Chapter 18

    "At first," Paul said, "this is going to look and sound just like so much razzle dazzle. And that is just what it's meant to do. And it did exactly that to you and Maggie, although I had no idea of anyone thundering in off the playground. I knew there were some kids out there, but I never thought about them hearing me. I really just wanted to see how the piano sounded. And it's not every teacher who gets a piano in his own classroom. Maybe every teacher should, but it's not currently the custom. Wait till I tell my Mom. The razzle dazzle has a very scientific purpose. It's to show you just how much lovely music you can make simply by understanding how the numbers work. You establish some very simple basic fingering - triads in the right hand and octaves in the left - and then you put them together in only three variations of the triads, all of which repeat consistently and in order, and away you go. And not necessarily in all the variations. That's an ultimate theoretically assignment, but any structure along the way can be interesting and useful, to tell the completely honest truth, you'll hear a lot more simple structure than razzle dazzle at the beginning."
  
    "To tell the truth from my point of view, that's probably just as well. Is that what you were doing? Triads and octaves? That's all?"
  
     "I think that was all. My mind wanders around all over the place, of course, so I can't be totally sure of what I was doing in strictly technical terms, but that would be the gist of it. But I do know that it makes a grand noise, and much more interestingly than you'd get in your average book of scales."
   
     "Maggie and me both thought you were playing a written piece. At least for a while. Beethoven, maybe. Or maybe something more modern, like Rachmaninoff. We'd never heard a study like that before."
  
     "Interesting you should mention Rachmaninoff, because my grandfather used to say that he couldn't understand why the Russians hadn't realized what he - my grandfather - did about piano studies, because so many of their composers had studied engineering, and thus a lot of mathematics. Also, they sang a lot of chant, which is modes, which are nothing but numbers if you really want to understand them, and thus the rest of music, perfectly. Or even adequately. But let's get going, with the razzle dazzle that you heard edited into nice, little, fairly easily apprehensible sections. And we'll do it in A minor, and thus avoid black keys for the time being."
  
     Paul began with the left hand. "This is the weak hand for most people, technically speaking, so we'll make it confident first. If the hand is not big enough or old enough for octaves then you use fourths and fifths. But we'll start with octaves. I think your hands are just big enough. Pinkie on the A below great C. Plunk, plunk, plunk, plunk, plunk. Now the thumb on the A below small C, plunk, plunk and then together. Plunk plunk boom bang thump and crash. Delightfully visceral, what? If  you were a raw beginner I'd get you to try it, but you're half an expert so I'll show you a combination that allows for a small degree of sophistication."
  
     He shifted his hand down a whole second and began producing the G octave in the same way for a bit, then he shifted back and forth from the A octave to the G. "That's rule breaker number one," he said.     "You won't find that in a scale book because in a scale book you'd be moving up to B, just for the sake of somebody's idea of order. But this is according to somebody's idea of music. Sounds a bit like an Indian motif, doesn't it? You can almost hear the tom toms. Simple, but if you put it together with the right hand intelligently, over a nice little four note range, you've already got almost half the octave beaten into shape, I say almost because this octave has nine notes. We're adding the G below into the melody. It's a lot like a tune Nick Taylor wrote once my Mom had shown him a trick or two."
  
     "I think I can do that," Deirdre said. "It must have shown up in something I learned with Iris."
   
    "There's actually an awful lot of it in the Moonlight, and with a mob of triads in the right hand, but I don't think we want to go there just yet. You have to get my drill down first. Let's study the right hand, just by itself. Pinkie on the A below middle C, index on the E, thumb on the small C. Then forget the letters and use the numbers. So the pinkie is on 1, the index on 5, the thumb on 3. That makes an A minor chord. When you get that down you add the left hand octave, A to A, or 1 to 1. Thus you have the first chord in the intelligent man's piano chord book."
  
     "What did you say about a song? Do you know someone who is a composer?"
  
