Wednesday, January 13, 2016

Chapter 12



    When the class was done, and all three individuals involved had parted in such a way as to make it clear that they thoroughly appreciated the degree of the graces of intellectual, musical, and spiritual understanding of the happy moment that had befallen them, Paul walked back to his new home. The warmth of the afternoon continued, but there were clouds gathering in the south-east, and it looked like that change was on its way. Good. This was, after all, the east coast of Vancouver Island, and the rains simply had to come. How else would the trees grow? And it would make the children less restive in school. It would be his own class, this time. Not a group of children he was borrowing from a sick nun. His own class. The most terrifying of privileges, as his mother, his father, and the legends of his grandfather had for so long impressed upon his soul, his spirit, his imagination.

    Not everyone in the family taught, of course. But there was a significant number in the first two generations, and now he was finally a working member of the third, with a personal history of not really desiring such a trade in the first place. Art was his real first love, and they had said he was good at it. But there were also these other elements, and they said he was good at those too, and then first one job in a classroom had come up, and then another, and somehow both of them had seemed all right to accept. He had felt at home with the idea, then with the action, and now with the idea again, not even minding the surprise of the auxiliary action rearing up before him so quickly. Growing up in a city, attending a big and swiftly getting bigger university, one was often persuaded by the popular press, and even by some novelists or short story writers, or perhaps even filmers, as much as they liked landscape in their lenses, that somehow the small communities lacked intensity, or sufficient diversion. They were useful to the resource industries, naturally, or retreats for the soul fatigued and overstressed by the demands of the whirling and competitive metropolis, but intellectually challenging? Fulfilling to the talents and industry of the whole man? Impossible. If nothing good could come out of Nazareth, who would take anything worthwhile into it?

    That had been Gaetan Renard’s question, in his querulous speculations on his hometown and his father’s fortune, at the end of the First World War, in Paris, as he and his new bride pondered the future. To go back to Canada, to return to a mill town east of the Saint Lawrence, had not seemed appetizing, after university in France, after the drama of the war – he had volunteered to the French artillery, – but his wife was not at peace with his not at least trying out the role of the dutiful son, so he had returned and fairly quickly discovered Philippe Gagnon. Philippe had come down from the north while he was away. And this discovery was better than anything he had ever known in France, except, of course, finding his wife. Size and the frenzy of activity, therefore, were irrelevant, where wisdom ruled the day’s unfolding.

    Paul remembered Gaetan. He’d sat on his knee, as he had sat on his Grandpere’s. A lovely man. Adam Blakeley was not unlike him, except that Adam did not actually own the mill he was responsible for running, and therefore would not have as much money to throw around as Gaetan had. Together, Gaetan and Philippe had made Saint Jean de la Riviere into the most culturally sophisticated little burg in their part of La Belle Province, continually astounding the experts from out of town, until the experts finally gave up their assumptions that they actually knew better and called in for advice, or perhaps with an offer to entice Philippe away to Quebec or Montreal, or even Toronto or New York. He, Paul, had known little of this when he was small; it was really after his Daddy came home from patching up wounded soldiers and the family had moved to Vancouver and as he grew older that he heard these stories from his Maman, often while she taught him his music. He heard these tales because he asked questions. Maman’s teaching was so sensible and full of fun and excitement, while most of his peers that took music lessons complained a lot about theirs, so he was provoked to try to understand why the difference.

    The difference he was now taking home to the Blakeley house for Deirdre. And Maggie if she were there. Quite amazing how it was all falling into place. He had come to Blackfish Bay a few days early, to get settled in and perhaps prowl about with his sketch pad before visions of needy students filled his thoughts, but he had first gone to test the pitch of the classroom piano and been invaded by the two girls, plus the hospitality of the Blakeley household. Enter the good guys. But then Iris McCallum showed up, and no sooner was that problem dealt with than Edna Havincourt stuck her oar in. Enter the bad guys. Well, it was ever thus. Truth against error, good will against bad. First you dealt with the ignorance and malice in yourself, and then you headed out into the world to take it on there. And if you actually knew what you were doing, you found allies, either of like mind, or eventually willing to become like-minded.

    Chuckle. Gaetan had started out as an enemy, a victim of the gossip and misunderstanding that had roiled about in Saint Jean when Philippe and Camille had left for Montreal and Gaetan and his Parisienne wife were about to return. Well, it was the return of Gaetan, not a little unreluctant, but Madame Renard’s first visit. Then Gaetan had found it necessary to go to Montreal on business and further decided to see the Cyrano staged by the Theatre Hochelaga, as the Montreal critics were so busy exulting in its comparisons with performances they had seen in France, and returned to his old home town to roll heads, with Philippe in tow. Pretty dramatic stuff, no pun intended. There was not likely to be the difficulties for himself here that there had been for Grandpere in Saint Jean, especially with a priest as solid as McKeon and no wing nut of a professor trying to teach ascetic and mystical theology in the diocesan seminary, drained out of his own skull with sloth and envy because the real thing had come to town.

