My Year with Bluestone: Friday House Day (8)

I started Friday House day blogging in the back corner of garden, in the chook shed, and have gradually been moving forward towards the front of the house (though I have sometimes skipped the Friday blog).

But today we go even further backwards, to the bluestone laneway behind the house. It's a gorgeous Melbourne autumn day, and it's very quiet, even close to our main road, because it's Good Friday.  I went round to the laneway to take photos of Joel for an upcoming gig in June (first outing of his new piano trio: a big milestone for a jazz pianist). Like countless other bluestone lanes, this one is used more as a thoroughfare between streets than for access to back gardens. It also has blocks of flats at either end, one with the obligatory "tenants ears only" sign.

So here's the musician in the family, blessedly choosing a bluestone laneway for his promo stills...

Gleeful: Never My Love

Joel's vocal group doesn't have a proper name yet. They don't wear a uniform: "performance black and grey" is the dress code, which can mean anything from a white shirt, a black miniskirt, a grey cardigan, a pretty brown dress with a hint of white petticoat. They have only just learned to bow properly, together, and have almost stopped messing with their hair between songs. Some are tall; and some are short.

For all that, their sound is warm and close: perfect for a capella traditions and competitions.

Last week they competed in the Get Vocal competition for school groups as part of a six day festival of concerts, workshops and competitions. They won their small division on Wednesday and last night were invited to perform at one of the closing night conferences.

First up was the group (from a school in the Yarra Valley: a most beautiful place) that placed first in the larger contest, and second in the division that our lot won. A bigger group, possibly slightly older, and looking for all the world as if, with the lighting and sound production of Glee, they would be contenders for television. Their act was choreographed and dramatic, and featured a Glee style mash-up, arranged by one of the boys, of "Crazy" and "Rolling in the Deep." The boys wore black suits, the girls wore black cocktail dresses, high heels, make-up, and white ribbons in their pretty spiffy hairstyles. Gorgeous to see. They did that Glee-style walking around, singing to each other business. They closed in a triangle formation and one of them courteously thanked their teacher and families, the concert and festival organisers. They sang about five songs. Some of their solos were very good indeed, and they rightly received rapturous applause.

The MC also raved about them, and expressed some surprise that they were beaten in one of the divisions. In spite of his disbelief, he nevertheless introduced the Princes Hill group.

They walk on. They are smaller, less formally dressed, less polished behind their mikes. But they open their mouths, and when they get to their first long sustained harmonic chord, you can hear the warmth and closeness of their sound, something that wasn't as evident in the other group.

They sing only two songs. I spent several hours last night trying to move a 7 minute video from my iphone to my computer, on outdated software. I'm only posting the first song, as the second they are working up for another competition in Mt Gambier in a few weeks. But here they are, with apologies for sound quality, and with shaky camera action stilled by YouTube. It's just a phone. Click through to full screen to see all seven of them.

Come on in, ya mongrels!

So, last night Joel's vocal group from school was supporting the Bigmouth community choir in Northcote. I thought we'd just go for their opening number, then we'd come home. After all, it's less than a week since he had all his wisdom teeth out, and he's been pretty low with the effects of the general anaesthetic. He also can't yet eat cereal (quite a big problem for a teenage boy), and I didn't think he'd be able to sing at all.

Anyway, we got there nice and early at 7.30 for them to rehearse, and I hung around in the foyer for a while, not sure I'd even stay, since Joel could get a lift home with someone else. Then I saw Meg's mother and sister, so I bought a ticket, anyway. Everyone else obviously knew something as they were all lining up with cushions and chairs. We could hear the big choir rehearsing right up till 8.30, and then finally the doors swung open and a man in a hat came through and said, "Come on in, ya mongrels." This was not calculated to impress people who'd been standing outside for half an hour but we all trooped in anyway. I got a chair near the door, planning to leave early, but in the end I stayed for the whole thing, and not just because Joel's group sang near the end of the evening. The man in the hat turned out to be Stephen Taberner, whose Spooky Men's Chorale has featured elsewhere on this blog, and who led this 80-strong choir through a wonderful hour of carefully staged and sung music in the gorgeous 30s public elegance of the Northcote Town Hall:

The evening also featured a couple of other musicians, including a wonderful countertenor accompanying himself on double bass: astonishing.

Joel's group sang a song, "Rachel", I've heard them sing many times, but they really nailed it last night. Only eight of them, with young 16 and 17 year old voices, but they stood in a circle in the middle of the hall and filled it with precision and passion. Here's a clip of them singing this song on another occasion earlier this year:



I had far too much to do (emails, budgets, bills, Christmas puddings, writing), but stayed anyway. I kind of toyed with the idea of finding out about how to join the choir, but kept thinking about how much I had to do (emails, budgets, bills, etc.).

