by James Rhodes
Most of all, anger that I really, truly know that I cannot ever make what happened disappear completely. It’s one of those hideous faceblot stain things that children stare at and adults look away from. It is just there all the time and nothing I do can or will ever erase it. And I can try as much as I like to make it ‘my thing’, the reason I am special, a permission slip to behave however I want and to feel like a wannabe, spastic Holden Caulfield even at thirty-eight, but I know all the time, every day, that there is nowhere I can put it, no way I can frame or reframe it, nothing I can do with it to make it bearable or acceptable.
There is an inbuilt mechanism in our psyche that helps with that, and it is dissociation. The most serious and long-lasting of all the symptoms of abuse. It’s really quite brilliant. It started in the gym all those years ago.
He’s inside me and it hurts. It’s a huge shock on every level. And I know that it’s not right. Can’t be right. So I leave my body, floating out of it and up to the ceiling where I watch myself until it becomes too much even from there, and then I fly out of the room, straight through the closed doors and off to safety. It was an inexplicably brilliant feeling. What kid doesn’t want to be able to fly? And it felt utterly real. I was, to all intents and purposes, quite literally flying. Weightless, detached, free. It happened every time and I didn’t ever question it. I just felt grateful for the reprieve, the experience, the free high.
And ever since then, like a Pavlov puppy, the minute a feeling or situation even threatens to become overwhelming, I am no longer there. I exist physically and function on autopilot (I assume), but no one is consciously inside my mind. ‘The lights are on but no one is home’ is the perfect description. As a child that wasn’t good because I couldn’t control it at all, it happened all the time, and it meant I was labelled as spaced-out, difficult, gormless, not all there. I would wander around in shades of grey and disappear for ages. I’d be sent out to the shops to pick something up for my mum and not return for hours. When I did I’d be astonished at the panic and worry I had caused – time just seemed to disappear and I would have ended up hanging out with some random stranger or going somewhere entirely different from where I had meant to go.
Or today I will be chatting to my best friend and discussing, in detail, his plans for Christmas when five minutes later I’ll say ‘So what are your plans for Christmas?’ Not that chatting with a pal about mundane shit is threatening in any real sense of the word, but it has become so in-built, such a part of me, that I often disappear, without even realising it, at even the barest hint of a threat. Like potentially having to commit to seeing someone at Christmas when it’s only November and I may be dead, on holiday, busy, wanting to be alone and safe instead.
Key moments in my life are missing because of this. I look at my passport and know that I’ve been to certain places. I meet people who claim to know me, sometimes know me quite well. I go to restaurants where I’m welcomed back, tell people stories they gently remind me I’ve told them before or were there with me when it happened, and nothing . . . No fucking clue.
On the plus side it means I can watch the same movie and TV show several times without realising it; on the minus side I come across as rude, inconsiderate, a bit stupid. And it is fucking annoying not being able to remember almost everything to the point that it takes me several minutes to figure out what I had for breakfast, why I left the house, what day, month and year it is.
All the more weird that I can remember over 100,000 notes in a piano recital. All the more amazing that sat in front of a piano is one of the few places I am truly grounded.
I’ve been like this for as long as I can remember. As a kid dissociation was the only way the world could be vaguely manageable. If you don’t remember you can’t be terrorised by the past. Our psyches are fucking brilliant – designed to deal with any and all eventualities, at least until they are overloaded and break in two. And yet, even then there is often a way back to something approaching a working state.And my closest friends are aware of it and they don’t get upset when I ask them the same question twice in forty-five seconds or have no recollection of a holiday we took a few months or years ago. Which is exactly why they’re my closest friends and why I can count them on the fingers of one hand.
TRACK FOUR
Bach-Busoni, Chaconne
James Rhodes, Piano
(shut up, I’m proud of this one)
Bach wrote several groups of pieces in sixes – six partitas for keyboard, six for violin, six cello suites, six Brandenburg Concertos and many more. Musicians are weird like that.
