The Importance of Music to Girls

by Lavinia Greenlaw

  Although I could not play it, I was curious enough to read the notes. In the final variation, Raymar draws attention to the rhythm of the closing bars – DUM de de DUM de de, a tumbling metre (as opposed to the limping opposite, de de DUM). This fascinated me – that things could be built out of surprising angles, and could finish so openly. I had not expected Mozart to surprise.

  Listening to Mozart, I would hear something finished. Trying to play a sonata, I sensed something being made. I wanted to know this one piece of music fully, and even though I had stopped having lessons, corrected my fingering, my use of the pedals, and practised each passage over and over. I didn’t need the music but could not play without it in front of me. I did not read it or think about it, in fact I could only play if I were thinking about something else. It was as if I had to let my body get on with it.

  I moved from Mozart to Beethoven, starting with what I thought I knew – the ‘Moonlight’ Sonata. Donald Francis Tovey, who wrote the notes this time, is adamant: ‘Moonlight can certainly be very beautiful … But moonlight will not suffice to illuminate the whole of this sonata …’

  That first movement is Adagio sostenuto with a note: ‘Si deve suonare tutto questo pezzo delicatissimamente e senza sordini’.* The only word I understood was the hardest to negotiate, hardest to spell, pronounce, even to look at: delicatissimamente. Just how delicate could anyone be? I imagined a pianist shrinking into a little knot of niceness and timidity. Tovey cuts to the chase: ‘How are we to attain a sensitive pianissimo that is neither patchy nor dull?’ He goes on to emphasise strength and accent, and compares the cumulative effect of this movement’s endless triplets – DUM-DUM-DUM DUM-DUM-DUM – to Wordsworth’s lines:

  Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course

  With rocks, and stones, and trees.

  In other words, the moonlight was also a cement mixer, which made sense when I thought about the lunar effects on the tides and the tides’ effects on a stony beach.

  Tovey invokes Liszt’s famous interpretation of the Sonata as a lesson in the importance of technique, adding that ‘Beethoven gives us very little apparatus for working such miracles. Suggestion plays a large part in them …’ So much of music is about suggestion, including the suggestiveness of the player’s interpretation, how they have to evoke but not explain so that the listener will lean towards them.

  At fifteen, I wanted slow. I no longer ran spontaneously, in fact I was not remotely spontaneous but extremely wary. I liked sad poems and sad songs, and anything moody. My relation to the tempo of the world around me was like that of a record being played at the wrong speed. I found slow most pleasingly in the slow movement of the ‘Pathétique Sonata’, which I thought I could handle. The only problem was working my way towards it as, ten bars into the first movement, my playing was buried by an extraordinary chromatic avalanche. I watched the black heap up as the notes grew smaller and more crammed together, and as I tried to get ahead, it always overtook me and I stumbled and was lost.

  I wanted to play jazz and blues but didn’t know how to go about it, so I settled on Fats Waller, and pushed my way through his wry serenades: ‘Your Feet’s Too Big’, ‘I Ain’t Got Nobody’, ‘Viper’s Drag’, ‘Alligator Crawl’, ‘Honeysuckle Rose’. I was given a record of him playing them himself and despaired to hear him be so nimble, all glissando like a speed skater, reaching easily an octave and three, an octave and four, and freeing up the tempo. My versions were English, sturdy and contained but still, I hoped, had something of his swaggering ugliness. That was what attracted me to this music most.

  I bought a book of Scott Joplin’s rags because I had seen the film The Sting, which featured his rag ‘The Entertainer’. I discovered that I had no interest in playing something I knew so well and found two other pieces in the book – ‘Bethena’, a waltz, and ‘Solace’, a serenade. Joplin insists: ‘Do not play this piece fast. It is never right to play ragtime fast.’ I never grew tired of that challenge. Instead of rushing through a passage of Beethoven before being buried under a pile of notes, I had to pull back from the most joyful crescendo I had ever encountered.