    But it would be pretty naïve to assume that all the music teachers were going to roll over and play dead, or kiss his hand with gratitude, once they realized how much students, real students, liked Philippe’s system.

    “He always growls when they call it his system,” Maman would say, “although he was often forced to use the possessive pronoun himself. It really is simple reality. Just music and common sense use of the faculties, mental and physical. ‘The student is no different than a donkey. Keep him in the right pasture and he’ll do well. Put him out into the wrong grass and he’s in trouble, whether he knows it or not.’ Paul! Stop rushing into that five finger nonsense. Stay with the one, the middle finger, a little longer. Give your shoulders time to talk to your brain, your memory. Your hands sound like a room full of old women, gossiping. No real authority, but the less they know the more racket they make. One, one, one, one, one. All five C’s in Bach’s country. Good. Now with your eyes closed. You don’t have to sing them if you don’t feel like it – the voice can certainly be a drain on the mental energy you really need – but think the one’s, hear the one’s, take all the time you have to. One hand, then the other. Think of a baseball player, warming up before he steps up to the plate, slowly waving his bat to get the feel of it into his shoulders. We’re not going to start on the Mondschein until I’m confident you’ve learned to feel the pulse Beethoven had in mind when he wrote it. And when we get to it, you’re going to play every note in the right hand at least with just that one middle finger. In the first movement the left is full of octaves, so we’ll just bother with the top note until the right hand notes are second nature. Comprendez vous? Now into C sharp, as that’s the key for the Moonlight, of course. Good. Without the numbers, of course, four sharps look wretchedly difficult. With the numbers, they’re possibly even easier than C major, with all those black keys sticking up. That’s better. Good. Much better.”

     He entered the house whistling, to find a very somber trio in the living room. In fact he suspect that Maggie had been crying. She was trying to hide it from him, of course, but without much luck. Paul had had sisters her age.

    “Oh, Paul, I’m so glad you’re home,” Sadie said. “ I called Sister Teresa and she told me you were on your way. She said she’d just had the piano lesson of her life and so I was very happy for her but I had called her to see if you were still there because we had just had call from Maria Schlegel. That’s Maggie’s mother, of course. Maria is as concerned about your method now as Iris was earlier. She actually told Maggie she can’t carry on with you and must go back to Iris.”

     “Has she talked to Iris?” Paul sat on the piano bench.

    “I don’t think so, because I think Iris would have explained. No, she seems to have heard about you from someone else. And then she talked to Maggie on the phone, of course.”

    “And what did Maggie say about it?” He looked at Maggie, and she was at first apprehensive, but as she saw that he was grinning as if there were absolutely no problem, she relaxed. But she did not seem to have any words by which to inform him.

    “Okay,” said Paul, we will have to reconstruct the scene of the crime, like good detectives. “Maggie, did you tell her you were going to learn to play by ear?”

    “Yes. And I tried to explain about the numbers making more sense than the letters. But she wouldn’t listen.”

    “Does your Mom play the piano?”

    Maggie hesitated. “Sometimes. A little. But she says it’s more important that I have the practice time and we mustn’t have too much noise in the house.”

    Sadie spoke up. “Maria is a good singer. She sings in the main choir. Iris’ choir. That’s where Maggie gets her voice.”

    “Did your mother take lessons?”

    “Yes, but she always says she doesn’t play very well because she didn’t practice enough.”
Paul grunted. “Maybe she wasn’t taught well enough. If she is a good singer then she obviously likes music. Maybe she just didn’t like piano because of how she was taught.”

    “I thought of telling her that, but then I decided maybe I better not.” Paul’s grin was getting contagious.

    “What precisely was her complaint?”

    “She’d said she’d heard that you were not going to use the scale book. That we didn’t have to use any of that stuff.”

    “And she didn’t think that was a very good idea?”

    “She said she would have been a better player if she’d practiced her scales more.”

    “She’s absolutely right. It’s absolutely impossible to become a great musician without knowing your scales inside out, upside down, backwards, forwards, and sideways. But there is a right way of going about scales, and then there are the wrong ways. I had to be so emphatic with your deeply, profoundly, psychosomatically disturbed sidekick because she had – rightly – already learned to hate scales as they are commonly taught.” Paul grinned at Deirdre. “Am I right, O Star of the County Down?”

    “Yes, and double yes. If you hadn’t said that right off I would never have listened to you. I’d have taken up the bagpipes.”

