I like to think that when Alice first saw her photograph she was disappointed, because it captured her as the accommodating and secretive daughter she is at home. I look at Alice as a young woman and think, I would really like to understand you better. And yet even as I recognise that desire, I suspect that whatever she felt most deeply either came out in her singing and playing, or remained silent.
11
I HAD A LOVE WHOSE NAME I dared not speak to my piano teacher: improvisation. The notes that weren’t written down were the ones I loved best, the ones my fingers gravitated towards by default. But as Mr McFarlane’s student, I diligently practised the works he’d chosen for that year’s grade examination, in addition to the scales and arpeggios that were the foundation of any musician’s study. As I was an advanced student heading towards the pointy end of eight examination grades, my daily practice comprised the constant repetition of the same notes in the same order.
My goal was a discernible improvement in accuracy and expression from one piano lesson to the next. Typically one section of each work needed special attention, whether it was clarifying the separate voices in a Bach fugue, perfecting a trill in a Beethoven sonata, or, in the case of Mozart—the composer who presented my greatest challenge—striking the balance between lightness of touch and emotional connection. Always with Mozart I felt defeated before I’d really begun to get the notes under my fingers; merely learning the right notes in the correct order was so far from what was necessary to fully convey the delicate beauty and formal perfection of a Mozart piano sonata, and I had neither the proper temperament nor sensibility to play it. I never felt that way with Beethoven, though his sonatas were no less of a technical challenge; nor with Bach, despite the demands of the fugues in particular. I felt a strange sense of kinship with Bach and Beethoven, which I never felt with Mozart. Kinship aside, the time I spent closely studying the works of those and other composers had made me realise how much I chafed on the limitations of faithfully respecting the fully notated score.
It was through my schedule as an accompanist that I became aware of my preference for improvising. Whenever I set a piece in front of me that wasn’t for the purpose of examination, I regarded the accompaniment as a set of guidelines rather than a prescription. And even when the piece was a set work for study, I found myself straying from the music as notated, my fingers seeking out dissonance and delicious sounds made from notes that weren’t written down. I spent hours by myself at the piano, tinkering with notes, playing with combinations of sounds that my ears heard as pretty, or ugly, or somewhere in between. Often an ugly sound made from a cluster of notes transformed into a gorgeous chord with the simplest of changes; one half-note’s movement, a semitone up or down, was all it took. Perhaps ugly and beautiful were closer than I thought. Maybe any of us, whether we were beautiful or a nondescript and metal-mouthed maiden, were just a few notes away from thorough transformation.
Practising the second movement of a Mozart sonata, I would lose concentration and after ten minutes find my fingers tracing the patterns of my unconscious on the keyboard. Bored by repetition and rote learning, I thrilled to the variations I discovered by leaving everything to fingers and to chance—or probability, really, based on combinations made possible through the musician’s working knowledge of harmony. Pianist Keith Jarrett, who built his reputation on solo performances of pure improvisation, said in a documentary that he learned he was an improviser by playing classical music. But I refused to embrace the same impulse. Each time I detoured from the notated music I felt guilty about it, as if I were a teenage boy who, having learned to play his own flute, can’t help putting his hand down his pants.
On my way home from high school I often foraged at Allen’s Music Store in Pitt Street, a vast emporium full of the nutrients essential to my piano diet. It was there that I had discovered the so-called Fake Books, a genre of cheap ring-bound editions that encourage the musician’s departure from through-composed music. In fact, they assume the musician will use a Fake Book to learn a song’s melody and harmonic structure, then depart from them to some degree in performance. Many of the titles in the Fake Books were drawn from the popular canon known as the American Songbook. These songs—which originated on Broadway or in the dance-hall music of the early decades of the twentieth century—became what are known as jazz standards. These days the publications are known as Real Books, the difference being that the songs are now published with the copyright owners’ permission.
When I brought home my first Fake Book, I was intimidated by the lack of visible notes, but soon realised how liberating it was to use a music chart instead of a notated score. The chord symbols were like a map that worked in reverse, wherever you found yourself: they revealed secrets of familiar territory hidden in plain sight, and made unfamiliar landscapes instantly recognisable. The freedom of finding my own notes to accompany a melody, to cast off from the notated shores, was exhilarating. By contrast with the fully notated music I’d studied so seriously for years, which made me feel like
