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RED HOT NOTES, INTRODUCTION
Carmel Bird
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Red Hot Notes was first published by University of Queensland Press, 1993; ISBN 0-86914-281-X
Copyright © Carmel Bird 1996.
All rights reserved
I have often wondered what music is and why we love it so.
Kurt Vonnegut, Palm Sunday
Music grows
Like a rose
Jim Henson, Fraggle Rock
The appellant, who was engaged to give lessons in singing and
voice production to a girl of sixteen years of age, had sexual
intercourse with her under the pretence that her breathing was
not quite right and that he had to perform an operation to enable
her to produce her voice properly.
Court of Criminal Appeal 1922, Rex v Williams
Owen Williams was the choirmaster of a Presbyterian church, and
Vera Howley's parents arranged for him to teach Vera singing and
voice production. During the second singing lesson Owen told Vera
she was not singing properly. He asked her to lie down on the
settee and then he 'removed a portion of her clothing and placed
upon the lower part of her body an instrument'. This instrument
was an aneroid barometer that was 'not in working order'. He told
her to take three deep breaths and after he had checked the barometer
he took some notes in a book. He then 'proceeded to have sexual
intercourse with her', telling her he needed to make an air passage
to correct her breathing.
In a crude, exaggerated and horrible way, this story turns on
the connection between making music and 'making love'. The two
players in the drama are those familiar characters, the teacher
and the pupil. Between teachers and students there is always the
possiblility of an erotic charge, and the best teaching is probably
sexy in some ways. However, in the case of Vera and Owen, the
subject iteslf is sexy; the subject is music. So often we associate music with
romance, with soft lights, flowers, champagne - that's courtship,
love, sex -- whatever you call it.
Sometimes I when I am teaching a class of fiction writers, every
now and again a student comes up with a personal account of what
I describe as 'the piano teacher story'. It's not unlike the story
of Owen and Vera, and I am struck by the frequency with which
it is told. After I had read several anecdotal versions of this
story I began to think seriously about the relationship between
a young child and a music teacher -- I mean a music teacher of
the old-fashioned kind. So often the music teacher is the first
adult with whom the child is left alone in unfamiliar surroundings
-- no parent, no other children, all alone in a room with a strange
man or nun. The teacher holds the secret to the strange, spiritual
realm of music which is so very close to the big secret, sex.
If the instrument is a piano, and often it is, the room is dominated
by the piano's presence, its mystery, its power, potential and
fascination. And the power of the teacher who has mastered the
instrument.
I was still thinking about the meaning of these stories when Jane
Campion's film The Piano was released. Here the image of the piano itself looms up to
dominate the imagination. It is the woman's very voice, and with
it she is strangely powerful, and sexual. The bargains struck
around this piano, and the adventures of the piano itself, which
is really a character in the drama, stirred me to look more earnestly
for writing where music is explored.
Those piano teacher stories the students told me were only anecdotes
really, vivid recollections artlessly told, and without the narrative
drive and structure needed to sustain a reader's interest. Yet
they worked away at my imagination, and Red Hot Notes, pieces chosen from works already published, and others that
are new, is the result. This is a collection of writing in which
a dominant concern is the meaning of music in the life of the
character or the writer. As I talked to writers and read more
on the subject I saw the subject broaden so that Red Hot Notes has become an anthology of writing that explores music in many
different ways; it is not the collection of 'piano teacher stories'
I first imagined. I found Gwen Harwood's poem 'David's Harp' irresistible,
so that although I was looking for prose, I began with this poem,
sending it to the other writers as an inspiration for new stories.
The man is attracted to the seventeen year-old girl playing the
organ in the church, and their embrace is rather quickly followed
by the death of the man so that music, sex, power and death are
intertwined.
I have a less romantic story of my own to tell, now that death
has entered the scene. When I was eight I had a piano teacher.
He was a man in his forties who suffered from tuberculosis of
the lungs. The lessons took place in a neat brick house at the
end of cul-de-sac (I mean, of course, a dead-end street), near
a dark Victorian orphanage for girls. I went there on the tram,
alone, carrying my treasured leather music case. It was all pretty
important and ritual and brought on a kind of trance I used to
practise sometimes. Mr Buchanan, because of his disease, always
coughed into a large white handkerchief, and the main thing I
remember, apart from his brown tweed jacket and the pale walnut
grand piano, was the awful smell. I wasn't aware of how ill he was, but I realised what I could
smell was decay, masked by eucalyptus.
I liked playing little arrangements of Haydn, and I learnt a piece
that had some trills -- embellishments we called them, and I loved
that word. (I think I was a sucker for words with double 'll'
in them at that stage. I adored a piece of music because it was
called 'Les Hirondelles'.) In lessons and practice I got the trills
going well, but came the day of the concert and I simply left
them out. Nobody much cared about this, but Mr Buchanan was shocked.