It turns out Joel's group has bought a little studio time with money they won in a competition in Mt Gambier earlier this year, and will be recording a few tracks next week. But they need a new name. The "vocal group" or "senior choir" doesn't really cut it, I don't think.

The school is celebrating, too. The Victorian College of the Arts takes only 50 students into its new contemporary music program: six of them, next year, will be coming from this nonselective state school. It is just such a Good Thing to have music in my life.

Human voices

It's a cold Saturday morning, at the end of the school holidays. As arranged, Joel brings me a strong cup of coffee at 7.15. We climb into the car. Its newly fixed thermostat registers 2 degrees. We pick up Meg, then head into the city and down Punt Road. The sky is pale but clear, and we see three hot air balloons in perfect triangular formation flying low across Parkville.

We are heading to a three-day music teachers' conference, being held at Melbourne High School. We arrive with plenty of time to spare, and sit in the car, marvelling at the school's enormous playing field, and the tall gothic brick tower of the main building. Our school is made of grey concrete blocks, doesn't have its own oval or gardens, really, and the kids use the public park a block away. This feels like a private school, though it's Melbourne's only selective boys' high school. Two different balloons are flying low towards us, and seem to skim past a block of flats on the other side of the oval.

The vocal group meets with Miriam in the foyer, surrounded by glass cabinets full of trophies, wooden honour boards, and memorials to the fallen. As they prepare, I walk into the main hall. A young girl is practising a violin solo with piano accompaniment. She plays with great accuracy and skill, but is still warming up to full performance mode. It is not yet 9.00 am.

Our kids rehearse. They are wearing their usual medley of clothes, supposedly in performance blacks and greys, but interpreting the colour code very loosely. They look a little withdrawn and distanced, standing apart from each other. Miriam checks their cues, the sound engineer jumps athletically up on to the stage several times as he checks levels, and adjusts their mike. They run through most of their set, just going over a few tricky entries. One of the girls can't be there, so Claudia steps in for her solo.

The conference begins, and our group is on first, as a kind of warm-up to the day's proceedings. The girls have brushed their hair, and everyone has taken off at least one outer garment. They walk on to the stage and Miriam announces the first song, modestly not mentioning that this group came second in a national jazz competition not too long ago.

I realise, at this point, that the battery on my phone is about to run out. I am sitting with Susie's mother in the front row, and the angle is all wrong, as I can't get all seven in the one frame and am looking up at them. So I record just the two middle songs from their bracket of four: "Sometimes I'm Happy" by King Pleasure, and "Rachel", by Trish Delaney-Brown. They sing well today, very well. They stand close together, and sing accurately in key and in time, which is hard when the piano is so far away, and of course, even harder when they sing a capella, and with no conductor. No one "sings out" (i.e. making their voice stand out from the group), but the parts and words are distinct. The solos work well, too. Claudia, Mary and Joel just step up to the mike and sing without fuss. "Rachel" is a show-stopper.

The music teachers in the audience — that's a tough crowd for kids to sing for — are warm in their applause, and the other parents and I follow the kids out in to the foyer. Miriam does a quick debrief, and the group breaks up with hugs and congratulations all round. I have been struck, as always, by the authority and confidence of this group of fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds, and the serious intent with which they sing, and sing with each other, listening so hard to each other. They don't all hang out together as friends. They are in different year groups and subject clusters. But when they sing together, there is often a great warmth and strength about their voices in harmony. Joel and Meg explain to me later how they have literally learned to breathe together, so they can all start phrases in the same second. The other parents and I have confessed we regularly cry when we hear them: it is the terribly beauty of their vulnerability and the fearful power of their strength, brought together by a wonderful teacher who guides them with skill and passion.

Marion and I take Susie, Meg and Joel to brunch in Richmond: Dench fruit toast with maple and vanilla butter at Richmond Larder, sitting outside in the sun. Then I drop Joel and Meg off in the city, and watch them head down Bourke St on their different expeditions. A good morning's work...



Double-click on these to get the full screen view which will show you the seven singers.

Blue and brown

The young man is better, I'm glad to say, and has gone off to Chinatown for his customary Saturday lunch with friends, since he hardly saw them all week.

But Paul and I are both struggling with colds of various degrees. I'm not too bad, but he and I kept each other awake last night with a barking cough.

I struggled to Italian class this morning, and made a few neighbourhood stops on the way home, so our lunch was a ball of burrata mozzarella (with gorgonzola also inside), on fresh Dench grain bread, drizzled with porcini oil. Unbelievably delicious.

I feel ok now and am doing chores on the computer. Behind me, Paul is stretched out on the couch with a pillow, a blue mohair blanket and two burmese kittens. I'd love to post a picture, but the ipod is playing and I don't want to wake him up. It's on "shuffle" so we are jumping from jazz to Leonard Cohen and girly pop songs and retro 70s and 80s pop and lots of Beethoven and Sibelius. Something rather personal about him lying sleeping/listening to my mix, which desperately needs updating, except that my laptop is too old to use the current iTunes.

