My mother pored over one of the two home-delivered Sunday papers at the kitchen table, beginning with the personal classifieds, a section she dubbed Hatches, Matches, Catches and Dispatches. She would proceed to read the news of a total stranger’s death, or a summary of the most gruesome murder or severe prison sentence, in crisp syllables at maximum volume, for the benefit of my father in the next room, who read the other newspaper from the sports pages forward. He sat in a chair in easy reach of the record player, wearing a fresh pair of KingGee work shorts and a white singlet. His location reflected a rare period of leisure, but his outfit announced his imminent deployment to outstanding tasks around the house. My father’s crossed legs, with their knobbly knees and tapping feet, were the first things I saw when I emerged from my bedroom. The blue veins protruded from his pale calves like a relief map of Australia’s east coast. The tabloid newspaper in his hands obscured the rest of him, but the angle of its open pages revealed his degree of progress from the back page with the accuracy of a sundial.
There was no rest for the record player on Sunday mornings, though each week my father’s musical lesson comprised a different text. Sometimes it was the yee-ha banjo business of John Denver’s ‘Grandma’s Feather Bed’; at others, the rambling anecdotes of Tom T. Hall or Willie Nelson. Either way, I woke up to a story in music whether I wanted to or not. Of Dad’s Sunday morning singer-songwriters I unconsciously favoured the British: melancholy Ralph McTell, who mourned the homeless of ‘The Streets of London’, and the wordy Gilbert O’Sullivan’s rhyming nasal twang. In his enthusiasm, my father often attempted to engage me in music appreciation while I still had sleep in my eyes. Decades would pass before he slept later than 7 a.m. ‘You can sleep when you’re dead,’ he’d say. He expected me to be alert from the moment I was vertical. ‘Johnny Cash: listen!’ he’d say, lowering the newspaper, and I would hear immediately that he had left his teeth in the glass jar in the bathroom. Without them Dad’s enunciation was less than perfect, especially when he attempted a mouthful of sibilants: ‘In this song he’s singing about a boy named Sue.’ Out of a fear of disappointing my father, I expressed more enthusiasm for Johnny Cash’s throat-lozenge growl than I sometimes felt.
Dad’s favourite sound of all was a big band in full swing. Nelson Riddle and the Dorsey Brothers often performed for us on Sunday mornings. Operatic singing might have been likened to the strains of a drowning cat, but the scat singing of Ella Fitzgerald was considered genius. And Sinatra was only ever referred to as Frank. Those musicians known outside our house for breaching the wall between classical and jazz music only performed one style inside it. I heard Benny Goodman play Duke Ellington but not the Mozart clarinet concerto. Instead of Rachmaninov, George Gershwin performed ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ for us. For years Leonard Bernstein was beloved to me not as a conductor but as the composer of West Side Story. My knowledge of ‘classical music’ was limited to the orchestral soundtrack of Walt Disney’s Fantasia. There were no ‘classical music’ records in my house. I didn’t know that Beethoven was a composer of ‘classical music’, and I wasn’t familiar with the term ‘classical music’ or any of the myriad ways in which grown-ups discourage curiosity by naming things and placing them in clearly marked boxes.
The first time I heard Beethoven at home was when Schroeder played the ‘Pathétique’ and ‘Moonlight’ sonatas in the Peanuts television specials broadcast in Australia during the early 1970s. To sit at those black and white keys helped Schroeder escape real life while keeping completely still; to disappear without leaving the house; to explore pretty sounds that were pure and abstract and free from the world of baseball and Christmas and neighbours like Lucy who didn’t understand his passion and dedication. He played in an attitude of joyful self-improvement, looking up to Beethoven who watched over him from the lid of his piano. But Schroeder didn’t play simply to get better at playing: his virtuosity was tied to a deep emotional need, and this magical connection to the instrument fascinated me. For as long as his fingers touched the keys in exquisite isolation, Schroeder found relief from frustration, anxiety and distress—emotions I was yet to name.
In the early 1970s the ‘Moonlight’ sonata was just as popular as it had been after its composition in 1801, and it was one of the first melodies I played by ear on my toy piano. But Beethoven wasn’t too happy about its runaway success. ‘Surely I’ve written better things,’ he later told Czerny.21
Over time I came to realise that of the music I heard during the Peanuts specials, Schroeder’s Beethoven recitals weren’t my favourite. What I enjoyed best were the jaunty soundtracks. Free of any music terminology to name what I heard, my young ears felt an intense affinity for the syncopated swing, the pretty melodies and the minor-sevenths. I thrilled to the walking bass, and the tap and swoosh of the brushes over the drums. Most of all, the miracle of the piano—by turns happy, wistful, ecstatic, morose, hopeful, lonely, impatient—somehow encompassed a whole world of feeling: not just how Charlie Brown or Snoopy or Lucy or Schroeder felt, but how I felt while watching them. It was the piano music that helped me to know how I felt about what I saw—and somehow made me feel it more intensely. How did the music do that? And would it be possible for me to learn how to play such music?
Despite admiring Schroeder’s virtuosity and dedication to practice, even then I could tell that his passionate attachment to Beethoven was at the expense of other kinds of music. In that attitude, too,
