Authors: Anna Lyndsey
“Suppose we try a different approach,” says Pete. “Apart from develop and implement government policy, what can you actually do?”
“Er, play the piano?”
“There you are, then.”
“You mean teach it?” He nods. “Do you know,” I say, “that is not a completely silly idea, and it had crossed my mind. It would be a bit weird, kind of like entering the family business, but it could be good fun.”
“Well, it seems the most realistic, darling.”
So I look into the matter, and discover that some people set up as piano teachers without any specific qualifications at all, beyond some grade exams, and then learn on the job. But I do not have sufficient chutzpah to do this. Being a bureaucratic soul, I know I will feel much more confident if I have done a training course and got a certificate.
I also discover that the European Piano Teachers’ Association (UK branch) runs a piano pedagogy course that starts in January, and involves going to the Royal College of Music every second Sunday for six
months. Given the state of my face, this would be difficult, but just about achievable. I qualify to go on the course, because I have passed my Grade 8 (when I was seventeen) and have been playing pieces of diploma level since. The deadline for enrolment is looming, and I am feeling keen and motivated, so I decide to sign up—but there is one snag. In order actually to be assessed and therefore qualify for a certificate, I am expected to have procured two students on whom to try out what I will be learning from week to week. For each student, there are lesson plans to be prepared, a lesson diary to be kept and an extended essay to be written about their progress.
The course is aimed at a wide range of levels of experience, so, for those participants who already have a teaching practice, this does not present a problem. However, I am new and green, and therefore have somehow to lasso two pupils from the local community, from a standing start, before the middle of January, which is in about four weeks.
I design an advert. “Have you always wanted to learn the piano?” it says. “I am looking for two students to take part in a teaching project.” Pete photoshops the text white on black, with a piano keyboard running up one side, and we distribute copies around the neighbourhood in local shops and the library. Nobody does anything over the festive season, so I settle down to enjoy Christmas, and hope I will get some replies in the New Year, when people peel themselves off the sofa, and start to look about them.
I am in charge of Christmas dinner!
It is the first Christmas that Pete and I have spent together. I am looking forward to being the person delegating tasks rather than one of the hapless delegatees, required to hang about looking helpful and making periodic offers to peel sprouts.
I have drawn up a Project Plan, which indicates at what times various activities need to happen, in order to meet the objective of lunch at half-past one. (I find this very satisfying, and it is indeed similar to what I used to do in the civil service. Clearly I am missing work …)
We have invited my mother and brother, Sam, who arrive on one of the last trains out of south-west London before everything shuts down. My father is not with us, having died a few years before. He and my mother divorced when I was fifteen, a great surprise for my brother and me. We had a very happy childhood full of jokes, laughter and affection, with no tensions evident between our parents until my father fell in love with someone else.
On Christmas morning, I am up at eight o’clock to get the turkey out of the fridge. Soon my mother comes in, in her dressing gown. “Hello, my best daughter,” she says. “Happy Xmas. Now mind what you’re doing with that turkey. Are there any oats?” Both my mother and my brother, although living independently, are on a healthy eating kick.
“In the cupboard,” I say. “Pete got some specially.”
My mother prepares a large bowl of oats and chopped apple. Then she goes back into the living room, sits down at the piano and breaks into an extempore version of “Merry Christmas Everybody” by Slade, thus ensuring that everyone else is also awake.
Soon creaking and sloshing from upstairs indicate that my brother is having his morning shower, about which he is always very thorough, so that afterwards the bathroom looks as if someone has been trying to wash a baby elephant; plastic bottles of shampoo upended and squeezed in the middle, water on every available surface, towels and bathmat askew.
“Morning, Sam,” I say to him when he comes down. “How’s tricks?”
“Not too bad, thanks. Are there any oats?” I point them out. When he has finished his breakfast, he sits down at the piano and does an alternative version of “Merry Christmas Everybody,” all slow gloopy chords and dramatic modulations, because it is in the style of Brahms, who is his favourite composer. He finishes off with a fugue.
“Very good, Sam,” says Pete, who has come down, having attempted a modest lie-in after going to Midnight Mass. “But could we have something other than Slade?”
“Oh sorry,” says Sam, always sweet-natured and obliging. He begins a series of variations on “Hark! the Herald Angels Sing” in various musical styles, including baroque and blues.
It will have become obvious by this point why, although a competent pianist myself, I have always felt
intimidated by the extreme facility of my mother and brother, particularly when it comes to improvising. They also have very good musical memories and perfect pitch.
“Right,” says my mother, bouncing back into the living room after having a bath. “Now, what shall I do in respect of lunch? And when are we going to have presents?” She enters the kitchen just as I am lifting the turkey out of the oven to baste it. “Stop!” she yells, aghast, and I nearly drop the roasting tray. “That does not look at all good for the back. Can’t you get Pete to lift it in and out? And that oven is very badly designed. I’ve always said you ought to get the door rehung, so that it opens sideways, like mine.”
