Ballade No. 1

Chopin Ballade Opus 23 No.1.  What a monster of a piece.  This is the piece that defeated me in my final recital at the Con.  I got very close but it was just out of reach.  For years I felt not quite good enough because of this ‘defeat’.  But this morning, I played the Ballade through, slowly, carefully, and made it to the end.  Bloody Hell.  What a marathon.  I thought back to my 21 year old self and felt like giving her a huge pat on the back for even attempting such a behemoth.  Well done me, for giving it a red-hot go.  Even the most experienced and technically skilled of pianists would admit that this piece is VERY difficult.  Today I can see that my efforts were not a ‘failure’ – that the piece was just beyond my capabilities, but I had done my best.

I can remember the ridiculous amount of repetitive practise, over and over and over again, faster and faster to get it up to speed.  And I remember the amazing elation of getting it almost right, the huge power of those chords, the gorgeous lyricism, the flying passages up and down the piano.  It takes my breath away just thinking about it.  And this morning, my body remembered that feeling – the elation was there, my fingers remembered more than I thought they would and could play more than I thought they could.  To be inside the huge emotional span of this work is kind of amazing, exhilarating, terrifying, moving, poignant and profound. 

Earlier this morning I sat with my 10 year daughter as she struggled, in tears, because she couldn’t get the ‘right’ sound out of her flute.  “I don’t want to go to my flute lesson”, “I want to give up”, “I can’t get it right”.  I can remember that feeling as well; the misery and frustration and feeling of inadequacy.  And she’s worrying that her music teacher will think she hasn’t done enough practise, that her teacher will be cross, that she will be judged and found lacking.  I know why she wants to just run away.  My response to her, apart from lots of hugs and reassurance, was ‘No, you are not giving up.  You have to learn how to get through the hard stuff.  That’s what life is like.’  I have no parental ambitions for her to become a professional musician – in fact I think I would probably discourage it!  But what I do know is that learning a musical instrument is an incredibly valuable life experience and it teaches us so much more than just how to play an instrument.  Tenacity, perseverance, problem solving, critical thinking, self-reliance, as well as all the other well-researched cognitive benefits.  I explained to her, that if she stopped now, she would most definitely NOT feel better; what will make her feel better will be to work through her current technical ‘block’ and then know what she can achieve through hard work and determination and mental focus.  And then, she can decide whether she wants to keep learning the flute or go back to learning the piano, which is where her musical journey (and mine) began.

dusting off the piano

Haydn Piano Sonata in c minor, hello old friend, I've missed you. It's been a while, probably 15 years since my fingers have attempted you, but amazingly you are still there, lying dormant, waiting. My fingers have not forgotten you and neither have I.  Haydn’s piano sonatas, so often overshadowed by Mozart’s and Beethoven’s offerings, but so full of grace and delicacy, muscularity and depth of feeling.  Having browsed through some more contemporary and ‘popular’ piano music (think Nyman) I am so happy to delve into this music that sits so perfectly under my fingers.  No awkward twists and turns that make little sense under a human hand, this music lives when it is played and what a feeling to again dive into it.   I played through one of Messiaen’s Vingt Regards the other day and felt such happiness to be back inside this music, these crystalline sounds and inspired construction.  And then there is Bach, always Bach.  From my first Minuet from the Children’s Bach, to the slow movement of the Italian Concerto, to the dense complexities of some of the more hairy preludes and fugues, I always come back to Bach.

My relationship with the piano is a fraught one.  There is love and loss and guilt and self-criticism and love and disappointment.  Do other musicians (lapsed and otherwise) feel this way?  I look at my piano and I can almost hear it calling out to me, my fingers yearn to play it, there is something like an ache of longing and also an avoidance, a reproach, a turning away.

I recently read Anna Goldsworthy’s beautifully written book Piano Lessons (that it has taken me this long to ‘get around’ to reading this book is testament to my avoidance of things piano).  Reading about Anna’s journey in music from childhood to adulthood led me to reflect on some parallels but also some notable differences.  At what point had the joy and love for playing being overwhelmed by anxiety, self-criticism, loss of confidence and eventually an abandonment of my musical mother tongue?  When did it stop being about the music?  I can remember the stress of competing in Eisteddfods and music competitions, the nervousness that served no purpose other than to distract me from playing my best, the disappointment at knowing I could play better but hadn’t, the feeling of letting others down, then the scathing self-criticism only enhanced by a throw away comment from a music teacher; “didn’t you want to win?”  

