Girls at the Piano

by Virginia Lloyd

  Daniela and I now sipped gin and tonics. Between songs and sets, we enjoyed listening to other people’s conversations. One woman might complain to her friend, ‘It doesn’t sound the same as it does on the record,’ and Daniela and I would turn to each other and smile into our drinks. That’s the point—it’s called improvisation. The sly attentions of men we caught looking at us also made us laugh. In fact, we laughed about as much as we could. It staved off the anxiety.

  There were almost no women jazz musicians. Why was that? They seemed to be everywhere in other styles of music, fronting rock bands, strumming guitars, singing backup. Had there been one woman in any of the jazz bands I saw during my late teens and early twenties, I would have gone up to her during a break between sets and asked her how she did it. How did she fight through the muck of self-consciousness to play to the best of her ability in public? Did she feel self-doubt and go ahead anyway? Did she have a secret trick to drown out all the self-criticism in her head as she played? Did she believe other people when they told her she sounded great? Why didn’t I?

  Just as it had when I saw my first jazz concert at the age of six, live musical performance still seemed to be the best way to spend my time. But I was hung up on the dilemma of perfectionism. ‘To be a professional musician one must be schizophrenic, with a split mind, half of which knows it is impossible to play perfectly, while the other half believes that to play perfectly is only a matter of time and devotion,’ wrote Rebecca West in her posthumously published 1984 novel This Real Night, about budding concert pianist Rose Aubrey. Though West was writing of her heroine performing the classical repertoire, the principle was the same in a jazz setting. Unfortunately my mind was locked on the impossibility of perfection, convinced that no amount of time or devotion could help me reach it despite the very idea being anathema to the music.

  There seemed no way for me to broach the subject with the male musicians. Try as I might to psych myself into walking up to one of the guys between sets and asking them about their compositions or how to get better at improvisation, I never could. Desperate to know their secrets, I listened at home for hours to their recordings, poring over liner notes like sacred texts. But at live gigs I was too self-conscious, obsessing over whether the musicians recognised me from my frequent attendance—and if they did, worrying that they thought I was a groupie looking for a date. I couldn’t bear being thought of as a groupie even though I would have jumped at the chance of a date. Sex was the invisible and ubiquitous barrier to communication.

  I submitted reviews of jazz gigs to the student newspaper, Honi Soit, and got a small buzz from seeing my name in print. If I couldn’t be on stage, I thought, I could at least write about what I heard. For a time I co-presented a jazz show on campus radio with my new friend David, a Law student whose taste in jazz, as conservative as the rest of him, stopped at the soundtrack to When Harry Met Sally.

  In her 2007 memoir The Importance of Music to Girls, Lavinia Greenlaw wrote, ‘I knew there were those for whom music was soundtrack and those of us for whom it was, well, music, but didn’t notice that most of those who took it seriously were boys.’ My fascination with live jazz was as all-consuming as a love affair. Sublimation was the sincerest form of flattery—I needed regular live performances as other girls my age needed sex.

  I was not having sex with David. I was not interested in having sex with David. We enjoyed the sort of rapid-fire witty banter that young people too easily mistake for intimacy. The only men who really interested me were on stage, where they safely stayed and from where I could fantasise freely about our future together.

  At nineteen, David already had the economic privilege and the testosterone to regard as inevitable a woman’s hope to hitch her wagon to his breed of horse: private school education, budding lawyer, white. David and his classmates had gone from the elite Sydney Grammar School to the dorm rooms of St Paul’s College in the collective movement of a school of fish. Having chosen to become lawyers and accountants like their fathers, they followed a career path as well signposted as a tourist trail. One hundred years after Banjo Paterson left Sydney Grammar to study Law, his fellow alumni were still becoming lawyers, if no longer writing poetry. Perhaps the loss of poetry reflected the process of sexual selection. David’s professional future—which to him must have appeared linear as he walked those early qualifying steps along it—formed, when viewed from the distance of hindsight, a perfect circle.

  ‘Career! That is all girls think of now, instead of being good wives and mothers and attending to their homes and doing what God intended,’ rails Sybylla Melvyn’s grandmother at the very mention of the C-word in My Brilliant Career. ‘All they think of is gadding about and being fast, and ruining themselves body and soul.’

  I would have loved to ruin myself body and soul, but in my first two years on campus there were no takers. At least none who interested me. For a long time it didn’t occur to me that I kept people at arm’s length: about the distance between a pianist and her instrument.

  David laughed when I explained that I couldn’t imagine ever marrying or having children. ‘But you’re studying for the marriage degree,’ he teased about my poor-cousin qualification, the Bachelor of Arts. On some fundamental level, David was relieved to know his Law degree would grant him a vocational qualification, if not a sense of vocation. Perhaps what I really meant was that I would never marry him.

  ‘You’d be a terrible mother anyway,’ David said. This casual line stung me more in practice than it should have in theory, but I felt proud to confuse him.

  Being single sounded just fine to me as long as I could find the roadmap that would show me what to do with my life. But I felt no closer to finding that map. Whether or not a young woman had marriage on her mind, at the close of the twentieth century, the Bachelor of Arts had become the contemporary equivalent of piano lessons.

