Chapter 16

    Paul filled his cup, but he did not return immediately to the piano. For one thing, Deirdre was doing fine on her own, and for the other, he wanted to check on Sadie's attitude toward it all. She was unquestionably positive and open, but the fear of the unknown and the omnipresent possibility of Iris McCallum's opinions could not help but exert certain pressures. And, thirdly, he had to admit that this initial lesson had already taken a toll on him. Such a fingering method, as Philippe had warned his daughter at the onset of her taking it on after some years of the usual approaches, seemed so full of contradiction at the beginning that simply getting a student to accept it, to take the first necessary steps, was never a pre-assured event. His pouring arm shook a little, and Sadie noticed.
    
     "Hard work?"
   
     Paul sat down at the table. "Yes and no. She is docile, and eager to get on with it. I think we'll get along fine and it will all go very well, as long as she doesn't get impatient when the fingers and the mind seem to be incapable of staying out of each other's way. She's obviously a good all round student. But the system is profoundly radical, so unlike anything she's been exposed to, and because it creates such a complete mastery of the keyboard, there's a cost to getting the basics under your hat. You really do go slowly at first, and for a lot of the time you really believe you're never going to get it. And there are no nice little performances in a music festival to chalk up to supposed progress. And my grandpere has often said that sometimes it seems to operate like an exorcism. The student can't function properly until she's had the devil run out of her. He's talking about those who've started along the other route, where you have to chase out the demons of misinformation. They like to hang on for dear life. I think we're fine, but you have to be prepared for the fences, as the steeple chasers say. It will take a while for her to acquire the habit of automatically solving problems with the numbers. Then, once they're ingrained, she'll wonder why anyone else has problems. It's like learning religion from the right catechism. Clear and forceful teaching, and a great respect for sense memory. Philippe lays it down that as every Catholic church has a variety of statues, each of which a child gets to know about one at a time, so each note of the scale merits its own attention. And seven statues is a fairly good average for a good-sized church, wouldn't you say?"
    
     Deirdre had maintained her music, mostly dealing just with the fingers and the sound of the keys, but here and there singing the relevant number. Now the sounds stopped. "Paul? I think I've this pretty well for now. What do I do next?"
   
     "Getting bored?"
   
     "Sort of."
   
     "Good. So you don't hate me anymore."
   
     "I never hated you."
   
     "You will now. Place your right hand precisely an octave higher, and play the One with your right hand RING finger. That's an A, of course."
    
     There was a pause, and then a perfect Wuuuuuuun played repeatedly, and also sung.
   
     "Excellent. Your voice is warming up. Did you play with the ring and not the middle?"
    
     "Of course. Well, I did hesitate a little bit."
   
     "Only natural, given the ravages of original sin. Now use the middle on Two, and putter back and forth. And if you feel like swearing at me, keep it down. You don't want your Mom to hear you."
   
     "Why should I swear at you? I won't ever swear at you. You remind me of when Andy showed me how to shoot a basketball properly. You're a genius."
   
    "Only God is good."
   
     "I know, but He never came down to earth to show me any piano secrets."
    
     "Right. But He went to an awful lot of work to get me over here and into your house. It was neither your Mom nor me who thought this up. I can only say definitely that it was He who sent me over to the school to practice at the time you guys were around the basketball net. That I do know. Father McKeon had asked me if I wanted to have a look at my textbooks for the year, and I said no, that I was about to turn ugly if I didn't get my hands on the keyboard for a bit. The artist is somewhat like Jonah. If he doesn't get on with his work he knows he'll soon run into a hungry whale. Besides, I'd already seen the text books, in the school where I was teaching in the spring, and I've heard a lot about grade eight from Nick Taylor." He turned his attention back to Sadie. "Does Deirdre like poetry? There's a whole book that's just poetry. They brought it in a couple of years ago, when they created an entire new English literature collection. They brought in the new math the year before and then the new literature series. Nick was so pleased with his situation he added a little basic metaphysics. Deirdre?"
   
     "Yes?"
   
     "That sounds good, as long as you've got the fingers right. You're playing the One with the ring, and the Two with the middle?"
"Yes. Well, most of the time, when I go slow enough."
   
     "Good old slow. We never get enough of it in music. Now do the Three with the ring. Okay. The ring. Almost a reverse from the left hand, but not quite. It's the not quite that will throw you off, probably for a good long time to come, especially when you try putting both hands together."
   
     "Don't get me going on literature," Sadie said. "That was my favourite subject when I was a teacher. Explain to me what you were showing Deirdre, if you will. I don't want to argue with you. It sounded fine. But what are you doing? How are you so confident without sticking a book in her face? And I certainly didn't hear anything that sounded like a five-finger exercise. Part of me is trying to say that ignoring the five fingers at the beginning is like trying to teach reading without studying the alphabet, and part of me is thinking that your system is taking us to the moon and it is just the place to be."
    
     "It's not my system, it's Philippe's."
    
     "I know. But it's you that's gone to the trouble of studying it so you can, I suspect, give Deirdre wings. I did teach long enough to know much difference it makes to a child to have an absolutely secure grasp of the fundamentals. You learn that teaching arithmetic and reading, if in nothing else. Yet you will find teachers who don't drill the tables in arithmetic, or don't seem to understand how necessary phonics is for those with reading difficulties. If you - or your grandfather - is puttering around with two fingers and three notes with a thirteen-year old who's been doing music since she was six you obviously know something I never learned and Iris is not going to easily believe."
   
