Music and Freedom

by Zoe Morrison

I didn’t say anything.

  ‘I must admit, I thought it was bothering me,’ she went on, ‘but I think I’m mostly bothered by this concerto at the moment.’

  I still didn’t speak.

  ‘It’s very hard, isn’t it?’ she kept on. ‘I’m not getting anywhere with it right now. I’ve performed it before, but that was ages ago, when I was a student, and for a long time now I haven’t been doing enough practice, I’ve been so busy with work.’

  I found myself wondering if I’d dreamt her up; was this a ghost before me? The idea of a lie, an apparition, the music itself as an elaborate delusion; there was a weird safety in that.

  ‘You know it very well,’ she said.

  Every single note.

  Her open face was not guileless, there seemed to be knowledge there, perception, but it was not unkind. I didn’t think it was something I needed to hide from. She was at a point of struggle, which she seemed to be dealing with calmly, maturely. But I didn’t trust myself.

  ‘When is your concert?’ I said.

  ‘Beginning of March, next year.’

  It felt inevitable, that bolt of sick fear, and it must have been visible.

  ‘Don’t think I’ll make it?’ smiling.

  I looked down.

  ‘Well, I’d love to hear about your playing sometime,’ she said, ‘if you ever have the inclination. And please, if you hear me play something wrong, let me know. I need it!’

  I nodded.

  ‘Well, thanks,’ she said.

  For what? For keeping quiet?

  And then, as if I’d spoken, ‘For the music through the wall.’

  64.

  Oxford, October, 2005

  The following week she continued to practise, although her efforts were sporadic. Why? I wondered. Because she was busy with work? Maybe, but she could play more in the evenings, couldn’t she? Unless she was working then, too. Was it because she’d played the concerto before that her approach seemed lackadaisical?

  Day after day she made the same mistakes without correcting them. And there was a lack of depth to the playing, as if she was skimming her hands over the keys, when the concerto required stretching to the extremes of dynamics – plummeting, soaring, reaching vast dimensions in the instrument. She was obviously an accomplished pianist, her touch was assured, her technique sounded excellent, but it felt, the way she was playing the concerto, that she wasn’t really listening or engaging with the music.

  I got agitated sitting beside the wall. I gripped the score in my hands as she made mistake after mistake. Countless times I nearly went to the piano to bang out the correct version with my finger, and when she played a passage in a lukewarm way, I found myself leaning into the wall, into the plaster, willing her to press her fingers in harder, harder.

  One evening when, yet again, she was making the same obvious errors, I got up and beat out on one key the correct way to play a particular passage. She stopped playing immediately, then played what I’d suggested. We carried on like that for a little while, but it was always hard to make clear what I meant with one finger.

  She was at the door again; I knew she would be.

  ‘I’ve had a radical idea,’ she said, and her eyes were sparkly. She was wearing jeans, a coloured sweater, shiny boots; her hair was shiny too. ‘And this really is just an idea,’ two hands up for emphasis. ‘I’m not a professional musician, you see, I’m an academic, a geographer.’ She paused, took a breath. ‘Not being part of the music scene here, I have no one with a decent knowledge of the concerto to play it to. So what I was thinking was maybe one day I could come in and play the solo part for you, and you could tell me what I’m doing right and wrong. I’d really appreciate it.’

  Edward would have said no. He would never have permitted it. If I’d arranged this without his knowledge and he’d come home while this woman was in the house an embarrassing scene would have occurred, and as soon as she left there would have been repercussions. The place had never been my home, to act in as I wished. But Edward was dead, Edward was gone. Perhaps I was finally starting to realise it.

  ‘The house is untidy,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t see mess. I don’t even own a Hoover.’

  ‘I’m not a piano teacher. I haven’t played for … years.’

  ‘The things you notice are important. It’s not just random notes you’re playing through the wall.’

  ‘The piano is probably out of tune, horribly so.’

