For most of my adult life, I had castigated myself for abandoning thirteen years of piano studies and the love of accompanying other musicians for an adult life conducted without much direct contact with a piano. I chose a professional life in book publishing and limited my participation in music to passive consumption: attending live performances and listening to recordings. Like thousands of other musical girls, adulthood had taken me a long way from the piano stool.
My twentieth high school reunion had made me confront that choice and wonder about what I’d lost as a result of making it. At first I despaired at the roads not taken, the lives not lived. I jumped to the demoralising conclusion that all those years of practice, competition and exams had been for nothing. I castigated myself for not using the same time to study a foreign language or HTML, even if the latter had been possible in the 1980s.
As it had been for my grandmother Alice May Morrison Taylor Lloyd, intensive music study and performance had been a crucial part of forming my identity. And, like my grandmother, in response to a crisis I chose to renounce my musicianship. Her decision to leave her burgeoning professional life in Scotland as a choirmistress and well-regarded soprano was much more significant than my decision to abandon the piano and any glimmer of a life in music, but in each case the choice involved a shutting down, rather than an opening up, of possibility.
In her strange new life in New South Wales, Alice taught local students and was the Yeoval Baptist Church accompanist, but her performing opportunities were limited in number and quality. It must have been supremely frustrating to live with the contrast between the musical life she led in her adopted country and the variety and esteem of the one she had left behind. Perhaps the discrepancy gnawed at her unconsciously, because she didn’t teach my aunt Charlotte or my father John to play. One must form a fairly negative impression of the value of a musical education to possess that knowledge and not pass it on to your children.
In my own case, I had become so focused on solo performance for the sake of competition and advanced grades, I had forgotten how much I enjoyed playing with others. It was fun, it was pointless, so I stopped. I had renounced any participation in making music and spent years grieving the loss of it, when I’d had no reason to do so other than a misplaced sense of shame at no longer being able to play with the same dexterity or focus I had as an adolescent. My metabolism isn’t as fast as it used to be either, but I still eat.
Participating in the jazz ensemble is a humbling lesson every week in the importance of fun. For me it’s the perfect meeting point of learning and enjoyment—the same state of joyful self-improvement I had intuited as a child about Schroeder’s devotion to the piano in Peanuts. I attend each workshop with the refreshing confidence that there is no shame in being an amateur musician. But embracing my amateurism took me a very long time.
Whether we’re falling in love, playing the piano, or trying to be a good parent or friend, we are all amateurs. Through study and practice we can acquire expertise or discover a special talent. In most acts of living, though, we’re all doing it for the first time, improvising as we go. We connect, we lose, we try again. We’re all making choices in limited time within the parameters of our educations, childhoods, the opportunities we’ve had or lacked. We’re all learning to balance the melody and the harmony. To survive, we have to learn how to play solo, and how to play with others.
Each week’s workshop is also a sober reminder of my responsibility in the decision to abandon my musicianship: that it was I who had been so afraid of failing, who had used my perfectionism as an excuse to isolate myself, who had cost myself years of enjoyment by closing myself off to the sheer fun of playing music with others. I had learned early in life that isolation was a safe place to be. Later, as a widow, I had done the same thing, closing myself off for many years to the possibility of a new relationship. Now, in our Brooklyn apartment, as I practise on the electronic keyboard that Nate bought me for Christmas, I see they are variations on the same theme.
I believe that my grandmother made a similar choice in coming to Australia and renouncing her musical life in Glasgow: a choice to withdraw rather than embrace, to isolate rather than connect. Even though she established a new life for herself, marrying George and having children, she stopped performing and taught other people’s children for money rather than her own for pleasure. I remember how scared I was of her, how little I knew of what she’d loved, lost and left behind. When I think about Alice May Morrison Taylor now, I think of her lovely soprano voice, and how I never heard her sing.
The writer and literary critic Terry Eagleton recently proposed that the very meaning of life is like the workings of a jazz band.
A jazz group which is improvising obviously differs from a symphony orchestra, since to a large extent each member is free to express herself as she likes. But she does so with a receptive sensitivity to the self-expressive performances of the other musicians…There is no conflict here between freedom and the ‘good of the whole’, yet the image is the reverse of totalitarian. Though