  It did not seem strange to me to go from the record shop to the music shop, to buy a Buzzcocks single and some Chopin Preludes in the same afternoon. While making my way through Chopin’s Prelude in C Minor, I got to the fifth bar and hit a phrase I’d heard before. Not in Chopin, nor among my sheet music, but on a record by Donna Summer – a disco hit I had once owned and now would bury thirty feet down in the woods – ‘Could it be Magic?’ That phrase is the best part of the Donna Summer song, and the best part of the Prelude too – it starts from somewhere up above and then immediately decays, like the kind of firework that is all about its fall. But how could this happen? I discovered that the song was written by Barry Manilow, whose ballad ‘Mandy’ I’d briefly been hooked on.*

  Now Barry and Donna were back to haunt me. I didn’t want them, I wanted Chopin (and the Buzzcocks). Yet I couldn’t play the Prelude without hearing them (both!) warbling: ‘Come, come, come into my arms …’ I was fascinated, too, to think that a songwriter as cheesy as Barry Manilow could be as serious about music as to know Chopin, and cocky enough to steal his phrase. Perhaps Chopin had done such things too. I had thought of Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin as coming fully formed and out of nowhere. Perhaps classical music was like pop and punk after all, in which things were borrowed, stolen and adapted all the time.

  When the family home was sold, that piano was delivered to a housing co-op I was living in near Clapham Junction. We had bare floorboards, mould on the walls, wasteland and corrugated-iron fences around us. In the next ten years, I moved six times and took the piano with me. It was always the biggest thing in the room. I lived in tiny flats where I could hear neighbours coughing through the wall, and so I never played it and because I knew I would be out of practice, I wanted to play even less. Finally, I was moving to a top-floor flat where the piano would not fit. It was worn out and got in the way, like an old sick pet.

  I found a dealer from Chingford in the Yellow Pages, who came by one evening. The piano was in my daughter’s room.

  ‘I can’t do anything with that,’ he said.

  I was moving out in a week and the piano had to be gone. ‘Could you just take it away?’

  ‘Not worth it.’

  In despair, I sat down on the bed, and my daughter copied me.

  The dealer was a huge man. He looked on us like a god with a soft spot, put his hand in his pocket and pulled out the largest wad of notes I’ve ever seen. ‘I’ll give you fifty quid.’

  ‘That’s very kind. When do you want to collect it?’

  ‘I’ll take it now.’

  And he did. He shoved the piano into the stairwell, got in front of it and asked me to push it off the step like a boat from a jetty. He half carried, half dragged it away.

  Ten years later, I bought a plain Dutch piano because my daughter had begun to play. I still had my grandmother’s piano stool and in it, my music. My fingers were stiff and slow, but the real problem was that I was thinking about what I was doing. Only when I forgot to concentrate, did my body admit that it remembered everything.

  * ‘You must play all of this piece very delicately and on the sly.’ ‘On the sly’ means without dampers, that is with free use of the right pedal.

  * I asked the composer Richard Baker why this phrase was so captivating: ‘The eight chords in the original (which provide the harmony of Manilow’s chorus) are constructed over a chromatically descending bass line, and the inner voices also move by step to create varying degrees of harmonic tension. Resolution is denied until the seventh chord, with the sixth chord in particular calculated to wring maximum harmonic tension: to me, it seems to be hinting at inexpressible yearning, emotions almost too strong to bear.’

  18

  The cat’s whisker

  The buzz of earth, buzz of the earth …

  OSIP MANDELSTAM

  Before I had a record player in m
y room, I had a transistor radio. My parents issued one to each of us like a form of rations. They were the size of a billy can, with a leather case and loop handle. Before this, I had thought of radio as news and orchestras, background to eating cereal or brushing teeth, to my father reading the paper and my mother sewing. Now I carried round Radio 1 pressed to my ear as if listening to Top of the Pops in a seashell. Music became a private occupation, not least because the sound was so small. I could not have shared that radio with anyone even if I’d wanted to.