The heater's on. My three brown cats (one wearing a big brown jumper) are asleep. The sky is wintry pale blue, though at mid-afternoon the shadows are already long and the sunshine weakening.

I ploughed through a huge pile of emails and chores yesterday, and just as soon as I finish these grant assessments, I'll be ready to write a talk for Thursday and finish polishing my Langland talk to send off.

Health and sickness. Winter and sun. Blue and brown.

Looking for America

After Italian class, popped into La Latteria for burrata and squaquerno cheese, olive oil from Gippsland, then Dench for grain loaf. After lunch, washing up with Joel playing Simon and Garfunkel's "America" which he's hoping to sing in his music class on Thursday (honestly, that class sometimes sounds like something from Glee) and the two of us singing along and harmonising as we went. Reminded me of harmonising Methodist hymns with my family over the kitchen sink, years ago.  I'm supposed to be working on my essay on Magna Carta; and he's supposed to be doing piano practice before we visit Paul's parents. But here am I searching versions of the song on YouTube, while I can hear him trying out the chords to the song on the piano — and now the guitar (which he can barely play). It's enough to make a fond mother weep.

Not really a video here; but lovely music for a rainy Saturday afternoon.

Death in North Fitzroy: Music, Mortality, Sleep

Another school concert last night. Although J has a jinx of having his name left off the program for such things, last night he played piano and bongo drums to accompany the junior girls' choir, sang solo with a friend on acoustic guitar (Red Hot Chilli Peppers' "Snow"), played cello in the vastly improved Camerata strings, and sang in the vocal group, taking a two-line solo. Plenty in the evening to gratify his parents' and grandparents' fond hearts. And just generally an excellent evening of music. Particularly affecting was the flute teacher's tribute to two year 12 students playing their last chamber music concert for the school, after six years of performing there — and winning prizes in national competitions, too. You could feel the generations swinging through the school.

Some of these kids will go on to start a career in music: the school has a strong record of such. Others will just always have music in their lives. Others will stop learning violin, and won't sing again after they leave school. But they will all have had that chance to make music together in a group, and to experience the terrors and pleasures of a loving audience.

I went to sleep instantly, as is the nature of this never-ending jetlag I'm still suffering. I've been waking on the dot of 4.30, and been unable to get back to sleep for thinking about the things I've been too tired to do during the day.

But last night at 2.00 I woke to a tremendous screech of brakes and a loud crash. I went downstairs and looked out to see a car crashed into a fence on the other side of the main road that runs at an odd angle from the house. The car's rear end was lifted a metre off the ground, its nose pointing down the garden bed near the bike path. I had the phone in my hand to call the ambulance, but then saw three or four taxis stopping (where did they all come from?), and people walking around calmly. I realised people were making calls, and I thought the people walking around had miraculously survived. So I went back to bed. I heard the sirens coming, then for another hour or two heard a low murmuring and rumbling. I assumed it was the tow truck struggling to lift the car out of the fence. I lay there, trying to sleep, refusing to get up again.

I woke, however, to the alarm clock radio speaking of two deaths in North Fitzroy. And at the same time the doorbell rang. Paul got there first and was faced with about eight people and several television cameras and very bright lights, asking had we seen or heard anything. P had not (he is a *very* good sleeper), but I started to stumble out my story, till I realised, and said, that I did not want to appear on TV, at which point they switched off the lights and went away. I've never liked those interviews with neighbours, especially since I know I'm not a brilliant eye-witness at the best of times. Besides, I was still in my dressing-gown...

But two people are dead. The driver of the stolen car was a 17 year old boy from Thornbury, two suburbs away, whose learner's licence had already been cancelled. His female passenger has not yet been identified. He was speeding, heading north, and lost control of the car, that must have then spun across the road and into the power pole, then tipped down the embankment. I hope it was instantaneous for them. I keep thinking of the sound of that dreadful screech of brakes: the last thing they heard; the terror of that moment; the shocking finality of such a death.

But it's hard not to be struck by the contrast between the proud parents of our school's beautiful young musicians, whom we took home safely in our cars, and the trauma of today for two other families. The age difference is minimal, and some of our kids will be out driving on these streets in a year or two. When they do, I think we won't be sleeping soundly till we hear them come home.

Update: well how annoying is this? I just checked a news website again to see my own face on the video footage. Clearly it's convenient enough for them not to show the bit where I say "I don't want to be on television". Hurrumph. Could I be bothered making a complaint? But you can catch a glimpse of the car. It's worse than it looked when I peered out the window; as it's clearly wrapped around the pole...