“Mum, I’m doing fine,” I say, putting the bird on the worktop. “Just don’t come up behind me and make a loud noise.”
“Oh all right, but you should think about that oven door. Shall I start peeling potatoes?”
“Well, we don’t have to do that until ten fifteen and there’s some other things I need to concentrate on first. And I thought we’d have presents at eleven o’clock, once I’ve got the spuds in the oven.”
“What about sprouts?”
“We’re not having sprouts. We kind of thought—neither of us like them, so we’d have broccoli.”
“Hmmm. I rather like sprouts. A very traditional winter vegetable.”
Sam wanders in, looking helpful. “Can I chop something?” he enquires.
I am becoming flustered. I foresee that unless I provide some sort of distraction to keep people out of the
kitchen until I need them, something is going to go wrong.
Pete realises what is happening and nudges me. “Didn’t you want these two to have a look at ‘Little Donkey’?” he says.
This is a brainwave. In the run-up to Christmas, Alex, a friend of ours, had asked me if I would make an arrangement of the children’s carol with an easy piano part so that she could accompany her daughters, who had to learn it for school. I wrote out the melody for the right hand and added some basic chords underneath, even developing a clip-clop bass line, of which I was rather proud. The exercise made my brain feel stretched in unusual directions, because I had not thought about harmony for years. Alex was pleased with the result, and she and her daughters performed it to me over the telephone, with gusto. However, I would also like some feedback from the experts.
My mother and brother become immediately alert. Their spines lengthen and their noses twitch. Pete leads them to the piano, and indicates the small manuscript book in which I have written out my masterwork.
For the next hour, two ferocious musical intelligences are trained upon this modest arrangement.
“There is an implied consecutive fifth between the first and second bar,” says one.
“I’d say the C in the bass is far enough away from the D not to matter,” says the other. “However, the use of the supertonic chord in bar two is weak. I would prefer a subdominant.”
“Well, what about bars five and six? Now that is a
serious
implied consecutive octave.”
“Yes, there ought to be G followed by A in the bass, rather than E followed by F. That gives a nice bass line and circumvents the problem.”
“And in bar six, one would swap the harmonies round.”
At times, the debate becomes heated.
Pete and I get on with the Project Plan, seething with suppressed giggles whenever we catch each other’s eye.
Lunch is delivered on time and pronounced a success. The verdict on “Little Donkey” is that what I wrote was mostly OK, but that improvements could be introduced at various points, if I wish to make it truly rigorous.
In the afternoon, we have a game of Scrabble, which my mother wins, with two seven-letter words.
Very soon in the New Year, I have my first piano pupil. She is Libby, a sober, intelligent ten-year-old, with googly blue eyes and straight pale hair. Her mother wants her to “have the opportunity to try lots of things, to see if she likes them.” She is already doing football and French, and learning the recorder.
Having made such a good start, I am sanguine about finding a second student, but the days tick by and the telephone is maddeningly silent. I reread the rubric supplied by the course. Yes—definitely two students—and
furthermore, two
contrasting
students, each posing different pedagogical challenges.
I begin to look at my fiancé with a speculative air.
A few days before the start of the course, Pete is relaxing on the sofa after a day at work, reading a bit of the Saturday paper. “Pete,” I say, “could I ask you a huge favour?”
“What sort of favour?”
“Look, I’m really sorry about this, I wouldn’t ask if I had any other options, but … you know I’ve only got one student?”
“Yes.”
“And if I don’t have two students, I could end up doing the whole course and not getting the certificate, which would be really frustrating.”
“Yes.”
“Well, I was wondering—would you be my other student?”
“What?” He looks sharply up from his newspaper.
“Would you be my other student, and let me teach you the piano—just for a few months, for the duration of the course?”
“What, me—learn the piano?”
“Er—yes.”
“But … I can’t even read music.”
“I’ll teach you. That’d be part of it.”
“But … what would I have to do?”
“Well, I’d give you a lesson every week, and in between you’d need to practise.”
“Practise?”
“Yes—just a little bit, most days …”
“I’m not practising if there’s footie on the telly.”
“No, no, of course not,” I say hastily. “It doesn’t have to be absolutely every day.”
“Hmmm. I don’t think I’d be any good.”
“That doesn’t matter, at all. Anyway, you don’t know that, until you try it.”
And, eventually, he agrees.
I lean down and put my arms round him, resting my face against his hair.
“Thank you, my darling,” I say. “I’m sorry everything is so bonkers, and that this is yet another bonkers thing.”
T
HE 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 have
a 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.
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 out
of 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.”