  The radios in the kitchen and living room were ruled by my parents to the extent that it wouldn’t have occurred to me to switch one of them on, even when alone. In the car, on those long journeys to Wales, I would grow desperate for music and would plead with my father to let me listen to a pop station. If I got my way, someone would protest, especially because I could not help but sing along. In our holiday cottage, I would survey the bookshelves, seek out a radio and hunker down. If allowed to, I would not leave the house.

  Songs on Radio 1 were happy or silly or romantic, and so were the voices of the DJs; so was life, apparently. I listened to the request shows and thought that everyone who wrote in had their name read out and their record played, and that by listening I was becoming part of a network of happy pop fans who were all attuned to a certain signal.

  My brother once made a ‘cat’s whisker’, a crystal set with a copper-wire aerial which magically earthed itself and, without batteries or electricity, brought radio so distant and frail that it could only be heard whispering in headphones. The sheer difficulty of this made every utterance precious and we would listen to anything – Dutch, big band music, Morse code. The reception of my transistor was not much more reliable and I spent a lot of time tuning it and moving it from desk to floor to window ledge, angling the aerial. And then there would be the miracle of a clear signal, and a song I knew and the possibility of all the other songs that might be played after that. Radio was no longer background noise. I practically sat and watched it.

  We had four radio stations, which closed down each night. Then there would be the shipping forecast, the national anthem and silence. There was plenty of silence although radio was a far leakier medium than television. The airwaves were full of crackle and hiss, and I could pass through all kinds of countries and conversations. Everything was always in mid-flow – a song, a concert, a rant, an advert, a jingle, as if beyond our early-to-bed shores was a 24-hour world of music and talk.

  I could not watch television in the privacy of my room and had to negotiate hard to get to see what I wanted. After bedtime, I couldn’t put a light on and read but I could listen to my radio under the blankets. When Abba won the Eurovision Song Contest in 1974, it was all a matter of noise: first the bleariness of live performance then the matted applause, the dramatised announcements, the adding-up of points, the speculation and calculation and the band in interview, breathless, startled and right there.

  As with music itself, I started with the most obvious step, Radio 1, and then looked around for something more interesting and found Radio Luxembourg. It might have been more or less the same as Radio 1 but it had the cachet of being foreign and harder to tune into, which made me feel like a member of a more exclusive club. It also carried advertisements, rare enough then to seem like colourful diversions.

  From Radio Luxembourg, I moved on to the pirate station Radio Caroline. It was illegal, and broadcast from a boat just out there off the Essex coast. Listening to Radio Caroline was like eavesdropping on the world of older teenagers. There was no patter, no sense of organised timed entertainment but something altogether more live. Its DJs never sounded silly or romantic, and rarely cheerful. They were improvisatory and they never played the usual chart hits. They played songs from LPs: Eric Clapton’s ‘Layla’, Lynyrd Skynyrd’s ‘Freebird’, Led Zeppelin’s ‘Stairway to Heaven’. Instead of adverts, they had spots promoting ‘Loving Awareness’. The DJs talked like people instead of like DJs and when something went wrong, they told you about it: the boat was raided, the generator packed up, or there was a storm and the music would lurch around as if the airwaves were all of a sudden as turbulent as the sea.

  The most exciting radio was like this, coming from a distance, out of the dark, and the DJ who always sounded as if he were at the edge of the island, at the top of a tower built out of records, was Radio 1’s John Peel. I taped his programmes, scribbled notes and was prepared to listen to anything if he chose to play it. Every teenager who considered themselves serious about music listened to John Peel, only we were far too serious to do what he did for ourselves. We relied on him to take the risks, to stick his neck out, to play something just for the hell of it because it was new and to be tried out, and it didn’t matter if by the next week he was bored or proved wrong because there would be more to try, to get excited about and to give up on, and that was what it was all about.