There was a piece of music that Bach wrote around 1720 which was described by Yehudi Menuhin as ‘the greatest structure for solo violin that exists’. I’d go much further than that. If Goethe was right and architecture is frozen music (what a quote!), this piece is a magical combination of the Taj Mahal, the Louvre and St Paul’s Cathedral. It is the final and longest movement of his second (of six, of course) partita for violin. It is a set of variations (sixty-four of them, I counted) on a theme that drags us through every emotion known to man and a few bonus ones too. In this case, the subject is love with her attendant madness, majesty and mania.
Brahms said it best in a letter to Schumann’s wife: ‘On one stave, for a small instrument, the man writes a whole world of the deepest thoughts and most powerful feelings. If I imagined that I could have created, even conceived the piece, I am quite certain that the excess of excitement and earth-shattering experience would have driven me out of my mind.’
THE SEXUAL ABUSE WENT ON for nearly five years. By the time I left that school aged ten I’d been transformed into James 2.0. The automaton version. Able to act the part, fake feelings of empathy, and respond to questions with the appropriate answers (for the most part). But I felt nothing, had no concept of the expectancy of good (my favourite definition of ‘joy’), had been factory reset to a bunch of fucked settings, and was a proper little mini-psychopath.
But something happened to me bang in the middle of all of it that I am convinced saved my life. It remains with me to this day and it will continue to do so as long as I’m alive.
There are only two things I know of which are guaranteed in my life – the love I have for my son, and the love I have for music. And – cue X Factor sob-story violins – music is what happened to me when I was seven.
Specifically classical music.
More specifically, Johann Sebastian Bach.
And if you want to be ultra detailed, his Chaconne for solo violin.
In D minor.
BWV1004.
The piano version transcribed by Busoni. Ferruccio Dante Benvenuto Michelangelo Busoni.
I can keep going with this for a while yet. Dates, recording versions, length in minutes and seconds, CD covers etc etc. No wonder classical is so fucked. A single piece of music has dozens of extra little pieces of information attached to it, none of which is important to anyone other than me and the other four piano-mentalists reading this.
The point is this: in anyone’s life, there are a small number of Princess Diana moments. Things that happen that are never forgotten and have a significant impact on one’s life. For some it’s the first time they have sex (aged eighteen for my first time with a woman, a hooker called Sandy, who was Australian and kind and let me watch porn while we did it in a basement flat near Baker Street for £40). For others it’s when a parent dies, a new job starts, the birth of a child.
For me there have been four so far. In reverse chronological order, meeting Hattie, the birth of my son, the Bach-Busoni Chaconne, getting raped for the first time. Three of these were awesome. And by the law of averages, three out of four ain’t bad.
I’ll take it.
A few things about Bach that need clearing up.
If anyone does ever think about Bach (and why would they?), the chances are they will see in their heads an oldish guy, chubby, dour, bewigged, stern, Lutheran, dry, unromantic and in dire need of getting laid. His mu
sic is considered by some to be antiquated, irrelevant, boring, shallow and, like the beautiful architecture in Place des Vosges or Regent’s Park, belonging to other people. He should be confined forever to cigar adverts, dentists’ waiting rooms and octogenarian audiences at the Wigmore Hall.
Bach’s story is remarkable.
By the age of four, his closest siblings have died. At nine his mother dies, at ten his father dies and he is orphaned. Shipped off to live with an elder brother who can’t stand him, he is treated like shit and not allowed to focus on the music he loves. He is chronically abused at school to the point that he is absent for over half of his school days to avoid the ritual beatings and worse. He walks several hundred miles as a teenager so he can study at the best music school he knows of. He falls in love, marries, has twenty children. Eleven of those children die in infancy or childbirth. His wife dies. He is surrounded, engulfed by death.
At the same time that everyone he knows is dying, he is composing for the Church and the Court, teaching the organ, conducting the choir, composing for himself, teaching composition, playing the organ, taking Church services, teaching harpsichord, and generally going mental in the work arena. He writes over 3,000 pieces of music (many, many more have been lost), most of which are still, 300 years later, being performed, listened to, venerated all around the world. He does not have twelve-step groups, shrinks or anti-depressants. He does not piss and moan and watch daytime TV drinking Special Brew.
