‘It’s half a mile whichever way we go,’ his wife replied. ‘When Alice joins the choir she’ll have to get there and back by herself, and you know very well this is the simplest.’
Every Sunday Alice watched the conductor, old Mr Cunningham, her eyes glued to his narrow shoulders as he moved his arms in front of the choir, trying to imagine exactly what he was doing. As long as she could remember, she had yearned to join the choir. But musically speaking, Dowanhill United was a serious business: membership of the choir was by invitation only.
‘Mr Cunningham told me today he’d be happy to have you join the choir when you turn twelve,’ her mother had said the previous Sunday afternoon, unpegging the dry sheets from their section of the common clothesline. Alice had bent to help her fold them, trying to contain her excitement. ‘It’s God’s gift to you, your voice,’ her mother had said, the peg lodged in one corner of her mouth keeping her tone flat. ‘Sure as eggs you didn’t get it from us.’
Despite the peg, Alice had heard the quiet pride in her mother’s voice. But twelve? She had only just turned eleven. How could she possibly wait that long?
8
THE PIANO STOOL QUICKLY BECAME THE most comfortable seat for me in any house. At home I was rolled out at dinner parties to entertain my parents’ friends, and on Christmas Day post-pudding for members of my extended family who preferred Bacharach to Bach but politely clapped anyway.
Because I was a strong sight-reader—meaning that I could play credibly through a piece that was new to me—by the age of ten I was a regular accompanist to the violinists, singers and flautists of my neighbourhood. Like those of any freelancer, my gigs came through my immediate network and word-of-mouth recommendations. Mrs Wilcox’s strongest flute students—which I also became, for a time—needed accompanying at her regular concerts, where I was now a featured soloist at the end of the program. While I rose to the challenge of solo performances, increasing anxiety over forgetting the notes or making an obvious mistake had begun to cloud my enjoyment. I found myself gravitating toward the variety, novelty and companionship of the accompanist’s job: to help the soloist sound their best. A budding violinist at primary school asked me to perform with her for a church concert; a local singer needed me to help her rehearse for an upcoming audition. I said yes to everyone. Accompanying wasn’t about me—it was about making the other musician feel secure.
Sight-reading is the process of converting musical information from visual signs and symbols into sound. It’s a feat of short-term memory built on the solid ground of cultural familiarity with the type of music set before the musician: a combination of nature and nurture. Research has shown that proficient sight-readers look further ahead in the music than their less fluent counterparts, managing to process and remember a larger eye–hand span—the gap between reading the notes and actually playing them—than other musicians. Similar to reading language by expectation (the unfortunately named ‘chunking’), the effective sight-reader recognises patterns of notes as a single unit.
Sight-reading is an addictive business, because by definition a musician requires vast amounts of fresh notation to develop the skill in the first place, and subsequently to satisfy the need for more music. French philosopher Roland Barthes, a highly proficient sight-reader, has been described as ‘insatiable’ for new music.30 I know this particular lust. I understood musical promiscuity long before any other, always looking for the next piece to play, whether alone or with others. In my case the talent for sight-reading led me to accompanying, which in turn made me a stronger sight-reader, but this isn’t an inevitable path. Barthes sought only new pieces for solo piano, which he would perform every morning for an audience of one—his mother.
Looking back, I can see there was little coincidence that I practised every day before dinner, when invariably my mother would be preparing the meal in the kitchen—right beside the Sitting Quietly room. It was crucial to me that my mother heard me as I played. Sitting at my piano and not being able to see her through the dividing wall, I associated the tones of her voice with the pitch and rhythm of musical notes. Though her words didn’t correspond precisely to any single note, their patterns translated easily enough: in the case of ve-ry good, into two quavers and a crotchet, with an emphasis on the rising pitch of the second word; in the case of that’s nice, darling, four quavers in a symmetrical u-shape that fell from and ascended to the same pitch. In this way my mother’s rising and falling intonation became the essential accompaniment to my domestic piano performances.
Because I was as sensitive to the nuances of my mother’s voice as a seismograph to an earthquake, the worst possible sound was her silence.
One day I helped her fold invitations to the local Rotary Club art show, an enormous act of unpaid labour that my father undertook each year like a volunteer Sisyphus. Usually Mum and I chatted or sat in a companionable quiet, but as the afternoon wore on a cloud came over the silence. I don’t know how I knew my mother’s mood had changed; I could just sense that she was upset about something despite showing no outward sign of it.
I pointed to the pile of sealed invitations in the centre of the kitchen table where we worked. By now there were hundreds of them. ‘Look, Mummy,’ I ventured to puncture the quiet, ‘there’s a wall between us.’
‘There certainly is, my girl,’ she said sharply, as the temperature around the table plummeted. ‘There certainly is.’ She continued to fold invitations while her face froze into the stony silence that could last for days. Talk about a lesson
