‘I told him that’s too bad and that’s where it’s staying,’ she said with the sharp edge in her voice that acted on me as a bridle did a horse. I was certain the piano tuner wouldn’t have mistaken her tone either, before remembering he was self-employed and tuning the instrument where it stood.
On Wednesdays I could hardly wait for school to end so I could sit on my teacher’s smooth black leather piano stool and explore her books of music manuscript. Like many beginners, I had started with John Thompson’s series, including the classic Teaching Little Fingers to Play, before moving on to Robert Schumann’s Album for the Young, along with The Children’s Bach by Johann Sebastian himself. I can still picture those creamy quarto-sized pages crammed with squiggles and lines and dots and white-faced notes and black blobs—and running through them all, like a comb through the knots in my hair, the five lines for each clef, treble and bass, right hand and left (more or less). ‘I didn’t understand anything until once I saw a musical staff at the top of a greeting card,’ wrote Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva of her struggle to learn notated music, ‘where, instead of notes sitting on the staff, there were—sparrows! Then I understood that notes live on branches, each one on its own branch, and from there they jump onto the keys, each one onto its own. And then it makes a sound.’26 In her 1934 essay ‘Mother and Music’, Tsvetaeva—who became one of the twentieth century’s finest poets—confesses she disliked simultaneously reading and playing music, feeling that the notes hindered her. My experience was the opposite: to me the written notation was a puzzle or a secret that I could understand, if I paid attention to Mrs Wilcox and practised every day.
My mother had taught me to read letters and words, but learning to read music was my independent discovery. The very idea that a circle with a straight tail corresponded to a particular note, that a symbol written on paper indicated not only the precise pitch of a sound but its duration too, was so intoxicating I kept coming back to the piano stool for more. But reading music was exhausting—you needed to be able to read up and down, to the right and to the left, using your full concentration. And even when you did that, the music never meant anything more than the pretty sounds it made. The combination of dots and lines weren’t like letters forming words; they weren’t about anything. Still, I was learning to speak a new language, and I didn’t want to stop talking. ‘I know every thought in your head,’ my mother sometimes said to me as a warning against discord; but she didn’t know this. My anxiety to please her was countered by the pleasure I felt at the piano, my little fiefdom of discipline and delight. As the only one in my family who understood what the black notes and straight lines meant, I associated notated music with privacy and power, and the piano became a secret place I could go where no one else could follow.
As I progressed, getting the notes under my short impatient fingers was only one aspect of learning a new piece. Another was learning the vocabulary of music’s written language, which was primarily Italian. The pages of my Bach Two-Part Inventions, a classic teaching text for beginners, were filled with Italian words and phrases. Allegro tranquillo at the top left of the two pages of ‘Invention 13 in A minor’, for example, instructs the pianist as to the speed (allegro means fast) and tone (tranquillo, no prizes for guessing) at which she should embark—and though I’d never had a problem with playing fast, the tranquil part was more elusive. Presto was my preferred tempo to play, though andante, for a walking speed, was my favourite adjective. I loathed largo; its slow pace required patience, restraint, and what Mrs Wilcox described as an emotional connection with each note, whatever that meant.
There was the fancy f that I knew meant forte, loudly, and the mf that added mezzo to the forte and indicated a volume about halfway between f and the p for playing softly, piano. There were the signs that looked like the bobby pins my mother used to keep my hair in place, which, depending on the way they opened, indicated I should gradually get either louder or softer. Beneath one bobby pin the instruction grew quite specific: decresc. poco a poco. How I loved that poco a poco: to get softer, little by little. The abbreviation dimin. told the pianist to become quieter—in English, to diminish it—while cresc. suggested it was time to play louder.
In 1723, Johann Sebastian Bach described his fifteen two-part Inventions as exercises composed for ‘amateurs of the keyboard, and especially the eager ones’.27 He wrote them for his then nine-year-old son Wilhelm Friedemann. By ‘keyboard’ Bach referred to the harpsichord and clavichord (clavier), which the pianoforte would not dislodge for several decades. About 250 years later, when I was two years into my lessons—near Wilhelm Friedemann’s age and learning Bach’s ‘Two-Part Invention number 13’—my twentieth-century edition marked gradations of piano and forte. The terms sum up the transformative difference of the instrument from those two earlier keyboards: it can play from soft to loud. Because of that development, in the late eighteenth century the pianoforte not only became the dominant keyboard instrument but also quickly made its predecessors redundant.
An invention is a short work for keyboard defined by its counterpoint. In the case of a two-part invention, two independent and different voices operate in harmony with each other. It was a model
