bars, number of notes in a phrase, a hidden musical signature placed at key points in his works. It probably kept him safe in that weird way all those afflicted with light-flicking, counting and tapping tics feel safe. When it’s done right.
Aged twelve he would sneak downstairs when everyone was asleep, steal a manuscript that his dickhead brother wouldn’t let him look at, copy it out and hide it before carefully placing the original back where it belonged and going to bed for few hours’ sleep before rising at 6 a.m. for school. He did this for six months until he had the entire musical score that he could study, pore over, inhabit.
He loved harmony so much that when he ran out of fingers he would put a stick in his mouth to push down additional notes on the keyboard so he could get his high.
You get the idea.
Back to the Chaconne. When his first wife, the great love of his life dies, he writes a piece of music in her memory. It is for solo violin, one of the six (of course) partitas he composed for that instrument. But it isn’t really just a piece of music. It is a musical fucking cathedral built in her memory. It is the Eiffel Tower of love songs. And the crowning achievement in this partita is its last movement, the Chaconne. Fifteen minutes of shattering intensity in the heartbreaking key of D minor.
Imagine everything you would ever want to say to someone you loved if you knew they were going to die, even the things that you couldn’t put into words. Imagine distilling all of those words, feelings, emotions into the four strings of a violin and concentrating it into fifteen taut minutes. Imagine somehow finding a way to construct the entire universe of love and grief that we exist in, putting it in musical form, writing it down on paper and giving it to the world. That’s what he did, a thousand times over, and every day that alone is enough to convince me that there is something bigger and better than my demons that exists in the world.
Enough hippie.
So in my childhood home I find a cassette tape. And on the tape is a live recording of this piece. Live recordings are, always, unequivocally better than studio ones. They have an electricity about them, a sense of danger and the thrill of a moment in time captured forever just for you, the listener. And of course the applause at the end gives me a little bit of wood because I dig things like that. Approval, reward, praise, ego.
I listen to the tape on my battered old Sony machine (with auto-reverse – you remember the almost magical joy of that?). And, in an instant, I’m gone again. This time not flying up to the ceiling and away from the physical pain of what’s happening to me, rather I’ve gone further inside myself. It felt like being freezing cold and climbing into an ultra-warm and hypnotically comfortable duvet with one of those £3,000 NASA-designed mattresses underneath me. I had never, ever experienced anything like it before.
It’s a dark piece; certainly the opening is grim. A kind of funereal chorale, filled with solemnity, grief and resigned hurt. Variation by variation it builds and recedes, expands and shrinks back in on itself like a musical black hole and equally baffling to the human mind. Some of the variations are in the major key, some in the minor. Some are bold and aggressive, some resigned and weary. They are by turns heroic, desperate, joyful, victorious, defeated. It makes time stand still, speed up, go backwards. I didn’t know what the fuck was happening, but I literally could not move. It was like being on the receiving end of a Derren Brown trance-inducing finger-click while on Ketamine. It reached something in me. It reminds me now of that line in Lolita where she tells Humbert that he tore something inside her; I had something ripped apart inside me but this mended it. Effortlessly and instantly. And I knew, the same way I knew the instant I held him in my arms that I’d walk under a bus for my son, that this was what my life was going to consist of. Music and more music. It was to be a life devoted to music and the piano. Unquestioningly, happily, with the doubtful luxury of choice removed.
And I know how clichéd it is, but that piece became my safe place. Any time I felt anxious (any time I was awake) it was going round in my head. Its rhythms were being tapped out, its voices played again and again, altered, explored, experimented with. I dove inside it as if it were some kind of musical maze and wandered around happily lost. It set me up for life; without it I would have died years ago, I’ve no doubt. But with it, and with all the other music that it led me to discover, it acted like a force field that only the most toxic and brutal pain could penetrate.
Imagine what an aid that is.
By this time I had managed to find an exit strategy from the school of rape and applied to some provincial fuck-bucket of a school in the country. But I had now become a kind of classical music superhero – off I went to boarding school aged ten, piano music as my invisibility/invincibility cloak.
It was a bit of out of the frying pan and into the industrial meat grinder, because I was by now a very odd kid, all tics and bed-wetting and spaced out and just weird. I threw up continuously on the way there, was so terrified I didn’t speak to anyone for the first few days, was wandering round shell-shocked like some bomb survivor with his hearing broken and his brain still reverberating.
I was also the only Jew at this school. They literally had never even seen one before. I was like a science experiment – kids actually touching and prodding me to see if I ‘felt different’. And they only knew I was Jewish because the cunt of a headmaster announced to the entire school at assembly one morning that I’d be absent for a day as I was celebrating the Jewish New Year. Which fell about a month into my first term.
But it didn’t matter. Really it didn’t. Because in comparison to what else was going on this was nothing. Regular beatings, blowing older boys (and staff) for Mars bars (I was more innocent back then – money meant nothing, sugar everything), torturing animals (newts, flies, nothing bigger that I can recall should that ease the disgust of the animal lovers amongst you), hiding, spending countless hours in locked toilet cubicles either bleeding and shitting or fucking and sucking. Throwing myself at older men and boys and doing anything they asked of me because, well, that was what you did. In the same way as shaking people’s hands meant hello, offering yourself to some perverted bastard because you recognise ‘that’ look (paedophiles – don’t think for a minute you’re anonymous to those who’ve been through it) was absolutely normal and expected. Like being on holiday aged ten and going off with a dude in his forties (there with his family) into the toilets to blow him for an ice cream and still not classing it as abuse even today because I chose it. I gave him the nod. I led the way. I wanted an ice cream.
But I had music now. And so it didn’t matter. Because I finally had definitive proof that all was well. That something existed in this horrific fucking world that was just for me, did not need to be shared or explained away, that was all mine. Nothing else was, except this.
The school had a couple of practice rooms with old, battered upright pianos in them. They were my salvation. Every spare moment I got I was in them, noodling away, trying to piece sounds together that meant something. I would get to breakfast as early as possible, before anyone else, because by this stage any kind of social interaction was too startling and fraught with danger, choke down Rice Krispies covered in white sugar, sit on my own and avoid any and all contact, then leg it for the piano.
I was shit, too. Not that it matters, but really, I was truly dreadful. Look at any one of a thousand Asian toddlers whacking out Beethoven on YouTube for the real thing, then imagine them with three stubby fingers and the brain of an Alzheimer’s-addled stroke victim and you’re approaching my level of skill. I laugh so hard now when parents push their kids up to me at CD signings post-concert and instruct me to tell them how long little Tom needs to practise for each day so that he can pass his grades and be proficient. My response is usually ‘As long as he wants to. If he’s not smiling and enjoying it then don’t worry. If he’s got the piano bug it doesn’t matter – he’ll find a way to make it.’
I
