During our lessons Mrs Wilcox hovered over my right shoulder holding her yellow pencil, worn down to a stub. In the Invention, in addition to helpfully inserting a numeral above an especially tricky note to indicate the best finger for me to use, she took her pencilled annotations one step further: she altered the left-hand notation in one bar so my nine-year-old hand could manage it. Even then I wondered what Johann Sebastian would have made of her editorial intervention.
The future novelist George Eliot was an eager amateur pianist from girlhood, when the world knew her as Mary Anne Evans. As an adult, she described in her letters how playing the piano gave her a ‘fresh kind of muscular exercise as well as a nervous stimulus’.28 As a writer, she endowed several of her female characters with musical talent. In The Mill on the Floss, Eliot channelled her passion for the instrument in the musical preferences of her heroine Maggie Tulliver: ‘The mere concord of octaves was a delight to Maggie, and she would often take up a book of studies rather than any melody, that she might taste more keenly by abstraction the more primitive sensation of intervals.’ If Maggie was managing octaves single-handedly, her handspan was broader than mine. It wasn’t the remote musicianship of the virtuoso that captured Eliot’s imagination; she understood the physical and intellectual challenges the instrument presented to its students, and empathised with her heroine’s faults in playing. ‘Hurrying the tempo…was certainly Maggie’s weak point,’ Eliot noted.
The beginner’s temptation to hurry was hard to curb. In his instructional Letters to a Young Lady, Czerny warns against the common ‘error of accelerating the time’.29 The off-white pages of my first music books are covered in notes from two distinct hands. Mrs Wilcox’s handwriting is long and slim like she was, neat from years of writing in the margins of music manuscripts at odd angles over the shoulders of her students. All her annotations remind me about tempo. In my own hand, rounder and thicker like my prepubescent torso, are my colloquial translations: Slow down! Do NOT rush!!
And then there were the punctuation marks, such as the dot beneath a note that told me to play it staccato—to jump off it—as opposed to the smooth evenness of the ideal legato. I had a lazy tendency when first learning a piece to ignore phrase marks, which comprise the internal punctuation of any composition: a musical phrase shapes a series of notes or measures of a piece with its own beginning, middle and end. And just as disrespect for punctuation, now epidemic in the age of instant-messaging, leads to misunderstandings and garbled communication, so my rushed delivery of melodies minus precise phrasing resulted in interpretations that for Mrs Wilcox were semiliterate at best.
Raising my eyes from Mrs Wilcox’s keyboard, I was often shocked to see myself in the shining black surface of the piano. It wasn’t the same as seeing my reflection in the mirror over my bedside table, where the ribbons my mother tied around my pigtails hung above a tiny vase of fresh flowers she sometimes placed there. Staring into the piano’s black mirror was more like seeing into the future, recognising for the first time the possibility of another version of myself, glimpsing the girl I would become, the girl who could play the piano and understand the world around her through her fingertips, and let her hands speak for her when she could not.
7
AT THE PIANO, ALICE MAY MORRISON Taylor picked out the notes she saw in her mind’s eye, repeating under her breath the new hymn the choir had sung this morning. When she listened to the choir she pictured the shape of what they sang. Didn’t everyone? Sometimes the notes marched in a line as straight as Dumbarton Road. Other times the melody would soar as if to the top of Dumbarton Rock, then float back down to the Clyde. If Alice could keep its shape in her mind’s eye during the service and the walk home, she knew she would be able to remember it when she returned to her piano. She had come to think of the piano as hers, because Nance had given up all pretence of playing it, and, despite the organist at church being a man, their parents and brothers considered playing the piano as something only girls did.
The Dowanhill United Free Church was ten minutes from home. On the way there, one of her brothers would crack the joke about how it should be downhill, like its name. Nance giggled every time, but it drove Alice to distraction. Her favourite moment was rounding the corner into Hyndland Street and seeing the steeple pointing straight up to God. Soon she would be inside the church and singing, even if she were sandwiched in a pew between her fidgeting brothers instead of up the front with the choir where she just knew she belonged.
‘Surely