He gets on with it and lives as well and as creatively as he can. Not for the fanfare and reward, but, in his words, for the glory of God.
This is the man we are dealing with here. Drenched in grief, emerging from a childhood of disease, poverty, abuse and death, a hard-drinking, brawling, groupie-shagging, workaholic family man who still found time to be kind to his students, pay the bills and leave a legacy totally beyond the comprehension of most humans. Beethoven said that Bach was the immortal God of harmony. Even Nina Simone acknowledged that it was Bach who made her dedicate her life to music. Didn’t help her so much with the heroin and alcohol addiction, but hey ho.
Clearly he was not going to be emotionally normal. He was obsessed with numbers and maths in a scarily OCD way. He used the alphabet as a basic code, where each letter corresponds to a number (A B C = 1 2 3 etc). BACH. B=2, A=1, C=3, H=8. Add them up and we get 14. Reverse that and we get 41. And 14 and 41 appear all the time in his works – number of bars, number of notes in a phrase, a hidden musical signature placed at key points in his works. It probably kept him safe in that weird way all those afflicted with light-flicking, counting and tapping tics feel safe. When it’s done right.
Aged twelve he would sneak downstairs when everyone was asleep, steal a manuscript that his dickhead brother wouldn’t let him look at, copy it out and hide it before carefully placing the original back where it belonged and going to bed for few hours’ sleep before rising at 6 a.m. for school. He did this for six months until he had the entire musical score that he could study, pore over, inhabit.
He loved harmony so much that when he ran out of fingers he would put a stick in his mouth to push down additional notes on the keyboard so he could get his high.
You get the idea.
Back to the Chaconne. When his first wife, the great love of his life dies, he writes a piece of music in her memory. It is for solo violin, one of the six (of course) partitas he composed for that instrument. But it isn’t really just a piece of music. It is a musical fucking cathedral built in her memory. It is the Eiffel Tower of love songs. And the crowning achievement in this partita is its last movement, the Chaconne. Fifteen minutes of shattering intensity in the heartbreaking key of D minor.
Imagine everything you would ever want to say to someone you loved if you knew they were going to die, even the things that you couldn’t put into words. Imagine distilling all of those words, feelings, emotions into the four strings of a violin and concentrating it into fifteen taut minutes. Imagine somehow finding a way to construct the entire universe of love and grief that we exist in, putting it in musical form, writing it down on paper and giving it to the world. That’s what he did, a thousand times over, and every day that alone is enough to convince me that there is something bigger and better than my demons that exists in the world.
Enough hippie.
So in my childhood home I find a cassette tape. And on the tape is a live recording of this piece. Live recordings are, always, unequivocally better than studio ones. They have an electricity about them, a sense of danger and the thrill of a moment in time captured forever just for you, the listener. And of course the applause at the end gives me a little bit of wood because I dig things like that. Approval, reward, praise, ego.
I listen to the tape on my battered old Sony machine (with auto-reverse – you remember the almost magical joy of that?). And, in an instant, I’m gone again. This time not flying up to the ceiling and away from the physical pain of what’s happening to me, rather I’ve gone further inside myself. It felt like being freezing cold and climbing into an ultra-warm and hypnotically comfortable duvet with one of those £3,000 NASA-designed mattresses underneath me. I had never, ever experienced anything like it before.