I told you I was sick

... and have now had confirmation.  (And how lucky I am to be registered with a medical practice that holds a no-appointment clinic on Sunday morning for regulars who haven't been able to get in during the week.) I came home with

• a referral for a chest x-ray, as it seems as if my rib is cracked, not just bruised; 
• a prescription, plus repeat, for top-strength anti-biotics since the lingering cough turns out to be bronchitis;
• instructions for lung-clearing exercises that promise to be so painful (see cracked rib, above) I have to take paracetamol before I start them; 
• disprin to start thinning my blood before the flight to Italy, to counter the greater risk of DVT with a lung infection; and 
• a warning that if I don't get better soon I should think about cancelling my trip. 

Sigh. Still, I realise I have been fighting this cold since the day I got home from Berlin last month. No wonder I'm feeling a bit flat and run-down.

But also feeling strangely out-of-body, unexpectedly thrown back to 1971. I'm listening to Joel's new CD of Tea for the Tillerman, which was the very first record I ever bought. It cost $5 and I played it and played it over and over, and pored over the lyrics. And now "Longer Boats" is playing; and I realise how much I love this music still, its lyricism and its passion. Pity I have no breath to sing along with.

I've just dropped Joel at Trinity College for a week-long residential jazz intensive, being run by five members of the Juilliard Jazz programme. Yes. That Juilliard. So many excited teenagers running around looking for practice spaces to start jamming, before sessions start tomorrow. Can't wait for the Friday night end-of-course concert.

Naughty chickens

Something there is about a chicken that wants to climb high into a tree at dusk. That's all well and good;  but the danger for chickens is early morning, when the foxes come out for breakfast.

Tonight at dusk I left the party, changed my shoes and drove up to Ceres. By the time I got there it was pretty much pitch black, and the chickens were lined up quietly on their perches in their shed. I counted them, but came up two short, and I remembered that this morning I had found two black ones outside that had eluded capture the night before (the group is on a fortnightly roster). Determinedly, I went outside with my little torch and started scouring the runs, to no avail. Finally I saw two black chickens high up in the quince tree. By climbing a couple of feet into the tree, I could just about reach them with the end of the rake, but no amount of poking or prodding (in the dark, clutching my little torch, trying to keep my balance, trying not to poke my eyes out on the tree, trying not to wreck my clothes, trying not to hurt the chickens) would budge them. I then tried giving the branch a vigorous shake, but from underneath I could just see their little feet curling tightly around the branch. Finally — it's pretty much pitch black, remember — I had to climb up over bags of mulch, onto the wooden supports of the flimsy wire fence between the two runs. Standing five feet off the ground, propping myself against a quince tree in the dark, I had to reach into the tree and grab the two chickens, one at a time, then precariously lower myself down so I could drop them onto the ground. And then I had to jump down off the fence and run around to the gate into the other run so I could chase them inside before they took it into their heads to fly up into the tree again.

All this time I had an image of how funny it all was — except that I wasn't so much laughing as swearing. The funniest thing though was when I finally picked them up to put them inside, they both set up such a dreadful complaining squark. They really didn't want to go inside; they really didn't see why they couldn't stay up in the tree; they'd been all right the night before, so what was my problem? And then when I put them inside, all the other hens woke up and squarked about being disturbed. Not sure I'm spelling 'squarked' correctly: but I kind of like the look of its awkward q and k there.

I was very glad to get back to the party, I can tell you. Our boys had played beautifully for Peter's guests: Joel set the keyboard to the marimbah sound effect, and it blended perfectly with electric bass and drums. After most of the guests had gone, the band and its parents dined on a perfect pea and ham soup and orange and almond cake, and then the boys played again. As parents, we are simply in awe of our talented children. We are of a generation that learned to play music, but learned to play set pieces from scores. These kids experiment and improvise, and take the beat from each other, and watch each other to produce perfect, irregular rhythms together. Now that Joel's wrist is out of plaster and is gradually  becoming more mobile, the drummer, naturally, has a thumb in plaster; and was holding the brush between the second and third finger of his hand.  The poor boy had a blister developing on the inside of one finger from this unaccustomed use. But they weren't going to stop the music...

In which I play a little jazz

When I play the piano, which is not all that often these days, I need a score, a good light, and the right glasses. I dig out The Children's Bach, or more ambitiously, the English Suites and plod through material that's much too difficult for me, but loving the abstract form of a fugue, or Bach's Glass- and Nyman-like progressions through chords, patterns, keys and harmonies I can barely name.

Sometimes I've picked up J's introductory blues and jazz books, but my training doesn't really allow me to swing rhythms with any confidence at all. Something about the new piano I still find daunting, too, I think.