  25

  ALICE MAY MORRISON TAYLOR’S PASSPORT, WHICH she presented on 25 August 1921 in order to embark the SS Berrima, lists the features of her 26-year-old face in a less-than-flattering light. Forehead—square. Eyes: hazel. Nose: small. Mouth: medium. Chin: small. Colour of hair: dark. Complexion: ruddy. Face: round. Next to the final item, Any special peculiarities, a short dash indicates there was nothing to add. What did my grandmother make of that dash? That there was nothing special about her, nothing to distinguish her round ruddy face from those of other women boarding a ship to the other side of the world? Experience had curdled the milky complexion of her schoolgirl portrait. Perhaps she felt the dash was appropriate. She most likely preferred to keep her peculiarity to herself: that dash was as conspicuous a silence as a period of rest marked on a music score.

  Like Alice May Morrison Taylor herself, the SS Berrima was a product of the working classes of Glasgow. The workers of Caird & Co. at Greenock on the south side of the Clyde built the passenger liner in 1913 before the navy requisitioned it for less leisurely purposes.54 In the roundabout way of these things, the ship travelled all the way to Sydney to be refitted and armed. And to push the irony even further, the Berrima was transformed in Sydney Harbour at the Cockatoo Island Dockyard—less than five hundred metres from the Hunters Hill peninsula where, sixty years later, I would grow up. Now an auxiliary cruiser, HMAS Berrima left Sydney on 19 August 1914 and headed to New Guinea, landing troops in September. Returning to Sydney, the Berrima changed roles again. She became a troop transport ship and sailed for the Middle East in December 1914. On 24 March 1920, the Berrima resumed commercial service.

  Alice had made it to London—the Royal Docks at the Port of London, at any rate, a few twists of the Thames east from the city’s centre. The girl from Glasgow had arrived in the music capital of her world, and no sooner had she set foot in it than she was boarding the gangway of the Berrima for a voyage of more than 13,000 miles.

  Physically packing up her life wouldn’t have taken much time. There wasn’t much room at home for accumulating the sorts of things other young women drew to t
hemselves like iron filings. Alice had her house clothes and her good clothes, and what she didn’t have she knew how to make. In any event the Berrima had a strict baggage limit per passenger. The bulk of Alice’s weight allowance was most likely taken up in copies of the church music repertoire, some of it as yellowed as the smoke-stained walls of the sitting room at 370 Dumbarton Road.

  Perhaps there was music at the Docks that marked the beginning of Alice’s journey; more likely she heard the percussion of mass travel—the wails of children, the sniffles of women, the thud of boots and the scrape of luggage—punctuated by the bellows of the mighty ship as the time neared for departure. She would never set foot in Covent Garden, or hear a concert at the Royal Academy of Music. There would be no scholarship to the Guildhall School or the Royal College of Music. There would be no position as a private music teacher for an aristocratic young lady while she undertook the grand tour. Alice would not become a governess for an upper middle-class family in London, or on one of the country estates where bored daughters idled their young lives away reading Jane Austen and waiting for a husband. I wonder if Alice thought about all the kindred musical spirits she might have met if she’d only had the opportunity to study and work in London, and if that knowledge was harder for her to bear than the thought of never seeing her brothers again.

  There was no one on the Docks waving her goodbye. Who could have afforded the time and the travel for such an extravagant gesture? But perhaps she wished someone was waving her off who would miss her. She might have thought of the people she’d known in her life till now, and wondered why she was still by herself when other girls had found husbands. It couldn’t be solely because she had chosen poorly in John Henry Edwards. Alice would have heard of similar stories often enough in the past three years to know bigamy was unfortunate but far from rare. Did she suspect that something was wrong with her? That her focus on music took up all the room where proper love for a husband should have been? That she had been so devastated and humiliated that she doubted she could believe the words of any man.

  Thinking about Alice’s decision to emigrate, I struggle to understand why she gave up her job at Gardner Street. Resigning from that coveted position would have been the biggest decision of Alice’s life that she had made with complete information. Did she feel bereft or liberated? She knew no one at her destination with connections that might help her find the work for which she was best suited. And although she carried letters of recommendation, what significance would they be given by people unfamiliar with the institutions of her study and work? As the Berrima embarked on its seven-week voyage, I wonder if Alice considered that it had taken years for her to make her musical network, and that she was sailing away from those who could help her, recommend her, point her in the right direction. That while she’d married a sailor, it was she who had ended up at sea, floating to the bottom of the world.

  I suspect my grandmother failed to value her skills as a musician. She most likely underestimated the value of her contribution to the musical life of her home town, even though she was a paid professional, being the choirmistress of two well-established churches and performing regularly as a soloist. She had suffered the humiliation of marrying a bigamist, but had continued to work during and after the scandal. I believe she lacked faith in her ability to go on making a living as a choirmistress; and that, coupled with the unspoken expectations of her family that she marry in order to secure her financial future, drove her from Glasgow to Australia.

  Alice’s parents had not abandoned her. Charlotte and James Taylor were present for the momentous occasion of their daughter’s departure for the new world—but not to wave her goodbye. Passenger records from the Berrima show that Charlotte and James boarded the ship in third class like their daughter. Unlike Alice, they held return tickets. On the passenger list, James Taylor’s occupation is described as boilermaker. The self-designation seemed to indicate career progression of a sort, but to be a boilermaker was still backbreaking manual labour. Now in his fifties, he must have taken leave without pay from Denny’s Shipyard in order to be able to spend several months away from home.

  James and Charlotte had the excuse of visiting Nance and her family in Newcastle, but their decision to accompany Alice strikes me as a conscious if belated effort at protection and supervision. I’m not convinced they weren’t suspicious that Alice was capable of disappearing—whether by melting into the crowds on her arrival at the Port of Sydney, or by throwing herself into the steely depths of the Atlantic.

  26

  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 t
oo 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.