    “Then it’s very clear what we must do. This afternoon’s lesson shall be brought to you by the good people who publish scale books, although by no means in the fingering they recommend. If they give us any trouble about it, we’ll send them to the principal’s office.”

    “But Sister Teresa didn’t use a score or a scale book at all!” Sadie exclaimed. “She distinctly told me that because she said she had so much enjoyed just herself and the piano. And you, of course!”

    “Sister Orlando doesn’t have Maggie’s mother,” Paul laughed, somewhat grimly. He got off the bench, looked under the lid, and found the book of scales. “All right, ladies. Let’s get to it.” The girls brought a chair each from the dining room while Paul opened to C major and began to travel the scale with the middle finger of each hand. Again the voice, though by no means loud, resonated through the room. But this time he occasionally included the letter name along with the number. Sadie suddenly relaxed completely. She knew very well who Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau was, and so did Maria
Schlegel. Maria would have to be in very high dudgeon indeed not to hear the comparison.
But then Paul did something else. The girls had each gone up and down the octaves of the scale book with either hand, and both hands, just with the third finger, singing along with Paul and tuning their voices to his diction, their eyes shifting from the keyboard to his face and mouth – with not a little clowning by all the participants – when suddenly Paul broke off.

    “Ah hah! I have it. You see? Nothing is more inspiring than an assembly of resonant voices.” He nodded at Sadie and included her. “Especially when attended by an attentive audience. That’s the power of real art for you. It solves the knottiest problems. Maggie. Does your mother ever condescend to take advice from you?”

    Maggie gave him a look which was not encouraging. “I don’t know. Maybe. She and my Dad always ask us what we’d like to do for holidays. But she doesn’t listen to me when I try to talk about music, about what I like or don’t like. She just says I have to do what my teacher wants me to do.”

    “Excellent, because I’m your teacher, and I’m telling you about something you can show her to do which should solve all our problems. I was going to hold back on this until you’d learned the left hand four-note harmony scale, and how it goes with the melody scale – that’s what I was showing Sister Teresa – but your Mom has forced my hand and so now I have to try one of the other big guns. This is the one that always gets the people who think they know scales in four voices. Or wished they knew the scales in four voices. The fact that they might have learned to play scales in the way they’re laid out in the scale books doesn’t mean they actually understand them, any more than a person who reads the newspaper actually understands how to be a politician. Okay? Now, you take over the bench and I will sit in your chair, unless I happen to feel moved to stand up and shout all the things that I will do to your mother if she doesn’t listen to you and try what I’m going to show you. This is very top secret stuff, worth a fortune to the music publishing industry if it knew how to use it, so I don’t take any back chat over it, not from anybody. Is that understood? If your mother defies me in this, she’s had it. She might as well leave town.”

    Maggie took her new seat as directed, but she could not help but stare into Paul’s face. In her entire life, no one had ever spoken to her with such an immense authority before, yet with so much warmth and kindness and determination for her own good, except maybe Father McKeon in the confessional, and of course that had nothing to do with music. And yet Paul could do all this as if it were a huge joke.

    “Now, you’re really going to see how the numbers work. This is a lot to grasp at first, so there’s no shame in taking it one section at a time, but it all repeats with exactly the same numbers and exactly the same fingering in every key, so if you plunk along in patience you’ll wind up sounding like Einstein would sound if he played the piano. And if I so something you don’t understand, just punch me, all right? You get to whack my fingers, for my impatience. We will, of course, start with good old C major. Okay? Left hand, little finger on the C below middle C and thumb on the G. That’s 1 and 5, in that order. Steiner at least knew that much about kids, that they were good with fifths. On the matter of thirds he quite missed the boat, but that was all Ammerbach’s fault. Or his interpreters’.” Paul winked at Sadie. “So the negative aspects of the stitch and bitch group is already at work, is it? Well, we’ll give them something to talk about. The question is, do they know who Ammerbach was? Maybe we should hire a hall, and I’ll give a lecture. With a baseball bat for a pointer. Or maybe two baseball bats. One for each hand.”

    He watched while Maggie’s left hand played the notes alternately. At first she was tentative, but Paul mimed a hand like Fats Waller’s and she got the point, and as she established a danceable cadence Paul began shifting rhythms, playing on the octave below her hand rather than with a mere mime, although only long enough to give her a push into finding variety on her own. “Good enough. You just need to get the sense of using each interval set to play around with rhythms. Get all the tunes and beats you can out of any pair, and the soaking up of the numbers become painless and just plain good fun. 1 1 1 1, 5 5 5 5, 1 1 1 1, 5 5 5 5, 1 5 15, 1 1 5 5 and so on. If you were showing this to a little person, she might be able to use only the pinkie, instead of the ring. But if you can stretch to the ring and the middle finger you do, because not only is the stretch good for you, but it leaves the pinkie free to play a note below if you need it. Okay? But that’s for later. For now we do the simplest thing, the most natural, which is to make a fifth with the pinkie and the thumb. Now, on to the next set, simply by shifting the hand a note to the right in the case of each finger. Pinkie on the 2, thumb on the 6. . . .”
Maggie complied, and began exploring different rhythms on her own. “Do you have a scale book with this exercise in it?”