It’s a dark piece; certainly the opening is grim. A kind of funereal chorale, filled with solemnity, grief and resigned hurt. Variation by variation it builds and recedes, expands and shrinks back in on itself like a musical black hole and equally baffling to the human mind. Some of the variations are in the major key, some in the minor. Some are bold and aggressive, some resigned and weary. They are by turns heroic, desperate, joyful, victorious, defeated. It makes time stand still, speed up, go backwards. I didn’t know what the fuck was happening, but I literally could not move. It was like being on the receiving end of a Derren Brown trance-inducing finger-click while on Ketamine. It reached something in me. It reminds me now of that line in Lolita where she tells Humbert that he tore something inside her; I had something ripped apart inside me but this mended it. Effortlessly and instantly. And I knew, the same way I knew the instant I held him in my arms that I’d walk under a bus for my son, that this was what my life was going to consist of. Music and more music. It was to be a life devoted to music and the piano. Unquestioningly, happily, with the doubtful luxury of choice removed.
And I know how clichéd it is, but that piece became my safe place. Any time I felt anxious (any time I was awake) it was going round in my head. Its rhythms were being tapped out, its voices played again and again, altered, explored, experimented with. I dove inside it as if it were some kind of musical maze and wandered around happily lost. It set me up for life; without it I would have died years ago, I’ve no doubt. But with it, and with all the other music that it led me to discover, it acted like a force field that only the most toxic and brutal pain could penetrate.
Imagine what an aid that is.
By this time I had managed to find an exit strategy from the school of rape and applied to some provincial fuck-bucket of a school in the country. But I had now become a kind of classical music superhero – off I went to boarding school aged ten, piano music as my invisibility/invincibility cloak.
It was a bit of out of the frying pan and into the industrial meat grinder, because I was by now a very odd kid, all tics and bed-wetting and spaced out and just weird. I threw up continuously on the way there, was so terrified I didn’t speak to anyone for the first few days, was wandering round shell-shocked like some bomb survivor with his hearing broken and his brain still reverberating.
I was also the only Jew at this school. They literally had never even seen one before. I was like a science experiment – kids actually touching and prodding me to see if I ‘felt different’. And they only knew I was Jewish because the cunt of a headmaster announced to the entire school at assembly one morning that I’d be absent for a day as I was celebrating the Jewish New Year. Which fell about a month into my first term.
But it didn’t matter. Really it didn’t. Because in comparison
to what else was going on this was nothing. Regular beatings, blowing older boys (and staff) for Mars bars (I was more innocent back then – money meant nothing, sugar everything), torturing animals (newts, flies, nothing bigger that I can recall should that ease the disgust of the animal lovers amongst you), hiding, spending countless hours in locked toilet cubicles either bleeding and shitting or fucking and sucking. Throwing myself at older men and boys and doing anything they asked of me because, well, that was what you did. In the same way as shaking people’s hands meant hello, offering yourself to some perverted bastard because you recognise ‘that’ look (paedophiles – don’t think for a minute you’re anonymous to those who’ve been through it) was absolutely normal and expected. Like being on holiday aged ten and going off with a dude in his forties (there with his family) into the toilets to blow him for an ice cream and still not classing it as abuse even today because I chose it. I gave him the nod. I led the way. I wanted an ice cream.
But I had music now. And so it didn’t matter. Because I finally had definitive proof that all was well. That something existed in this horrific fucking world that was just for me, did not need to be shared or explained away, that was all mine. Nothing else was, except this.
The school had a couple of practice rooms with old, battered upright pianos in them. They were my salvation. Every spare moment I got I was in them, noodling away, trying to piece sounds together that meant something. I would get to breakfast as early as possible, before anyone else, because by this stage any kind of social interaction was too startling and fraught with danger, choke down Rice Krispies covered in white sugar, sit on my own and avoid any and all contact, then leg it for the piano.
I was shit, too. Not that it matters, but really, I was truly dreadful. Look at any one of a thousand Asian toddlers whacking out Beethoven on YouTube for the real thing, then imagine them with three stubby fingers and the brain of an Alzheimer’s-addled stroke victim and you’re approaching my level of skill. I laugh so hard now when parents push their kids up to me at CD signings post-concert and instruct me to tell them how long little Tom needs to practise for each day so that he can pass his grades and be proficient. My response is usually ‘As long as he wants to. If he’s not smiling and enjoying it then don’t worry. If he’s got the piano bug it doesn’t matter – he’ll find a way to make it.’