by
Helen Garner
inspo/music
Helen Garner,
Lauren Elkin,
Helen DeWitt,
Ingmar Bergman,
Patricia Highsmith
musical appreciation
To Paul Crossley’s piano masterclass at the Con. After three hours of intense concentration I was completely exhausted. His teaching was very challenging. He was not a giver of praise or even of encouragement, except to one girl who played Ravel; everyone else played Debussy. I loved the language he used: not only because it was clever and striking but because it showed me that the way I have been trying to write about music is not, as I had feared, hopelessly romantic or amateurish. ‘A furtive texture,’ he said. ‘A harmonic wash in the left hand. Then he clears the texture. Let the harmony settle again, before we take off. Hover above what you’re going to do.’ The concept of phrasing began to have meaning for me, not to mention texture. And now I know what the pedal is for: to ‘avoid breaking the sound’.
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William Styron in Darkness Visible—how hearing Brahms’ ‘Alto Rhapsody’ had hauled him back from suicide. A day when I’d been struggling with V and was dully washing up: the radio was on, and they played a Brahms string quartet. For the first time I knew what the word ‘grace’ meant. It came dropping gently on my head, through the music. My anger and sadness flowed out of me and were gone.
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At the Sydney International Piano Competition I sat in the second row where one can see the sweat splashing off their noses and chins and soaking the hair on the backs of their necks. I’d been in a mood for never hearing Mozart again, but a Frenchman played a rondo with such airy clarity and creamy smoothness that I nearly passed out. People in the audience become intimate friends with strangers. By the next session they have completely forgotten each other.
pretty
11/3/66
In the most terrible and terrifying moments of my life (ten, perhaps, in a lifetime) Mozart, not a sedative, is the hope—though not the healing power. There is no healing power. But Mozart knew all that. I, or we, suffer here and now, and he often wrote his music during the worst. It is this that I admire, and only this spirit that gives me courage to go on also. It is (apparently!) impossible for me to convey the joy I felt one miserable Saturday morning, listening to the 24th piano concerto on a transistor radio in the bathroom. I had been wretched a moment before. But with Mozart’s courage, I could face lions. Bach for minor crises. Mozart for major ones.
Florence is practising the piano and I want to go out. I don’t want to go out with her but I want to go out and if I want to go out I have to run it past her. It’s an antisocial act, a marriage-betraying act, simply to leave. So I sit here behind her, watching her back, waiting for a pause.
When did I first notice that she really isn’t any good? Her Satie. She plays it very badly. Her grace notes are graceless. Instead of adding a promising, mysterious touch of dissonance, of something happening of which we would have remained unaware without the visit of the note next door, the mystery vanishes. All these years I’ve listened, it’s blurred together with the ideal performance of Satie, one I heard on the radio once, or at the beginning of a film. That must be why I found her interpretation beautiful: it wasn’t hers alone I was hearing. Or perhaps it was a potential performance I loved, one I’ve never yet heard, the one she might give some day. The evening passes and I do not go out.
What is she thinking, as she lies there beside me, under the brown duvet we bought at the BHV because it had to be brown, does she think I am happy with the way my life is going, does she think it is all grace notes, no dissonance?
oof
On Clémentine’s last night we go to see a French band we both like play at a little venue near Old Street, dark with people smoking the occasional illicit cigarette, the kind of place where the owners don’t care, and everyone misses the days before the ban, when we couldn’t see each other clearly through the smoke, but perhaps we felt things more intensely as a result. It is a sit-down-and-listen kind of place, and we grab a table not too far from the front and drink our beers in the close, companionable heat. The lead singer has a voice like a woodwind, a warmly timbred alto, and when the band begins to play a Cowboy Junkies cover of a Velvet Underground song I dissolve into some liquid version of myself mixed with world, with the warm bentwood chair I’m sitting in, with the scuffed mosaic floor, with the French singer who is slightly out of place in London, dépaysée, with the husky insistent bass guitar, with Clémentine, who slips an arm around the back of my chair. Her arm isn’t touching me, but I am encircled by her, by the music.
By the time the singer reaches that heart-healing end of the song, as the guitarist slides through the never not surprising chords of the bridge, notes of bright acidity in the otherwise warm liquid of the music, I have, quite simply, arrived elsewhere, gone further than Old Street, been transported back to a place I haven’t been in a very long time, felt feelings of safety and origin I thought had escaped me forever. Or maybe, in fact, I am somewhere I have never, ever been.
For the next seven and a half hours Yamamoto played Op. 10 No. 1 in D minor, & sometimes he seemed to play it exactly the same five times running but next to the sound of a bell or an electric drill or once even a bagpipe and sometimes he played it one way next to one thing and another way next to another. Some of these sounds were produced at the time and others were recordings, and after six and a half hours he stopped stopping to start the other sounds: a tape began to run & he kept playing. The tape was of traffic and footsteps & people talking and he played Op. 10 No. 1 nine times while it ran, and naturally you could see that you couldn’t really hear how he was playing it or even how he was dealing with the two phrases. At 5:45 the tape came to an end and the piece came to an end and there was silence for 20 seconds or so, and then he played the piece so that you heard it after and over the silence. This went on for six minutes and then he stopped and there was a moment of silence and then he raised his hands to the keys.
You expected to hear Op. 10 No. 1 in D minor for the 60th time, but instead were shocked to hear in quick succession Op. 10 No. 2 in D major, Op. 10 No. 3 in B minor and Op. 10 No. 4 in B major, and you only heard them once each. It was as if after the illusion that you could have a thing 500 ways without giving up one he said No, there is only one chance at life once gone it is gone for good you must seize the moment before it goes, tears were streaming down my face as I heard these three pieces each with just one chance of being heard if there was a mistake then the piece was played just once with a mistake if there was some other way to play the piece you heard what you heard and it was time to go home.
[...] . The force comes from the stomach, don’t cheat with your posture. There’s no instrument, never will be, that can render the dynamism Beethoven imagined in his silent world. See, now it sounds lovely. You who have so much beauty in you, you must learn to bring it out. Let’s go on then. Here you have a premonition of what will happen to us twenty-nine bars later; you hardly notice it, but it’s important. No padding in Beethoven, he speaks persuasively, furiously, sorrowfully, cheerfully, painfully, never mumbling. You mustn’t mumble, never produce common stuff! You must know what you want even if it’s wrong. Meaning and context. Go ahead now. That doesn’t mean everything has to be emphasized; there’s a differencebetween emphasis and significance. Now let’s go on, be patient, practise patience. When you want to stop, you have to connect up to a special battery that doubles your effort. There’s nothing so awful as a guilty conscience in art. Stop there. A C. My friend Horowitz went to the piano every morning after breakfast and played a number of C-major chords. He said he was washing his ears.’
I listened to Andrea and thought about theatre, about myself and actors, our sloppiness, our ignorance, the damned common stuff we produce in exchange for payment.
INTERVIEWER
The ending of the novel—that list of paragraphs all beginning with “And … ”—is strikingly beautiful.
GARNER
I suppose it’s the book thinking about itself—about what is going to happen in the world after it stops being a book. I didn’t want the book to fade out. I wanted it to feel like the way Glenn Gould plays Bach’s Two-and Three-Part Inventions—the way he flings the final notes away with force.
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