The Importance of Music to Girls

by Lavinia Greenlaw

  I can’t remember my parents playing these records and it never occurred to me that they might do so after I had gone to bed. I assumed that they were my discovery and my secret. My parents had fetched up as medical students in Fifties London. She arrived from the Sorbonne, he from National Service. They married in 1958 and two years later, the first of their children was born. My father was starting out in general practice. When would they have time to listen to music? If you don’t hear this kind of music at the right time, can it ever make sense to you?

  I knew all the words to Nashville Skyline long before I knew what they meant: LAY LAY DEE LAY, LAYER PONYA BIG BRA SPED … UNTILLA BRAKE ODAYEE … LEMMY CEEYER MAIKIM SERMIYUL. I was not interested in who Dylan was or even what he said but in how he said it. He had difficulty finding words and then couldn’t get them out straight. I imagined them swelling on his tongue and pushing each other out of shape.

  ‘Lay Lady Lay’ was, I thought, a song about delay (and I was right). I worked this out partly from the title, LAY LAY DELAY, but also from the feel of it, how Dylan injected delay into the lyrics. His delivery of the phrase ‘big brass bed’ stands rhythmically apart from what is going on around it which might be why, once I realised what the words were, the image came to stand out so. I wasn’t interested in the drama of the man asking a woman to spend the night with him. I was captivated by the emblematic vision of that huge, golden, shining, empty bed.

  In the opening duet with Johnny Cash, ‘Girl from the North Country’, I recognised an echo of a song I knew, ‘Scarborough Fair’, yet this was not what I thought of as singing. Dylan and Cash were out there struggling through the snow, barely able to gather the strength to hit the note. Their fraying harmonies are the most moving thing on the record especially when they lift at the end, becoming freer and higher as they repeat the barely recognisable phrase: ‘True love of mine’.

  On this album, Dylan is feeling out the big words in particular and letting them go only when the edges have been worn down. For years, I didn’t realise that these spasmodic moans were in fact ‘cruel’, ‘fool’, etc. The words falter, their connections fail in an awkward pause such as ‘she said she’d always … stay’ or an odd moment in which the word gets stuck. This left me with the feeling of not having quite caught whatever it was the man was throwing away.

  What takes three minutes to play seemed to take ten minutes to listen to. It provoked emotions and suggested circumstances I couldn’t wait to experience – being trapped by regret or riveted by desire; trying to be offhand about passion or grown-up about loss; moving on or giving in. It was, for me, a rehearsal of feeling.

  A woman who babysat for us remembered me at the age of eight, throwing myself back on a chaise-longue and declaring that what I wanted when I grew up was peace in my life. Listening to Nashville Skyline, I could be quiet at least: someone else was making my noise for me.

  8

  Come on something

  Romeo: ‘O brawling love …’

  WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Romeo and Juliet, I. i

  I walked down the street apart because I was not in 1960s London but 1950s New York, where people communicated in whistles and finger-clicks, where life was not black and white but red and blue, and where conversation tipped over into song, fight into dance, emotion into grace.

  West Side Story was a fire-engine-red album cover with high-rise black lettering propping up a fire escape on which the sharp silhouettes of a man and woman danced (fell? fought?). From the first whistles and clicks, the spasmic strings and brass, it erupts into a drama of such extension and motion that I gave myself up to it. This music has its own architecture, machinery, circulation, boundaries and weather. I got lost and found myself back where I started. I passed places I’d seen earlier. I found dead-ends, alleys, shocking open spaces, blind corners and always the pleasurable sense of something building. A city still building itself – what could be more exciting and alive?

  And these characters who spat or sang were neither adult nor child. Until I saw the film, they weren’t characters at all but each a formulation of feeling. I was astounded that they could be talking, quite ordinarily, more than ordinarily, and from there, burst into song. I thought people either stood around talking or stood around singing, but here was a new possibility: you could go about your life and then, when the mood took you, you could dance, you could sing, and everyone around you would know the words and the steps, and just like that the world would be musical.

