I experienced a surprising sense of dominion over my student. As the piano teacher I assumed a position of authority that I felt I hadn’t earned but would savour anyway. At least I was earning money. For an eighteen-year-old my habits were expensive, though I didn’t buy illegal drugs or even cigarettes. After my car expenses, my spare change went on live performances by Vince Jones, special-import jazz CDs, and a subscription to The New Yorker. Each issue arrived by boat several weeks after publication, reinforcing my conviction that life was taking place elsewhere, a party to which I not only hadn’t been invited, but which was over before I’d even heard about it. The magazines piled up on the carpet by my bed in a bonsai skyscraper as I dreamed of real ones: the Chrysler Building and Empire State.
Richard pressed Middle C again and kept his hand hovering over it while the sound died.
‘Just like the alphabet has letters, the piano has notes,’ I said. ‘There are seven notes that repeat at different pitches, or levels, up and down the keyboard.’
Richard said nothing, but bent forward over his hand. It was amazing how he just sat there, listening to everything I said. The authority was intoxicating.
‘I think you’re a little close to the piano, Richard. Try moving the seat back a bit. And remember to sit up str—’
He raised his hands as if to grab the edge of the piano stool, then they paused midair and shivered. At first I took this for an expression of rebellion, a refusal to accept either the form or the content of my instruction. But I concluded it was anxiety—I’d had no idea he would be so nervous.
‘Richard, are you all right?’
He gave no response, but jerked his head in a precise flicking motion a lawn-watering system might make. I leaned forward to catch his eye, but he was somewhere else. Wherever he had gone, there was no music.
Prior to the lesson, Richard’s mother had explained they were trialling new epilepsy medication that could have the paradoxical side effect of increasing the frequency of his seizures. Behind his twitching head I glanced at my watch. The lesson was fast disappearing. I had taught him nothing. Richard cradled his head in his hands. ‘Sorry,’ he muttered. I let out the breath I’d been holding for the duration of his epileptic fit, somewhere between twenty seconds and two minutes. ‘Are you okay?’ I asked again, for something to say. Thankfully he nodded, keeping his head down as if he wished he could plunge nose-first into the shag pile.
When Richard politely declined my offer of a glass of water, I decided to proceed as if every student had a seizure during a lesson with me. I got up from my chair and propped open a beginner’s book on the piano’s music shelf. It seemed too much for me to ask Richard’s brain to process new information, but I didn’t know what else to do. He looked up.
‘Have you seen music written down before?’ I asked.
He shook his head. I worried the action might trigger another fit, but the electrical storm in his head seemed to have passed. The rest of his body was eerily still.
‘Well, this is what it looks like,’ I continued. ‘These five black lines, we call that a stave.’
‘Why?’ he said, not moving a muscle. I couldn’t tell whether his rigidity was from fear of prompting another seizure, or sheer anxiety.
‘I’m not sure,’ I admitted. ‘That’s just what it’s called. The notes you play correspond to the black circles on or between the lines. For example, the bottom line on this stave is E, here,’ I said, pressing the note above Middle C. I had gotten ahead of myself, and way ahead of any beginner’s first lesson, let alone someone who had just experienced a seizure. But in a kind of immunisation theory of teaching the instrument, I believed Richard deserved maximum value for his minimal exposure to the piano.
Richard shifted in his seat and frowned. ‘But why?’ he said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Who says that line means E?’
I was stumped. Not once had it occurred to me to question the basis of Western music notation.
‘Well, this system came into use hundreds of years ago,’ I began, struggling for an answer. Now I felt like a chump for never having wondered about it myself.
‘But why should it?’
If I were a better teacher—or any kind of teacher, really—I would have anticipated my student’s resistance and prepared a response to it. And I don’t know if anyone can learn anything while being under fire from one’s own brain. But Richard had started to irritate me.
How could I explain that we were stuck with the five-line staves as much as we were with the alphabet? Nothing can be altered in the ‘notation of music by dead masters’, Elfriede Jelinek wrote in her 1983 novel Die Klavierspielerin, which appeared in English five years later as The Piano Teacher. Her protagonist Erika Kohut, a failed concert performer, has shifted like the translated title from player to teacher, scaring the bejesus out of most of her students. Part of me wanted to believe Richard’s inference that an alternative system of notation might be possible. Who was I to dismiss the idea? I had learned the system in the traditional way and swallowed its prescriptions like medicine—reading black and white marks on staves of black lines, connecting them to the black and white notes on the keyboard. Now I was perpetuating the transfer of knowledge by teaching it without question to my own student. But Erika Kohut—living with her mother, tormented by sadomasochism and her artistic failure—is trapped by more than the notes:
Erika has been
