The Piano Exam

by Gordon Lawrie

so out.”) Although he was prepared to teach me piano how to play the piano with one-finger - the left hand was for waving, punching the air, and blowing kisses to the crowd - I decided that he and I weren’t quite on the same wavelength.

  Then one Sunday I was walking back from the Stockbridge market when I noticed a couple of pink notices tied to a lamp-posts in a side street. Assuming they were there to announce a road closure or an increase in parking charges, I stopped to have a look, only to discover the following:

  PIANO LESSONS

  EXPERIENCED TEACHER

  GUARANTEED SUCCESS

  And then followed the name and telephone number of Mary Maxwell-Hume.

  So now, four days later, I’m on my way to her house. I confess I’m a little intrigued by the woman’s ‘guaranteed success’ claim - I’ll be testing that to the limit. On reflection, setting my aims and objectives at passing Grade Three piano is the equivalent of trying to scale Everest without ropes.

  Mary Maxwell-Hume lives in a quiet terraced villa in the Trinity area in the north of Edinburgh, and I’m forced to park my green Honda Jazz at the end of her street and walk back some distance on foot to her house. I’m relieved that there’s no sign of life as I make my way up the path to her front door. Ringing the bell produces no sound and no response, so I ring it again, longer this time in the hope of hearing myself, and my finger is still attached to the buzzer when the door opens. As soon as the door opens I can hear a doorbell ringing - loudly - in another room. Ah - that must be me, I think, and sure enough removing my finger causes the noise to stop.

  “Sorry,” I say. “I thought the bell was broken.”

  “Well, it’s not,” the woman before me replies. That’s all she says.

  Whatever I was expecting my new piano teacher to look like, this wasn’t it. She’s tall - with the benefit of the three steps up into her house she towers above me. I’m guessing she’s around fifty, although she could be as old as me and simply looking young for her age, slim and with hair that contains colour and streaks of silver, and I can’t tell how much is her own. She’s wearing a dress, not any ordinary dress, but a blue calf-length lace thing that accentuates every sinewy curve of her figure from top to toe. She has discreetly-dangling earrings, she’s barefoot, and she’s wearing a sizeable quantity of some sort of perfume which doesn’t make feel sick, and so therefore is probably expensive. It might be Chanel No. 5, now that I think about it.

  I must have been staring open-mouthed at this apparition for almost ten seconds when she finally says, “I assume you are Mr. Reid?” There might be the faintest trace of a Mona Lisa smile there.

  “Yes.” It’s all I can manage. Then I remember my manners. “Ms. Maxwell-Hume?”

  “You’ve come to the correct place, Mr. Reid. But unless you plan on having your lesson in my front garden, I’d suggest you come in. Please leave your shoes at the front door.” As I remove my shoes, I’m at once both grateful that I put clean socks on before I left home, and curious how I’ll deal with the piano pedals.

  “Come through with me to the piano room.” I follow her into a large south-facing room which backs onto a conservatory and then an extensive back garden which is bathed in the summer sunlight. In the centre of the room are a couple of large traditional sofas, and looking behind me, I spot a full-size grand piano, which I suspect might be the focus of today’s activities. She motions me to sit down on one of the sofas, then to my surprise she opts to sit at the other end of the same one.

  She studies me. “Do you like what you see?” she asks.

  Mary Maxwell-Hume has put the question in the oddest way, especially as she waits until I’m looking directly at her until she asks.

  “Yes,” I reply, deciding to keep my options as far open as possible. “Beautiful.”

  “Call me Mary, Mr. Reid.”

  “My name’s Brian,” I reply. “Brian Reid.”

  “Well, Brian, this is where I give my piano lessons. And you would like to do a Grade Three exam, you say?”

  “That’s the idea,” I assure her.

  “Then I’m sure you’ll succeed. In fact I guarantee it.”

  “You do?”

  “Trust me, Brian,” she says firmly. “But first I need to hear what you can do, to get some idea of the task ahead.” I’m supposed to be the schoolteacher, but she’s the one who’s in control.

  “How much did you say you charged?” I ask, just to be sure.

  “The standard - thirty pounds.” She pauses. “For fifteen minutes.”