But tonight J asked a favour. Still with his left arm in its heavy cast, he had written out a little four-bar melody in 6/8. Could I play it, so he could test out whether the chord progression he had devised would work?  I am sorry to say it took me a long time as he patiently took me through what will become the saxophone part till I could play it in a loop while he tried out his chords, playing what I would have thought of as the left-hand part with his right hand. And very sweet it sounded, too. By about the fiftieth time round my little loop J was off in full flight, and I had just added one little grace note, one time, and was starting to see how, yes indeed, it might be possible to improvise while playing, when he had thanked me and was off to start scoring the parts.

But I did get to play jazz, just a little.

To break one wrist is unfortunate; to break two...

No, not J (though I have been hearing many stories about people breaking both wrists in bike accidents). J's going ok; and able to make surprisingly rich sounds on the piano with one hand. But the band was booked into a recording studio next Saturday to make an audition recording for a week-long jazz intensive — run by the Juilliard jazz school — at Trinity college in July. Unfortunately, the drummer is also a rugby player, and has strained a ligament in his left arm. P took a photo of the band after rehearsal on Saturday — now with two boys concealing their slings and bandages of outrageous fortune.

There is something about being adolescent and male and feeling invulnerable, on the bike or the rugby field, that's not all that compatible with having musical ambitions at the same time... They've deferred the studio booking for a few days, but they are losing percentage all the time, so I doubt this will be their best performance.

New suggested names for the band?

The Band Who Hurt Too Much (Melbourne ref: The Band Who Knew Too Much).

Any others?

Rehearsal

So the Blue Manoeuvres are rehearsing at our place today. Everyone sets to with a will to bring in the drum kit (kudos to the drummer's mother: roadie par excellence). They are on their third run-through their first number, taking turns to improvise and 'comp' when it's someone else's turn to solo. I can't help but admire their work-ethic (they have set aside three hours for rehearsal) and their co-operative spirit. I'll send them out for hamburgers for lunch later.

Best of all, for me, is to hear J playing (even if one-handed), and to hear the happiness in his voice. Right now he and the bass guitarist are making a little duet (R. plays double bass when he can but the guitar is easier to transport); and now it's piano and drums. The sax will kick in the melody soon - ah yes, there he goes!

They are working towards making a recording for an audition in the next few weeks; and may also be applying for a busking licence. Watch this space for their next appearance (and for the corrected spelling of contemporary. Any day now).

Maternal Pride

Work is still crazy busy. There is much to do, still. I'm messing about with our horrible online system for uploading lecture notes that doesn't seem to work very well; email keeps crashing; I've much to do on the grant application; and I must soon wrastle in a serious way with the two reports that have now come in on the six chapters of the Garter book I sent to my wonderful editor.

But in the meantime, how is this as an occasion for maternal pride? Four young musicians, all of 14 years, playing up a storm at a jazz club on Tuesday night. Joel's school sponsors a regular jazz evening at Dizzy's in Richmond. Three of these boys (piano, drums, bass) have known each other since they were at kindergarten, and here they are, performing their first gig together. They are the Blue Manoeuvres, and even though this video, shot by the saxophonist's uncle, has bass, sax and drums all lined up in front of each other so you cannot see the drummer's wonderful, intense face, you do still get a pretty good look at the flying hands of the pianist (how did my son learn to *do* that? I mean, I hear him practising and all, but there is something about an audience, perhaps, and the clank of plates and glasses that produced something quite new). Nor can you see the faces of the four mothers beaming with pride at our clever boys, but it was truly a watershed event for the boys and their families.



After this we took them off to hear Branford Marsalis, by coincidence on the same night, giving them a taste of other things that are possible with this combination of instruments. Highlights were a Joey Calderozzo composition, "Hope", and an extraordinary adaptation, for soprano sax, of Henry Purcell's "O Solitude", as performed by the counter-tenor Alfred Deller, and heard by Marsalis on late-night radio. But unsurprisingly, the tune I remember best from the evening is this passionate performance from our boys.

Twelve days later

Goodness! I wonder if being head of programme will mean I don't have time to blog... I can already see my days and weeks are going to be taking on a different rhythm from last year's leave, as you'd expect. So what have I been up to?

