I sit at the piano keyboard, reading through the Courante from Handel’s Suite in D minor. It’s a single page long, 40 bars, played moderato. There is white space, the music typeset generously so that the regular form of six quavers per bar, with spare minim and crotchet harmonies, appears to float on the paper. It’s far from Chopin’s frightening black waves, Lizst’s towering chord progressions or the relentless semi-quaver counterpoint of Bach. Handel is spacious; minimalism before the word was invented. Only the lightest of touches is needed to bring the score to life. I can hear what I read; simple ascending patterns, musical logic and moments of poignant beauty.
My hands touch the keyboard. In the first bar, I stumble on a simple five-quaver phrase. In the second bar, I run out of fingers to play both the melody and inner harmony. By the third bar I’ve forgotten the key signature and play a graunching B natural. I stop.
Once, I learned to play the piano. In the days before bike helmets, I pedaled the short distance to Mrs Sorenson’s for my weekly lesson. I glowed with pride at the row of neat ticks down the page of my theory book and played my pieces well enough to avoid her disappointed tone. Then freedom! Whizzing down the slope of her driveway, back home to television, a turn on the swing or seclusion with a book.
What would I say now to nine-year-old me, sitting alone at the piano in the cold front room? Half an hour of intended practice more and more often dwindling to ten minutes, five minutes, or none. Did she care when the lessons were stopped? What did she know of synaptic pathways and brain plasticity, of muscle memory? At nine, can she even imagine being 54 and recognising a lifetime of loss in the score of a simple Courante?
Rosemary McBryde
My hands touch the keyboard. In the first bar, I stumble on a simple five-quaver phrase. In the second bar, I run out of fingers to play both the melody and inner harmony. By the third bar I’ve forgotten the key signature and play a graunching B natural. I stop.
Once, I learned to play the piano. In the days before bike helmets, I pedaled the short distance to Mrs Sorenson’s for my weekly lesson. I glowed with pride at the row of neat ticks down the page of my theory book and played my pieces well enough to avoid her disappointed tone. Then freedom! Whizzing down the slope of her driveway, back home to television, a turn on the swing or seclusion with a book.
What would I say now to nine-year-old me, sitting alone at the piano in the cold front room? Half an hour of intended practice more and more often dwindling to ten minutes, five minutes, or none. Did she care when the lessons were stopped? What did she know of synaptic pathways and brain plasticity, of muscle memory? At nine, can she even imagine being 54 and recognising a lifetime of loss in the score of a simple Courante?
Rosemary McBryde
No comments:
Post a Comment