  She shrugged. ‘Sounds okay to me. You might be right, though. I’m not sure I have a great ear at the moment.’

  ‘I think you do.’

  We looked closely at each other for a second.

  ‘I could come around one evening about six, if that would suit you. I don’t work late on Mondays.’

  I was tipping, I was looking over the edge, the fall was far. I started to feel the pounding of my heart.

  ‘I’ll see you then,’ I said.

  65.

  Oxford, October 24th, 2005

  I had washed, dressed, powdered, twisted back my hair, and eaten a meal. The house was as clean as I could get it; respectable, at least. I was sitting in the chair I’d placed behind the piano. I was looking at a woman sitting at the Steinway, putting a score of the concerto onto the stand.

  ‘How do you think we should do this?’ she said, swivelling around.

  ‘You could start from the beginning,’ I said, after a pause.

  ‘Good idea.’

  She turned back, lifted her hands, the first line of the concerto stepped off the strings into the room.

  She was Dr Emily Green, a Senior Lecturer in Human Geography and Fellow of Jesus College. Her parents were both academics: her mother a professor of geology, her father of law. Her brother was doing a PhD in coastal geomorphology on a tropical beach. She was a cultural geographer, she told me, and at the time she was working on a series of papers on the relative merits of economic and cultural analyses to understand geographical phenomena such as gentrification and inequality. I thought geography was about maps, I said, cartography, explorers. It still is, she said, in the sense that maps, cartography and explorers were always about space and power.

  Her interest in social justice, as she put it, extended beyond the confines of her academic work. As a member of the governing body of her college, she was involved in a campaign to ban sexual relationships between Fellows and their students; mostly middle-aged or elderly men courting young female undergraduates dependent on them for their academic progress. (Alice, she said, they even divvy up the blondes and brunettes during the admissions process.)

  She was also concerned about the university’s aggressive acquisition of land in the city, which, in a town surrounded by a green-belt, was finite. The university’s strategy was affecting housing prices, she said, and worsening the homelessness problem. She wanted the university to open up spaces like sports fields to the public.

  Don’t you get into trouble doing these sorts of things? I said. A bit, she agreed, but it’s Oxford trouble; subtle but toxic. They do things like ask you about your referees. Doesn’t that scare you? I said. Not really, I’m not going to stay here, she said. There are far better departments for my sort of stuff elsewhere. Besides, no one lives in Oxford forever, do they?

  I noticed that her tone, particularly when she played legato, was like a voice. It was as if the instrument had sprung larynx, mouth and lungs and learnt to sing. I’d heard none of this through the wall. And her technique was unbowed by the work; this was not just because of the size of her hands. To give just one example, there is a sequence of chords in the development of the first movement which is huge and difficult and had caused me so much pain and trouble, yet when she played them she used an up-down motion of her wrists that allowed her to relax momentarily between each chord, preventing strain, which was clever, I thought. Another thing I noticed that day was the clarity of her touch, the way she was able to bring out individual voices in the work, despite its complex texture. But
I did not dwell on these aspects of her playing that day, because what I noticed most was her interpretation of the concerto.

  At the time, unsurprisingly, I associated Rachmaninoff with melancholy. His work is often said to be able to reach you at your lowest. (I even read of a man, a writer, who was prevented from suicide by simply listening to his music; he no longer felt alone.) But Emily was playing the first movement joyously, with obvious pleasure, revelling in the beauty of it. She was playing it in a way that could only be described as victorious, Beethovian, even, with suggestions of his great clarions of triumph over adversity, except that in the Rachmaninoff she had yet to establish any adversity. Combined with this there was a slippage at times in her tone; that voice-like timbre changed to something lighter, almost flippant, and wasn’t helped by the numerous inaccuracies I had already noted. Overall there wasn’t the intensity of engagement at the keyboard that the work required; this was part of what I had been trying to get at when I had been listening on the other side of the wall.