• wrote and delivered my paper for the Wollongong symposium, which (the latter) was truly amazing. 15 papers over 2.5 days, with maybe 24 people attending, all engaging, talking furiously and convivially. Papers on medievalism, medieval literature and its teaching and reception, papers by romanticists and Australianists and children's literature experts, all working together to set up some wonderful new lines of connection and inquiry. We hope to publish most of these papers in the next year and a bit. Watch this space!
• completed an Italian intensive course ("lower intermediate") and graduated into livello cinque, starting in a week or two.
• travelled to Sydney for a day with John and Bea before we went down to Wollongong. Highlights? Seeing Frank Woodley as Candide in a new production for the Sydney Theatre Company as part of the Sydney festival. We booked late, and got late-release front-row seats in the Opera House theatre. This is what you really want to do with visiting scholars: place them so they get to take part in a little audience participation in the theatre: how many visiting scholars can you say you have given the chance to yodel — solo, into the microphone — in the Sydney Opera House with Barry Otto (father of Miranda/Eowyn)? We followed this up with dinner in Potts Point and a stroll through the Cross.
• travelled to Geelong to see my boy perform in the grand concert that concluded his stay at the Geelong Summer Music Camp. He had five nights with his grandparents while I was away. It turned out to be more like an intensive training course than a camp. He had to practise and practise when he got home each day after a full day's playing, just to learn the parts and keep up. But the 250 kids who took part put on an amazing concert. Highlights? Seeing J playing in Sibelius' Finlandia, and, in the string ensemble, parts of Elgar's Serenade for Strings and the last two movements of Holst's St Paul's suite (sweeping renditions of Greensleeves against the sprightly Dargason, parts swapped around between cellos and violins). Maternal pride in buckets; though mostly because the whole camp was so much harder and more demanding than we thought, and he just stuck with it, and came through in the end.
• saw Nadal down Kohlscreiber last night at Rod Laver Arena, from the pleasant comfort of a corporate box (courtesy P's associate). Really very pleasant to be served a lovely dinner (esp. the crab salad), chilled drinks with ice, etc. It was a very hot night, but after dinner was served, our hosts opened up the spotless glass windows between us and the back row just in front, so we could cheer the players on and take part in the action (while still feeling the comfort of the air-conditioning, the freshly-brewed coffee and more chilled drinks with ice, etc.). An utterly sybaritic way to watch other people play sport, I must say. We are going again on Tuesday, and fully expect to be seated in the back row, just in front of such a corporate box. We will have to carry our own drinks up the stairs: can you imagine?
  

More scarily — and in a way that is completely inappropriate for a list of things that have been finished or completed — I'm starting to see just how many emails are starting to flood my in-box, and how many things there are to do in my job, in addition to the writing of books and the teaching of students.  I'm making lots of resolutions about how to manage it all. We'll see.

In Praise of Public Education

A few days ago the excellent (rather, the honourable) Michael Kirby, former justice of the high court), gave a speech at Melbourne High school's speech night. I heard part of it on the radio the next morning, especially the bit in favour of public education in this country. Kirby said we should all blog and twitter in support of public education.

So here's my contribution.

Over the last week or so I've been to two school music concerts. The first was a cabaret organised by the parent-teacher liaison at Joel's school: parents loaned rice-cookers and a dedicated team cooked up wonderful curries to serve at the school canteen. The weather had been wild that afternoon, but we were able to sit outside and watch as the kids performed. I've written about the school's music before. What I loved on this night was to see the music staff up there on stage with the kids, playing along with them. And, when the parent who was going to MC the event had to withdraw at the last minute, and when Joel offered his services, there was not a moment's hesitation, and he was given the running sheet and complete freedom to compere. And his parents and friends all thought he was terrific, naturally...

Special praise for the year 8 student, Susie, who sang "Stormy Weather" with passion and verve, and the wonderful multi-talented Lena (trumpet, clarinet [and either trombone or saxophone, possibly both], who, sadly for the school, is leaving this year.

Then this week, one of the music teachers had organised an evening at Penny Black, a cafe in Brunswick. It began with the brilliant Claudia (year 10?) singing "I Heard it on the Grapevine" with great gusto and strength out in front of a band of about 16 musicians: keyboards, guitars, drumkit, and a fabulous brass section.

The school is stronger with jazz and swing and Latin ensembles than it is in orchestral terms: and the string ensembles can't compete in energy and numbers, though I like their ambitions (Barber's Adagio, for example). But the vocal performances are the most amazing to me: one after another kid — mostly girls - just stood up and sang, often quite difficult material. They don't always move with much confidence; and some struggle to perform the song's emotions. But they still blow me away. The kids are also encouraged to improvise and jam; so they have a wonderful facility with different styles.

This year one of J's electives has been a kind of music master class, where amongst other things, they were put into groups and asked to choose, arrange and perform a couple of numbers. Joel's group was a little diminished in size on Thursday night, so they just did one song: Tom Waits' "New Coat of Paint", with J on keyboard and vocals, sharing the stage with two close friends — Lenny, on scorching guitar solo; and the adorable Meg on lead vocals — as well as a couple of others. Oh, I did think it went very quickly. But it was lovely to hear these friends singing together: "You'll wear a dress; and I'll wear a tie".

I'm sure Australian Idol has played no small part in investing these young performers with a sense of what's possible, and what works when you stand in front of an audience to perform. But there was something magical about seeing them in a live, commercial venue, even if the entire audience was comprised of the school community. So while I understand this school is one of the better government schools, it still shows what is possible with energy and enthusiasm. And while I understand that not everyone in the school feels this way, there is an undoubted core of love for and identification with the school amongst its community: without badge or uniform to bind them together, and without the idea of financial investment in the young.

