The Piano

And other things

The Pianist’s Picture Chords

I never did learn to play the piano. I tried a few times but I never learnt. At least not well. Though of course, if I had tried harder, I expect I would have been a proficient. We all think we would, given time. Given our time over again.

Music used to mean cultivation rather than avoiding the earning of an honest living. When girls who apply to be governesses are interviewed in novels like Agnes Grey, it is their musical ability and their artistic talents that are implied when they claim to be accomplished. The median governess in a Bronte novel was talented. More talented than her employer, often; more talented than the ladies who had previously attempted to teach the children. A smattering of French, a little German, and the ability to sing; all on top of other musical instruments. Those are things that their little charges ought to benefit from, if the governesses-in-prospect are hired.

Now, in our modern world, music is everywhere, but it somehow means less and less. Very few people talk in the almost reverential tones about music that, say, the poet Peter Porter did. (Peter Porter, whom a cartoon once depicted genuflecting before a generic bust labelled simply ‘A Maestro.’ He didn’t like the cartoon, but he said in later interviews that talent and genius do in fact exist and it’s only right and proper to pay them their due reverences.) Music is not the subject of as much public life.

Instead, it’s something that’s on in the AirPods, something you care about and argue about on TikTok and Twitter, something that is in the news and in the papers, but mostly as a series of celebrity stories. A pursuit that plays only a small part in your physical, external life.

Music is a thing held pretty close to the chest. Streaming service recommendation engines and AI music generation means you can find a very well-stocked niche and hide out there, never emerging and never having anyone to talk to about what you like.

The fans of team sports still sing in the stands, a proud tradition that may predate the beginning of competitive sport.

But people don’t sing together in the evenings any more. TV exists. Social media exists. There are other things to do. And though the children of ambitious middle class mothers still take their music lessons at school, and still take their music lessons outside school, being able to play and play well does not mean social mobility, as it did to the men of, for instance, Spike Milligan’s generation. It doesn’t mean money or fame or even popularity. It’s just something to do, something to learn, another abstract place to try to find some meaning.

I never learnt to read music. Or at least, I never did at a time when it would have been useful to me, when I used to sing and used to try to learn the keyboard. Then I found the whole thing too much like work. And if you were singing well enough and in a group, you could listen to the parts other people were singing and approximate them, or work out where you ought to be. That seemed easier than figuring out what the notes were, and what they stood for.

This book takes an extremely specific, and quite direct, approach, to teaching piano chords. It includes photographs of a left hand playing those chords on a real piano, and some arrangements and transpositions. This is very useful and would have helped me much about twenty years ago. I would have benefited a good deal. I might even have kept up my studies.

When I was a boy, the performing arts were all put together into one category and occasionally, in the summer, you’d go to summer schools and do all of them at once. You’d try some acting, but mostly it was singing and dance and a little musical instrument practice. And many of the children who could sing could not dance, and many of the children who could act could not sing.

There were some, of course, who did all of the above. And they were either worshipped as Herculean demigods or they were despised by the others as flashy and over-praised and quite untalented. When one of the boys I knew in childhood was announced as appearing in a musical at the West End, even though I didn’t see this happen, I can imagine one other boy who was also at a performing arts summer school with me grimacing and saying ‘typical’ to an audience of none.

I don’t remember any catty back-stage fights among us children (between, if I were to guess, the ages of about ten and fifteen). But there may have been some. I imagine even to us the categories seemed unduly mixed; and it was clear to us that specialisation was clearly the future.

Only for a few years later the whole landscape to change, with the importing of Asian idol culture, which attempts to fuse singing, dancing, musicianship and acting, all in one person; and to turn individuals into machines for group promotional efforts. Perhaps the performing arts summer schools that tried to teach everything were ahead of their time, and perhaps I ought to have really learnt the piano.