  Here were boys, bristling and strutting and unlike London’s floaty hippies, the end-of-the-pier Teddy Boys or prissy Mods, they were completely boy. They fought, smoked and swore even as they sang and danced. The opening scene in which the Jets strut through their territory, threatening and teasing and showing off, is described in the libretto as ‘half-danced, half-mimed’ as if the whole of it lay in movement.

  Song and dance are explosion and interruption, and sometimes the only way to keep up with what’s happening. Midstrut, the boys pause, spin and glide, their arms opening into a port de bras (which means ‘the carriage of the arms’ and it was as if they were carrying arms), parting the air as if to reclaim a space they felt themselves losing. They could sing and dance and then get back to business; they could have feelings, and they could recover from them. In the musical world, everything was elastic. People could fly and fall without hurting themselves and they bounced from one scene of their lives to the next, pinging back into shape as they went.

  Leonard Bernstein wrote in his West Side Log in 1956 (by which time he and Arthur Lorenz had been ruminating on the idea of West Side Story for seven years): ‘Chief problem: to tread the fine line between opera and Broadway, between realism and poetry, ballet and “just dancing” … The line is there, but it’s very fine, and sometimes takes a lot of peering around to discern it.’ Like the narrowest tenement, West Side Story is built on this fine line which is why it is such a volatile structure, why it keeps falling and rebuilding. The score is kept teetering by the use throughout of the destabilising tritone. This is an interval of three tones, or six semitones, which sounds powerfully unsettled. So much so that in the Middle Ages it was known as diabolus in musica. It is the augmented fourth, the diminished fifth. Play middle C and F sharp on the piano and your ear will insist that something has gone wrong or has been stretched too far.

  The Jets and the Sharks meet at a dance in the gym. No one speaks but everyone dances through a sequence of ‘Blues-Promenade-Mambo-Cha-Cha’. These dances are expletive, plosive, headline and subtext. This is war and even the girls, who mostly simper and flounce, produce some brutal moves. It wasn’t the girls I identified with, nor was it Tony and Maria, the simpering Romeo and Juliet. I identified with the music.

  The architecture of West Side Story, with its use of motif and reprise, taught me the pleasure of finding something familiar in an unfamiliar place, differently lit so that it offered some new aspect of itself, another facet, texture or angle. Here, it was ‘Tonight’, a song we first hear as Tony and Maria’s soppy duet but which returns as the pivot around which everyone’s conflicting interests turn. Tonight there will be a truce, tonight there will be a battle, tonight there will be an escape, tonight there will be a seduction. Everyone is singing to themselves, but the music pulls them together like the spokes of a wheel rolling inexorably towards a final collision as in Homer’s ring of dancers or a circle game.

  At the end of West Side Story, the singing gives way and the impetus it provided disappears. No one is able to move forwards from this moment. Perhaps it has something to do with needing to listen. When you are singing, how can you listen, especially to yourself? Leonard Bernstein:

  At the denouement, the final dramatic unraveling, the music stops and we talk it. Tony is shot and Maria picks up the gun and makes that incredible speech, ‘How many bullets are left?’ My first thought was that this was to be her biggest aria. I can’t tell you how many tries I made on that aria. I tried once to make it cynical and swift. Anot
her time like a recitative. Another time like a Puccini aria. In every case, after five or six bars, I gave up. It was phony …

  9

  Spanish dancer

  And all at once it is completely fire.

  RAINER MARIA RILKE, ‘Spanish Dancer’

  In the photograph, I am turning away from the noise I am making. The tambourine in my right hand is the focus of the picture and I am hiding behind it. My left hand and left leg are blurred. I must have been clapping and stamping my foot.

  It is my seventh birthday, summer 1969, and the photograph was taken in Aberbach, Pembrokeshire, west Wales. I know that because we went there every summer and behind the girl in the flamenco dress, that landscape progresses through a field of seedy grass and towering gorse to wet green woods and a corner of stone-grey sea.