My self-confidence took a further battering when I arrived at ‘The Con’ and was overwhelmed on a daily basis by the technical mastery of many of my peers.  Their pianistic pyrotechnics left me in awe and also in no doubt that my own musical skills were inadequate: that I was inadequate, with nothing to offer as a pianist in the face of such obviously superior musicianship.  No one talked about the love of music, what a gift it is to share with others.  Music was reduced to a competitive sport; accuracy and technical proficiency and virtuosity were valued above all else.  Performing in front of anyone became of trial to be overcome, and an activity that inevitably reinforced my own sense of inadequacy and failure as a musician.  At the end of second year I decided I wanted to major in composition but I convinced the faculty to let take a double major and keep having piano lessons.  I remember clearly that I did not want to give up on the piano, it was still my musical lifeline and I was not ready to cut off this part of myself.  I made it through to the end of fourth year, passed my final piano exam with a credit and walked away.  I never played in public again, or indeed in front of anyone, except the occasional piano student.  Composing music became my primary musical outlet, one that I convinced myself was a much better fit – I could write music and someone else could play it. 

I still played occasionally for myself, but less and less as my technical facility lost its edge; enjoyment gave way to frustration and the piano collected dust.  But I have always come back to the piano.  When I lived in Edinburgh and had access to a Steinway grand, I would wait until weekends when no one was around, take a pile of music and spend a couple of hours revisiting loved pieces and untangling new ones.  Work and young children served as further distractions and kept me away for a time and I sometimes felt, with sadness, that playing the piano was lost to me, that I had let it go and was past the point of getting it back. “What a waste” was a comment often repeated by my mother, a phrase which in many ways twisted the knife but also failed to understand the connection between the years of learning to play the piano and my current musical life as a composer. One would not be possible without the other.  Piano was where I learnt to ‘speak’ music, now I use that language in another way.

A couple of years ago I took up the cello, wishing to learn a new instrument, and enjoyed immersing myself in a new set of technical challenges and the rewards that come from expressing oneself in a new way.  At the back of my mind this sometimes felt like a willful betrayal, another form of avoidance.  Why was I spending time learning and practicing the cello when my piano sat untouched?  Why was I struggling to learn to play a simple tune on the cello when I could launch into something much more musically complex and satisfying (however rustily) on the piano?

Having had little time for either instrument over the last six months, it is the piano that I have returned to.  I feel like I am reconnecting with an old friend, long avoided and undervalued.  But I am also making a very conscious decision to let go of all the ‘baggage’ associated, for me, with this instrument.  Self-criticism, and reproach, disappointment, frustration, guilt, feelings of inadequacy… be gone.  I’m done with you: you never served any purpose anyway. 

I am playing the piano because I enjoy it and if I play it for someone else, it will be so I can share something, not impress them.  And if I make a mistake or if my rendition of the piece is less than ‘perfect’, that is OK because I will be playing the music with love and that’s the important thing.  Not musical pyrotechnics, not aiming to be better than someone else, not misplaced perfectionism.  I want the music back, the joy of playing the piano, the technical challenge, but more importantly the sense of satisfaction of bringing some little black notes on a page to life.  And I’ll be happy to share that, if anyone wants to listen, and just as happy to have it for myself.

And here’s the thing: I never wanted to be a concert pianist or a chamber musician or any kind of performer.  I just knew that whatever it was that I was, it was about music.  And somewhere along the way a part of my musical self was sidelined, shamed into submission and left in a corner to gather dust.  So, I’m sorry old friend, it wasn’t your fault, or my fault, you’ve been waiting patiently and we’ve got some catching up to do.

Why I love Alain de Botton

I love Alain de Botton.  His writing is so clear and sensible and logical.  His Religion for Atheists was something of a revelation – I thought I was the only Atheist who felt that religion-shaped hole in their lives.  His latest book Art as Therapy (with John Armstrong) is not only one of the most beautiful books I’ve seen in a long time, but looks set to challenge and enhance the way I understand Art.  I haven’t even got to the end of the first chapter, ‘Methodology’,  and already I’ve had one of those light-bulb moments about how I respond to art, and for me most particularly, how I respond to Music. 

In a section about ‘Growth’ de Botton opens with the following observation:

It is one of the secret, unacknowledged features of our relationship with art that many of its most prestigious and lauded examples can leave us feeling a bit scared, or bored, or both.

 Who of us hasn’t felt this at one time, and then felt guilty or inadequate for feeling this way in the face of ‘Great Art’ or ‘Great Music’ or ‘Great Literature’?

De Botton questions why we may have such a negative response to particular art works when others may find them beautiful or moving, and he proposes that this may be based on some negative experience that we have come to associate with a particular work or style or genre.  This is of course a very subjective and personal perspective to have of a work or art but then a huge part of how we approach art is subjective and emotional – so it shouldn’t be surprising that there is the potential for a negative response.  This hostility that we may experience towards a particular work of art or genre has the potential, de Botton claims, to “taint” our experience of aspects of life because they can trigger “…a variety of defensive behaviours in us”.  If we take a defensive stance towards a piece or art and by association an entire genre or style, we are in effect depriving ourselves of potentially enriching experiences.  We move from a particular negative experience and generalise and project this onto our experience of a whole range of related works of art.  “We employ a powerful, erroneous emotional logic.”