  “What? Other teachers charge that for thirty minutes.”

  “They’re not as good as me. I may seem expensive, but I guarantee success.”

  I try to take this in. “Do I get all my money back if I fail?”

  “Of course. But you won’t fail.”

  “You haven’t heard me yet. I’m not very good,” I tell her.

  “Which is why you really ought to start playing,” she says quietly. “You’ll be paying for my time, whether you play or not.” It’s slightly sinister.

  “So no coffee and biscuits beforehand?” I ask. I was looking forward to a Kit-Kat or a Blue Riband. All my other teachers have had some sort of welcome routine.

  “No coffee and biscuits.”

  She instructs me to play. For those who have never had a piano lesson as an adult, it’s a sweat-inducingly nerve-wracking experience, and this woman has the palms of my hands utterly awash already - the soles of my feet, too. I make a note to try not to slip on her sanded wooden floor, but the bright summer light flooding in from the garden shows my footprints as I walk. It’s a relief to reach the safety of the piano stool before I faint with fear.

  “I see you’ve brought some music with you, Brian. Is this what you’ve been playing?”

  It’s the music from the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music - the gold standard of music exams - Grade Three. I nod my head. “I’ve been trying to play a couple of the pieces,” I tell her, but omitting the words “…for over a year.”

  “Play for me,” she commands, with a wave. She’s still not risen from the sofa. “Perhaps you should start by playing a couple of scales for me. Would you like that? Do you practise scales, Brian? I do hope so.”

  The answers to those two questions are “no” and “very little” respectively, but neither of those is the correct answers, so I simply reply, “Where would you like me to start?”

  “How about the key of C?”

  In theory, this should be the easiest of all the keys on the piano, played as it is on all the white notes, although personally I’ve always found it slightly more reassuring to have the odd black note to say hello to on the way up and down. In my sweaty hands, I make a complete mess of the key of C.

  “Can I try again?” I ask. “I’m a little nervous.” She nods, but in fact the second attempt is worse, and the third worse still after that.

  “The key of C can be a little tricky, Brian,” she says, coolly. “How about G?”

  G is a little better. There’s only one black note, but it helps. At Grade Three level, I only have to play two octaves, I remind myself. On the other hand, that’s sixty notes, which I have to play in the right order and on a mixture of two hands.

  Next I stumble through D, then A minor. Then she drops the nuclear bomb on me.

  “Play E flat, please.”

  E flat is a complete nightmare of a key on the piano, requiring the player to engineer a thumb movement only really suited to animals with a surfeit of fingers. It takes me almost thirty seconds to work my way up the two octaves of E flat and back down again.

  “Hmm,” she says. I can’t really bring myself to think of her as “Mary”. “Perhaps scales are not your strongest suit, Brian.”

  “In terms of the piano, perhaps I’m more likely to apply clubs and spades than hearts and diamonds,” I suggest. It’s meant t
o be a joke, but she simply frowns at me.

  “So it seems,” she replies. OK, so that joke fell flat on its face. “How about playing some music for me, Brian? Shall we try that? What do you have?”

  In fact I’ve been practising a couple of things furiously, the first of which is by James Hook, an eighteenth-century English organist and composer who made lots of money by writing idiot-proof pieces for beginners. I set off playing it, pretending to follow the music, but actually as soon as I refer to the music for real, I lose my way, so I end up playing the piece as a four-part serial. Nor is the second piece any more successful, a “Little Study in D Minor” by Theodor Kirchner, a composer I know nothing about and care even less. My version of his “Little Study” occasionally finds the key of D minor, but only occasionally.

  The end of this - I hesitate to use the word - performance - is greeted with silence by Mary Maxwell-Hume. She studies me for a moment, then utters her judgement.

  “You’re not very good, are you?”

  Actually, I thought I was a bit better than ‘not very good’, perhaps ‘requires improvement’ or even ‘shows some promise’, so ‘not very good’ is a bit of a disappointment.

  “No,” I agree. “Is Grade Three beyond me?”

  “Perhaps you need to broaden your horizons,” she suggests.

  “What did you have in mind?”

  “The Associated Board isn’t the only organisation that offers piano exams.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “Not at all. There are also the Trinity