Until tonight’s concert, Loussier’s approach to Bach had been a mystery for my ears only, but now I watched it come to life. Even though I knew what trio meant, I could hardly believe that there were only three musicians on that wide stage. Somehow they created an entire world of sound. I can still see the double-bass player plucking the long strings of his instrument, one hand down low and the other up high at the neck, to produce those soft staccato steps that led to the opening of ‘Pastorale in C Minor’.
Through my father’s binoculars I saw the bassist and pianist communicating with their eyes: each lifting an eyebrow or nodding when it was time for the other to begin or finish their solo. The drummer shared a similar intimacy with the bassist, each smiling when some aspect of one’s playing pleased the other. It surprised me to see how actively they listened, how attentive they were to each other’s every note and gesture. They looked like good friends having the time of their lives. I wondered how they kept track of what they were playing and where they were in the piece. Loussier didn’t refer to printed music although the bassist had some loose sheets of paper scattered near his feet. The drummer kept them all in time, but despite the responsibility he seemed so relaxed. I envied their familiarity with each other, their easy confidence on the stage, how they weren’t embarrassed that everybody was looking at them.
I had played Dad’s recording so many times that I recognised the Bach compositions, but the music came out differently on stage. How thrilling it was to hear the difference. The possibility that there could be such variation within the boundaries of a single piece thrilled me. I understood that the discrepancy between each performance of the same tune was intentional: the point was to honour the original composition with harmonically appropriate changes that became possible only within the notated boundaries of the melody and chords. My ears heard enormous freedom in music that offered flexibility within the larger context of an agreed form.
It surprised me to see the musicians sweating, or reaching for nearby glasses of water. These men had seemed like gods to me—that they felt sweaty and thirsty was liberating. It gave me hope that when I grew up I might be able to play like them. I wanted to play all of the instruments. I wanted to know how to sit at a piano with other people and produce the exquisite sensation that made it hard for me to sit still. I thought that to be a grown-up playing music like this on a stage for an audience was the greatest possible thing in the world to do. It didn’t occur to me that these grown-ups were all men, or that this fact might be in any way significant.
When I handed back the binoculars, my father smiled at me with the pride of a man who knew his hard-earned money had not been wasted.
It wouldn’t be easy. I would have to practise all the time, like Schroeder, to become good enough to play Bach. Then, when I could play Bach, maybe I could show him how much I loved his music by dancing with and around his beautiful melodies. How marvellous it would be to talk to a composer across time using my hands and my imagination at the piano, playing new variations on familiar themes. Schroeder might not have understood, but it was time for me to put away the toy piano. I needed to learn how to play Bach, so I could play like Jacques Loussier.
5
ALICE MAY MORRISON TAYLOR. IT WAS hard to credit that my scary grandmother owned a maiden name of such glorious abundance. Until I saw her name written down in its entirety—at which time I was seized with the compulsion to read each word out loud, as if it were a poem—she had only ever been Granny, or, much later, the posthumous Alice Lloyd, with its three paltry syllables. But Alice May Morrison Taylor: the syllables, clustered in ones, twos and threes, had the gravitas of a complex chord played with two hands.
Alice was born on 8 July 1895, the second-oldest of five children born to Charlotte and James Taylor of 370 Dumbarton Road, Partick, in the west end of Glasgow. Home was one level in a three-storey tenement of sooty blonde sandstone, one of many rows of such housing built for the workers who had flooded into the city during the nineteenth century to work in its mills and shipyards. James Taylor worked for Denny’s Shipyard, which sat at the mouth of the River Leven where it met the Clyde, just below Dumbarton Rock. Denny’s was as famous as Charles Dickens.
The Taylors’ firstborn, Anne, was named after her mother’s mother, according to Scottish convention. But everyone knew her as Nance and the pretty one. In quick succession Alice gained three brothers—Vincent, Stephen and James—so that five children learned to squeeze into two bedrooms.
When I imagine how Alice recalled her childhood, I suspect it was the noise that first came to mind. Home was an incessant din of her brothers running after each other and yelling out until their mother’s even louder rebukes quieted them. A constant scraping of chairs against cold stone and threadbare carpet, of knives and forks on chipped dinner plates, the heavy thud of her father’s boots announcing the end of another long day’s work.
In the year of Alice’s birth, Glasgow was the fourth-largest port in Europe, and so important economically it was known as the second city of the British Empire. Positioned at the head of the Clyde, Glasgow conveniently faced the Americas, and the influence of that invisible shore rippled from the docks into every working-class home. By that time, shipbuilding had replaced the trade
