Growing Up In a War by Bryan Magee

Author:Bryan Magee
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781407015316
Publisher: Random House

CHAPTER NINETEEN

MY FATHER HAD kept his promise, and let me start learning the piano in my second year. The lessons were with the handsome young clergyman ‘Corks’ Cochrane, in his study at the other end of the Avenue. As a musician he was a talented all-rounder. More at home on the organ than the piano, he could not only sight-read anything but transpose it into any key, or put a full orchestral score on the music rest and play it. He was an outstanding choral conductor, and a good singer. He had perfect pitch, which means (contrary to what many people seem to imagine) that if, without sounding a note of any kind, you asked him to sing, shall we say, a B flat, he would do so. Perfect pitch is a form of memory, the ability to remember pitches, and most professional musicians, including singers and composers (indeed most great composers), do not have it – it develops in early infancy if it develops at all. Corks, so gifted and so attractive, was fated to deteriorate catastrophically in his later years, when he became bloated with drink and almost disgustingly gross. I am pretty sure repressed homosexuality played a role in that development.

He decided to teach me differently from the way he had taught his pupils hitherto. Usually, after learning to read the notes, they went on to learn the different keys, and used these in the most elementary way possible at first, by playing scales, and then learnt how to move from one to another. After that they graduated to short and simple pieces, and developed steadily upwards from there. Notoriously, though, beginners found playing scales boring. Scales are not music. The pupil might be learning the relationships between the keys, and their written signatures, and developing the requisite suppleness in his hands, and being introduced to the basics of fingering – and all this was essential – but he was not getting any music. This made the endless repetition of scales mind-numbing, and many people were so put off at this early stage that they dropped out altogether. This now led Corks to decide, without having thought it through, that scales could be dispensed with. He saw no reason why a pupil should not begin straight away on simple pieces, and learn to read music – and familiarise himself with the different keys – through playing those. Such a pupil would proceed slowly, of course, and it would take time, but the process as a whole would be much more interesting, because he would be playing music, real music, from the beginning.

In my first lesson Corks explained to me that this was what he was going to do. He took up the score of Schumann’s Album for the Young and played the first few pieces. Then he played the first again, two or three times, with a running commentary. Then he told me to take it away and practise it for the following week’s lesson. Daily I

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