step. But of course I had no idea about things like fingering or how exactly to practise. Which finger to use on which note is, arguably, the most important part of how to learn a piece. Get it right and it makes your job so much easier. Get it wrong and it’s an uphill battle that will never be fully secure in performance. There are so many factors to take into account. Here’s an easy one, for example: what combination of fingers will make the melody sound clearest, smoothest, joined up and voiced as the composer intended, while still playing all the other notes and chords that are surrounding it? Some fingers are weaker or stronger than others and shouldn’t be used in certain places; the thumb, for example, is heaviest and will make whichever note it hits sound louder than, say, the fourth finger, and so that has to be considered. The physical link between the fourth and fifth fingers is comparatively quite weak (especially in the left hand) and so when playing passages containing scales you should try and move from the third finger to the little finger, missing out the fourth entirely, in order to make them more even. Trilling (an ultra-rapid alternation of two notes, usually side by side, to create a vibrato, quivering sound) is easiest between the second and third fingers, but sometimes the same hand is playing a chord at the same time and so you need to trill between the fourth and fifth fingers to make everything flow naturally.
Sadly, the easiest combination to use physically doesn’t always work musically (it can make things sound choppy or disconnected, uneven or unbalanced). Where a physical connection between two notes is impossible (too big a jump or simply not enough fingers) you need to learn to use weight to make the join sound totally connected, even if you’re not actually physically connecting them. There must always be awareness not just of the note that you are playing but the relation of that note to what has come before and what is coming afterwards, and using the correct fingering is the surest way of doing that.
Sometimes you can play some of what the right hand is meant to be playing with the left hand to make it easier and vice versa, even if it’s just one note of a chord – but it doesn’t usually say that in the score and so you need to learn to spot opportunities to do it, mark it in the score, remember it, finger it, ensure the melodic line is still clear, that you’re not using the pedals (which sustain and/or dampen the notes) too much, that you are in fact playing all the notes the composer wrote down, that the runs are even and balanced, the chords are correctly weighted (each individual finger must use a slightly different weight and force when playing a chord with five notes simultaneously), that the speed and volume are perfectly judged, graded and executed, the tone (how to use the weight of the hand, arms, fingers to make the chord you’re playing sound a certain way) isn’t too harsh or too soft, the wrists and arms aren’t too tight, your breathing is right, the volume is measured and correct, and so on. It’s like a giant maths puzzle where you get to use logic to solve it. But if you don’t understand logic in the first place you’re shooting in the dark.
The school I was at had a piano teacher of sorts, and he and I had a few sporadic lessons together, but he had no clue either. Of course he didn’t – he was the music teacher who did everything and happened to play the piano at a pretty low level, and so he was the ‘piano teacher’ there. He knew as much about fingering, tone, breathing or posture as I did.
And all of this stuff is purely mechanics. The physical ‘how to’ of learning and playing a piece. It doesn’t even touch on musical interpretation or how to memorise a piece. Christ, sometimes Bach didn’t even specify what instrument a piece should be played on, let alone things like the speed and volume of it. Things got more detailed with Mozart and Beethoven as composers started to indicate those things, but even so they are merely signposts. There will never, can never, be two identical performances of the same piece of music, even when you’re playing it twice yourself. There is an infinite choice of interpretation, and everyone has different opinions as to what is the ‘right way’, what is respectful/disrespectful of the composer, what is valid, what is exciting, what is dull, what is profound. It’s entirely subjective.
And where to even begin with memorising approximately 100,000 individual notes so that even when phones go off, latecomers shuffle in, the wrong finger is accidentally used thus fucking up muscle memory completely, you are still totally secure. Some people visualise the score in their head, complete with coffee stains and pencil markings. Some rely on muscle memory. Some even use the score (which goes very much against the norm in solo recitals but is never a bad thing if it enables a great performance and removes crippling nerves). For me the best way is to play a piece through at a tenth of the normal speed without music because if you can get through it like that then there is nothing to worry about. Imagine an actor rehearsing a giant, hour-long monologue, going through it and pausing for three seconds between each word – if he can do that he knows it inside out and will nail it during performance. Playing it through in my mind, without moving my fingers, away from the piano and in a darkened room is a great memorising tool as well. Seeing the keyboard and my fingers on the right notes in my mind’s eye proves invaluable.
And so learning the piano is maddening because it is at once an exact and an inexact science; there is a specific and valid way to master the mechanics underlying the physical performance of it (even this is dependent on physical attributes such as size, strength, finger span etc), and an inexact, ethereal, intangible route to find the meaning and interpretation of the piece being learned. And figuring out all of this as a vaguely retarded ten-year-old, pretty much entirely on his own and emotionally and physically fucked, was a bit of an ask.
I remember the first time I learned a full piece – the sense of achievement and total, utter delight I felt. It doesn’t matter that it was Richard Clayderman’s ‘Ballade pour Adeline’ (well to be fair it kind of does, I can only apologise) or that it was probably riddled with wrong notes. I had learned something, from memory, and could play it the whole way through. And all the arpeggios sounded fast and impressive and just like the guys on my tapes sounded, and holy shit this is the best thing that’s ever happened to me. Christ how I wanted to play it to people, but there was no one there to get it, to hear it, to understand what it meant. I had to keep it just for me even if my heart was exploding with excitement, and that somehow made it even more special.
I was such a well-adjusted kid.
The only thing that came close to my worship of all things piano was smoking. Fucking smoking. The best invention since anything anywhere. This whole book could be a love letter to tobacco. The only thing greater than being on my own as a kid and playing the piano was wandering around hiding from the world smoking cigarettes. These magical cylinders with the most extraordinary medicinal qualities offered me everything I felt was missing. Getting hold of them was easier than you’d think, especially in 1985 – friendly newsagents, older kids, the odd kind (and horny) teacher. Silk Cut was my best friend.
I look at my life today and realise not much has really changed – Marlboro now, but cigarettes and the piano are the central things in my life. The only things that will not, cannot, let me down. Even the threat of cancer would simply be an excuse to finally watch Breaking Bad in its entirety and take a metric fuck-tonne of drugs.
The thing about smoking that they don’t tell you is how good it is at stifling feelings. Later I found out that in several of the psych wards I was in, they actively encouraged patients to smoke as it made the nurses’ job a lot easier. There is nothing as terrifying to a mentally ill person as a feeling. Good or bad doesn’t matter. It still has the potential to turn our minds upside down and back to front without offering the vaguest clue how to deal with it reasonably or rationally. I am at least forty-three times more likely to top myself if I am not smoking. And so I smoke. Whenever I can, as much as I can. The odd occasion I’ve tried to stop has always been to please other people – the girl, family, society. Never works. I am a master at engineering a crisis that allows those close to me to grant smoking consent again. If there’s a loaded gun (real or imagined) or a pack of cigarettes in front of you, take the smokes every time. I know that’s off-message. But good God they work wonders for me. Even the thought of being able to smoke at a certain future event, be it a concert, party, interview, restaurant, keeps me