  Sitting behind her, gazing at her hair sliding down the middle of her back, I listened to her play the last lines of the first movement, a pianissimo meno mosso section, a coda, which I’d always thought sounded like Rachmaninoff’s pitiable anxiety tugging at his sleeve just when he might have achieved some relief from it. She flicked off the final chords, turned around.

  ‘So,’ she said, smiling.

  I shifted in my chair, bent slowly to pick up the score.

  ‘That was very good,’ I said.

  She turned back to the piano.

  ‘I’ve been trying some different things with the interpretation. I’m not sure they really work.’

  I didn’t say anything. What did she want from me anyway? I wondered. Some quick praise so she could leave and get on with it? Her conscience assuaged by paying some attention to her lonely and decrepit elderly neighbour?

  ‘As I said, I’d really appreciate your perspective.’

  I’d actually been feeling excited. I’d powered through the housework, got dressed up, and now I realised, oh, what folly it all was. What did I have to tell her about this piece of music that would be of use? How could I even begin? I had nothing to say.

  Her scarf was lying on the floor beside the piano; I noticed a faint lattice pattern in the silk. I would make a few comments, I decided, about the music, then I would never see her again, and that would be it. I roused myself.

  ‘When the recapitulation starts, those big chords carrying the basic motif …’

  ‘Yes?’ flipping pages.

  ‘You could play them more lightly.’

  ‘Oh right, why’s that?’

  ‘Your part is the accompaniment there.’

  ‘Is it?’ She looked closely for a minute. ‘So it is. Thanks.’ She made a mark with a pencil. ‘I always seem to have trouble with the section after that,’ she volunteered. ‘It always feels a bit out of control.’

  ‘It’s because you get faster there before the octaves begin, which makes them difficult. More difficult.’

  ‘Do I get faster? You see, I didn’t realise this …’ She bent forward with the pencil. ‘This is very helpful. What else?’

  ‘Your runs could be crisper. You could use a lighter pedal, a flutter pedal, and more strength in the fingers. Aim to hear the edge of every note. It’s easy to remember that with Bach or Mozart but the temptation with Rachmaninoff, the Romantics in general, is to go to mush.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘One must avoid that entirely.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Especially with this work.’

  ‘Oh, I agree.’

  I looked at her, trying to tell if she was mocking me. That open face seemed sincere.

  ‘You could maintain,’ I said, ‘a greater sense of the rhythm throughout. Like a heartbeat. Duh-dum,’ and I thumped my chest. ‘Duh-dum. All that rubato you use, the feeling this, the feeling that, demonstrating the beauty of it, you risk losing the thread. And you’ll certainly find it difficult when you have an orchestra in tow. If you keep a continuous beat at the foundation of the work you’ll bring the audience with you, as if you have roped them to you. Your playing will be addictive.’

  ‘Do you think?’

  ‘It was how Rachmaninoff himself played,’ I said, defensive. ‘A hallmark of his technique was his rhythmic drive.’

  ‘Oh, I believe you. It’s just that I sensed something big was missing, and I think this might be part of it.’

  ‘It’s a question of balance,’ I said, looking away. ‘Rhythm versus rubato. Tightness versus looseness. Head versus heart.’

  She was nodding.

  ‘Rachmaninoff was a controlled man, most controlled.’

  ‘Is that so?’

  ‘He was cold. Diffident. When he performed, he hardly moved. Just his hands moved, and from them, ah,’ (I was demonstrating) ‘passion flowed. Rubinstein was the same, you know; I saw him once, in London.’ (Oh shut up, shut up.)

  ‘Did you!’

  ‘Like a statue when he played, a stone. Detachment,’ I said, getting up, ‘it’s not a bad thing to remember.’

  66.

  Oxford, October 26th, 2005

  I was at the front window. I saw a man walking a dog, a big boxer; the dog had its chest right near the ground and was straining so hard against the leash it was choking itself. The man was being hauled along behind it.

