest of it was out of my hands. I was the captain of this ship, if only for a few precious minutes.
In 1832, when George Eliot was a thirteen-year-old student at Miss Franklin’s school at Coventry, she was considered ‘the best performer in the school’. But the teenaged Mary Anne Evans felt highly ambivalent about her skills at the piano. A recollection of her as a highly musical thirteen-year-old student describes her sensitivity as ‘painfully extreme’. She would dutifully perform for visitors ‘though suffering agonies from shyness and reluctance’, then ‘rush to her room and throw herself on the floor in an agony of tears’.47
My own extreme sensitivity was the opposite of Eliot’s, occurring away from the piano rather than at it. I might worry about making a mistake, but it was one I could cover, and later I would practise to ensure I’d never make it again. But away from the piano, one error could result in death of the irrevocable, social kind.
At the piano I glanced up at the most senior students, warbling from the upper storey of the assembly hall. I hoped that in a year or so, when I reached their age, I would have their curves as well as their confidence. It was all very well being able to perform a Mozart sonata from memory or play a new piece at first sight, but what did it matter if you weren’t invited to parties and didn’t know any boys? Earlier that year my friend Joanna had shunted me out of the way as soon as she met Matthew at one of those parties. With her boyfriend, her shoulder-length blonde hair and her eye-popping breasts, Joanna had entered a social orbit in which mysterious friends outside our school, who knew boys of similar ages to us, hosted parties that those boys attended. An orbit to which I, with my braces, monobrow and inconvenient location, was denied access.
Playing through ‘Jerusalem’ by rote, I thought about how pathetic and ugly I was. I couldn’t blame Joanna for tiring of me. While she had become a woman, I had remained stuck in girlhood, practising my piano. Joanna’s cheeks teemed with huge white-headed pimples, but Matthew still wanted to kiss her. There must be more to the business of being a woman than I knew. It couldn’t have been just my braces or hairy legs—something else must be wrong with me. Maybe it was because I had perfect pitch.
I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In Englands green & pleasant Land.
As Joanna never invited me over to her house anymore, and told me nothing about what she and Matthew did at weekends, I concluded that beside attending the occasional party they did nothing but have sex. In the words of ‘Jerusalem’, they had built their own green and pleasant land, in which his sword did everything in her hand but sleep. Leaving me with the ceaseless mental fight, a struggle that was both endless and already lost.
It wasn’t so long ago that Joanna and I had made each other laugh so hard that tears ran down our cheeks and we gasped for breath. When we swooned over Paul Weller and spent weekend afternoons repetitively playing his Style Council albums. When we watched crude Mel Brooks movies and invented sexual fantasies for our prim grey-haired English teacher Miss Anderson, whom we were convinced was still a virgin like we were.
Like I was.
Marianne Dashwood in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility was the girl after my own broken heart: ‘She spent whole hours at the pianoforte alternately singing and crying; her voice often totally suspended by her tears.’ When she wasn’t miserable at the piano, Marianne was miserable with a book in her hand: ‘In books too, as well as in music, she courted the misery which a contrast between the past and present was certain of giving.’ At home the piano was the perfect location for me to wallow in self-pity. I could have a good cry about how unhappy I was at school, keeping my back to the rest of the house. I took comfort from the pent-up tears inching down my cheeks, knowing that the only other place I could do this safely was the shower. Despite the noise-absorbent shag pile under my feet, I was attuned to the warning sounds of an approaching parent, which gave me time to drag the back of my hand across my eyes and apply my happy face.
Marianne Dashwood’s thoughts as she cried, played and read were purer than mine. The idea of sex fascinated and revolted me, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it. The third verse of ‘Jerusalem’ was teeming with phallic references: a bow of burning gold, arrows of desire—even a spear, for goodness’ sake. It was amazing that Miss Jackson allowed us to sing the hymn at all. Did Joanna and Matthew do it in bed? Did they lie under the sheet or on top of the duvet? On a couch with an old towel laid down first, or in a secluded park under a blanket and a hollowed-out tree? When they kissed, how did they breathe? Wasn’t she afraid of becoming pregnant? How would you even put on a condom? Maybe she was on the pill. But how did she get to the doctor without her mother knowing? Did Matthew’s thingy stand up straight or stick out? Did she kiss it? If she did, didn’t it smell? How did they clean up all the goo that must go everywhere? In Dolly magazine I’d read references to a mysterious ‘wet patch’. It sounded disgusting.
After four verses, ‘Jerusalem’ finally came to an end. ‘Thank you, Victoria,’ Miss Jackson said. I should have been pleased at her mistaking me for someone else, yet again, but as much as I longed to disappear at the piano, I depended on it as the one thing that helped me to stand out. Our principal’s misattributed gratitude was as reliable as her admonitions against eating in public and applauding in church, activities that she considered equally vulgar. Just as well she wasn’t a mind-reader—she’d have had a conniption at my filthy imaginings.
In November 1838, after hearing an oratorio performed by the Choral Union in Coventry, George Eliot described her complicated feelings about being an accomplished musician in a letter to her dear friend and former teacher, the evangelical Miss Lewis. ‘It would not cost me any regrets if the only music heard in our land were that of strict worship,’ she began piously, though she immediately qualified her enjoyment: ‘nor can I think a pleasure that involves the devotion of all the time and powers of an immortal being to the acquirement of an expertness in so useless (at least in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred) an accomplishment, can be quite pure or elevating in its tendency’. A very wordy way of saying that to give pleasure by performing music is an accomplishment that takes god-like dedication and skill, but is pointless. That’s nothing if not ambivalent.
In Jane Austen’s Persuasion, Anne Elliot finds solitude and privacy at the piano while she accompanies others dancing (including Captain Wentworth, whose engagement she had broken off eight years earlier), ‘and though her eyes would sometimes fill with tears as she sat at the instrument, she was extremely glad to be employed, and desired nothing in return but to be unobserved’. To be useful, and to be left alone: I suspect that was the t
rue goal of my high school music career. This is where George Eliot got the wrong end of the stick about performing for an audience: it isn’t an appeal for attention, but rather a defensive strategy in which your instrument functions as an effective tool of border protection. The piano in fact affords you great privacy. At the piano you do not have to engage in conversation. You do not have to risk saying the wrong thing. You sit at your instrument for a reason; you are there for active purpose. Not to be looked at per se, as if you were posing awkwardly for your portrait.
Despite her rejection of me, I still believed reviving Joanna’s friendship to be a worthy goal. In his Letters to a Young Lady, Czerny wrote: ‘There is no higher satisfaction than in being able to distinguish one’s self before a large company, and in receiving an honourable acknowledgement of one’s diligence and talent.’ But Czerny was wrong. I had received a bucketload of honourable acknowledgement, but as far as I was concerned the higher satisfaction would be to have Joanna’s friendship again. And maybe a boyfriend.
14
IN MARCH 1914, ALICE MAY MORRISON Taylor won a First Class Certificate of Merit at the annual competition of the Scottish National Song Society, held in Glasgow. According to her certificate, she scored 90 out of a possible 100 for ‘quality, expression, time and tune, general affect, voice, expression, and general conception’. In her first outing at the competition the previous year, she had scored a mere 85. The quality of her singing made her eligible for the National Sangschaw, the competitive pinnacle of Scottish music, poetry and song; she came home with one gold and one silver medal.
Girls at the Piano Page 11