     "Yes. My brother's friend. That lived with us for a while. He wrote a very beautiful tune, and then couldn't find any words for it. Odd for Nick, because he's a wordy devil. Comes of being a writer. Always practising. Turns everything into an episode in a piece of prose. But poetry is harder for him, I guess. He tries every once in a while to scare up some words, but they don't really work. My Mom was very pleased with his tune and told him not to worry about the words. He was young, and had a long life ahead of him. The words would turn up at the right time. Maybe when Michael Thurman needed a theme song for a film, for instance."
   
    "Did that happen?"
   
    "No, not yet. But it probably will. They work really well together. Now let's see how well you and I work together. You sit on the piano bench and give me the left hand octave. Nice and slow. No rush." Paul stood up and they switched places.
Deirdre put her left hand to the keyboard. There was no problem with the octave. Her hands had been playing eighths for a couple of years. She played the interval in unison for a bit, then in arpeggio fashion, but only with the pair of notes.
  
     "Good," Paul said. "You can add the fifth later, but for now we'll keep it simple. Okay. Now do the same with the pair of G notes."
  
     She descended the major second. "My heavens. I think I've actually done that before but it feels different doing it for you. Is it really important? I get the sense that it is, and it almost scares me to think of using it."
   
    "Ah, it's the Irish in you. Faith and begora and all that. There are so many Irish tunes you can provide the basic harmony for with just those two intervals. It's the nature of a simple minor scale. For one thing, it gives you so much variety, because of the whole tone between the first and the natural seventh below, if the triad you use with the seventh in a major, in this case a G major. You go back and forth between A minor and G major, always getting a big part of so many tunes, and occasionally a whole one."
  
     "You're kidding me. It's too easy."
  
     "I'm glad you find it that way. Stay this docile and you'll be telling me the Moonlight  is too easy.  All right, stop the left hand and educate the right. It will be a little more challenging because you have a variety of notes. First: the A minor triad: counting downwards, 1, 5, 3. A, E, C."
Deirdre executed, but saying the letters.
  
     "I'll allow the letters for old times' sake, and in deference to the inferiority of the Germanic intellect. But you must get used to the numbers or die. Either that, or never get past the first key signature. Actually, you might not make it gracefully into the second triad, because it is NOT a minor chord, and thus it is a major chord and you will have to study how the number differ from each other: 1,5,3, and 2,7,4. And therefore the fingering, slightly. Index in the middle for the first triad,, middle in the middle for the second triad.
  
     "You're really kidding me now!"
  
     "Not a bit. I'm dead serious, and so was God when he invented the rules for reasonable music theory. Most of the time, you have to have major chords within a minor scale, or the whole thing is too gloomy. And who wants a diminished chord on the second degree of the scale? Or the seventh, for that matter, but that's for later. Come on. 2, 7, 4."
Deirdre complied, and this time she said the numbers. In fact, she sang them. "You're right. That is easy, and it's bloody delightful. Where did you learn all this again?"
  
     "At my mother's side."
     "And where did she learn it?
     "From her father."
    "And where did he learn it?"
   
    "I think the same place where Moses was given the two tablets. He had to spend a lot of time in thunder and lightning all by himself and the Muse. In spite of their loyalty to solfage, as with all the other Romance language peoples, the French are just as dull as the Germans when it comes to obeying the medievalists about the primacy of the numbers."
  
     "What about the English?"
  
     "German is the mother tongue of English. And for musical purposes the Irish pursue the English customs. The blind leading the blind from one end of Europe to the other. Now put two hands together and show your mother what a genius you've suddenly become."
  
     Slowly, carefully, as if she could not quite believe it would work as well as he said, Deirdre played out Paul's schema. She sang the numbers for the right hand. "That is so beautiful! And as you say, so easy. You promise me the rest of the scale goes so nicely?"
  
     "As long as you stay patient, and sing, or at least think, the numbers as I show them to you. And allow for the fact that with the left hand we have to make certain choices depending on the student. You get to choose whether or not you want to learn just left hand harmony, or if you'd like to study just left hand triads at first, so you can play a tune in the left. If you were a male I'd make you start out that way because of your vocal placement. But you're female, so you get to choose."
Deirdre said nothing of Andy, but she thought of him, and said she's go with the latter. And Andy was also beside the point. She had never heard of anything so radical as using just the left hand to play an arranged melody. It would be fascinating just to see how it was done.