  I heard her start to play the concerto. She was playing it exactly in rhythm, and I mean exactly, as if to the tick of a metronome. It sounded absurd, it was absurd, and wrong, absolutely. I sat there trying to ignore it. After a couple of hours it stopped and I saw her pass the window. I drew back, fast. The knock was light, conspiratorial.

  ‘Hi there. I just wanted to thank you for the other day,’ and she was holding up a large metal pot. ‘It’s soup.’

  The aroma was billowing out, the steam. I could think of nothing to say. I reached out, the handles were still warm.

  ‘Actually, it’s also bribery. I wondered if I might be able to come around again sometime. I found our conversation so helpful, Alice. I used a metronome after we spoke and I’ve realised the extent to which there is this pulse all the way through, just like a heartbeat, as you said. It’s such a percussive work.’

  I nodded.

  ‘It uses all these different aspects of the instrument, all these different sounds, as if there’s a whole orchestra under the lid.’

  I nodded again.

  ‘Well, what do you think? Should we meet again?’

  ‘That sounds fine,’ after a beat.

  ‘Great,’ smiling. Then, ‘Are you sure I’m not troubling you with all this?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Good,’ instantly relaxed.

  ‘You know,’ I called, as she opened the gate.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘The rhythm.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Rachmaninoff’s rhythm – it varies. It isn’t metronomic. It’s the sense of rhythm that I meant, not something literal.’

  ‘Oh, yes, I know, I looked it up after we met. I was just using the metronome to get a sense of what an even beat was like, but come to think of it I could have just held my hand here.’ She pressed two fingers to her neck.

  ‘I don’t —’

  ‘The pulse.’

  ‘Oh. Yes.’

  The soup was studded with vegetables and short, thick noodles. I ate it that night, the entire pot.

  67.

  Oxford, October 31st, 2005

  When she played the first movement for me again, the Monday after, the music was transformed. Transformed: I am being hyperbolic. She retained some of her ill-judged rubato and deeply unfortunate cheerfulness of expression, so the mood was still wrong. There were other problems too, but she was playing it with exactly the sort of rhythmic drive I imagined. I had heard a little of this through the wall, but nothing like what I was hearing played before me. I was seized by her playing; I could have got up and danced. I tapped my
hand on my knee, listening to her great swells and dives as she rode that music like a wave; it crashed down in a great wall of water, and then surged up again, over and over.

  ‘Any thoughts?’ she said as she turned to me when she finished.

  It was a long time since I had talked about music; it was a long time since anyone had listened to what I had to say. Perhaps it was her playing that so emboldened me. Perhaps it was the way she had listened to what I’d said, and with such positive consequences; yes, perhaps it was the music that opened me.

  ‘Did you know,’ I began, ‘that this is one of the most difficult pieces in the entire repertoire for piano? You need to be a virtuoso to perform it.’

  ‘Do you think?’

  ‘So they say.’

  ‘Were you a virtuoso?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Am I a virtuoso?’ smiling.

  ‘No. Not yet.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ still smiling, then, ‘I wonder what makes a virtuoso?’ and still that lightness of tone.

  ‘You need to practise more. You do – what – a couple of hours a day?’

  She thought, nodded.

  ‘It’s not enough. You also need to do more technical work, particularly with your left hand, which coasts along sometimes, I’ve noticed. You don’t grip the keys with it enough. You’re aware Rachmaninoff had a formidable left-hand technique?’

  ‘I’ve read that, yes.’

  Outside, clouds were moving quickly across the grey sky, the bare branches of the tree had started to rattle.

  ‘Your problem is not only technical, which can be fixed if you do a lot more work. Your problem is interpretative.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I agree. I’m confused about the interpretation of this work.’

  ‘Well, where do the climaxes lie?’

  ‘You mean here? On this page?’

  ‘On that page, in that movement, in the whole work. What is your destination? What are you aiming for? You need to keep that in mind when you are playing it. There should be no distractions, it needs to be a single, focused mission.’