  Aberbach is a green place, green and damp, but I am red-hot, dancing on the mossy stone terrace. My scarlet dress is covered in white polka-dots and has white puff sleeves. Its skirt has three flounces fringed with black tassels. I have never had, or wanted, a dress like this. My dresses are simple shifts, nothing more than rectangles. This dress is a kind of reward, or perhaps a reminder. I am a girl. My blonde hair is scraped back beneath a clumpy black wig which comes complete with a lace veil I want to call a mantilla but it is no more than a nylon shiver, a shadow across my face.

  The costume fits me perfectly, even the shoes, which I slip on and off like Cinderella unable to believe her luck. They are what delight me most: transparent plastic edged in white ribbon with high heels that change not only my posture but, like some metamorphic device, my shape.

  I burn instantly in the sun, and in this picture you can see me burning. My skin is pink, my cheeks red, my mouth crimson. Perhaps I am not turning away from the noise after all but turning into it.

  10

  Ventages

  Hamlet: Will you play upon this pipe?

  Guildenstern: My Lord, I cannot …

  Hamlet: ’Tis as easie as lying. Governe

  these Ventiges with your finger and thumbe,

  give it breath with your mouth, and it will

  discourse most eloquent Musicke …

  WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Hamlet III. ii

  We started with recorders, the practice instrument on which one makes practice music. The sound is that of a rough sketch, of unseasoned breath. We brought our recorders home from school and played, but never together. Only later, once we could read music, were we given instruments of our own and expected to play with other people.

  I was allocated the violin. My elder brother played the trombone, my sister the flute and my little brother the cornet. This child’s trumpet suited him. I could see him crossing a battlefield protected by his perpetual jeunesse, his air of being exempt and elsewhere. The cornet depended upon a subtle control of breath that I could never have been expected to master. My brother, though, suited the restraint and complexity of the instrument, and in relation to him I think of it not as flaring open but tapering back towards the mouth – a reverse megaphone for someone who knows that to speak quietly is to be heard loudly.

  I once took my sister’s flute from her hands, but could not make a noise. She, of course, had the instrument that looked like a wand. It suited her combination of steeliness and modesty, her air of knowing more than she was saying and of being capable of more than one might expect. I led our adventures but depended on her to realise them. I went first over the wall or up the tree but she had to help me up and then manage by herself.

  Both cornet and flute concern the angle and strength of breath, and the Little Ones, as they were known, were more subtle than us older two. My big brother played the trombone, which was all comic potential and swagger. The trombone evolved from the sackbut, the name of which derives from Old French: sacquer and bouter – to push and to pull. This was my brother – granting the rest of us an audience, the chance to participate in his world, and then dropping us with a shrug and a smile.

  I cannot remember the sound I made on the violin and I did not enjoy trying to play it, but I liked to hold and carry it. The weight of the case in my hand felt just right – significant but not onerous. The case itself was pleasing with its flaking black exterior and sumptuous trashy crushed-velvet lining. I enjoyed greasing the bow with rosin, stuff that was sticky and dry at the same time, and marvelled that the bow was horsehair – I had never seen any such hair on a horse.

  Playing the violin hurt. I had to clench it between my left shoulder and chin, and my right arm had to keep the bow lifted. When I read the story of Orpheus and how his lyre was grafted to his body, I thought a lyre must be like a violin. Your own arm disappears and is replaced by the instrument, which is grafted to your collarbone and chin. In keeping with any curse, you cannot speak, you cannot move, you can only play. Recently, I was watching a chamber orchestra and thought that, more so than with any other instrument, the violin becomes part of the body. A good musician is physically dissolved when playing and for violinists, who cannot see where to place their fingers, and have nothing to guide them through touch, music must be more than ever about memory rather than fingertips and breath; the ventage is deeper, more of the self, closer to singing.

  With this instrument I had to imagine making music. I found it hard enough to learn how to sense where a note would be, let alone to give it any character. The sounds I produced were those of physical failure: my pizzicato notes were as raw as my fingertips, and my bowed notes as thin and shaky as my arms. Instead of making music, I was struggling to manage an instrument. It seemed so sensitive and conditional that I began to understand how notes took shape and how little their shape had to do with dots on a stave. I was beginning to learn this about language, too.