    “No. Why would you want such a thing at this point? You can count, can’t you? Or are you hopeless at math? If 1 goes with 5, and 2 goes with 6, then what does 3 go with?”

    “7” said Maggie without hesitation.

    “Ah. So you’re a genius at math.”

    “Maggie’s the best math student in the school,” Deirdre said.

    “No I’m not, I just know that 7 comes after 6. Everybody knows that.”

    “Not everyone in the music business,” Paul said. “Too many people in the music business just think that B comes after A. It is not the same thing at all, especially to the brain of a normal human being.”
Maggie found some nifty syncopation with the 3/7 pair, then continued making the fifths until she got to the top of the octave, happily fiddling as she went along. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! That is so easy! I don’t feel at all stiff about it, any more than I feel stiff when I’m in a math book. It just makes sense.” She was utterly glowing, and Sadie was trying recall when she had seen her daughter’s bosom buddy so relaxed and content and full of something outside herself. But then a little cloud passed over her brow. “It can’t all be that simple, Mr. Cameron, can it?”

    “Oh, yes it can, unless the simpletons get in the way.”

    “Do I just do fifths with the right hand too?”

    “Nope. Well, you could, and you will sometimes anyway, of course. But right now we are about to learn the utter and absolute beauty of correctly organized triads with a doubling on the melody note, in order to get a sense of the basic and fundamental application of numbers to the basic and fundamental schedule of harmonies. Run that by your Mama when she’s giving you a hard time by trying to quote some one of the badly researched approaches she begrudgingly studied in her youth. So, we will now do downward sixths, and as soon as you get two or three of those under your belt we will put them together with the fifths so you can see how they sound together and then you can fall in love with the piano for the rest of your life. Okay?”

    “Okay.” Maggie thought that it might be nice to fall in love with Mr. Cameron, except for the fact that he sometimes looked so fierce. The first thing she was going to tell her mother was that he was the scariest teacher she’d ever known, no matter how much of a musician he was. So she’d better not argue with him.

    “Let’s do the simplest spread,” Paul said. “Right hand pinkie on middle C, which is of course your 1, in the right hand, and right hand thumb on the 3 below. Now you have a sixth instead of a fifth. And that gives you the tonic triad, 1, 3, 5, only not quite in that order, when you add the left hand. We don’t want a whole chord, just an interval, a simple pair of notes, so we won’t put the left hand in quite yet. Get the feel of moving your right hand in sixths, measuring with the same spread all the way up and down the octave. There are actually four different fingerings for sixths, ordinarily speaking, but at the beginning it’s only sensible to study one at a time. You have to establish your sense of measurement, and there are enough variations in the distances between keys that it’s essential to learn the octave with each one of the four choices. This really is a place where the scale books are quite insane. They simply ignore the physiology of the hand. No no. Middle C, with that pinkie. You’re an octave too high. Not your fault, because of where we placed the left hand before. But when we put both hands together we’ll start the left hand with its pinkie on great C, the next octave down.” Maggie moved her hand to the right position. “That’s it. 1, 3, 1, 3. Pinkie, thumb, pinkie, thumb .That’s fine, and take it slow because you want to keep yourself in the mood for adding the left hand, without getting frustrated or rattled. That’s just for the hands. The head also has to deal with the fact that in the right hand the melody note number is at the top and in the left hand it’s at the bottom. It makes very good sense for beginning harmony studies, and it is the only way to find balance and keep it, but it takes time to get used to it, if you’ve been working always from sheet music.”

    Maggie had completely relaxed. It was all so different than working on a written tune, following the fingering notations, or worse, zipping up and down as fast as she could on scales and arpeggios as they were written out. She had been much more docile than Deirdre, and had begun to think of Deirdre as a rebel who was going to be full of regrets like her own mother, but now she had begun to think differently. What if they had never gone to play basketball and hadn’t heard Paul? What if she had refused to go into the school with Deirdre? She actually did not move up the keyboard. There was something totally new about simply staying where she was, trying out different rhythms on the one pair of keys. One, three, one, three. If she paused like that, the numbers seemed to become words that she should sing. But she also wondered what it would be like to be a drummer. For a moment she forgot the room, forgot that she had a teacher sitting beside her. Then she came back to her surroundings and wondered if Paul might be annoyed at her sticking at the one interval.

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