On being bad at playing the piano

My memoir piece ‘On being bad at playing the piano’ has been published in the Geelong Writers’ anthology, and the June issue of ‘All Your Stories’. As the title says, it’s a short personal essay about being a bad pianist and also about five generations of our family piano and my father’s Alzheimer’s disease.

On being bad at playing the piano 

Light shines on the white walls and the glossy, dark wood in this airy, quiet space, empty at the moment except for myself and the new Hub piano. It’s not a new piano, but it is new to the Arts Hub. It belongs to the Fine Music Society, and now the Hub has given it a home. There will be regular monthly concerts and choir practice. The space will fill with music. I’m looking forward to that. 

I lift the lid and begin to play. A John Field nocturne should sound like water flowing over rocks. I enjoy playing John Field’s nocturnes, though I will never get the tempo right. The piano is lovely, sweet and clear. I imagine for a second that I am equal to it. 

Playing John Field, listening to the echo of the notes, reminds me of all the pianos I have played, beginning with my family’s old upright Randal, dating from my grandmother’s time, now impossible to tune, but much too precious to be thrown away.     

 That piano sat in a corner of the living-room in the house in Geelong where I grew up. I learnt for three years as a child, from the ages of eight till eleven. When I think about those music lessons, what I remember most is the unpleasantness of travelling to and from them, on an old, heavy bike, up and down Belmont hill. In my recollection of these rides, it is nearly always cold and often raining. The house is dark and the piano teacher grumpy. My clumsy hands seem embarrassingly spotlit, and the smell of the face powder my teacher wore makes me feel like choking.

My father suffered from Alzheimer’s disease for a decade before he died in December 2001. For about half of that decade, he no longer recognised me as his daughter. My father lived with my mother at Point Lonsdale. I lived with my growing family in Canberra. My visits were infrequent. I could, and have, blamed myself for this. But almost till the end of his life, my father and I and I listened to music together. 

One time I arrived at Point Lonsdale by myself. I climbed the steps and knocked on the door. 

My father opened it. ‘Who are you?’ he asked me.  

I did not know what to say.       

At about the time my father forgot who I was, I started playing the piano again. 

It is the melody in music, some researchers say, that makes our minds hold onto it the way they do. When I took up the piano again, thirty years after I had dropped it, it was to learn, haltingly and over several months, Schubert’s Impromptu in G flat Major, written in that extraordinarily productive year before he died. I could not play the piece at the proper speed, but my slower speed didn’t bother me. Indeed, I found it an aid to memory. Images of my father as a healthy younger man, a man who recognised his daughter, came into my mind unbidden, and were a comfort to me as I played. 

A few years ago, when I was staying at Ledig House, a writers’ residency in New York State, I discovered that, just before I arrived, the piano had been moved from the communal room, where it was okay to make a noise, to the ground floor of a barn that had been converted to living quarters. This floor held computers and a fax machine, but people slept and worked on the other sides of thin wooden walls.

Undaunted – I had asked beforehand if I would be able to practise the piano and was told yes, no problem – I asked the other writers if they would mind me playing for half an hour before dinner. Nobody objected. In fact, to my face they were very nice about it. But one evening, as I was sitting down to my allotted half hour, a team of young people arrived. Their leader, robust and sunny-haired, told me they’d been instructed to move the piano back into the main house. I knew why immediately, and it seemed, from the expressions on their faces, that the movers did as well. I wondered who had complained about the noise, and why the complainant had said nothing to me directly. 

The piano at Ledig House had not been well looked after. The D sharp/E flat note didn’t work at all. During my stay, I learnt the whole piano part of a Schubert trio leaving out one essential note. But I took my music with me to Boston, where I’d been invited to give a conference paper. I could only afford to stay at the conference hotel for two nights, and the rest of the time I spent at the Boston YWCA. This remarkable building, with over three hundred rooms, is home to some of the city’s poorest women, quite a few getting about in wheelchairs, or walking the corridors with oxygen tanks on trolleys. 

There were two pianos – one a grand in full view of the entrance foyer, another in a practice room in the bowels of the building, next door to the kitchens. This practice room was always in use. Guests booked ahead and lined up for a key at the front desk. All of a sudden, I had an E flat again. Thrilled by the soundproofing, I pounded out my trio.  

The following year, I was lucky enough to be invited to another writers’ house, in Switzerland this time, at an eighteenth century chateau called Lavigny.

That piano was an old upright as well, hidden behind a screen in a corner of one of the living-rooms. My piano and I shared our hidey-hole with a television set that nobody bothered to plug in the whole time I was there. 

By then I’d moved from Schubert to Chopin – once again, far too hard for me.  My three weeks in Switzerland were spent learning his Nocturne in E Minor. When somebody walked past, I stopped and waited. I always played softly, but this suited the nocturne. 

My daughter wanted to learn to read music, but wasn’t keen on practising. Mindful of my own experience, I did not insist on piano lessons, but, at her request, stuck bits of adhesive tape on the notes of our family piano and named them with a texta. The system worked to some extent, but then my daughter lost interest. The adhesive tape has proved durable, though the texta has long ago rubbed off.

These days I sit with my one year-old granddaughter on my knee, while she bangs away. When I play scales she watches my fingers, then it’s her turn again. Those old bits of tape, I remember trying to prise them off, then thinking – well, what does it matter, really? There is a continuity, from my grandmother to my granddaughter – I’m glad the piano has been here to witness that.   

 I feel that the Hub piano might be a good companion, and that I might come here as often as I can. I think about art and memory, and artist’ spaces all around the world. I count each rest and wonder what resemblance mid-way silences have to the final one. 

When I heard that Schubert Impromptu on the car radio and found the sheet music and decided to open a lid that had been closed for a generation, I didn’t think of my father immediately. Images came later, and most often when I paused with my hands just above the notes. Dad was never sick and old in them. The front steps up which I climbed to hear that unanswerable question were less worn.