  11

  What shall I do to be saved?

  The way to heaven is too steep, too narrow, for men to dance in and keep revel rout. No way is large or smooth enough for capering rousters, for jumping, skipping, dancing dames but that broad, beaten, pleasant road that leads to HELL.

  WILLIAM PRYNNE, Histriomastix

  To be a teenager in 1970 was to suffer an excess of gravity. I watched them move slowly along Camden High Street, boys and girls alike with faces half-closed behind long centre-parted hair. The shape their clothes made was that of something being pulled down into the earth: scoop-necked tops, peardrop collars, flared or leg-of-mutton sleeves, and flared ankle-length skirts and trousers made of cumbersome corduroy, denim or hessian. They wore bare feet or sandals in summer and otherwise heavy boots or wedge-platform shoes. In winter they wrapped up in afghans, antique fur coats and greatcoats, hats and scarves. Their colours were vegetal – umber, ochre, aubergine, mushroom, sage. They looked damp.

  I thought that their music must be the key to becoming like them. I got to know it as we absorb music in passing but can remember only its seriousness and weight. The record sleeves had the same droopy, glutinous lettering as the clothes-shop signs. The music of lumbering lost creatures. Is that what I had to become?

  There was a higher realm, occupied by beautiful men who might be women, who wore feather boas and silver eyeshadow, their hair in ringlets, solid wedges and angular curtains, and who seemed remote, gentle and dangerous. If the Camden hippy colours were earthbound, the glam rock colours were like the whirl of gas around a planet. I glimpsed these figures passing in and out of adult doorways, their paths through the city crossing mine as indifferently as if we were in separate orbits. So much about them was concentrated in their surfaces that they seemed weightless. They suggested a perfection which I would have to move through many worlds in order to attain.

  They looked like David Bowie on the cover of Ziggy Stardust. He poses on a narrow pavement strewn with rubbish in a city of gas lamps and cardboard boxes. It is dark and raining. The buildings are soggy brown, the sky grey, the huddle of parked cars black, grey and white. Bowie has silver-green-blond hair, silver-green skin, and is wearing a jumpsuit that looks like a spacesuit.

  Such creat
ures were neither bad nor good – they were other. They complicated my idea of beauty and persuaded me to submit to much that I didn’t understand. Their songs might as well have been written in another language, but they were delivered with such conviction and style that they too were a triumph of surface.

  There was a great deal of music-making, and a feeling that anyone could and should do it. A lot of people carried guitars and would sit down and play wherever they were – on a patch of grass, at a bus stop, at any kind of gathering. A group of local musicians had set up a Saturday-morning music school for children, and I played the violin in the orchestra and sang in the choir. That year, the Young Music Makers staged a production of The Pilgrim’s Progress at the nearby Roundhouse, a vast circular building I knew well, but only from the outside. I had never imagined a way into it.

  The Roundhouse was one of my childhood’s architectural features, like the Mermaid Theatre or the Post Office Tower. I took such names literally and had the notion that in the darkness of the theatre our legs turned into fishtails, that letters were sorted twenty floors up and that the Roundhouse was someone’s house, only round. Then I was told that it was a place where the Victorians had repaired steam engines and I wondered how they got the train in – perhaps coiled like a snake. This information convinced me that the Roundhouse must be even bigger than it looked. Even so, steam engines had apparently become too large for it and, for the next hundred years, the Roundhouse had been used to store thousands of bottles of whisky and gin. So the train uncoiled itself, the steam evaporated and that vast space filled up with row upon row of glistening bottles. Not in boxes of course, but lined up as they would be behind the bar in a Western, reflected in mirrors, only in the Roundhouse there would be no mirrors but more and more actual bottles wherever you looked. I wondered how anyone could walk among them without knocking one and what would happen if one fell. Would it be like dominoes, bottle after bottle crashing down till Camden was awash with alcohol and glass?