  I stopped listening to music on the radio when I had acquired enough of my own to contrive listening to it as an adventure. Oh look! This! I haven’t heard this for ages! As if my carefully edited stacks of records and tapes might ever spring any kind of real surprise.

  19

  Joyful occasions

  From the preceding quotations, it will sufficiently appear, 1. That dancing was a religious act, both of the true and also of idol worship. 2. That it was practised exclusively on joyful occasions, such as national festivals or great victories. 3. That it was performed by maidens only. 4. That it was performed usually in the day-time, in the open air, in highways, fields, or groves.

  DR LYMAN BEECHAM’S tract on dancing published by The American Tract Society, cited in May Christians Dance? by Jas. H. Brookes

  Somewhere between twelve and thirteen, I formed a gang of three with Janey and Cara. For the first time, I felt like a girl. It was as if I couldn’t have been a girl on my own or with my sister but only if I were connected to other girls. Alone I existed more and more in a perpetual state of embarrassment but with my friends I was a girl, no, we were GIRLS and we went forth into the world arms linked, making noise.

  Were we trying to get attention or to scare everyone else away? We did not smile, we guffawed. We did not sigh, we shrieked. We were never irritated, we were enraged. When we sang, it was as loudly as we could. It was not meant to be serious or beautiful and while sometimes it might have been to make ourselves feel safe in the dark as we made our way home, we were just as loud in daylight.

  If we sang out of trepidation or the need for release, the experience was nonetheless one of joy, as was dancing. I danced in line with my friends and alone in front of the mirror, as a rehearsal of love. It was preparation for saying ‘Look at me’ and ‘Yes I will’ and ‘I know how’.

  There are times when we need the rocket fuel of singing and dancing to power us through an act of blind faith. Falling in love is one of those times, when we need to move into a phase of enchantment with enough force so that when things cool and the air clears, we are locked into that person, that love. We fall in love and we sing as we walk down the street; we turn up the music and dance.

  20

  The kitchen arias

  My sister had a trenchant way of cutting our bread-and-butter for us, that never varied.

  CHARLES DICKENS, Great Expectations

  We turned nine, eleven, thirteen and fifteen, and more than anything wanted our own lives. Boredom might drive us together for a game of Monopoly or table-tennis but we only really met when slumped in front of the television or around the kitchen table over the evening meal. This was when we talked. Our friends were always welcome and somehow my mother fed everyone but while I was proud of this, I made anxious speeches and issued warnings:

  Don’t sit there, that’s my little brother’s chair and only he knows how to … Oh! Let me help you up. Sorry, it’s just that it’s held together by this string here. No, don’t worry, you haven’t broken it. It fell apart ages ago but he was so attached to it that when Mum got the new ones, she let
him keep it. Are you alright? Why don’t you sit here. Oh. I’ll just move those plates. They’re from yesterday. I didn’t wash up, you see. We won’t, or at least Mum says we won’t and she’s given up trying so we’re each supposed to do our own, only we forget and so she leaves them on our chairs. She’s just being … logical.

  During a meal, everyone talked and persisted whether or not anyone responded, so that it seemed as if each of us were singing to ourselves:

  There’s a fascinating article in the British Medical Journal about the tapeworm …

  Did you see what Tracey was wearing today?

  This is ever so nice, Mrs Greenlaw. What’s it called?

  What is that disgusting notepad doing by the phone?

  I told you, Mum. I’m, like, a vegetarian.

  And she’s got, you know, child-bearing hips.

  Now, the tapeworm, as you may know …

  But you, like, shoot things.

  Boiled wheat and ratatouille.

  It’s advertising thrush. It’s disgusting.

  Do you think I could get away with it?

  What’s thrush?

  I need a lift into town.

  I shoot pests.

  It’s just the stationery your father gets sent by pharmaceutical companies.

  It’s a yeast infection.

  They’re still animals.

  Mum, why are there weeds in the salad?

  I would describe it as the result of an imbalance of vaginal flora.