He only wanted to know why? I couldn't explain. My fingers just wouldn't do it. Anyhow, the
point of all this is that I never had another lesson from Mr Buchanan,
and shortly after that, I learned that he had died. I was filled
with sadness and guilt. Leave out the embellishments and the teacher dies.
I had other teachers, but there is nothing much to report. I was
obsessed by the piano for a time, and later obsessed by the violin.
No singing teacher with a barometer. I now play the piano and
the violin strictly for my own pleasure, putting in or leaving
out as many trills as I like. My favourite recording is that of
Itzhak Perlman playing Beethoven's violin sonatas, accompanied
by Vladimir Ashkenazy on the piano. Recently I found an old photograph
of myself at a piano, round about the time of Mr Buchanan and
Haydn. It's a shiny black grand on a stage, and the photographer
has caught me in profile as I am about to attack the keyboard. I am only telling you this because there is an
odd similarity between my attitude and that of the angel in the
picture on the jacket of this book. The painting is by Vaclav
Vaca who is a Canadian artist. I didn't realise, when I chose
the image for the jacket, that there was an echo of myself in
the figure. (The angel and I part company once we have assumed
our positions at the piano.) I only knew that this was the picture
that had to lead the reader to the stories in the book, a manic, desperate
heavenly messenger whose music sets the pages and, indeed, the
world, on fire. When the writers talk about music they talk about
the power and violence of strong human feelings, emotions of love
and hate, anger, despair and jealousy. They touch on mystery,
on the puzzle of creativity.
In some of these stories there are piano teacher anecdotes, hints
of the idea that began my construction of this anothology. In
the extract from Peter Goldsworthy's Maestro and the one from The Mint Lawn by Gillian Mears you will find these hints, but the stories go
far, far beyond my first idea in their examination of the complex
feelings and relationships that surround and embed themselves
in the human response to music. Something that surprised me was
the number of busts of great composers that adorn the pianos of
students and teachers in these stories. Everywhere a dusty effigy
of Beethoven, thedustiest being in Matthew Condon's story. Not
as many nuns as I expected, but Robert Dessaix brings us a truly
awful Sacred Heart.
Kerryn Goldsworthy's piece, written before Jane Campion's film
was released, curiously echoes the film, and is written in the
voice of a colonial woman, composed and shocking. Shocking too
the strange events of John Cranna's story. Oh, the brilliant,
violent madness of the extract from Alison Lesley Gold's book
Clairvoyant, and the exquisite pain of suicide in Hal Porter's 'Miss Rodda'.
(Gillian Mears commented that it would be unimaginable to produce
this book without including 'Miss Rodda'.)
The stories by Timothy Doyle and David Brooks take us away from
the instruments and concentrate on the human voice; and I am haunted
by Marion Halligan's unhappy cousin who sang 'Now sleeps the crimson
petal' in a 'dark rich voice'.
Helen Garner introduces a range of instruments at a family gathering
where there are nervous undertones to the music made. Jane Watson's
character moves sadly from one instrument to another, trying to
express herself, drowned by the behaviour of the parents. Parental
hope and despair are ruthlessly explored in 'The Sun Like Honey'
by Janey Runci. I read this story to a class of secondary students,
and they re-told the events from the point of view of the daughter
- a different story indeed. 'Striving to please', the girl in
Fay Zwicky's story 'practised scales and read Greek myths'.
This girl learned to hate. The mother in 'The Sun Like Honey'
also leared to hate. The sounds of the saxophone and the 'cello
come from Julian Davies and Bronwyn Minifie, the flute from Gillian
Mears. And in the pieces by Chris Gregory and Thea Astley we see
strange musical fanatics at work in very different ways.
Terry Lane tells the story of Rosemary Brown who is 'visited'
by some of the great composers, and who writes music to their
dictation. He speaks of 'the mystery at the heart of things'.
In the stories in this collection the writers approach the mystery,
examine the role of music in the heart of things, reflect on the
relationship between music and human passion, human joy and sorrow.
Of all the arts, music seems to be the closest to the divine,
and to make music is one of the most thrilling of human achievements,
one of the most difficult and troubling. Having collected these
stories I have circled the question asked earlier by Kurt Vonnegut,
and I am no closer to the answer than Bill Henson was ('Music
grows like a rose' is, after all, pretty good). But I have had
a great time on the way. I share this pleasure with the reader,
and trust that there will always by an angel at your keyboard,
a fire-extinguisher, perhaps, at the ready.
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