     "Deirdre has just had the one teacher?"
   
     "Yes. Well, for piano. There's always been quite a lot of singing at the school. The sisters are pretty musical. But she's never met any music teacher like you. There's something much different in the way you go about it. I have no idea what you're doing, but I can't think of a word by which to get in your way. I suppose I even might try out your ideas myself, if the mood hits me. I have been known to sit down and play some old chestnuts once in a while. I read much too slowly to think I have time to learn new pieces. And I know I was never as eager about it as she seems to be at the moment. But there's a certain .  .  . authority in how you go about it. In the way you proceed. Some people find it hard to deal with real competence. They're confused as to the nature of real humility. Adam runs into that a lot in his business, so he knows you're going to run into it here. He's even said it already. Iris saw right away what you were, and I know her well enough to know that she almost choked on her own reaction, because she immediately suspected you knew something she didn't, and that was naturally very hard for her to take as a teacher, but then she's a mother, like I am, and she had to sit on herself for the sake of Ian."
    
     "I wonder if she would have sat on herself so well if you hadn't been there. And it was your house. The location was very useful. Providence set things up nicely. But there could be a backlash. And not only in Iris or any other teacher whose nose gets out of joint." He lowered his voice. "If I don't have Deirdre balking like a mule at some point I'll count my lucky stars. The system contradicts so many things that's she's been taught. It simply strips away so many apparent intellectual securities. And those outside the experience of it get positively weird, as people always do when they don't understand something and still feel called on to comment. Philippe was actually accused, more than once, of teaching a Communist version of music theory, because he more than once said that the conservatory system filtered down through a lot of middle class nonsense. And nonsense was the kindest of the words he used. He simply cannot stand students being imposed on by the least hint of false teaching and mindless exercises. He's really quite fierce about it, especially where music is concerned, because it's such a universal art. I shouldn't have said 'intellectual securities'. They're actually pseudo-intellectual securities, like maps that would show us that we live in a flat world with four corners. All knowledge comes through the senses, especially knowledge of the keyboard, and musical understanding and practice is only truly intellectual when all the channels for accurate knowledge have been explored and educated. Once Deirdre can see that, she won't balk, of course, but it can take time to trust that the method will work better than a book. But she looked pretty methodical around the hoop in the school yard. If she can keep in mind that music drills are pretty much the same thing as sports drills, she might sail through without a hitch."
   
     "Why did you start with her left hand? I would have thought you'd begin with the right."
   
     "I probably would have, if she were a beginner, and automatically in need of acquiring confidence from doing the simplest possible exercise, like playing the C scale with her thumb."
    
     "What? My heavens, that would have been easy. I can only remember having to use all five fingers at once."
   
      "What an underprivileged child you were." Paul chuckled. "But of course you were not alone. And initially, you probably felt pretty proud of yourself when you got them to work together and render sound out of the symbols on the page. It is, actually, a fairly respectable accomplishment. But it's too much like memorizing an inadequate text, in any area of writing, religious or otherwise. It doesn't do you much good in the long run. You're left with the memory of having done well with a school room exercise, but still don't have the skills for carrying on your own independent inquiry into the problem at hand. You said yourself you were slow to learn a new piece. But I suspect you can pick out just the melody pretty nimbly."
    
     "As a matter of fact, yes."
   
     "Well, when we're done with Deirdre, she'll know how to add her own harmonies, with any variations she feels like adding."
   
     "You mean like a composer?"
    
     "More like an arranger, unless she made up the tune as well. It's the tune that marks the genius, the artist. The harmonies, no matter how brilliant and sensitive, basically identify the mathematician, although it has to be a mathematician with an ear. And he can - and must - develop that ear by studying the ordered and arithmetically predictable intervals that line up below or above each note of the tune."
    
     "Above?"
    
     "Yes. You've heard of descant? Probably sang it in school. Oh, maybe not. Deirdre's an alto. You were likely an alto."
   
     "As a matter of fact I was. But my sister was a soprano and sang a lot of descant. I know what you mean. But Penelope just learned the descant tune by rote. I don't think she thought of it as a harmony above the tune. You make it sound very technical."
   
     "If music isn't technical it isn't music. But the more technique, so long as it's fundamental technique, the more musical the production. With a false or shallow method, of course, such a rule can bring a terrible boredom, or a profound and quite legitimate ache to slip away from it all. But once you see how real technique is a very useful employment of a lot of little key bits - like what she's doing now - it all becomes fun, for want of a better word, like they were having on the basketball court."
   
     "So that's why you were showing her just the two fingers with three notes."
    
     "Exactly. It's the precise combination of a digital and mental exercise at a level that presents the first real challenge to habit formation, fundamentally due to the natural differences between sense and the intellectual faculties." He chuckled. "And it also brings up the difficulties we have in learning anything because of the effects of original sin. That's why great music played and sung really well give us a very genuine taste of Paradise. For the moment, we can hear a little of what goes on in the Garden of Eden."
    
     The piano and the voice went quiet, and Deirdre came back to the table.