Girls at the Piano

each performer contributes to ‘the greater good of the whole’, she does so not by some grim-lipped self-sacrifice but simply by expressing herself. There is self-realisation, but only through a loss of self in the music as a whole. There is achievement, but it is not a question of self-aggrandising success. Instead, the achievement—the music itself—acts as a medium of relationship among the performers. There is pleasure to be reaped from this artistry, and—since there is a free fulfilment or realisation of powers—there is also happiness in the sense of flourishing. Because this flourishing is reciprocal, we can even speak, remotely and analogically, of a kind of love. One could do worse, surely, than propose such a situation as the meaning of life—both in the sense that it is what makes life meaningful, and—more controversially—in the sense that when we act in this way, we realise our natures at their finest.⁶⁰

Is it crazy to aspire to live like a jazz musician? There are worse things than playing solo and playing with others; expressing myself honestly rather than hiding from vulnerability; aspiring to exist in reciprocity, love, respect and acceptance.

There’s an improvised coda to my life’s work that no one, not even I, saw coming: my daughter Hazel, who arrived when I was well into my forties. Many women understandably rail against the medical term for a woman who becomes pregnant for the first time after she turns thirty-five, but I could not be happier to have been an elderly primigravida.

Hazel sits on my lap and bangs her tiny palms on the black notes and presses her right index finger on the tip of the white ones. Sometimes she likes to play the notes highest up the keyboard, or simply turn the pages of whatever music manuscript is propped open on the stand in front of her. She’s partial now to selections from the Peanuts Illustrated Songbook, especially the unmistakable ‘Lucy and Linus’ that so enchanted my ears as a child. At eighteen months, the printed music fascinates her; most likely due to the high-contrast black marks on white pages. Hazel is getting to know the same piano I started learning on when I was seven, in a house in Sydney not far from the one I grew up in. This apple, via the Big Apple, has landed not far from the tree.

I have concluded that the authorship of one’s life is a form of improvisation in which each of us is engaged, like members of an infinite jazz band. While jazz isn’t exactly the meaning of life, the dynamics within a jazz ensemble provide a model of community to which, with Eagleton, I believe human society should aspire. Eagleton suggests the goal would be ‘to construct this kind of community on a wider scale’, while acknowledging the political challenge in achieving it. Utopian, yes, but I’d still vote for that.

Perhaps other girls at the piano didn’t regret giving up their lessons or no longer playing with other musicians. Perhaps they did, and got over it. Or in the frenetic jumble of long hours, high-pressure jobs, deadlines, school drop-offs and ballet pick-ups, they folded up and packed away that passionate amateur—the girl obsessed with drawing, or photography, writing, dancing, singing—who was never seen again. In my case she didn’t go away, nor did the desire to play music with others, no matter how much I sublimated that desire in attending live jazz and listening to recordings. The physical act of playing the piano was too important to my identity, too central to my first experiences of joy, envy, love, pain, exhilaration and despair.

‘The piano was my first mirror and my first awareness of my own face was through blackness, through its translation into blackness, as into a language dark but comprehensible,’ Marina Tsvetaeva wrote in ‘Mother and Music’. ‘That is how it was my whole life: to understand the simplest thing I had to plunge it into poetry, to see it from there.’

Writing about my relationship to the piano has shown me how much I need music and writing in my life. I had always considered them to be intense competitors struggling against each other in a zero-sum game for my attention; they are in fact opposites that depend on each other in the same way that the strength of a bridge is reinforced by equal tension from both sides. Learning the piano intensively for such a long time shaped my way of seeing and hearing the world, reflecting me back to myself. My ‘pianohood’ of self-discipline, attention to detail, careful listening, exponential learning, competition, failure and the discovery of improvisation affected so many choices I made later in life. It turns out that I have, in fact, been doing something with the piano all my life—living with the sensibility and preferences shaped by the experience of passionate attachment to the instrument. These effects of early music training are largely invisible but unmistakable, the ripples in the pond. It’s a long way from how my old schoolfriends had expected me to apply my musicianship. If I ran into a former classmate today, I would confidently tell her that yes, I still play the piano. That I love to play it, I need to play it, and at last I understand why. I may never again play with the skill or frequency that I did as a teenager, but I will always think of myself as a pianist.

ENDNOTES

1 Roy E. Wates, Mozart: An Introduction to the Music, the Man, and the Myths (Amadeus, 2010): 26.

2 James Parakilas, Piano Roles: Three Hundred Years of Life with the Piano (Yale University Press, 2002): 65.

3 Wates, Mozart: 26.

4 Feb 25–26, 1778, in Wates, Mozart: 27

5 Quoted in Arthur Loesser, Men, Women and Pianos: A Social History (Dover Publications, 1990): 102–103.

6 Loesser, Men, Women and Pianos: 133.

7 Loesser: viii.

8 Statistics and Girls Own Annual taken from Cyril Ehrlich, The Piano: A History (Dent, 1976; revised edition Clarendon Press, 1990).

9 Hugh Reginald Haweis,