Part of de Botton’s project in this book is to suggest ways in which we can gain more from our experience of art – how it can be potentially ‘therapeutic’.  He invites us to move beyond our initial negative emotional response and ask ourselves why we respond that way – to be open to our discomfort or ambivalence or distaste and its root causes.  In this way engagement with art can help us to address past negative experiences and their ongoing emotional legacy and move beyond our defensive response. “The first and crucial step to overcoming defensiveness is to be highly alert to its reality: to be generously aware of how normal it is to harbour strongly negative views about things.”  From there he suggests that we try to gain some insight into the artist’s perspective and “…look out for points of connection, however fragile and initially tenuous, between the mindset of the artist and our own.”

This all seems totally sensible and reasonable and in some ways obvious, but it took Alain de Botton to point it out to me.  I find it all to easy to hold on to an initial negative response to a particular artist’s work or genre, often stemming from an initial negative emotional response of not ‘understanding ‘a work and feeling irritated or inadequate.  There are composers whose work I almost instinctively reject because of my ‘defensive’ response – and for some reason it never occurred to me to move beyond my flawed emotional logic.  I had always put it down to individual ‘taste’ – I just don’t like it because it is not my kind of music.  This in not to say that there is no such thing as individual aesthetic preferences but I wonder how much of our assumptions about what we like or enjoy or respond to in art are tainted by a negative response somewhere in our past that we probably can’t even remember.  I have always thought that I was quite open minded and eclectic in my musical tastes but reading this book has led me to challenge quite a few assumptions about how I respond to different kinds of music. 

So thank you Alain de Botton, for again asking me questions and suggesting new ways of looking at things.  And for reminding us that we all have flawed judgement from time to time, because we are human, but that we can find ways of moving beyond these self limiting defensive responses and become more open and receptive to new experiences and all the world of art has to offer.

Bach and Perseverance

For as long as I have know them, my children have shown no interest whatsoever in me playing the piano.  When they were very little they would wail ‘stop mummy’ or ‘let me play, mummy’, so I quickly gave up on my romanticised view of musical motherhood where I would play Bach as they played on the floor beside me.  But recently something has changed.  The last two evenings after homework is done, they have actually ASKED me to play for them.  ‘Play the Waltz’, ‘Play the fast one’, ‘Play the one you played when you were a little girl.’  This last request was the reason I climbed up to the attic today to seek out my box full of old piano music and find my copy of The Children’s Bach.  This particular collection of piano pieces has an almost mythical status among those of us who learnt the piano as children.  Helen Garner chose to use the title for her 1984 Novella.  I remember being particularly moved when, at a musical soirée, Anna Goldsworthy played a piece, probably a Minuet, from The Children’s Bach and read extracts from her memoir Piano Lessons because it took me straight back to my early years learning the piano.  When I found my copy of The Children’s Bach today I was similarly transported back to early piano lessons.  My copy is dog-eared, faded, sellotaped, with my name on the front cover in my piano teacher’s familiar handwriting.  I was filled with love for this music and fond memories of my piano teacher, Mrs Spratt, who was in many ways my musical mother, someone who understood me very well.  The reason I went up into the attic to extract this particular book was an ongoing ‘discussion’ (argument) I am having with my older daughter about the importance of perseverance.  She is learning the piano, and like every 7 year old, is not overly interested in practising, and being a clever 7 year old who often finds things easy, she is struggling with the realisation that learning a new piece is DIFFICULT.  Having tried the Robert the Bruce and the spider story (“if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again”) without much traction, I told her how I had struggled with a particular piano piece when I was little bit older than her; ‘A Little Air’, from The Children’s Bach.  I clearly remember how frustrated I was, how the piece tripped me up and just didn’t make sense and that it nearly made me give up the whole endeavour.  But after a stern word from my piano teacher and probably my mother too, I knuckled down and played it over and over and over again until I got it.  I also remember the fantastic sense of satisfaction and pride in my achievement when I could finally play the piece from beginning to end.  I told my daughter all of this.  And then she wanted to hear the piece.  I will play it for her and her sister tonight, along with a waltz and a fast piece and maybe a Bach Prelude.  And I hope my story of the ‘tricky piano piece’ will stay with her every time she starts a new piece and meets that wall of frustration.  Perseverance, along with resilience, are perhaps some of the most important lessons I hope to teach our children.