Note by Note by Tricia Tunstall

Author:Tricia Tunstall
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2008-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FIVE

Mastery

When I was fifteen my family moved from Westchester to New Jersey. It was the last of a series of moves necessitated by my father’s rise up the corporate ladder of what used to be called, in the quaint phrase of a simpler time, the phone company. My mother, as she had so often done before, began an exhaustive reconnaissance of our new location in pursuit of the perfect pediatrician, orthodontist, hair-dresser, car mechanic, tennis club, shoe store, skating rink and swimming pool. As she always did, she gave particular attention to the quest for the perfect flute teacher for my younger sister Leslie and the perfect piano teacher for me. My youngest sister, Paige, loved music—was very much attached, in fact, to the little record player she had inherited from me—but decided early on that she would rather listen to her sisters play than struggle with her uncooperative viola; for her, therefore, my mother was required to find the perfect riding stable. She found it, of course, a picture-perfect little establishment of white picket fences and emerald meadows called Tranquility Farms. For Leslie’s lessons, it was a simple matter of landing a flautist from the New Jersey Symphony.

I was a more difficult proposition. I had grown choosier as I became more advanced; and I was, after all, a teenage girl. I took a trial lesson or two with a number of excellent teachers and pronounced Mr. Bernstein too excitable, Mademoiselle Coombs too rigid, Mr. DeGray too far away. “There’s a young woman named Anita Gordon,” said my somehow-undaunted mother. “I’ve heard she’s good.”

Mrs. Gordon had light blue eyes clear as lake water, a beautiful aquiline nose, an easy smile and astonishing fingers; merely watching her play a scale during the first lesson, I knew I was in the presence of real virtuosity. The scale was meant to demonstrate something about arm and wrist position, but it was those fingers—perfectly curved, effortlessly fleet, lithe and muscular at the same time—that made an impression. “I think she’ll be okay,” I told my mother.

Mrs. Gordon had a Steinway grand at the end of her living room, which was sparely furnished and always immaculate. She had two winsome little boys, an eminent professor husband, a steady flow of amiable students; she made being a grown-up look utterly enjoyable. Her four-year-old son played sweetly and silently with Legos in a nearby playroom while she gave lessons, so among the many things I learned from Mrs. Gordon was the revelation that motherhood was effortless.

More to the point, one of the first things I learned in the lessons was that music could be spoken of in architectural terms. Mrs. Gordon insisted upon my understanding the thematic structure of a Mozart sonata, the harmonic plan of a Brahms intermezzo. I was unsettled by this, finding it unnecessarily theoretical and more than a little confusing. Was it really necessary to unpack the structural secrets of a piece in order to play it well? Mrs. Gordon maintained that

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