Mimesis, Diegesis and Infinite Regress

One of the most useful binary oppositions in literary theory is that between mimesis and diegesis, or between showing and telling. To over-simplify: a play like Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida shows the action; an epic poem like the Odyssey narrates the action in involuted folds of narrative, forwards and backwards like Penelope's shuttle. (And yes, Auerbach's Mimesis is indeed one of my favourite books.) And yes, I know this distinction is ripe for unpicking. But it's where I begin, today.

I've been thinking about the film, In Search of Beethoven, which I saw yesterday. It's a wonderful documentary, though it holds its fire all the time, and is quite restrained. It's more concerned with emotion than psychology, for example, and its attempts to fill out cultural and historical context are sketchy at best. For all that, though, it's surprisingly satisfying. It's full of irresistible close-ups of pianos, fingers, and the wood grain on the side of the piano keys and cellos, the extraordinary and unlikely tactility of bow hairs across strings.

The film has a clear message too: re-orient your vision of Beethoven as tempestuous angry man, frustrated by deafness; and re-think a man of a great mind and a great heart in struggle with each other. A man of generosity, spirituality and humane love.

Some of the most compelling scenes are where musicians demonstrate and talk about particular passages. Mimesis and diegesis working together. Someone explains that Beethoven was particularly good, as a pianist, at repeating a note, or progressing smoothly down a scale of octaves, and wrote such features into his work to annoy less able pianists. At one point, someone plays a repeated B, and shows how Beethoven is just "listening to the note" at that point.

But the most amazing moment for me was when Hélène Grimaud is rehearsing the second movement of the 4th piano concerto, and plays, very slowly, its slow descending scales (I listened to my CD of Lang Lang playing this this afternoon). Her face is overcome with anxiety, tension and love of every note of this music: in perfectly balanced irregular rhythm, note by note runs off wood and drops into a deep pool. It's utterly engrossing. Far less spectacular than the big symphonies, with their insistent obsessive rhythms, but completely compelling. It was about halfway through what is a rather long and academic film, but the cinema audience was suddenly transfixed and silent. I'm sure I was not the only one to feel the tears running down.

But of course, I can only try and tell you, diegetically, what this moment of mimesis was like. The other way to tell you is to say that I just put my ipod on shuffle. The first thing that came up was a Bach cantata, and I think for the first time in my life I heard Bach as a mechanical martinet of a composer. What if I am becoming a romantic, after all these years?

Slow teaching movement?

When we bought our piano, Leon generously offered to give Joel a couple of extra lessons, in the manner, I guess, of a personal master class. He had his first one on Wednesday and he was very very nervous. We had to drive way out into the depths of the south-eastern suburbs in peak hour — grey clouds and misty rain.

I sat down on the couch with the PhD I am examining (yes, this is what you do on long service leave if you don't finish it while on study leave), and half-read; and half-listened.

They started working on Chopin's Nocturne in E flat major, a piece J has only just started to learn. Over the hour, they worked through the right hand melody, but I was so struck by Leon's teaching, as they spent a good twenty minutes on the first phrase. There are some nice performances on YouTube, but the wikipedia page has a recording, plus the score of the opening (scroll down to Opus 9, No.2):



Those first two notes for the right hand feature an anacrusis, the unstressed B flat quaver, that reaches up to the (dotted crotchet) G, which is the first note of the first full bar. Leon described the relationship between these two notes in grammatical terms, as the article before the noun. Yes, it's common enough to think of music as a language, but his analogy has really stuck with me as a way of articulating the relationship between the unstressed and the stressed syllables (sorry; notes). They also did lots of analysis of the chord progressions. I'm sure Leon sensed Joel's nervousness (he normally teaches more advanced students), and was able to modulate his teaching as he worked out what Joel could and couldn't do.

But the slowness of the teaching reminded me of the beauties of close reading, a technique that is often reviled these days as apolitical, overly-formalist and privileging a certain aestheticist kind of writing and reading practice. Yet in medieval literature (and in other forms, too), it can be the best way to teach. I do remember feeling quite pleased, one time, that I had spent a good ninety minutes on the first two stanzas of Chaucer's Parlement of Foulys. Partly because this was the way I was taught, and partly because it was so satisfying to plumb so many depths of syntax, language, classical allusion, voicing, etc. Because I've quoted Chopin, I'm going to quote Chaucer, too.

The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne,
Thassay so hard, so sharp the conquering,
The dredful Ioy, that alwey slit so yerne,
Al this mene I by love, that my feling
Astonyeth with his wonderful worching
So sore y-wis, that whan I on him thinke,
Nat wot I wel wher that I wake or winke.

