COURSE TAKES place in a large high-ceilinged room, on the third floor of the Royal College of Music’s Victorian building, which looks out through two tall windows on to South Kensington rooftops and sky. I reach a deal with the tutors and the other participants: we will keep the fluorescent lights in the room off, unless it is especially dull or dark outside. However, there are also a number of distinguished visiting lecturers, who blow in to deliver one-off sessions on “Psychology for the Piano Teacher” or “Composition and Musical Form.” They are to make their own decisions about the lights. So if a lecturer bounces in saying breezily, “Now, let’s have some light on the proceedings, shall we?” it is my cue to squirm quietly backwards into the dimmest corner of the room, and put on my hat and mask.
The small kitchen a couple of floors down where we eat lunch and have coffee is cramped and dark, and needs to be lit. I am in a quandary every time we havea break: do I accompany the others, unmask, eat, drink, be sociable and get pain; accompany the others, not eat or drink, and attempt to be sociable through my mask while they consume coffee and sandwiches (always a slightly odd proceeding); or do I withdraw to some quiet, unlit room, and eat by myself, in the undemanding company of one or two grand pianos, as they stalk across pale carpet on elegantly turned legs?
I try all of these over the weeks, in combination and succession. My unusual situation places a strange invisible barrier between me and the other participants, a sort of subtle thickening of the air, through which social interactions, in either direction, find it harder to pass.
It becomes by far the most stressful part of the course.
February 2006
Pete has been having piano lessons for five weeks. I have planned each one carefully, and written a report on how it went for my course file.
Teaching a fully grown mathematical type is indeed different from teaching a ten-year-old girl. When I introduce him to middle C, he says, “Why isn’t it middle A? That would be more logical.” My attempts to answer this question lead to a long discussion about the principles of tonality, the diatonic scale, the development of clefs and the harmonic ratios between notes in terms of oscillations per second. Which is not exactly what I had planned for Lesson 2.
Pete is quite good about practising. I try to keep outof the way as much as possible, and go for a run when I can. I remember too well what it was like growing up, trying to practise in the same house as my mother who was also my teacher—not always an easy combination. Occasionally, provoked beyond endurance by some continually perpetuated fault, she would burst into the piano room saying, “No, no, you’ve lost the middle line, allow me to demonstrate,” and sweep me from the stool. Alternatively, when I had finished, and come out into the kitchen, she would produce some classic remark such as “You’re doing some jolly good work on that Chopin. I like the way you’re trying to get it in time, too.”
I did most of my practice in the early morning, with the thick velvet curtains of the garden-facing piano room tightly drawn, and my parents asleep upstairs at the front of the house.
Now, in Itchingford, it is about eight o’clock in the evening. Pete is practising the piano and I am in the office, trying not to listen as he blunders through the same phrase over and over again. “You are NOT going to go downstairs,” I tell myself firmly, and concentrate hard on
The Perfect Wrong Note,
a radical book about music learning that I am reading for my course. The botched repetition continues. I grit my teeth. But it does no good. There is something weirdly zombified about what he is doing. He is wasting effort, and probably getting fed up. I have to intervene—it will be better in the longer run.
So I hurry downstairs and open the living-room door.
Pete is sitting at the piano, splodging
The small kitchen a couple of floors down where we eat lunch and have coffee is cramped and dark, and needs to be lit. I am in a quandary every time we havea break: do I accompany the others, unmask, eat, drink, be sociable and get pain; accompany the others, not eat or drink, and attempt to be sociable through my mask while they consume coffee and sandwiches (always a slightly odd proceeding); or do I withdraw to some quiet, unlit room, and eat by myself, in the undemanding company of one or two grand pianos, as they stalk across pale carpet on elegantly turned legs?
I try all of these over the weeks, in combination and succession. My unusual situation places a strange invisible barrier between me and the other participants, a sort of subtle thickening of the air, through which social interactions, in either direction, find it harder to pass.
It becomes by far the most stressful part of the course.
February 2006
Pete has been having piano lessons for five weeks. I have planned each one carefully, and written a report on how it went for my course file.
Teaching a fully grown mathematical type is indeed different from teaching a ten-year-old girl. When I introduce him to middle C, he says, “Why isn’t it middle A? That would be more logical.” My attempts to answer this question lead to a long discussion about the principles of tonality, the diatonic scale, the development of clefs and the harmonic ratios between notes in terms of oscillations per second. Which is not exactly what I had planned for Lesson 2.
Pete is quite good about practising. I try to keep outof the way as much as possible, and go for a run when I can. I remember too well what it was like growing up, trying to practise in the same house as my mother who was also my teacher—not always an easy combination. Occasionally, provoked beyond endurance by some continually perpetuated fault, she would burst into the piano room saying, “No, no, you’ve lost the middle line, allow me to demonstrate,” and sweep me from the stool. Alternatively, when I had finished, and come out into the kitchen, she would produce some classic remark such as “You’re doing some jolly good work on that Chopin. I like the way you’re trying to get it in time, too.”
I did most of my practice in the early morning, with the thick velvet curtains of the garden-facing piano room tightly drawn, and my parents asleep upstairs at the front of the house.
Now, in Itchingford, it is about eight o’clock in the evening. Pete is practising the piano and I am in the office, trying not to listen as he blunders through the same phrase over and over again. “You are NOT going to go downstairs,” I tell myself firmly, and concentrate hard on
The Perfect Wrong Note,
a radical book about music learning that I am reading for my course. The botched repetition continues. I grit my teeth. But it does no good. There is something weirdly zombified about what he is doing. He is wasting effort, and probably getting fed up. I have to intervene—it will be better in the longer run.
So I hurry downstairs and open the living-room door.
Pete is sitting at the piano, splodging
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