Chapter 15

    "Every bit helps, especially in Canada. And now let's see what kind of preparation for the keyboard we can create with the numbers. Now, you don't have to sing or say the numbers out loud unless you feel like it. It takes energy, after all, and you'll already be using a lot of energy just to concentrate on the look and the sound and the fingering of the keys, so vocal noises are optional. The very first rule of music studies is "NO STRESS! Music - real music - is pleasure, and stress interferes with pleasure.    
 
     But you must at least THINK the numbers. Don't your fingers get ahead of your brain. Which means playing each note at least twice. I say twice now just to make you feel good. A very good deal of the time, actually, you'll be thumping it out a dozen times, or a dozen times multiplied. Precision doesn't come automatically, because you're dealing with so many possibilities that you can feel quite insane if you don't give the brain enough time and practice to sort it all out. Which means that you don't even have to be in a hurry to think the numbers because you are actually seeing them in the keys as you play. Later, they'll start coming automatically if they know they're supposed to. Same with the solfa. You have to have a real human brain to do music - no chimpanzee can play the piano - but no activity known to the human brain is more physical. Everything depends on your hands knowing precisely what to do, finger by finger. And that means that your fingers have to learn how to measure the distance from one key to another by distance while your brain learns how to measure by sound. It has to take quite a while for the two systems to co-ordinate, and they only co-ordinate naturally if each finger knows precisely what to do in each situation by knowing the numbered key it is supposed to play and the numbered key IT IS NOT SUPPOSED TO PLAY! That is, for starters. Eventually every finger can play anything. But not to begin with, and not quite a while down the road. Now, do you remember what finger you played that A with?"

    "My index. That's Two, right?"

    "Right. For guitar, it's One, in the left hand, just to keep you confused. And did you know that the first thing the theorists did after they finally allowed all five fingers access to the piano keyboard? They thought they should number the left hand fingers in the same direction that they'd numbered the right, so they called the thumb One in the right, and Five in the left. An honest mistake, I guess, made by learned souls. It gives you an idea of how bad theory can creep in, and how easy it is to fail to see that we have to be absolutely clear about the power and the right of numbers. Unfortunately, as Grandpere took longer than he would have liked to find out, they'd lost the sense of the priority of numbers in all sorts of places. And that other stuff I just told you about training the fingers properly."

    "How come they did that?"

    "I find it a mystery, basically. God gives man a fundamental intelligence, infallible for solving problems if it's used properly, and then man doesn't use it properly. If you learn this stuff, you'll be as amazed at most music instruction as I was. I mean, other people's music instruction. I had Maman, so I grew up with no problems. But let's do something, so you can find out how what a martinet I am." Paul grinned. "Play your A with the middle finger of the left hand, and from now on until I let you off the hook, never play it with any other finger. Play it over and over again, and talk to it sternly, because for a long time, unless we're very lucky, you'll find it as rebellious as any healthy two-year old."

    From the dining room came a mother's voice. "What about a healthy thirteen-year-old?"

    "So far at any rate, this thirteen-year-old has been anything but rebellious. She's as docile and attentive as my older brother Jacob. My mother used to hold him over my head, till I smartened up.
Now she can use Deirdre for other girls, when I tell her."

    "She was pretty rebellious over Iris' scales."

    "Good. So she should have been. That's why she was listening to mine on the school ground instead of playing basketball. Just like the sainted Jacob Cameron, my mother's wonderful student, on the subject of those idiot Latin texts provided by the provincial educational department, was an absolute renegade. He saved up his own money and bought the pair of books the Scanlons put out in the Forties, for seminarians, and therefore full of reference to the Bible and the Mass and so forth. Jacob said he wasn't going to center his studies of Latin grammar and vocabulary around a lot of pagan warfare and an epic poet so outstandingly inferior to Homer. He meant Virgil, of course."

    "Were you good at Latin too?"

    "Heavens, no. I didn't even take it. I was a coward and took French because I wasn't any good at it either, but Maman created an atmosphere that made it easier to pick up something that wasn't art."

    "Am I allowed to get rebellious if you don't give me more to do?" piped up the student.

    "Of course. Put us both in the corner for interrupting the class, and now play Two and Three with the ring finger."

    "What?"

    "I thought that would slow you down. Give you food for thought. It will also make you feel as if you have lost control of your own fingers for the next three months or so. You might even find that you really hate me and want me not only out of the house but out of Blackfish Bay, maybe off the Island entirely. And then when you get somewhere with your left hand, and start to try it out with the right, you'll find out that's even more confusing and frustrating, and you'll want to take a chain saw to your piano."

    "I thought you said little children could learn this quite easily."

    "And so they can, because they haven't been lulled into a false method they have to unlearn, and they don't have quasi-adult expectations of themselves. You, quite naturally, would like to have the same skill with these new ways that you have with the old, and that's impossible right away because the mind-body challenges with the new are all based on different physiological principles. So you have to be patient with losing old habits as well as with acquiring new ones."

    "That's a lot of scary language."

    "Of course it is. What we don't know is always frightening at first. Ignorantum terrorum est, or some such Latin like that. That's why we're letting your mother stay within earshot, so she can hold your hand, metaphorically speaking. Now, plunk. Ring finger, Two, three. Two, three. Always rather too slow than too fast, and go back to the middle finger with One when you feel like it."
Deirdre did as directed, and at as slow and thoughtful a pace as Paul had ever experienced in a student.
    "That's perfect," he said. "Utterly Adagio. Vivaldi would be delighted to put you in his orphanage orchestra. Keep it up like this and the chain saw will stay in the garage. Very nice. Different, isn't it, to make the one finger do all the work. In a word, that's is the fundamental secret of Grandpere's discovery, the basis of all the footwork. Each of the two fingers has its own specific, and for now, unchanging assignment, so the hand can learn to walk around the keyboard on two legs only, creating infallible security of hand and ear. You use your eyes at the beginning, of course, but as time goes by you won't need them for the keys and you can use them on the written music. Are you thinking about the middle finger yet?"

    Deirdre had begun using multiple beats on either of the second and third keys, the B and the C.

    "Sort of."

    "Make sure you think it out first. Remember, you're retraining your mind, because while this happens to be the most necessary cross-over, it's the one the studies never teach. You'll find it in a piece of written music, but not in a scale."

    Deirdre slowed down even more, and moved to her middle finger, playing the A precisely.

    "Very good again. Now go back and forth with this sonata for the first three degrees of the A minor scale while I refill my coffee cup."