For al be that I knowe nat love in dede,
Ne wot how that he quyteth folk hir hyre,
Yet happeth me ful ofte in bokes rede
Of his miracles, and his cruel yre;
Ther rede I wel he wol be lord and syre,
I dar not seyn, his strokes been so sore,
But God save swich a lord! I can no more.

But am I becoming hopelessly old-fashioned in my teaching? Is there such a thing as going too slowly? Or being too precious? Certainly in teaching for performance, as with the Chopin, it's hard to imagine rushing through at some global level. Conversely, in some subjects and contexts, I'm conscious of going very quickly, to make sure we can grasp the whole of a text, or a good chunk of it, as the full range of meanings aren't always evident — of course! — in the microscopic examination of two stanzas. But perhaps this kind of detailed explication de texte is not as satisfying to students as it is to me.

I realise, now, as I look at those stanzas, that Chaucer is at one level working through the same problem. Life (or love) is so short, like a text that passes quickly, but the skill of reading and negotiating one's way through it, takes years to learn how to do properly. And the text, like love, like life, that slit so yerne (slides away so quickly) under such examination? No wonder I spent so long on these stanzas: they were insisting I did so!

The Talking Piano (with apologies to Sylvia Plath)

We ordered this, shiny black box
Curved and square and too heavy to lift.
I would say it was the body of a whale
Or a gleaming tailfin
Were it not so still.

It arrived yesterday. First its legs and pedals were brought in, each in its own padded bag. Then the main body came down the hall, carried by two strong men. And I swear I heard it talking. Just a few notes, conversationally, as it was carried over the threshold. It then sat quietly on its side to be re-assembled, before being set to rights. Then its lid, and stand. After the men had left, I played a little (really, I can't play a single thing without lots of mistakes and hesitation), but feeling a bit overwhelmed, I closed it down. A red felt cover over the keys, and a black padded cover over the whole; and I set it to sleep till Joel came home.

As we started looking for a piano a month or two ago, I started thinking of them as big black whales, mysterious visitants to land, singing deep and curious songs beyond my ken, especially with their gleaming sailfin lids rising in rows in the bigger showrooms. The decision was difficult from beginning to end. Much harder than buying a car, or perhaps even a house.

One of the hardest things to think about was how it felt. Once you had set your budget (a traumatic enough experience), there was a lot of salespersonship going on, on the virtues of new or second-hand, and about finding the piano that's right for you personally, and so forth; and a great deal of flattery towards the teenage boy who valiantly played his way up and down the price range in front of scores of other shoppers and sales assistants. But in the end, as a friend said to us, how can you have a relationship on first meeting? It takes time to develop.

And I think that is right. We are all feeling a bit overwhelmed by what we have done. We spent the entire weekend moving furniture and fifteen years of accumulated bookshelf chaos to make room for it (and we have made some major financial adjustments and sorting of priorities: essentially, music comes first!). But it feels like the beginning, rather than the glorious culmination of a difficult decision. Like a traditional arranged marriage between children, perhaps, which has every prospect of working well as we all grow into each other.

When Joel was born, he began as he went on, conversationally. He started by talking to us. "Ah, ah, ah", he said, as they lifted him out of my womb and placed him on the pillow next to me. As the piano came down the corridor, I felt as if I was being spoken to, in a very similar way. We all have a long way to go, together.

The box is only beginning.

'58 babies

Of the three famous '58 babies — Prince, Madonna and Michael Jackson — it's Prince who's always had my heart. It's Prince whose music I've bought most often; and it's Prince whom I've actually seen in concert.

But I grew up listening to the Jackson Five, and that sweet clear voice out front.

Last night there were three other '58 babies, one a few years older, and two '95 babies in the house. We didn't watch the Italian movie as planned; instead, we alternated between So You Think You Can Dance, and the Essendon-Carlton game (which was meant to be a blockbuster between the two evenly-matched old rivals, except that my Bombers blitzed Paul's Carlton, doubling their score in front of 83,000 at the MCG: good work, lads!), and then a stupid doco on Jackson, so terrible we turned it off.

It says something about Michael Jackson, though, that all six of us then started practising the moonwalk, with the help of socks on floorboards, as our mirror family slowly edged (backwards) towards the front door. And something about the capacity of this death to mirror our own mortality and frighten us into laughter, when Peter made a wicked joke about how Jackson's pallbearers might also moonwalk backwards. Surrounded by our loved ones, all I could do was laugh myself to tears.

In which I sing the Magic Flute

A Saturday afternoon in the BMW Edge theatre at Federation Square. Wintry light, the river, and blue-grey clouds visible through the glass walls that surround the stage. And inside, I'm singing The Magic Flute with Victorian Opera's Richard Gill. And it was just like this.